Urban Sustainability

Before Sir Patrick Geddes developed the evolutionary urban concepts of eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic infrastructures, in the late 19th century, most humans considered cities to be the antithesis of nature. By the 20th century, however, sustainable urbanism—which expands upon Geddes’ ideas—was thought to be the only plausible route to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change through design and construction of dynamically balanced ecosociotechnical systems which erode the conceptual barrier between the functions of natural and human-made systems. In subsequent centuries, design- or abductive-thinking may even re-code cities to be inhabitable infrastructures that further erode any linguistic distinction between means and ends, or production and consumption.