How's the air on your block? The environmental inequality in cities
(2022) Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking: Healthful Ecotopian Visions for Architecture & Urbanism — accepted/in-press
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- Abstract
- The black and white ‘Nolli map’ representation that distinguishes the private and public realms in cities has until recently been considered a standard in urban planning practices. However recent advances in urban sensing and remote sensing technologies have revealed the strong environmental gradients present between neighborhoods in many cities. Through mobile urban sensing technologies, we have also recently learnt that within an urban block distance, the air quality conditions can get up to 8 times worse. The death rates from the pathogenic respiratory disease SARS-CoV-2 virus have also shown disconcerting spatial patterns in cities such as New York, Los Angeles or Madrid. The pandemic has evidenced the strong socioeconomic and environmental gradients present in many cities across the world. Not surprisingly such datasets have raised many political upheavals around the question of environmental injustice. We have learned the hard way that the urban environment is not a homogeneous medium but a complex and highly specific one. In times when high level governance bodies are failing to undertake the steps required to heal the insalubrious urban environment, local action becomes critical. In the discipline we may have now an opportunity to engage with the very same tools that have revealed the strong spatial gradients present in cities- data science, urban sensing and computational technologies- to develop architectural and urban design strategies to improve the urban environment. This may be our opportunity to become the designers of urban air, microclimate, and environment as a whole.
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Citations
Llaguno, M. (2022). How’s the air on your block? The environmental inequality in cities. In Mitra Kanaaani (ed.), Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking: Healthful Ecotopian Visions for Architecture & Urbanism. Mitra Kanaaani. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/228276