Like many of us in the early 21st century I am bewildered by the pace of change of life and the way that it has become incredibly complex and demanding. Like some of us I am also worried about the way that a fragmentation of knowledge is leading us in to choices that threaten our very existence. A major effect of this is that our environment is disintegrating around us with the vast majority of the World’s population choosing to ignore this fact. Yet, despite the impact of recent films such as ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ and the publication of the Stern Report in the UK on global climate change, the general public are still reluctant to accept a change to their way of life. This is in the face of mounting evidence that we have to act to protect our Planet and therefore the future.
I am not a philosopher; I am an architect who became an urban designer. Nevertheless, in this field I have been striving to find a philosophy for the way that we help to create the future for others in a way that will be sustainable. I deal with the future of cities and sometimes whole regions and constantly have to question the way society works in the urban environment and if there is any role for nature in our modern cities.
This website focuses, through an analysis of my main area of expertise, the design of the city, on why we are so reluctant to change our current lifestyles and suggests that we need a radical change in our values in order to rebalance our relationships as individuals with nature and society. The future city will need to express these changed values.
I have researched for the past 20 years for a philosophy in my own discipline both beyond it and around it. Yet I have found nothing coherent that gives me a starting point to resolve the contradictions we now face in developing our cities and surviving as a species. We are presented with rafts of conflicting ideologies, religions and philosophies that are out of date in that they do not address the key issue of human expansion and its effect on nature. The city is a key focus of this issue and we are now faced with a number of dilemmas in the way that we develop our cities in the future. I will suggest we need a radical rethink of the way that we live and of the nature of the 21st Century city if we are to have any chance of surviving into the 22nd Century. The 'LifePie' summary is the basis of a more complex philosophy that I will explain over the next few months in increasing detail. If you want to discuss this and help me to develop ideas please register on the website and join in the blog.
Richard Rees
January 2010