CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change / RESPONSE: William Morrish

CALL: Inaugural Lecture, Speculating on Change
The inaugural lecture on “Speculating on Change” was delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School on October 16, 2009. Cohen discussed cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change. Four specific “paradoxes” – dealing with issues of economy, geography, politics, and sustainability – provided entries to a discussion of cities as both spaces of hope and sites of vulnerability.

RESPONSE: William Morrish
The response is offered by William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design. Trained as an architect, Morrish comes to Parsons from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he taught and led research in the areas of sustainable urban infrastructure, new housing models, and global urbanization and climate change. In that role, he focused on interdisciplinary work addressing what he calls the “second generation of sustainability”: the design of cultural ecologies. He is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses inter-disciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design, which are applied to a wide range of innovative community-based city projects.

Michael Cohen’s lecture focused on the discrepancy between emerging ideas on sustainable urban development and the realities of implementing them on the ground, in the growing global city. The four points of his lecture identify the reasons that capacity cannot be delivered, namely the lack of adequate research, tools and models. His lecture points to the disturbing fact that most of our urban development skills are based on outdated concepts that identify master plans and large projects as the cure for urban ills. Cohen began to sketch the challenge faced when transferring stimuli for change from to the top to a middle zone, where local economic, social and ecological activities can aggregate into more sustainable urban networks of support. The sobering conclusion of his lecture was that we have little time to change practice and behavior. As the polar ice caps melt, cities are being flooded with new social, cultural and environment realities.

Yet within this maelstrom of global urban change, communities such as Bogotá, Columbia, and Rosaria, Argentina, are overhauling the old the rules of planning, governance and management procedures. Civic leaders and neighborhood activists are learning how to turn the principles of sustainable development into new models of integrated design, inclusive operations, and regenerative practices. These transformations focus on the mid-size scale of the cities and combine it with basic everyday economic and social transactions, for instance by expanding mobility options, connecting micro-business networks, and designing open and transparent civic facilities as cultural centers.