Shannon McElvaney writes that “Geodesign is about one community thinking across scales. A building does not stand alone, but is part of a neighborhood, city, region, nation, and even the globe. This type of integrative thinking and awareness of the effects of collective actions is the planning of the future.” As we have learned, with geodesign, planners work with communities to imagine and simulate any number of futures, and define and communicate the impacts of choices, effectively democratizing the entire process of urban design. In the opinion of this author, the radical democratization of design, enabled by a guiding framework and emphasis on collaboration, is the great promise of geodesign.

However, obstacles remain. As geographer David Harvey writes in The Right to the City, “We live in a world in which the rights of private property and profit trump all other notions of rights…..[but there is] another type of human right, that of the right to the city” (2008). Harvey argues that the right to the city is increasingly falling into the hands of private or quasi private interests – that these interests shape the design of the cities, how we live in them, and how we in turn relate to one another. The right to make and remake our cities and ourselves, as citizens, Harvey argues, is “one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”. It follows then that urbanization has always been a phenomenon shaped by class and capital. While this is a vast and complex topic that cannot be explored in much detail here, it is worth mentioning to conclude this course because the future of geodesign must be about reclaiming the right to the city.

As Stephen Irvin emphasizes in his lecture on the Futures of Geodesign, we practice geodesign not necessarily for the birds and the trees and animals on earth, but for the 10 billion plus people who will inhabit the earth in coming generations -  increasingly in urban areas. Accommodating this magnitude of population growth, in the most sustainable and socially equitable ways possible, is our greatest challenge. And it is the challenge geodesign was made for.

Embedded in this challenge are the realities of poverty, resource use, private property, and power. For example, in Mumbai, 6 million people are officially considered slum dwellers. They are settled on land without legal title. All maps of the city leave these places blank. With the attempt to turn Mumbai into a global financial center to rival Shanghai, the property-development boom has gathered pace, and the land that squatters occupy is increasingly valuable. As such, there is increasing pressure to clear it (Harvey, 2008).

How can geodesign be leveraged to solve these sorts of problems? There is no easy answer, but with enough social momentum feeding the development of progressive policy, geodesign can become an important tool to re-imagine cities as just, verdant places supporting community values and needs. 

In the interest of social justice, alternatives to land grab schemes are on the horizon. Progressive proposals to award private property rights to squatter populations are being pioneered in parts of the developing world. In Rio’s favelas, for example, the Brazilian government granted squatters access to private lands that were unoccupied, and provided assistance in regularizing these communities, effectively bringing water and services to these places to help lift people out of poverty. In one case that I would like to share with you, the geodesign process was used to help the residents of these favelas design the future of their community. In the video below, Carl Steinitz discusses how the geodesign framework fostered a unique form of collaborative negotion, enabling democratic design of these settlements among people with low literacy rates and technological capabilities.

Carl Steinitz: Collaborative Negotiation as a Geodesign Method  (53:45)

Video Transcript

In closing, I would like to return to David Harvey’s concept of the right to the city. One step towards a more sustainable and fair world is to adopt the Right to the City , as Harvey puts it, “ as a working slogan and political ideal”. The Right to the City is central to a democracy, and the construction of a broad social movement to enact it is critical to reclaiming design of our world as a human right. Geodesign, as a vehicle of democratic planning for the people and by the people, plays a critical role in enabling such a future.

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Sources:

Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53 (September-October).

McElvaney, S., & Rouse, D. (2015). Geodesign and the Future of Planning. American Planning Association (March/April).