The city that never was: Fertility

Understanding landscape considerations as a passive response to urbanization is a reductionist approach to land occupation. On the contrary, landscape-driven principles have the capacity to become the fertile substratum of new urban form. Rather than thinking of environmental and ecological issues such as deforestation, desertification, water scarcity, air quality, and heat islands as problems that we need to solve, this panel considers them as opportunities for rethinking and reorganizing how we occupy and create settlements.

—Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa, from their introduction to the panel

This video from The City That Never Was, a February 2013 symposium that took the current economic crisis in Spain as a point of departure for rethinking global patterns of urbanization and settlement, presents highlights from the presentations and panel discussion organized around the theme of fertility. In these excerpts, Daniel Zarza discusses how natural spaces can become good urban spaces; William van den Broek stresses the importance of balancing a variety of different models of agriculture in, for, and around the city; and Chris Reed talks about the agency ecological processes should have in reimagining cities.