Biennale Quotes

The ghostly movement of the Parisian tribes. Watch the crowd rushing out in the (cold and rainy) spring night towards the urban deserts of La Villette to attend the inaugural cult of the Biennale and then, when that is ended, flowing back in great waves towards the inauguration of the Book Fair at the Grand Palais, crossing Paris in a tide of two thousand people (always the same ones) who, after having communed in fairground thronging and bookish vanity will meet up again around midnight at the end of a third collective migration, in the small number of Montparnasse restaurants marked with the sign of the tribe. Preceded perhaps by some minister or other, followed as ever by a horde of journalists. You can mark out the trajectory of this fauna culturalis every evening in advance, working from the order of the invitations, as in days gone by you could follow popular gatherings from place to place with certainty.

People come, students and everyone else, to be inspired by the biennale. They expect to see architecture as a kind of seismograph of where we are.

He knew this was bound to happen but he kept himself at a safe distance, though he saw it come in every possible form, in trees felled to make way for new streets or cities, in chemicals that mimicked the human cells to invade the body, in every huff and puff of a CO2-emitting vehicle. What about the evil armies raised in the robotics classes of kindergarteners? What about the fake food with which the children had been fed? What about the devil winning the people’s vote on a ticket of broken promises, empty threats, and outright lies and a mission to send them straight to hell?

And so here it was, one of them bleak futures the Venice Biennale had flirted with in a bid to showcase the painful truths of the age.

We have all heard the sceptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. ‘We ask, “What are your core community priorities?”’ says Boston. ‘People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.’ These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. THE GREEN SURPRISE Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations. In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.fn1, 3 It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism – meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism. Not one of its programmes was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.