Urban geography II: Materially important cities

McNeill, Donald

doi:10.1177/03091325221104819

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…A growing technoindustrial and design movement now seeks to replace these materials with novel bio-based alternatives. We consider this raft of new ‘advanced’ wood products in the form of mass timber to be central to a broader push for a circular urban bioeconomy, which seeks to extract value from the biophysical basis of cities and their resource flows (Taylor Buck and While, 2021; McNeill, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An urban ‘age of timber’? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city

Veelen

Knuth

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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What will the low-carbon cities of tomorrow be made from? We see an unexpected answer today in the return of ‘premodern’/‘preindustrial’ materials to central cities and skylines. Champions of new mass timber materials have driven a race on iconic ‘plyscrapers’ and, increasingly, novel systems of industrial prefabrication. Drawing on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how advocates attempt to ‘fix’ desirable future cities and urban bioeconomies through this biomaterial. In doing so, we suggest that mass timber's emergent sociotechnical imaginary embodies a distinct kind of futuring, which we label ‘nostalgic futurism’, conjoining ‘technofuturist’ and ‘nostalgic-reparative’ visions. We find that, on the one hand, mass timber proponents embrace competitive novelty, uniting drives for architectural distinction and high-tech disruption. On the other hand, aesthetic advocates put forward visions around the material's more traditional premodern/preindustrial associations, in narratives of biophilic design which claim therapeutic benefits of contact with visible nature in buildings. These conjoined forward- and backward-looking compulsions pose tensions and internal contradictions. Nostalgic-reparative visions risk greenwashing and reproducing unequal access to environmental amenities, while reinscribing regressive appeals to an imagined past. Meanwhile, technofuturist drives extend late capitalist growth imperatives and pressures for accelerated material churn in both forests and urban centres—while obscuring tough questions about mass timber buildings’ expected lifetimes and claims for long-term carbon sequestration. Conversely, a reimagined mass timber project might support more progressive movements for climate restoration, repair, and reparations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%