Introduction in Norwegian:
Denne artikkelen av Stefano Serafini ble skrevet som en introduksjon til
International Society of Biourbanism (ISB) sin sommerskole for 2014. Men det er en meget viktig artikkel, som også for meg inneholdt nyttige nye begrep.
I dagens arkitektur og byplanlegging blir det ikke tatt hensyn til biofilia, bevisbasert design og neuroergometri.
Sosiogenesis, menneskelig interaksjon, er avhengig av myriader av velfungerende mønstre og biofile omgivelser. Gode neuroergonomiske bomiljø er en forutsetning for at mennesker skal bevare en god psykisk og fysisk helse, for slik å kunne bry seg om hverandre og naturen. Dette gjelder i forhold til alle former for støy, lys, lukt, stråling, farge, form, materialbruk etc.
Fungerer ikke de neuroergonomiske omgivelsene kan det ikke oppstå gode mellommenneskelige bånd. Modernistiske planleggingsregimer og profittbasert entreprenørvirksomhet tar ikke hensyn til neuroergonomiske tilpasninger og biofilia, noe forskningen til Christopher Alexander og Nikos A. Salingaros har vist.
Mennesket har som biologisk og åndelig vesen aldri hatt det verre enn i dag!
Neuroergonomics, Urban Design & Sociogenesis, by Stefano Serafini
“What if, instead of breaking them, the design of cities could naturally feed social ties? There must be a way for urban planners to make cities more human-centred and livable, by focusing on how the built environment affects sociality.”
Stemming from evidence-based design, neuroergonomics is a discipline that merges neuroscience and ergonomics in order to match design with human biological and psycho-neuro-immunological wellness. It scientifically upholds the call for a human-centred design by overhauling the user experience design, because it measures the real psycho-physical effects regardless of fashion, ideology, culture, or current use.
Original article here.
ABSTRACT
The International Society of Biourbanism (ISB) is organizing a Summer school in neuroergonomics and sociogenesis, to be h
eld in Artena, Italy, on July 13th-20th 2014. The program offers seven full days of lectures, practical workshops, and design studios, with international experts for exploring how to design urban environments able to revive, support, nourish, and enhance sociality and human relationships. Seven additional days will be devoted to study the ancient urban codes of two biophilic Italian towns, Artena and Segni – a research headed by the distinguished Professor Besim Hakim. The results of this study will be brought to the international Workshop on socio-spatial transformation under the state of emergency in Greece, on August 1-9.
Any full social interaction includes a fundamental part of the human person: the body. Therefore, it always occurs in a place. Space becomes place when intentionality is at stake, and landscape, nature, buildings, and forms in space have a meaningful interaction with life. An urban place – the social environment par excellence – has therefore always a biopolitical meaning. Designing the urban environment means designing the biopolitical preconditions of human life, including the chances for freedom, social interaction, political practice, health, and well-being.
Any full social interaction includes a fundamental part of the human person: the body. Therefore, it always occurs in a place. Space becomes place when intentionality is at stake, and landscape, nature, buildings, and forms in space have a meaningful interaction with life.
The placelessness of modern and contemporary cities is not an aesthetic issue – it’s social, and it severely affects citizens’ self-determination and quality of life, including the ability to connect to each other and to a nourishing environment. Thus, the ISB school aims at a needful social and cultural change of cities by design.
The placelessness of modern and contemporary cities is not an aesthetic issue – it’s social, and it severely affects citizens’ self-determination and quality of life, including the ability to connect to each other and to a nourishing environment.
Biourbanism is rethinking urban design by joining contributions from the domains of epistemology, neurophysiology, environmental psychology, economics, biopolitics, urban studies, service design, and sociology. The results outline the possibility of a paradigm shift in urban practice. This carries a peer-to-peer approach which involves designers, inhabitants, and places.
A Biopolitical Issue
The third ISB summer school will complete a cycle. Having dealt with neuroergonomics as a prerequisite to urban planning (Neuroergonomics and Urban Design, 2012), followed by its small-scale applications for propagating systemic effects over the entire urban organism through biourban acupuncture (Neuroergonomics and urban placemaking, 2013), participants in the 2014 International Summer School in Biourbanism will focus on how to design spaces that facilitate and reinforce social relations, with a special program in neuroergonomics and sociogenesis.
This issue is of paramount importance because although modern cities gather millions of people in, they tend to overlook and break down human relations, as Marx and Engels already noticed almost a century and a half ago.1 This decade, cities have become the living environment for half of the planet’s population for the first time in history, and according to urban migration and growth trends, 64% and 86% of the developing and developed world respectively will be urbanized by 2050 (67% overall, i.e. 2.7 billion more people than today),2 while urban exploitation of land will double in less than 20 years.3
This issue is of paramount importance because although modern cities gather millions of people in, they tend to overlook and break down human relations, as Marx and Engels already noticed almost a century and a half ago.
What kind of design is behind such an environmentally unsustainable, speedy, and dehumanizing urbanization phenomenon?
Fig. 1 Three phases of urban land use in Shenzen, China: 1988, 1996, 2010 (source: Google)
If you look carefully, modern cities have been meant as machines – economic growth catalysers. Several scholars accuse Le Corbusier of being the evil genius of such an urban conception;4 yet one should date its origins back to the very dawn of the Industrial age, with roots even into the phenomenon of the first ghetto (Venice, 1516).5 In fact, modern cities are designed to functionalize the horizon of human life according to production. And that’s precisely why they break social connections. In a way, the early subsidiary and social role of cities has been morphed into the capitalistic subsumption6 device par excellence. This happened by firstly transforming the physical space of cities through ghettoization, zoning or gigantism. Design has never been innocent.7
If you look carefully, modern cities have been meant as machines – economic growth catalysers.
The industrial revolution has accelerated the transformation of streets, squares, and common environments into paths for goods, and turned dwellings into individualistic boxes, piled into suburbia. This has allowed less and less room for delightfulness and social connections, hence most of the “ugliness” of modern towns addressed by several urban critics like Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, Wirth, Marcuse, Bauman, Augé, Alexander and Salingaros.
The industrial revolution has accelerated the transformation of streets, squares, and common environments into paths for goods, and turned dwellings into individualistic boxes, piled into suburbia. This has allowed less and less room for delightfulness and social connections, hence most of the “ugliness” of modern towns.
Post-industrialism led to a leap in the quality of city morphing: as finance has long dematerialized capitalism, the postmodern city is heading towards a dematerialization of places.
