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July 04, 2016  |  permalink

“Divining Providencia” in Venice, Rotterdam, and Quito

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One of the highlights of my busy spring and summer speaking schedule (more on which to come) was running into my friend Roger Sherman at this year's New Cities Summit in Montreal. Roger and I met in 2012 while he was dividing his time between his own architecture studio and teaching at UCLA. He'd discovered my role as the policy analyst on Jeanne Gang's MoMA team, and asked if I was interested in helping him design a city from scratch in the Ecuadorean Amazon. (As a fan of Fordlandia and Fitzcarraldo, how I could resist?)


The result was Divining Providencia, an earnest effort to re-imagine Providencia – essentially a truck stop erected on the banks of the Amazon at its westermost navigable point, across the river from the world's richest patch of biodiversity in the form of Yasuni National Park – as an ecological enclave instead.

My contribution to the project was to impress upon Roger that we not only needed to design a city with a minimal environmental footprint, we also needed to invent a new economy as well – one that had nothing to do with commodity exports to China, but would guarantee the integrity of the national park next door. Our ideas included a new national organization devoted to licensing the genetic diversity of Yasuni rather than drilling for the oil beneath it (an idea with precedents in the form of Costa Rica's INBIO and Mexico's CONABIO) as well as a university of indigenous knowledge.

None of our plans came to pass, of course, but I was please to learn the work lives on. Roger is now the Urban Projects Director for Gensler in Los Angeles, and the firm has brought our plans for Providencia to both the 15th Venice Biennale D'Architetura (within the Palazzo Mora as part of the pavilion hosted by the Global Art Affairs Foundation), and at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), whose theme this time around is "The Next Economy." Later this year, it will find its way to Ecuador itself as part of the exhibits around UN HABITAT III in Quito – the once-in-a-generation conference devoted to shaping the future of cities. From Roger's post on the exhibit:

For the Rotterdam and Venice exhibitions, which are seen by an estimated 250,000 visitors, Gensler joined a team comprised of cityLAB/UCLA (of which I was formerly co-director) and a similar think tank in Ecuador, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador (PUCE)–whose work on the project is ongoing, funded by the Provincial Government of Sucumbios and Avina, an Amazon-oriented NGO. Both installations used a table as a more “viewer-friendly” format for relating the story of the project than a conventional wall-mounted display. At Rotterdam–whose large exhibition filled a cavernous former coffee company with 100 tables of identical size and spacing–a dining table calls attention to the worldwide consumption of resources, telling through its place settings, plates, glasses and serving dishes how the design harnesses the shipping trade to instigate local means of production and improve living conditions. Chairs at the table invite spectators to consider themselves “guests,” and to linger and “digest” the project through text, pictures and maps. A tablecloth delineates global trade routes (literally woven into the fabric) as they pass through the Amazon and Providencia in particular. A series of “cake stands” support circular maps of differing sizes, sequentially zooming in to the scale of the Amazon Basin; the larger territorial plan; and the town itself. In each, a series of colors delineate the path of raw products extracted from the rainforest as they make their way from the point of extraction to that of refinement and transshipment. Each color corresponds to a particular Amazon resource of edible, medicinal or craft value, whose eventual product-for-purchase appears on placemats lining the table, along with information about the process and (on glasses) a portrait of one of the micro-enterprise workers involved.
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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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