DESIGNER OF NEW UKRAINE

 

Designer of New Ukraine

Architect Marco Casagrande got involved with the crisis areas of East Europe already at high school. Now he operates in a significant role in Ukraine, with focus on the reconstruction of the cities.

Hanna Freyborg HS
27.7.2025

ARCHITECT Marco Casagrande comes to Karjaa train station dressed in black. Walking, since he lives next to the station with his family.

Casagrande, 54, has designed a house to his family, which sits in the pastoral summer landscape as it would have always been part of it. The house is made of wood: birch and pine.

” I would prefer that everything in Finland would be constructed out of wood. This house I drew on snow, literally walking the floorplan on snow. I don’t even know, how many square meters does it have”, Casagrande laughs.

INTERNATIONALLY awarded and respected Casagrande is specialized in sustainable urban design and has now operated a year and a half as Professor of Architecture in a Kharkiv university (O.M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy) in East Ukraine and King Danylo University in West Ukraine.

When the university in Kharkiv first time contacted Casagrande, he was asked to start lecturing remotely on biourbanism online.

“I said it would not work. I needed to be present physically.”

TIME to get straight into business. We must talk about the war in Ukraine, especially about Kharkiv, a city with more than a million inhabitants, a city close to Casagrande’s heart.  

“War has given Ukraine a certain gift, it has united the East and West Ukraine together”, Casagrande begins.

That is his only positive comment of the full scale Russin attack.  

Before the war the border city Kharkiv was close to Russia also mentally. After the Russian attack the city is severely damaged, but it has also changed, it is now breathing Ukrainian patriotism.

The distance from the city to the front line is around 40 kilometres. Some of the regional cities and villages are practically on the frontline.

“When a missile hits an apartment building, the site gets cleaned up immediately and everything that can be fixed, will be fixed. The Ukrainians have zero tolerance for war debris on their streets”, Casagrande says.

Casagrande visits Kharkiv every three or four months. He stays a couple of weeks per tour, transportation takes time. Casagrande flies to Warsaw and usually takes a train to Ukraine from there.

In Kharkiv the university has provided him everything needed: local fixers and assistants, accommodation. Depending on the situation he can rely on a safe house in the middle of a forest, a location hidden from the Russians.

“I get all the intelligence and support from the university that I can think of. Nevertheless, I operate in Ukraine independently. Main thing is to keep safe distance regarding the artillery”, Casagrande says.

KHARKIV was before the war one of Ukraine’s most important industrial cities. There is no going back to the Stalinist architecture though, and the Ukrainians do not want that either.

Casagrande’s vision is to develop Kharkiv into ecologically sustainable so called Third Generation City, the very contrast to the Soviet time concrete brutalism.

“As an architect and am Animist, I believe in nature. Architecture is the art of reality, and for me nothing else than nature is real. The ideal is that the city learns to become part of nature.”

Essential part of Casagrande’s work is to redesign vital social infrastructure buildings destroyed in bombings, such as hospitals, underground schools, and rehabilitation centres.

He is using Finnish timber as much as possible and recycling destroyed buildings as much as possible.

REHABILITATION is needed for the wounded and war invalids, but also for the returnee children from Russian captivity.

There are up to 105 000 disabled orphan children in Ukraine.

” They have possibly never received any empathy, and therefore the buildings must be able radiate empathy.”

Casagrande calls this phenomena Skin-to-Skin Architecture, where the buildings have a skin.

” A successful building is like a warm hug” he says.

Before the war, the orphans were kept out of sight in Ukraine. The war has changed the attitude.

” It is sad that we needed a war to give visibility for the orphans in society,” Casagrande says.

Universal design is also incredibly important regarding the tens of thousands of disabled persons because of the war.

The war can still last a long time, which also must be taken into consideration. To minimize material losses the buildings are design to be mobile so that an apartment building or a factory can be relocated, Casagrande tells.

He wishes Finland to focus especially on the rapid development of the underground schools. Finland has the expertise.

” But the construction must start immediately. The need is excessively big.”

CASAGRANDE got interested in the East European crisis areas during his high school in Karjaa.

In December 1989 he was 18-year-old and working in the local newspaper Etelä-Uusimaa, when the revolution broke out in Romania. He was asked if he would like to report on the situation. The task was to follow if the humanitarian aid convoys reached their destinations in Romania.

Casagrande went to the journey, contrary to his parents wishes. In Romania he witnessed with his own eyes the chaos the country had gone into. The main feeling was not fear though, but curiosity. Senses sharpened up. He felt alive.

Marco Casagrande esittelee alasammutun ukrainalaisen hävittäjälentäjän äidin kirjailemaa paitaa, eli vyshyvankaa. Kuva: Outi Pyhäranta / HS

YEAR 1993 Casagrande had finished the high school, the compulsory army (Finnish Defence Forces), and begun his architecture studies, when Bosnia started calling. He had a girlfriend in Croatia and Yugoslavia was breaking up in war.

Casagrande volunteered to Bosnian Croat army (HVO Croatian Defence Council) the same year. He returned to Finland only to get back to war.

He wrote a war memoir Mostarin tien liftarit / Hitchhikers on the Mostar Road (WSOY; 1997) with pen name Luca Moconesi. Helsingin Sanomat reported in 2001 that the war crimes described in the book led to two police investigations, which were both cancelled due to no evidence of crime.

Was the controversial book an auto fictive novel?

” Something like that. It was not a documentary, but not everything that I wrote of could be created only by imagination either.”

According to Casagrande writing worked as therapy.

“War is always traumatizing. Soldier is like a high tuned machine, which after the war becomes a moped. Something is not right with a person if the war does not leave a mark.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TAIPEI RIVER URBANISM

The third workshop of the Ruin Academy is approaching. This time in the focus will be the relationship of the City and the River. The workshop will be a field study providing us data for the future Visionary Plan of the Taipei River Urbanism, when the industrial city will meet the river again.

A cross-disciplinary research group from Aalto University Sustainable Global Technologies – center will operate with the Ruin Academy 18. – 27.3. and then continue their work in Finland. The SGT would appreciate all possible assistance from Taipei Basin citizens (city + county) with their memories, wishes, dreams and fears about water and the river nature.

Tamkang University Department of Architecture master students with Professor Chen Cheng-Chen will join the Aalto University students to combine a larger task force for the River Urbanism research and design.

The workshop will be open for Ruin Academy operators and others who feel the cause of the River + City to be worth a personal contribution. This can mean many things: photographs, interviews, poetry, sociological insights, an introduction of a wise grandmother or a dip in the river Mao style.

Data collected during the workshop and afterwards will be edited as a part of the next issue of the Anarchist Gardener, the Ruin Academy’s independent newspaper.

The workshop and research is backed up by the Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development and JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture. The Aalto University’s SGT Centre is connected with the United Nations UN-HABITAT for which the Ruin Academy research and visionary plan will report as a case-study of Urban River Restoration and River Urbanism.

SGT Operators:

Andreas Svarvar / Civil and Environmental Engineering

Boris Fargeot / Civil Engineering

Emmi Jääskeläinen / Architecture and Urban Design

Ha Hoang / Energy Technology

Lauri Ahopelto / Civil and Environmental Engineering

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Frank Chen / Architecture

Yu-Chen Chiu / Architecture

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Yi-Ling Hung / Curator - JUT Foundation

Nikita Wu / Gardener - Ruin Academy

Marco Casagrande / Principal - Ruin Academy

廢墟建築學院第三回工作營TAIPEI RIVER URBANISM 台北都市河流學

很榮幸和大伙兒宣佈廢墟建築學院第三回工作營即將展開！本次工作營定焦城市與河流間的關係。藉由田野調查和一手資料的匯集，廢墟建築學院將在工作營告一段落後，整合眾人的智慧和意見，為已工業化的台北城擘劃出都市與自然河川之間再度和諧共生共存的未來都市願景。

芬蘭阿爾托大學（Aalto University）全球可持續性能源科技中心（Sustainable Global Technologies – center， SGT ）跨領域及學科的專家們，於3月18日至27日間進駐廢墟建築學院，並將把資料帶回芬蘭繼續進一步分析專研。SGT的成員將深入調研台北盆地居民們對河流 和水岸自然的記憶、期望、夢想與憂懼。

淡江大學建築系碩士班學生在陳珍誠老師的指導與鼓勵下，亦將和來自阿爾托大學的學生密切合作，以台北都市河流學為題，作更具遠觀的城市肌理研究及都市藍圖規劃。

誠摯歡迎先前曾經參加前兩次工作營的各位園丁，與關心台北河流與都市發展的有心人們以攝影、訪談、詩歌、社會學研究角度或幫我們介紹一位充滿在地智慧的阿媽，甚至借鏡毛澤東先後13次橫渡長江的氣魄，親身試探淡水河的水溫...等各樣方式一道兒參與我們的行動！

你／妳回望河水山色的片刻想望，將收錄於廢墟建築學院出版之《安那其建築園丁》獨立報中。

本工作營忠泰建築藝術文化基金會共同策劃，北市府都發局資料協力。阿爾托大學（Aalto University）全球可持續性能源科技中心（Sustainable Global Technologies – center， SGT ）及聯合國人居署（ United Nations UN-HABITAT）和廢墟建築學院協同合作以城市河道復育整治（Urban River Restoration） 與都市河流學（ River Urbanism）之專案研究計劃。

SGT 成員:

Andreas Svarvar / Civil and Environmental Engineering

Boris Fargeot / Civil Engineering

Emmi Jääskeläinen / Architecture and Urban Design

Ha Hoang / Energy Technology

Lauri Ahopelto / Civil and Environmental Engineering

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陳右昇 Architecture

邱郁晨 Architecture

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洪宜玲 策展統籌 ｜ 忠泰建築文化藝術基金會

巫祈麟 廢墟建築學院園丁

Marco Casagrande 廢墟建築學院主持

Laurits Elkjær - Marco Casagrande: Urban Acupuncture

Laurits Elkjær / The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Architecture in Copenhagen interviewing Marco Casagrande.

I am currently working on a large paper dealing with urban acupuncture. I understand that urban acupuncture is a strategy You have developed and would in this context ask You a few questions. If You have the opportunity to answer these, I will be both happy and grateful.

1: How do you as an architect define urban acupuncture?

Urban Acupuncture is cross-over architectural manipulation of the collective sensuous intellect of a city. City is viewed as multi-dimensional sensitive energy-organism, a living environment. Urban acupuncture aims into a touch with this nature.

2: How do you use urban acupuncture to create architecture?

First you have to determine the sensitive flows of the built human environment. Based on those you have to determine the acupuncture points. The last is to determine what is the needle: architectural reaction. The key to understand this is to be present. To be truly present one has to give up, one has to be weak. To be present is the key of all art.

3: What are the benefits of using urban acupuncture?

Weakness and flexibility can communicate with the collective mind. Environmental sensitivity generates knowledge building, which will reflect on design as design shamanism.

Every grass penetrating the concrete or asphalt pavement of an industrial city is urban acupuncture.

4: What requirements should an area meet if Urban acupuncture is to be used as a strategy?

Urban Acupuncture can be applied collectively as networks to deal with a whole city or it can be used puctually in close quarters. If a city is undergoing some sort of an active process or transformation, Urban Acupuncture is a good strategy to tune the direction. Acupuncture is good for hardness and industrial insensitivity. Hardness and strenght are death's companions. What has become hard will never survive. -Stalker

Urban Accupuncture can suggest the Dictatorship of Sensitivity.

5: What is your experience with the use of urban acupuncture? In what context? What were/are the expectations and what was the outcome?

A good case is the transformation process of the Treasure Hill settlement from an illegal urban farming community into a model example of ecologically sustainable urban living in Taipei. See: http://www.e-architect.co.uk/taiwan/treasure_hill_taipei.htm

The process locally was Urban Acupuncture tunning the direction of the collective Qi from destruction into construction and afterwards the whole legalized settlement acting as an acupuncture needle for the modern Taipei. I have been referring this process to the turning over of a compost - something that is considered to be the smelly and repulsive corner of the city suddenly becomes the most fertile top-soil and source of life.

Link: UA

Guandu: River Urbanism

Marco Casagrande
The article is first published in the Taiwan Architect -magazine, October issue 2009.

The Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development is facing a serious challenge. The growing pressure of Taipei Basin has turned its focus towards the last natural wetland environment of the city – the Guandu Plain. Will Taipei repeat its industrial sins with the planning of Guandu, or is the urban narrative ready to take the next step onwards and develop a more environmentally harmonious co-existence between the city and the river? Will the future Guandu be a groundbreaking example of River Urbanism, or will Taipei now cut off its primeval roots towards the river for good?

Guandu plain of the Taipei Basin at the meeting point of the Danshui and Keelong Rivers.

1G

The First Generation Taipei was completely dependent on the natural environment. The river was the main source of transportation and it provided a steady income of fish, clamps, crab etc. The rice farming culture in the Taipei Basin was based on man-made flooding imitating the natural pulses of the river nature. The surrounding mountains protected Taipei from the hardest hits of the Typhoons and fertilized the urban farms with topsoil generated by the composting process of the jungle. The citizens understood the environment through physical labour - the Local Knowledge of Taipei was environmental. People believed in Land-Gods and Goddess Matsu protecting the fishermen.

2G

The Second Generation Taipei is the industrial city introduced by the Japanese. The essence of industrialism is the claim of independence from nature. Machine moves the boat, not wind. The river of the industrial Taipei turned rapidly into an industrial sewage and the fish, clamps, crab etc. moved away. The river smelled bad and it was flooding – it wanted to break the machine. The city built high walls and cut the river off from the urban narrative.

Industrialism was good. It reduced the pain of physical labour and the industrial city was almost painless, it was entertaining. This urban-industrial modern amusement park is the height of human civilization and also the second-generation Taipei was modern. The closer to nature you are, the less modern you will be. The end of the line is the un-civilized native – the savages living from the nature. Farmers are somewhere in-between, but they sweat too – so: not modern.

Neil Armstrong, Moon, 1969.

Now it is 40 years since Mr. Neil Armstrong went to moon. It is good to remember that he found a couple of rocks up there but was shocked when he looked back towards the Earth: the planet was alive. The white clouds emerged from the green jungles and were sailing on top of the blue oceans. The photos of the blue planet questioned the industrial mind. The cities looked on the living tissue like anti-acupuncture needles. There appeared grey and dead areas around the cities.
The cities looked like pouring poison into the nature.

Third Generation Taipei

As it is obvious that the industrial city is not necessarily the best life providing solution from the environmental point of view, the question arises: what is the Third Generation City?

Guandu will be asked this very question – how can it be the Third Generation Taipei?



The city authorities cannot answer this. The current private planning companies cannot answer this either. They are all crippled by the industrial past and the methodology of building a modern city as a reflection of an industrial mind. They have all gone to school where Neil Armstrong comes from.

A new generation is needed. At least a new generation of thinking. Planning is running after money and politicians for political future. Planners are pleasing the politicians and politicians are lacking the knowledge to make the decisions towards an environmentally sustainable urban future. What is then the new generation of thinking – who are the ones building the Third Generation Taipei?

Professor Yoshio Kato from the Tamkang University’s architecture department says, ”in the future architecture will be designed by writers”. Professor Kato is an expert of bio-climatic architecture and microclimates, a Japanese pioneer of ecological design. Kato is talking about a story, a plot – humane narrative that the industrial city has lost. The third generation Taipei must have a drama. It must stage a straightforward play between the modern man and nature. A play that runs according to the environmental conditions. A play that the citizens are taking part in to be sure that they are part of the environment and part of the urban narrative. Commedia Dell’Architettura. Sociologists are needed for this, cultural studies and theatre, poets, writers and cartoon artists.

Treasure Hill, a previously illegal community of urban farmers in Taipei.

Environmental technology is not the key to solve the ecological problems of the industrial city. Environmental technologies are just a tool. Local knowledge will give answers. Taipei has been an ”eco-city” before its industrial condition. Urban farming must continue. The city is blessed by urban farming pockets and enclaves in wastelands, riverbanks, ruins and abandoned construction sites. Grandmothers are farming in the street corners and on the roofs. Grandmothers are constantly tuning Taipei towards nature the same time, as their sons are playing busy in air-conditioned offices planning the ”eco-city” with environmental technology tricks and ecological jargon.

The case of Guandu and thus the case of Taipei is simple: the city must find a way to live as part of nature.

SGT: River City Guandu.

Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. In this way of thinking we must ruin the industrial city. The grandmothers are already ruining it. The city must be ruined by nature including human nature.

In Guandu we don’t necessarily have to plan the industrial city and then ruin it, but we can aim straight into the third generation condition: modern city as part of nature. The future Guandu should grow from the environment - this is landscape urbanism. The environment of Guandu is dominated by the river nature – so the new city should be River Urbanism, city growing from the river.

Urban planners cannot design a river city. River engineers are needed. Natural river restoration and river engineering should be a corner stone of the Future Guandu. Urban planning will then react on the understanding of the hydrological conditions.

Missis Chen, the Matriarch of Treasure Hill.

Engineers and urban planners are not enough. The place must have a story told by the people. Writers are needed and grandmothers. Also local knowledge still exists. The River City Guandu will not be build from zero, but it will continue from the first generation Taipei. City must be a compost. Fishermen, farmers and Land-Gods are needed for participatory planning.

River urbanism cannot be planned in a classical sense of urban planning. It must grow. Growing needs water. This is more like gardening than urban planning. Farming a city / urban farming.

Environmental technology is easy. It will follow all the above mentioned.

SGT Case Study

The Helsinki University of Technology runs an experimental research centre for cross-disciplinary research, design and case studies. The SGT Sustainable Global Technologies unit is directed by Professor Olli Varis, who is one of the world’s leading experts on global water resources. The urban river cases are very much in the focus of the future’s river engineering and natural river restoration as part of urban development. Also United Nations’ UN-HABITAT is looking for river urbanism cases. Guandu would be ideal for a UN-HABITAT location.

Gundu was presented as a case in SGT for a half-year research and design task for a cross-disciplinary croup of river engineers, architects and applied arts and future studies. The group ended up with a draft master plan for the future Guandu with approximately 150.000 citizens living and working in a river city.

The Guandu River City during the high water.

Some principal characteristics of the SGT solution for Guandu:



Guandu River
A new man-made river will be created through the Guandu plain providing clean water for the future residents. The new Guandu River will take most of its water from the polluted Keelong River and also collects streams from the surrounding mountains. The 7.2 km long river will act as a biological filter with different vegetation and filtering layers purifying the river water for residential use. The last part of the Guandu River with clean water is opened for recreational purposes having a beach and a holiday village.

Urban farming forms an essential part of the SGT’s Guandu solution.

Guandu Plain
The existing Danshui-Taipei highway will be moved into a waterproof double tunnel under the Guandu Plain in order to create a larger unified ecological area. Now the highway is splitting the Guandu plain in two halves. The Guandu plain is partly naturally restored and partly used for urban farming and biomass production. Bio-energy is recognized as a suitable source or renewable energy. Biomass will be grown first in the Guandu plain area and later along the Danshui and Keelong River flood banks.

The Guandu traffic solution including the sky-train connected to the existing MRT system and the highway tunnel.

Traffic
An elevated Light Rail train will connect the different Guandu areas with the existing MRT network. Busses will serve areas where the LR or MRT stations are beyond a convenient walking distance. The existing bicycle and pedestrian routes are reinforced to include all the future Guadu.



Built human environment
The River City Guandu is based on the principle of free flooding. This means that there will be no floodwalls in the future Guandu, but architectural and infrastructure solutions will be reactions on the free flooding. The built areas will be elevated on 10 meters high landfill islands created by the highway tunnel and Guandu River constructions. Some of the housing will be floating.



Organic layers
The Guandu plain will be connected with the surrounding mountains with ecological corridors.

Urban farming will be a characteristic feature of the river city. Community gardens will extend to all areas of built environment.

Biomass production is viewed as a positive factor for the Taipei’s microclimate and as a source of renewable energy.

The wetland and mangrove nature is protected and other parts of the Guandu plain are naturally restored.

Conclusion

Guandu has the potential to be a world-class example of environmentally sustainable river urbanism. The urban solutions proved in Guandu will benefit the general ecological restoration of the Taipei Basin. UN-HABITAT could be considered as a partner for the Guandu development.

New kind of round table discussion methodology and participatory planning should be developed around the Guandu case in order to start cultivating the next generation knowledge building towards the third generation city.

The industrial-modernist solutions cannot be applied straight in the planning and development of Guandu. Industrialism has forgot the local knowledge and lost the social drama of the city. Guandu should turn back towards the local knowledge and forget the forgetting.



Sustainable Global Technologies Team:

Lasse Granroth (TAIK, applied arts and future studies)
Hanna-Sisko Hovila (TKK, architecture)
Francesco Mandrilli (Italy, water engineering)
Teemu Nurmi (TKK, water engineering)
Iina Valkeisenmäki (TKK, architecture)

Mentors:
Marco Casagrande
Frank Chen

SGT Cordinators:
Matleena Muhonen
Pamela Arslanbayrak

SGT Director:
Prof. Olli Varis

Finnish Design

The Crisp Voice of Nature

The Finnish soul lives inside the deep forest. “Thus the forest answers as it is called at”, goes a Finnish saying and the Finnish design is an answer of this calling. All of the great masters of Finnish architecture and design are getting their inspiration and sources from the deep voice of nature. They are design shamans.

When Lenin granted Finland her independence in 1917 it was not due to military separatism or counter revolution – Lenin admired the very unique culture of the Finns represented by the designers and artists. Lenin had lived in Finland and had felt the nature oriented passion of the Finnish national romanticism and how it belonged only to the Finns.

Finns are proud of their designers and have taken them to their hearts and homes. They represent the Finnish soul and all the Finns can feel the forest in behind. Every Finnish home will have at least two national symbols common: a sauna and an Alvar Aalto design vase. There is no distance between ordinary people and high design. Design belongs to everybody.

The forest changes during the year. In summer in its exploding vitality the treetops will be the roof above you and lead you to the different spaces and rooms. Some are open to the clear blue sky, some will present you a mirror like lake. In the autumn the forest suddenly turns to be full of bright colors of red, orange and yellow literally painting the landscape as if it would be on fire. When the snow falls all the world becomes a white background to beautifully graphical compositions of leafless trees, ice stickles and footprints of the animals. After the long winter when the sun finally rises again the forest will welcome you to admire the sculptures of the melting ice and the rays of sunlight finding their ways to you.

All shapes, all drama, all light, all space…if you want to see a Finnish design collection – go to forest.

Preface for Finnish Design -book, Tsui-Shan Tu, Garden City, Taiwan 2007

3rd Generation Ecocity

3rd GENERATION ECOCITY
Finnish High Tech EcoCity for Tianjin China

In a conference held in 17.-19.4. in Tianjin China the VTT Techical Research Centre of Finland presented the plans to construct a high tech ecocity for 20.000 inhabitants in the Tianjin area. The project is based on the thinking of Professor Eero Paloheimo, a hard line environmentalist and aiming to a completely new urban model of a third generation city with zero environmental compromizes.

Professor Eero Paloheimo is a reknown Finnish environmental thinker and strategist who’s book The Way Towards a New Europe (Finland 1996, China 2005) has gained wide audience in Europe and China and resulted to common plan to design and constrcut a futuristic high tech ecocity in the industrial area of Tianjin.

Finland is regarded as the world’s leading country in the environmental comparison by the World Economic Forum and at the same time as one of the most competative countries in the world. China already harbors some of the world’s most polluted areas and it’s industrial development has not reached even close to it’s peak yet. The coal dependent steel production in China increased by 18.5% between 2005 and 2006 when China accounted already 34% of the total global steel production. (source: World Coal Institute) The Chinese have turned to Finland to partly prevent the disastrous environmental development. The EcoCity Tianjin is one of the Finnish government’s FECC (Finnish Environmental Cluster for China) projects in China.

What differs the Finnish ecocity from many other ecological urban schemes is the ecological radicality of its nature. ”There will be no combustion engine cars in the EcoCity.” Professor Paloheimo preached in his opening speach and continued that the city must be more or less 100% sustainable what comes to its own food, material and energy production as well as waste treatment. Professor Paloheimo’s speech was followed by presentations of an army of elite Finnish researchers from the governmental Technical Research Centre, Helsinki University of Technolgy and Helsinki University with wide range of topics ranging from CyberCab Future Passanger Traffic to Buildings Sink or Source of Energy and all the way to Possibilities of Environmental Art in Ecocity.

Eco City What and Why

Professor Eero Paloheimo has written eight books about environmental issues and prospects of future. In his book The Way Towards a New Europe he offers a theoretical analysis and detailed solutions for tackling the problems of Europe on the basis of a broad change of ideological direction.

The idea originated in the author’s concern for the future of mankind, coupled with his knowledge that the technology required to solve most of the problems either exists or is know. All that is required is the political will to take the momentous decision. The book calls for immediate action to save the environment. The book is not a technoutopia or work of science fiction, but a plan for the sustainable future that is both necessary and reasonable.

The first part of the book discusses the ideological and technological principles involved and the second part consists of a model plan to ensure the survival of our world. Although the author limits his analysis to the highly integrated Europe of tomorrow, his basic argument is global: an immediate and radical transformation of the system of production in the industrialized countries is both necessary and inevitable. The basis of this is international agreement and cooperation of which the the proposed project of the Tianjin EcoCity is a clear example.

EcoCity Tianjin is a model community of Prof. Paloheimo’s thinking backed up by existing technological solutions cordinated by the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland including solutions for self-sufficiency in food, the diversification of forests, alternative sources of energy, an economy based on recycling, new ecological agriculture, sustainable architecture and urban infrastructure, information technology, cybecabs and local traffic and the automatised and electronic distribution of goods.
Tianjin EcoCity is a model of a so-called 3rd generation city trying to answer to the problematics of the industrial city and industrialization. Paloheimo argues that the return to preindustrial times is impossible. This would mean a significant reduction in population, production and consumption. Though technically feasible, it is psychologically and politically impossible. The second alternative would be the road of minor change which, though realistic and politically acceptible, is too slow – it would not prevent the environmental disaster. Prof. Paloheimo’s EcoCity offers a new industrial revolution, the 3rd generation high tech but ecological city.

Sun, Wind and Bio-energy

The energy production of the EcoCity is basedon locally produced renewable energy methods. The possibilities introduced in Tianjin included more conventional wind, sun and bio-energy as well as fuel cells generating electricity by a chemical reaction.

Most of the electricity for the EcoCity can be based on wind. Two 3 MW wind turbines, one for housing electricity and one for electricity needed for heat pumps are sufficient to provide all the energy needed by 1000 single houses. However, due to natural variation in wind enerby generation, additional means or electricity productioon are required. The combination of the various energy sources are controlled through a ”smart grid” energy transportation infrastructure reading and balancing the consumer and production conditions.

Heating and cooling the houses of the EcoCity is based on heat pumps, district cooling and combined heat and electricity production (CHP) in power plants. The houses will have building integrated solar panels.

Waste is regarded as a resource of energy. The sustainable energy production will utilize biogas technology in which the anaerobic bacterias will will ferment the organic waste and thus create methane biogas which can be used in small scale microturbines for localized energy production.

The ecocity will also have large biomass plantation areas for forestry and for fast growing vegetation as a renewable energy source. Converting effectively biomass into energy includes a variety of well tested technologies from gasification to fludised bed combustion.

In conclusion the EcoCity produces its own heat, cooling and electricity. The production is sustainable and locally distributed. The means include wind, biomass, ground heat, district cooling, solar energy, fuel cells and biogas.

Buildings Sink or Source of Energy

Although the Tianjin conference was not presenting any detailed architectural design concepts for the EcoCity buildings some basic principles of architectural choises were discussed. The overlaying philosophy was to minimize the building’s energy consumption and change the the buildings into a source of energy. All the needed energy will be produced by renewable methods.

”The new energy strategy for buildings is based on visibility of consumption and choises.” Said Dr Miimu Airaksinen. ”The citizens must be able to individually choose the energy source and get used to the use of the control strategies. This will lead to the reduce of consumption and to energy conservation.” Like everything, also the energy controlling in the high tech EcoCity was based on telecommunications and information technology.

Urban structure affects greatly on total energy demand. Therefore an efficient integration of urban planning, master planning and building design must be taken into consideration from the very first beginning. For example compact urban structure reduces network losses. Building orientation effects to reduced heating demand or may lead to increased cooling demand. Planning for active solar systems must be considered in the master plannng as well as the dicision on building standard: Passive Houses.

Good master planning is estimated to reduction of heating and cooling energy demand 10 – 30% . The cost of design is low, but the biggest decision to save energy are made in the early design phase.

In the Finland developed energy efficient buildings the heating energy consumption is 50 – 80% lower compared with the modern Chinese standards. The buildings are integrated with photovoltaics and have self cleaning windows with TiO2 facades. With efficient building automation an additional 10 – 15% saving of the energy consumption can be achieved. Shading provides 50% savings in cooling and the heating is based on solar assisted ground heat pumps networks.
Primarily the buildings will use passive cooling: solar shading, window properties and orientation, night ventilation, attic ventilation and roof insulation . In case the active cooling is needed it is based on ground cooling and decentralized cooling networks.

”Dispite all the high technology, mother nature is clever.” Dr Airaksinen concluded. Correct positioning of the buildings and understanding the local natural conditions is the biggest key to the saving of the buildings energy consumption.

No Taxidrivers

Combustion engine vehicles are forbidden in the EcoCity. The city will set up a factory for CyberCabs which will move powered by electrical batteries and have no drivers. The eco citizens can order these CyberCabs with mobile phones ”point to point and just on time” –bases. No parking problems and individuals do not have need to have their own vehicles.

CyberCabs are rubber wheeled, electric vehicles and having lightweight and environmentally friendly structures. The traffic is based on normal road infrastructure. Cabs are fully automatic (no taxidrivers) and easy to operate. Satellite positioning enables JOT (Just On Time) human transportation and radar sensors outside the car will provide extra safety to the passangers. CyberCab will also have airbags outside the vehicle. Roads and light traffic are separated with green fence. The CyberCabs will have a relatively low speed.

Most of the transportation in the EcoCity is by foot or bicycles. Taipei was also a strong bicycle and bicycle-rikshaw city untill 1966 when the rikshaws were banned because the city government wanted Taipei to be modern.

EcoCity Tianjin may sound futuristic or a sciece fiction day dream. Maybe it is a laboratory testing solutions for the existing industrial cities to take the needed steps towards the 3rd generation urban future. The Finns are serious with their mission and China for sure has a need for an EcoCity, but this is not the core of the environmental problem. The core is here. It is the existing cities that together with the industry produce the majority of our global environmental problems. It is the existing cities that concentrate the combustion engine vehicles and it is the modern cities that are sucking endlessly growing amounts of energy. It is the industrial city that has alieneted the urban man from the nature.

How about EcoCity Taipei ... the 3rd Generation Taipei? All the technology exists, Professor Paloheimo says, only the political will is required. Only that and then we have...lets see...

No more cars, no more scooters. The MRT is the backbone of the transportation. Like Danshui river was before. Smaller streams of collective transportation are linked to the MRT –river. These may be the light rail or tramways with free transportation from MRT onwards. The MRT stations will be the hot spots loading the batteries of your electrical scooters and cybercabes. Also the parking of your office house is a loading station since the office building is an electricity source itself: solar panels, small bio micro turbines, even windmills on the facade or on the roofs...unless the roof is not cultivated for biomass production.

Yes: biomass, more biomass. Where to grow? The flood reservs along the rivers are perfect! Full of biomass. Some sort of weed or what ever fast growing vegetation for the localized bioenergy plants. Subtropical climate is perfect for this and the vegetation will clean the river too. People can play basketball in the old parking houses, rivers are for biomass. Danshui river, Keelong river, Xindian river, Jingmei river and Dahan river will become vivid wild green corridors cutting through the urbanized Taipei Basin to the mountains. Wild animals will come back to the city and more clean fish in the rivers. Series of tall windmills will raise along the river corridors competing with the renewable energy production with the localized solar and bio energy plants.

Then when the people are accustomed enough for the 3rd generation city the old irrigation channels, creeks and streams are opened from below the urban layers of asphalt and concrete to provide natural air conditioning for the whole city center with running cool water. The communities will take care of their own waste and have community farms led by grandmothers. All the waste is recycled, turned to energy or to top soil. The communities are competing in the self sufficiency of localized energy production. The skyscrapere are turned into buidling reactors taking care or the waste of the surrounding city and providing them energy. It will be a blessing to live in the shadow of the skyscraper, the ecological needle of urban acupuncture.

But no taxidrivers. This can not be. Maybe the bicycle-rikshaws should come back. The post industrial Taipei taxidrivers will be the fittest people on Earth.

Data boxes:

1.
Prof. Eero Paloheimo

� Prof. Paloheimo is a deginer, politician and univeristy professor. He has written eight books and many articles about the prospects of future and environmental issues.
� Paloheimo has been a member of the Finnish Parliament (representing the Green Party) 1987 – 1995 and Chairman of the Committee of Long-Term Future Options in the Parliament 1994 – 1995. Professor in the Helsinki University of Technology (wood-construction) 1995 – 2000.
� Presently busy with developing a new traffic system and future development of Africa.
� Two doctorates: Dr (eng.), Munich Germany and Ph.D., Helsinki Finland
� www.eeropaloheimo.fi

2.
Finnish High Tech EcoCity Tianjin Conference Presentation topics:

� Whose EcoCity how to embed ecological innovations in peoples everyday life – Researcher Sirkku Wallin, Centre of Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology
� Waste is a resource in EcoCity – Ulla-Maija Mroueh, Customer Manager, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� Urban solar energy schemes as sustainable enerby – Prof. Peter Lund, Helsinki University of Technology
� Urban green spaces in the ecocity – Dr Susanna Lehvavirta and Prof. Dean Jari Niemela, Helsinki University
� Telecommunication as its best – Prof. Jussi Paakkari, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� Sustainable transport – Prof. Risto Kuivanen, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� Re use of materials – Kari Heiskanen and Harri Lehto, Helsinki University of Technology
� Possibilities of environmental art in ecocity – Prof. Markku Hakuri, Helsinki University of Art and Design
� Indirect reuse of used water or wastewater insted – Prof. Heikki Kiuru, Helsinki University of Technology
� How to optimise energy consumption in our neighbourhood – Jyri Nieminen, Customer Manager, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� Energy from Waste – Dr Annimari Lehtomaki, Jyvaskyla Innovation Ltd.
� Electricity from our village -Dr Pasi Makkonen, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� CyberCab Future passenger traffic for the demands of ecology and comfort – Dr Sami Ylonen, Helsinki University of Technology
� Buildings sink or source of energy – Dr Miimu Airaksinen, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� How to create the best possible environment -Prof. Kari Larjava, VTT Technical Reseach Centre of Finland
� Eco City what and why – Prof. Eero Paloheimo

3rd Generation EcoCity was published in Taiwan Architect -magazine, 2007

Urban Acupuncture

URBAN ACUPUNCTURE
Marco Casagrande


Taiwan is on the threshold of an urban ecological awakening. This is the time to decide which way the Taiwanese cities will go. Much of the heavy industry have already moved to the surrounding countries and the citizens are looking forward to the clean-up and environmental rehabilitation of the post-industrial cities. But which way will this go: will Taiwan continue copying the artificial Western urban face-lifts or will it be the Japanese – Singapore–style eco-fascism? Or is Taiwan able to look deep into the mirror and see, realize and use its own original Taiwanese – Chinese hidden social values and energies and develop a new compost like organic way of environmentally sustainable urban living?

I came the first time to Taipei in 2002 invited by architect Chi Ti-Nan to participate the Urban Flashes –symposium. I was very much touched by the city - mainly by the street level humanistic energies but Taipei left me also wondering why the soft core of the humanistic city did not meet with the official one. It was almost like analyzing two different cities when reading the official data and maps about Taipei and to walk the streets.

I came back the year after with the invitation of the Taipei City Government this time to spend some time studying the human / organic layer of the city and how to react to it by means of urban planning. This is the time, in October 2003, when I first entered the Treasure Hill –settlement near Gonguang.

I was shocked by Treasure Hill. It was an urban farming community enclave inside the modern city powered by grandmothers. By the time Treasure Hill was dying. The official city had given to this illegal settlement a death penalty and the bulldozing was already on its way. The farms were turned into lawns and the farmers were moved into apartment houses. Everywhere in the air was the smell of a slow death. But the energy had not left the place. It was everywhere: in the ruins of the bulldozed houses, in the furniture, altars and photo albums of abandoned houses and in the anarchy of the illegal small gardens by the river. The remaining inhabitants were scared.

I felt the human energy in Treasure Hill very strong but also that it was now directed towards death, destruction. I needed to make a plan how to tune this same energy towards construction, like turning over the compost that has been the smelly part of the farm just to become the most fertile top soil. I was careful to manipulate these hidden energy flows and the small elements that I introduced to Treasure Hill can be compared to the needles in acupuncture. I call this urban acupuncture.

An Urban Poem

I became the cleaner man in Treasure Hill. There was no garbage bins and the small snaking allies were full of filth. The people were hiding behind their windows but I saw that they were old. In the foot of the hill some three stories of houses had been demolished, bulldozed away and instead of the houses there was green grass. A lawn instead of a settlement because officially now this was a park zone. For nature lawn is the same as concentration camp. It is nothing. It produces a shameful amount of oxygen and is merely the roof of a worm. And these people had been living there for some 50 years and these people were gardeners, I saw the fragments everywhere – village people, growing their own food. City had stepped in and the village people had to go. Same old story.

So I became the cleaner man. The first day the people were hiding and I started to clean and transport trash from their streets down of the hill to be picked up. The next day the same. On the third day there were already some buckets waiting for me and on the fourth day the people were cleaning themselves too. Together with me was also an increasing amount of architecture students from Tamkang University and National Taiwan University. Soon the little settlement of Treasure Hill was cleaned from the garbage and I started to build up stairs to connect the remained stairways of the torn down houses. By that time Treasure Hill was a dead end and I needed to create a loop for circular movement.

In the end of 3 weeks I had 200 students working with me and architect Shieih Yin-Jun had come down from the mountains too. With Shieih every morning we met and agreed who builds where. I don’t know what language we spoke. In the end the steps were built and even a small parade took place. Treasure Hill could stay and the bulldozing was stopped. In the place of the lawn where once the houses had stood was now a vegetable garden, food and the inhabitants were eager to cultivate the land. City learned to appreciate this small sustainable settlement – a small urban poem. It helped that the poet Liao was in the charge of the Department of the Cultural Affairs.

Treasure Hill was important for me maybe because I felt that the place was so real and the city around it was so fictive. So many external powers in the city dominating the humanistic energy and in Treasure Hill none. Now after a couple of years I am happy to see that Treasure Hill still survives. I survived the heat and the construction process partly due Missis Chen, the matriarch of the settlement, who gave me Chinese medicines and feed me fish and a lot of beer. The gardening is going well of course, since these people know what to do if given a chance. There is still a lot of lawn, a useless layer of artificial nature which should be a garden too. It is good that the city is injecting new energy to the place by some artists working there but I also felt the danger of the real settlement becoming a background for art pieces. Now when I go there most of the junk laying around the mango trees and water streams are from art works – light stands, posters, pieces or worthless installations etc. If art becomes the junk of Treasure Hill, what is that? People don’t have to exploit Treasure Hill or use it for anything, people should just appreciate it. What comes to art or action in a place like Treasure Hill – build another one. Build a new Treasure Hill, the Ultra Village in the hearts of Taipei.

I also feel that in Treasure Hill surfaces many of the future possibilities of environmentally sustainable urban living. Treasure Hill is like the attic of a house that contains objects of the times once lived, the good old times as the grandmother says. Narrative objects, objects with memories. Attic is the most subconscious space of a house and attic is the memory of a house. As I feel it, Treasure Hill is the attic of Taipei. The memory and the link between the modern man and nature – human nature as part of nature.

Forget the Forgetting

The grandmothers of Treasure Hill are showing the way to Taipei. When the old farming based values of Treasure Hill and those of the surrounding modern city will meet a new kind of ecological urbanism might be born. I don’t mean with this taking steps back technologically but on the contrary suggest to reinforce the existing urban farming qualities of the Treasure Hill with state of the art high environmental technology solutions and so view the Treasure Hill settlement as a living laboratory of sustainable urbanism. The new technologies and solutions must respect the way of life of the Treasure Hill veterans – the active solar panels and mechanical biological treatment units of organic waste must make room for the grandmothers.

The Treasure Hill settlement is build originally as an anti aircraft position on terraced on a mountain and facing straight to south. These are ideal conditions for effective use of solar energy.

The banks of the near by Xindian River are used as platforms for highway bridges leaving the ground level open. The river also acts as a wind corridor all the way from the river mouth in Danshui. The banks of the Xindian and later Danshui Rivers are suitable for urban wind energy farms.

Under the highway bridge besides Treasure Hill can easily be positioned hermetically closed in-vessel MBT (Mechanical Biological Treatment) –units to ferment organic urban waste including digested sludge. The units are using anaerobic bacteria and do not smell. The outcome of the MBT is clean water, top soil and bio gas later on to be conditioned into electricity.

By these means the Treasure Hill community can be completely sustainable what comes to its electricity use and waste treatment. Besides this it will gain fertile top soil for its farms. Also other environmental technology solutions should be tested, such as biological gray water filtering and step by step the big clean-up of the Danshui River.
Taipei City Government should see the possibilities in Treasure Hill and react on them. The grandmothers and urban farming must stay but new environmental technologies must also be tested in a way that later on can be multiplied in Taipei and in the rest of the Taiwanese cities. The solutions must be site specific but the suitable environmental technology solutions are already existing. It is only a question of will to combine these two.

Finland has been reviewed several years in a row by the World Economic Forum as the leading country in the environmental technology solutions of the world and could be a good partner as the know-how provider.

Asia has an urban culture of thousands of years old including ancient environmentally sustainable megacities. The hectic rhythm of the modern city makes us to forget this. Now is time to forget the forgetting. With Treasure Hill Taiwan can find its own way towards urban ecology.

MC





Marco Casagrande is a Finnish architect and urban planner and visiting professor in Tamkang University. In his work he is focused in the research of environmental technology solutions as the bases of site specific urban ecology. Casagrande represented Taiwan in this year’s Venice Biennale in the Taiwan Pavillion exhibition Paradise Revisited, curated by Roan Chin-Yueh.


DATA BOX

MBT

Mechanical Biological Treatment is the anaerobic bacteria based closed system (in-vessel) fermentation process of bio waste. Depending on the waste the whole treatment process from raw material to top soil, water and gas takes 7 – 14 days. The gas conditioning plant burns the methane gas into electricity of which 25% goes into running the MBT unit and 75% can be sold back to the city. The highly controlled MBT -fermentation process does not produce smell of health risks and can be applied as a localized urban waster treatment solution instead of centralized incinerators as in Taipei. With MBT –technology the recycling of waste material is practically 100%.

Urban Acupuncture was published in Taiwan Architect -magazine, 2007

Can't Push a River

The article is first published in the Taiwan Architect -magazine, 2006.


The beginning of the year has seen two interesting architecture workshops dealing with urban river ecologies and environmental rehabilitation. Architect Ti-Nan Chi launched the latest edition of his Urban Flashes workshops in Mumbai India dealing with a chain of slums around a river bed and Tamkang University’s architecture department held its annual International Workshop on the banks of the Danshui river in Zhuwei, Taipei.

Ti-Nan Chi and his Human Environment Group has organized the Urban Flashes since 1999. The first edition of these international gatherings of architects, environmentalists and other urban thinkers was held in Taipei and since that the circus has toured in Austria, England, Turkey, Norway and now in Mumbai, India.


Chi emphasizes his thinking of Micro Urbanism as some sort of urban acupuncture determining key locations in the cities where small scale interventions could have a big impact to the bigger city organism in general. In Mumbai he had chosen the Oshiwara river bed slums as the possible location for micro urban strategies. The Mumbai Urban Flashes was organized in co-operation with local Kamla Rajeha Institute of Architecture and had participating student groups from Taiwan (Tamkang University), Norway, South-Korea and India. The students were divided into groups and led by architects Sohn-Joo Minn from Korea, Marco Casagrande from Finland and Chi from Taiwan.

Slum dwellings on a bridge crossing the Oshiwara River in Mumbai.

There is a great danger in this kind of a symposium or workshop to descent into bottomless academic architectural jargon and raising cocktails to people who raise cocktails to you. Obviously the Indian hosting institute had wanted to go this way but Chi hadn’t fallen into the trap this time but instead wanted to push the workshop out of the institute and into the slums of Mumbai…into some of the very worst living conditions on Earth.

Rich Kids Play Architects

For the most of the foreign students the Mumbai workshop was a shock. Normal living conditions without hot water caused problems in the beginning until the students were faced with the facts in the slums. No more talk about the hot water then. The hygienic conditions in the slums are extremely poor and most of the students fell ill due to various kinds of food poisonings and other stomach diseases. The workshop was just a little more than one week so for the most of the foreign students the time passed suffering physically in different ways or simply just being shocked to see what the dark side of India is really like. The most tolerant were the Norwegian students from Bergen School of Architecture who had spent in India a week before the workshop and suffered the stomach acclimatising then.

But still again the Korean, Taiwanese and Norwegian students formed the real working hard cores of the student groups – sick or not. The Indian students were either lazy or just not so interested of what is going on in the low life of the slums – with a couple of positive exceptions. It seemed that the university studying is more of a hobby for them than a passion and these kids come from the wealthiest families of India every day driven to and picked up from the school by personal car drivers. Every day around five in the evening the teaching stopped and the students gathered together into the inner courtyard to play games. No alcohol, cigarettes or meat was allowed inside the school. The official language in the school is English – not Hindu or other Indian languages.

Waste is a resource, a happy place.

When listening to the descriptions and briefings of the Indian students about the situation in the slum areas it came evident that the slums are not more than a strange layer in Auto Cad to be played with or erased – not really anything involving human life or at least life worth respecting. The Kamla Rajeha Institute is doing a hard work trying to raise up social issues and responsibilities to interest the students with private car drivers and safe life on the top of the cast –hierarchy. The students could answer to a question, why do the slums exist by saying the the slum people have chosen so – and this choice does not necessarily mean in this life. Being in the slum is destiny like being in the Brahman –cast is destiny and if you want to start changing this, you have to change a lot.

Most likely Chi did not necessarily want to change the fundamental facts of the Hindu religion but in any case he had found a theatre to operate through his micro-urbanism to actually deal with the whole Indian society.

Human Dump

The Mumbai slums are situated along river beds and streams which function in the bigger ecosystem as flood water relief channels - Mumbai is hit annually with heavy monsoons. Along these rivers are also situated the many buffalo sheds that provide milk to the surrounding city and buffalo dung as fuel for cooking food. The water buffaloes along the river sides is an old system and works pretty much in harmony with the nature – the buffaloes need the river and the river can handle the organic waste. Of course when the city has grown the amount of buffaloes has grown as well and so the river also functions a open sewage for the buffalo care takers and that amount of the buffalo dung that they can not handle. So along these buffalo sheds rose the first temporary settlements of the buffalo people and their families that usually come from the poorest areas of India.

Oshiwara citizenry.

Today the city produces a lot of non organic waste and much of this waste is dumped into the slums around the original buffalo sheds. Attracted by the amount of not registered labour the illegal factories found their way to the slums as well and toxic waste of mainly chemical factories was introduced to the rivers which today are pretty much dead.

Polluted Oshiwara River, dump of Mumbai.

In fact the surrounding city needs the slums like before the ecosystem needed the rivers: the slums are treating the flood of waste. This may sound actually surprisingly ecological, the urban waste is treated and recycled in the city, but it is not – the waste treatment process has killed the rivers and is also killing the people of the slums doing the recycling manufacturing with poisonous chemicals and in all the ways dangerous working conditions. Besides these the river beds are partly overbuild by residential areas and the rivers no longer can act as the flood water channels. When the floods come those who can afford will stay in their high rise buildings and many of the slums get simply washed away and many people will drown. People who are living in illegal slums and don’t officially exist.

The slums are the end of the line of urban human exploitation.

Urban Nomads

The Norwegian group with around 10 Indian students concentrated in opening up some view axis’s from the Oshiwara river through the slums into the city. Normally the Mumbai citizens don’t even see the rivers in their city and don’t have to face the shameless ecological and humanitarian situation.

In the river ends of these axis’s mainly the Norwegian students built piles of rocks to mark the ending points and then painted these piles orange – a favourite Hindu colour. They even had a Hindu priest blessing these piles, which was a mistake. The slum that they were working with was a fundamentalist Wahhabit Muslim neighbourhood with green flags on the roof tops and ladies walking in burkhas. Declaring the ground with the Hindu land marks was close to a declaration of war and the students had to face some serious hardship in explaining their work of art to the local residents. In the end the piles were accepted to stay.

Korean Sohn-Joo Minn took the experiences of the Seoul’s Han river rehabilitation and especially the restoration of the Cheonggyeheon river as references for her group’s Oshiwara work. Cheonggyeheon had originally acted the same way as Oshiwara as a flood water channel and then later on got covered completely with a highway. As part of the Seoul’s Han –river restoration project the Cheonggyeheon highway deck was demolished and the river rehabilitated closer to her natural condition and is today a famous site for ecology-tourists and city people in large. Cheonggyeheon and the Han river restoration have risen to a state of national pride in Korea. (some say the water is artificially pumped)

If a highway can become back to a river also the ecologically hazardous urban waste treatment in the slums can be dealt with and the river can become an honourable part of the Mumbai urban narrative. City must be a compost.

City must be a compost.

My own group – four Tamkang University’s master’s students and around ten Mumbai students were concentrating on the existing fact of the slums working as urban waste treatment zones but trying to find solutions how to make this manufacturing ecologically sustainable and reflecting in socially constructive ways to the slums and to the surrounding city.


The Oshiwara river bed slums is not a homogeneous urban fabric but in fact a chain of some 20 slum societies in different illegal – legal settlement stages and with various different ethnical and religious backgrounds. All the slums have their own landlord hierarchies, many work as voting banks for local politicians and so on. All and all the slums are not at all an anonymous layer in Auto Cad but are in fact linked to the society in many ways but somehow share the same global tragedy of urban dwellers exploiting the nomads and natives – people closer to nature and as in the classic industrial urban development nature being the great looser.

The reflection of modern Mumbai in the polluted Oshiwara River.

We proposed a series of high environmental technology MBT (Mechanical Biological Treatment) –units to be attached to the slum societies. Units effective enough to treat event the hazardous chemical wastes and to process the urban waste of Mumbai into top soil, clean water, natural gas and energy and piles of separated waste material ready for recycling. The top soil and the energy would stay in the slum as clean surface for urban agriculture and power supply. The river would no longer be loaded with waste that the nature can not handle. In our point of view the slum people, the urban nomads would have a lot to give to Mumbai.


As a small installation, a glimpse of possible future we placed a mirror floating in the toxic Oshiwara river mirroring the clean blue above and started the first farm together with a grandfather form the slums who originally had once been a farmer.

CityZen Garden

After Mumbai it was quite a relief to co-operate with Tamkang University’s architecture department to organize their annual International Workshop. Professor Haakon Rasmussen-Wiesener (3RW Architects) from the Bergen School of Architecture Norway teamed up with me to run a competition “Urban Acupuncture” to be followed with a one week workshop “CityZen Garden” in Zhuwei, by the Danshui river of Taipei.

The Urban Acupuncture competition entries were in generally speaking quite light weight graphical posters or expressions of more personal traumas, something that is often faced in the Taiwanese architecture schools where the computer skills are overtaking critical thinking and real problem solving. In most cases the students had been inventing problems later on to solve them instead of being confident enough to deal with everyday surrounding realities or questions of normal life.

This danger of design replacing reality or using art and architecture for therapy was avoided in the actual workshop where the students and the teachers were taken Zhuwei to work in 1:1 scale with limited time in real conditions.



Basically all the department was involved except the fifth class and the second class of master’s students, who were engaged with their diploma works. Besides the staff professors of the university some 10 visiting scholars were invited to participate in leading the student groups. 180 students took part in the workshop.

The workshop was based on the theory of viewing the modern cities through the traditional Japanese art of Zen gardens. The Zen garden is a visual platform of environmental meditation linking the human nature as part of nature and furthermore to more cosmic entities.

On one hand one can see the Zen garden as a reflection of the surrounding environment scaling down the mountains into its stones or the movement of the ocean into the racking pattern of the gravel. Meditation can build connections and dynamics between the elements of the Zen garden and its surrounding nature. Meditation can also reveal tensions, balances and directions between the Zen garden elements themselves and help the viewer to erase the realities around the garden letting the mind travel in this highly controlled environment.

The paradox of the Zen garden is in its highly controlled nature as a platform of accident. It may be, that the form of the garden has remained the same for 500 years having the every element articulated into their exact position – the racking of the sand or gravel, the pattern of the growing or merely being of the tree, the color of the moss around the stone…nothing has changed but still one has to admit that the slightest breeze of the wind might turn one piece of the sand or fall down a leaf from the tree and the same gardening work has to be started again. This ultimate human control celebrates the superiority of the smallest of the environmental changes.



We try to control cities with millions of people. And we easily forget the nature. We are capable of creating surroundings where human nature is no longer part of nature.

Garden is a window of eternity.

Urban Compost

If a Zen garden is trying to build a harmony between the natural elements, the human nature and the universe the city does not seem to have the time. And the time is in essence. To justify its being the modern city has created the artificial time and invented stress. After stressing for time and money death has become a defeat - a bankruptcy.

City must be a compost.

In nature death is the beginning of a new life. When a tree is growing, it is tender and pliant, but when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness and being. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible, when he dies he is hard and insensitive. Because what has hardened will never win.

We asked the students to think about the Zen garden and we asked them to think about the city to create a new Zen garden for the city, the CityZen Garden to help us to reach a level of post-urban meditation. The city of slowness, the urbanism of acupuncture, the new urban nomad – in a compost, as a garden.

The workshop was a big task of a creator. One had to be sensitive enough to look for the horizon and gifted enough to present the reflections of the future. The thinking and creations of the CityZen Gardens raised up questions of the urban development of the post industrial city, questions of taking the needed steps towards ecologically sustainable directions and questions about the role of an urban planner or architect in this development. The different interpretations of the CityZen Gardens were quite freely mixing the different disciplines or urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture and environmental planning and landing down to an open form.

Open Form

Zhuwei proved to be an excellent place to realize the gardens. There already exists citizen gardens and community farms surrounded by the MRT –line and residential and commercial buildings. Danshui river plays the big sound of nature with its daily tidal rhythm of and axis towards the river mouth and the ocean horizon. Also the mountains to the West of the river are present, city feels quite temporary.

The students were divided in two sections: one half to work by the river and one half in the grasslands and bushes closer to the MRT –line. Both of these sections were divided into 9 groups. The 9 riverside groups were tasked to work attached to each other cultivating individually a 2,5 meters wide area starting form the upper bank of the river all the way down to the water. The key word for this big community garden of nine groups was the theory of “Open Form” where architectural elements and environmental manipulation is designed to invite other forms or reactions into the present situation.

The other 9 groups in the bushes near the MRT were let to go free and find themselves individual sites where they would like to build their gardens roughly the size of one car parking space 2,5 x 5 meters.

It did not take long until the conversations were deep in the subconscious and weird gardens started to happen. Where as the big garden by the river had to cope with the big scale of nature and with actual physical natural powers – such as the tide the smaller gardens were safe to became gateways or interfaces where to step into another consciousness. Many of the small gardens were highly narrative, physical forms of childhood memories or hiding places and some were taken form as driven by some uncontrollable powers into temporary collages of industrial waste framing or focusing the eternal circulation of nature. Quite normal was to hear a dialogue about “Death” and “Life” while students were placing a rock to sit on in a garden.

A lot of secrets and personal meditation spaces started to get realized as if the nature had given the students a possibility to relax and feel free to open themselves. All the material used was found on the site. Everything that was build was temporary reorganizing of found objects and reactions to site specific conditions.

The big garden was hard. One had to cope and negotiate with the neighbors and the area of the site was constantly changing according to the tide. The tide also destroyed day after day all the decorative constructions that did not understand its force. Nevertheless the students to whom the Danshui river had possibly been a questionable back yard of Taipei, something you really don’t want to see were soon standing bare foot in the mud discussing the right angle to sit and contemplate the mountain. No matter of the aesthetics of the garden the Danshui river had become the dominating unquestionable real element of nature where the students felt performing at. Performing on the conditions of the river after realizing that there is no other way - nature don’t need decoration and one can’t push a river.

Of course the big garden ended up happily to look more Dao than a Zen garden but still again something very touching seemed to have happened. Time had changed. Maybe the time or the rhythm of the river had gotten into the garden or maybe the amount of human energy had done it but anyhow the time in this garden was not city time but more like human time, or nature time, or just time.

Professor Bee’s group used their time to dig up half a meter of the landfill soil in their area and cleaned away every man originated object of it and then put the top soil back. Of course this is a merely symbolic gesture towards the ecological rehabilitation that Taipei as well as the other Taiwanese cities are facing, but still honest, respectable and important. When Danshui river is back to its natural condition the conscious of Taipei is clean – now the river is a trauma. If architect is also a gardener, he is a constructor. If he is not a gardener, he can be a destructor – there is a danger.

We asked some 5-years old kids on the bicycle bridge just above the big garden by the river what do they think the people by the river bank are doing. “They are making traps for the crabs and then they will barbeque them.”

Your Mother Does Not Live Here

Based on the above described two international workshops and previous cases in Taiwan and abroad I feel the international workshops in the Taiwanese architecture schools are needed. The students should be send to abroad to work in unfamiliar conditions and comparing their working skills to the ones of the students from abroad. This will help them to value the working skill they have and also push them to the role of an experimental creator and taking risks. University is often a too safe place to play.

International scholars and student groups should be invited to Taiwan to contribute and challenge the Taiwanese students and schools. There is a great potential in the Taiwanese students what comes to computer skills and working discipline. What is lacking is down to earth touch to reality and bigger masses of people in society. For example in the student projects the city is often viewed as an amusement park and virtual or fictive realities seem to be an easy way to escape dealing with normal life question, not to mention taking social responsibility. In army the best thing is that you learn to clean when the Sergeant shouts: Your mother does not live here!

Taiwan is economically and in democracy in many ways the most advanced nation in the Asia Pacific excluded Japan and should be the one taking the most challenging steps what comes to sustainable architecture or urban ecology. There is a lot to deal with inside the country from the heritage of the hyper industrialization period. The lack of confidence and identity has left the students in the cross fire of copying western architecture, being silently admiring the Japanese solutions not even to mention the cultural burden of China. In many ways all of this is fictive and can opened up and dealt with through the work – if the tasks are the right in university and in working life. For this it is helpful to have international scholars visiting the country and making the students to face the Taiwanese realities as an outsider sees them. It is also helpful to take the students to work abroad to value their home country from another experience and perspective.

Nobody is a prophet in his own land, the saying goes. External observations are needed, one gets easily blindfolded for the real realities around the everyday life. Taiwan should also take a more responsible role in helping the surrounding countries in dealing with the heavy industrialization and urbanization after dealing with its own cities. To prepare for this role the architecture students should get familiar with working more internationally and facing real time the environmental problems back home. Through this the Taiwanese architecture can become valuable, even important – at least healthy.


Urban Flashes Mumbai

Urban development symposium and workshop in Mumbai India 3.-8.1. 2006 organized by Human Environment Group / Taiwan and Kamla Raheja Memorial Lecture Series.

Speakers and workshop leaders: Shirish Beri (Architect, Nagpur, India), Ravi Sundaram (Urban Theorist, Delhi, India), Madhushree Dutta (Film-maker, India), Rupali Gupte (Architect, India), Sudhir Patwardhan (Artist, India), K. T. Ravindran (Architect and Planner, Delhi, India), Anirudh Paul (Architect, Mumbai, India), Ti Nan Chi (Architect, Taiwan), Sohn-Joo Minn (Architect, Korea), Marco Casagrande (Architect, Finland).

Participating universities: Kamla Raheja Institute of Architecture (Mumbai, India), Tamkang University Department of Architecture (Taipei, Taiwan), Yonsei University School of Architectural & Urban Engineering (Seoul, Korea), Bergen School of Architecture (Bergen, Norway).

CityZen Garden

International Workshop of Tamkang University Department of Architecture in Zhuwei Taipei 21.-27.2.2006.
Workshop leaders: Marco Casagrande (Architect, Finland) and Haakon Rasmussen-Wiesener (Architect, Norway).

Can't Push a River published in Taiwan Architect -magazine 2006