MONU – Magazine on Urbanism, is looking for interesting contributions for their coming issue MONU“Clear Urbanism”.
When it comes to Clean Urbanism – i.e. an urbanism that is dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs for a city of energy, water, and food as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan, and water pollution – a lot of proposals have been made recently for the building of so-called “eco-cities” that produce their own energy from the wind, the sun, bio-fuel, or recycled waste. But it has often been denied that such sources of energy, being integrated directly into cities, are highly inefficient, very expensive, and in the case of wind energy, very noisy. Nevertheless, wind turbines in an urban realm, for example, nowadays feature in almost every urban competition entry that requires sustainable energy concepts. Solar panels on rooftops have become state of the art on innumerable new building designs, however inefficient and expensive they are.
The question is: how might we achieve a Clean Urbanism that is socially, economically, and politically, but also environmentally correct? In the final analysis, what kind of soap or detergent do we need to achieve true Clean Urbanism? This question, and many others will be featured in the next issue.
Ideas and abstracts should be sent to info@monu-magazine.com by the end of May 2009. MONU2009.