Introduction

Abstract

I am still motivated by something Bucky Fuller, America’s iconoclastic engineer and inventor, advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not his geodesic domes, dymaxion houses, or crazy three-wheeled cars, but an idea more fundamental to his thinking: whole systems design. Long before we saw a satellite view of earth, Bucky was talking about “spaceship earth”—an engineer’s metaphor for the ultimate ecological paradigm. His metaphor was complex and implied many things: that we are all in this together, that our planet is indivisible and interdependent, and that we are in charge, responsible, at the helm. We are not at the mercy of Mother Earth but occupy a place somewhere between steward and pilot. As climate change now presses down on us, this metaphor becomes even more compelling, challenging, and important.

In this book, I define the term urbanism broadly—by qualities, not quantities; by diversity, not size; by intensity, not density; by connectivity, not just location.