Premise

From forest in the city to Forest City

Mankind’s ambition to recreate natural landscapes has inspired a long and rich tradition. From the gardens of Versailles to Manhattan’s Central Park, land, water and vegetation have been meticulously engineered to our specifications. The contrast between brick and mortar and flora and fauna has been applied to enhance both spaces. Few experiences are more profoundly urban than reemerging from a downtown subway station into a lush park. Increasingly, natural elements have been stacked onto buildings, embedded within airport terminals, and revitalised outdated innercity infrastructure. The symbiosis between natural and artificial landscapes appears almost complete. Yet the sum of these spaces do not constitute natural landscapes. While more biodiverse, they expand urbanity, not nature. They are fragments of forest within the city, not yet a Forest City.

Rather than altering nature to enhance our cities, EPOCH45 suggests the next step in planning evolution is to invent a city that facilitates nature.

But the urban project seems caught in a loop. The world has witnessed a resurgence of new town projects. Yet this century-old planning model has hardly evolved. Instead, it is perpetually revived with new technologies. EPOCH45 posits that the concerns surrounding 'blueprint on greenfield' planning are spatial, rather than technological. Indeed, the model’s shortcomings are augmented. While villages and townships throughout the ages have been able to sustain a resource balance with the lands in their immediate vicinity, the modern city thrives on its intricate connections with global logistic and data networks. This real triumph is at odds with goals for local resource independence.

Putting the New in New Town

Urbanism has reached a fork in the road. The future of planning seems limited to two opposing ideologies that drive both discourse and global practices. On the one hand, there is the top-down, global-capital-dependent blueprint planning of large insular ecocity projects, and on the other, grassroots incentives geared towards incremental growth and community building. In reality, no urban project can rely entirely on one or the other planning logic. This dichotomy reflects a disturbing mismatch between urban theory and planning practice. This disparity is becoming more palpable as both newly planned settlements and suburban expansions are absorbed within the same ruralurban continuum. Cityscapes are now expected to incorporate nature, meanwhile rural landscapes are consumed by spaces of production spat out by the metropolis. However, in the absence of clearly distinguishable physical and conceptual boundaries, the planning models based on urban// non-urban and centre//periphery dichotomies that planners have so long relied upon, fundamentally falter. These two antithetical planning ideologies now share a common challenge: the amalgamation

of Red, Green, Blue, or the casual juxtaposition of urban, agricultural, and natural geographies.

This presents us with a wicked problem. The fork in the road is merely a false choice. Centralised// grassroots, urban//rural, and global//local binary systems have become intertwined to the point that they must be conceived within a unified, multiscalar space. Within this matrix agro-industry, city services, leisure, and flora and fauna must form a new productive landscape—a singular habitat of symbiotic co-dependence. This is still a dream, but it is also an urgent opportunity to revive the urban project in line with global exigencies, severely muddled environments, and a need for new planning models that—somehow—integrate diverse nature with spaces of consumption to form a new, gradually maturing productive ecosystem.

A Green Canvas

The new town model is notoriously challenging. Planning cities from scratch has been alluring to so many, even though it is fraught with numerous unresolved issues, which are compounded when such schemes are projected on a green canvas in virtual isolation. New town models clash with the core tenets of spatial planning—i.e. connectivity, context sensitivity, and community engagement. Complexity itself is undercut when designing a new habitat wholesale. As a future metro region, envisioned on a sparsely inhabited island, amidst a tree plantation, where urban history, nature, a larger community, and precise data are lacking, EPOCH45 embodies all these predicaments.

Teams are thus confronted with the persistent traps and temptations of designing the blueprints for a wholly engineered ecocity on a green canvas. However, there is a loophole to navigate the contradictions innate to the eco-new-town model. The theme of evolutionary planning invites exploration of a phased development, accreting complexity over time to generate a critical mass of people and industry, with its own data, its own agro-ecology, socioeconomic and communal fabric, and ultimately, its own path dependence.

Having avoided the pitfalls of a static blueprint, the EPOCH45 planning challenge extends, as teams are tasked with designing the spatial framework of a "forest city," a concept still undefined, and open to interpretation, which in turn evokes many new questions and presents significant new spatial, socioeconomic and procedural paradoxes, o.a.:

Spatial

How can a diverse jungle be cultivated by planning a city on the site of a tree plantation?
How can a vibrant and equitable city emerge from an existing urban core dominated by offices and exclusive housing compounds?
Is it possible for a metropolis to incorporate the aspired 70% forest while retaining spatial integrity, compactness, and thus walkability?
Can parametric or GIS models ensure a careful integration with the undulating topography?
In the face of diverse risks and natural disasters including drought, wildfires, flooding, inundation, heatwaves, and typhoons, can we rely on naturebased solutions to ensure a resilient forest city?
Can landscape urbanism mitigate the impact IKN has on the fragile ecologies of Balikpapan Bay?

Socioeconomic

Are the intended administrative and educational programs robust enough to establish a virtually disconnected city and support its self-reliance?
Can these relatively easy to relocate programmes provide the stimulus to incrementally attract other programme and promote ongoing diversification?
What alternative investment models could be conceived if influx from global capital stagnates?
Can ecosystem services provide a sustainable foundation to support the new metro region?
How can a sense of community be cultivated and surrounding villages benefit from developments?

Procedural

In what ways can incremental and adaptive planning models be effectively implemented for the development of the new forest capital?
In a remotely planned capital, to what extent can operations be virtual, and what is the physical infrastructure that would still be required?
What kind of management structure is required to engage a diverse range of local stakeholders and experts in a long-term iterative design process?

Who should be involved in participatory feedback loops to inform participatory GIS and budgeting?
How to define and evaluate the distinguishing qualities of a forest city—an unproven concept?
What are appropriate KPIs? Can the SDGs offer a holistic lens? Or would absolute resource autarky best define the new capital's success in 2045?

Such narratives will invariably escalate, while the competition solicits clear and concise visions to reinvent not only the new capital, but also the novel planning methods it will need to be built on.

Neville Mars
1-08-2024