The city as a closed system, a technological utopia of escape as a model of urban sustainability

Abstract

The first images of the Earth from space and the development of "cabin ecology" studies of the space program inspired, from the 1960s, the perception of the planet as an isolated spacecraft and the subsequent application of systems of closed ecological cycles as a solution to the terrestrial environmental crisis, giving rise to numerous ideal proposals for isolated, air-conditioned and self-sufficient cities that, in their most extreme version, will even raise the possibility of abandoning the Earth in space colonies, constituting true technological utopias of escape. Despite the risk of evasion of reality typical of escape utopias, these proposals represent an attempt to redefine the limits of the city, blurred since the industrial revolution, and recover the Aristotelian concepts of balance and limit, presenting themselves as a revision of the classic, agricultural and sustainable utopias by showing a contained miniaturization of an ideal system in static equilibrium. Isolated models through a skin or membrane that update the traditional vision of the island as a generic container of the classic preindustrial utopia. In their abstraction of a miniaturized and encapsulated ecosystem, they propose a change in the perception of our cities, insisting on the essential importance of the natural territory in the control of urban entropy and recovering the concept of the city-region as a unit of sustainable development.