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'Performalism': environmental metrics and urban design

This chapter originated as a paper Hagan was invited to give at the international conference ‘Ecological Urbanism: Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future’ at Harvard University in 2009. Other participants included Ulrich Beck, Sanford Kwinter, Andrea Branzi, Rem Koolhaas and Charles Waldheim. Ecological Urbanism, the edited book in which Hagan’s chapter appears, provides a multidisciplinary overview of what the urban might become if both subjected to and stimulated by the exigencies of the ecological.

Hagan’s chapter is one of the few to specifically address the implicit opposition between environmental engineering and urban design or, more simply, between environmental performance and form. Hagan describes in detail an environmentally-led urban design method. This was initiated in a research-by-design project called ‘EnLUDe 1’ (Environmentally-Led Urban Design), a collaboration with academics at the Universities of São Paulo and Cambridge, and then further developed in studies of the same site in São Paulo by ‘R_E_D’, Hagan’s research consultancy. The design method in question holds that environmental considerations are as important as social and economic ones for the process of urban design. It therefore began with a site survey of environmental problems and resources, and continued with a design for environmental performance first, which was then modified through a series of iterations that added social, economic and typological responses, layer by layer.

Hagan disseminated the various stages of the research widely: for instance, as a panelist in a public RIBA Futures Debate, ‘Data City: Doom or Boom’ at Apple Headquarters, London (2010), and in a keynote address, ‘Emerging practices at the interface between ecology and urbanism’, at the ‘Ecology and Urbanism’ conference, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (2010; later published by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in The Eco-Urb Lectures, 2011).