Nature doesn't exist, and it's a product of our thought. Or, our thought is shaped by nature, as we are embedded in it. In each case, ecology is not anymore an ecology of nature, but it is an ecology of everything: environment, mind, society. Human activities can be described with ecological models, and human activities have ecological consequences. If there is no "nature", no original "equilibrium" to be restored then GMOs, nuclear power, Geo Engineering, etc, are not intrinsically wrong. Paradoxically, they're also functional to lowering CO2 emissions. The wrong fact is that GMOs, nuclear power, Geo Engineering, etc, are a product of a not ecological vision of the world. The laws of Market are inherently anti-ecological

Expert meeting Nr. 2 - VOLUME i.c.w. VAN ABBEMUSEUM Since a sustainable city is often understood as a society of zero emission or carbon neutrality, we decided to ask ourselves: What happens AFTER ZERO, when this ideal stage is reached? What are the theoretical guidelines and interesting practices for designing a sustainable city? We think that the experiences of those who work in shrinking cities or cities in ‘crisis’ are in the process of finding answers to these questions. As these places offer a radically different case study on what a normal urban condition is, namely a condition which is not only determined by capitalist development incentives, but rather a kind of post-capitalist condition with a different logic to produce and a different set of ethics.

Did you know? Cities have always been shaped by food. Different systems of food production, storage, distribution, and consumption patterns affected the form of cities in history, from the first cities of Mesopotamia, to the proto-hydroponic terraces of Machu Picchu, from the post-war Western cities to the Southern Megalopolis. Our food system is the product of the so-called Green Revolution, begun in the Fourties. But today the Green Revolution shows its limits. Of course, it is criticized by ecologists and anti-globalization activists for the damages it causes to the environment and for its negative consequences for the poor in developing countries. But also, seems that the Green Revolution techniques are no longer profitable for the agriculture business. Therefore, a new, Greener Revolution is about to come.

Yesterday, the Italian newspaper il manifesto published two very different opinions on the Venice Biennale. The first is an enthusiastic article by Lucia Tozzi, pointing out the freshness of the young architects involved in the exhibition ... the architects selected by Emiliano Gandolfi [the curator of the Italian Pavilion exhibition] question security policies, land property, comunication systems, the established cycles of building industry, public space and energy resources management. On the other side, the editorial by Maurizio Giufré shows a completely different mood. What does it mean to be 'experimental' nowadays, when as "Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, there can be no innovation, neither eresy, for there is no orthodoxy"? Computer graphics is meant to represent an architecture which can resist consumption culture. On the contrary, architects are not aware that they are participating to it, and reproducing it at any time Can architecture go beyond the 'society of the spectacle'?

If sustainability is a global theme to address, the Venice Biennale 2008 must be the place to substantiate the claim of architecture to address our future needs and possibilities. Since this Biennale focuses on avant-gardes from the past and the present, practices that ‘go beyond building’, it comes as no surprise that many projects and presentations fall in the broad category of sustainability. What is surprising that sustainability equals green. Green cities, eco-zones, ecological futures. As far as design is concerned sustainability is basically about merging urban culture and nature, be it ‘natural nature’ or ‘productive nature’. Is that all there is to it?

You care for the environment. You try to use your car less, and you buy your food from the local farmers' market. You keep your ecological footprint under control, and become vegetarian. You regard yourself as a progressive, leftist. You read lots of newspapers, and the internet. Suddenly, you discover that GMOs and nuclear energy are good for the atmosphere, and your new Toyota Prius is not as sustainable as you thought. Perhaps, those biofuels are not so bio, and George W. Bush starts his war (yet another one) against global warming, while the best ecocities look like gated communities in the Emirates, or in China. That's too much. It is clear that something, somewhere, went terribly wrong. You need to take a break, and start to re-think the whole thing from the beginning. Stay tuned. Sustainability Reloaded is here to help you.

Part of the installation at the Biennale is an archive of projects, news, definitions and opinions surounding the three scenarios presented. Here are some examples of the info cards made for each issue.

The idea behind the Boeri Studio's Biennale installation is to present three different and extreme scenarios of an urban future radicalized around notions of sustainability. These visions can pass very quickly from utopian ideas regarding new relations between nature and the city to nightmarish scenarios that could also make the city unlivable. A series of eclectic materials (models, diagrams, books, an archive of projects and news, etc.) display the stories behind the three radically different urban visions while a video by the Flocking project shows the way in which flocks of birds invade Roman skies and the tactics used to shift them away: an example of the thin line between the utopia or dystopia of a sustainable future.

Are carbon neutral cities, Eco-cities and sus tain able cities discursive cover ups for synthetic design in the desert of Abu Dhabi or something stemming from an honest utopian desire? Questioning Foster's scheme for Masdar, Matt Lewis reaches revealing conclusions on the marketing of design in the Gulf. In a world in which human egos dominate, where more is better, bigger and taller are the only aspirations. Places like Dubai are an architect's playground. Here we see one ego trip followed by another through an architecture of excess. In a parallel world, however, the Mies van der Rohe's words ring true again, though in a different context. 'Less is more' now applies to our carbon footprint and an architecture of performance. Yet as these two worlds begin to intersect a new competition is born – the race to become the world's first sustainable city.

Scott is one of the most profound critics of high-modernist human development planning. He believes that the process of state-building, leading to what he calls the legibility and standardization of society, fosters control and domination rather than enlightenment and freedom. Scott started his academic career studying small village communities in the forests of Malaysia. When he left the rain forest he took with him a number of vital observations on how nation states organize their society. His monumental book, Seeing Like A State (1998)[1], became the basis for a fundamental and elaborate critique of how governmental planning for the advancement of society can go utterly wrong: compulsory villages in Tanzania, scientific forestry in Prussia, high-modernist Brasilia, industrial agricultural planning in the USSR and its modern day variant the Millennium Development Goals. According to Scott, these are all examples of rational-utopian blueprint thinking that proved fatal.

Recent bidonvilles (slums) and decaying dalles (large urban centers built on slabs), two extreme urban forms in Greater Paris – harsh reality and a bygone utopia – are both regularly the theatre of police violence. It is a situation full of contradictions: the dalle as an architectural expression of the ultimate capacity to design a lifestyle, the total city for model families; the slum as a fortuitous miscellany with which the poor demand a place, make their existence visible, and evade official architecture. All the same, their histories intertwine, for it was in the 1960s that immigrants living in shantytowns built the new towns and the slabs for the middle class, with flats whose keys would pass into the hands of the slum residents themselves a decade later. What do local authorities and other official bodies in France do when they are confronted with slums and slabs? How do they deal with the residents?

'A precondition for starting a significant architectural intervention is to define a project in consultation with those parties involved in its implementation (the government, the local municipality, private investors, developers, construction companies, planners, designers and architects).' This preamble to a recent international conference on 'architectural interventions and transformations' is typical for an 'all-inclusive' way of thinking about processes these days. Plans and policies are no longer defined and implemented by a few specialists;they are developed with all stakeholders (another popular contemporary notion). All parties? The user/consumer/resident, usually the subject and victim of intervention, is conspicuously missing from this description.

Publics are globalizing, public spaces are fragmenting. Modern institutions of knowledge, e.g. the library, the archive and the museum, are morphed into multi-experiential post-spaces. As a result of digitalization and worldwide webbing, searching and finding gains a radical different spatial dimension. What about the transformation of the library as a building and an institution?