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.

This month Archis trains its spotlights on ecology. Whatever that might mean. Ecology in some or other guise is of course a thematic presence in practically all the articles. They forward various ideas about the link between architecture and environmental consciousness. The potentials for a more nature-aware architecture are explored from a variety of different angles. And all the authors are interested in the balance between the reserves of worldly riches and their social consumption. All in all, the contributions have enough in common for us to speak of a special issue. In this respect, Archis is trying to do justice to a social sector, a domain of thinking and an important force field in our culture. Yet the subject of ecology is too broad to stay in a little world of its own. Ecology is an umbrella concept that covers far too much for there to be any such thing as 'an ecological issue'. It is a subject that relates to everything: to matter and mind, art and science, market and society, heaven and hell, earth, air, water and fire.

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.

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?