The World Urban Forum is taking place in Vancouver right now. According to City Council minutes (see the PDF here, our Mayor (Alan Lowe) got $484 to attend for a day, while our Councillors Pamela Madoff and Sonya Chandler received $968. I don’t begrudge our politicians’ attendance, but I hope they’re going with open minds. It’s significant that Councillor Chandler ran on a “green” platform, but has simultaneously opposed new 14-storey mid-rise downtown developments because they’re not “sustainable” simply by virtue of being tall(ish). That strikes me as an unhip, unstylish cop-out, Councillor. Are we to infill our unattractive downtown surface parking lots with low-rise buildings instead? What’s sustainable about that?

I suggest the councillor instead take a look at Ken Yeang’s Editt Tower: a 26-storey skyscraper that happens to boast over 55% water self-sufficiency (via rainwater collection and water reuse through built-in filter systems) and an almost 40% energy self-sufficiency through a system of solar panels. To read a more thorough review of Editt, see Treehugger. In other words, it’s nonsense to blur one’s antipathy to a style (Chandler appears not to like mid- or highrises, regardless) with the substantive charge of unsustainability. That’s playing with a stacked deck, dear.

Meanwhile, our suburbs to the west are happily forging ahead, sustainability be damned, with projects that fully exploit a particular kind of cocooning impulse (and nary a nod to eco-sensitivities, so don’t go looking for solar panels or waste-water recycling there). They’re going to build highrises in the wild, which have a special kind of significance. These projects, it seems to me, prove Douglas Larson’s urban cliff hypothesis. For example, Soaring Peaks plays to the urbane caveman (or woman) with visions of prospect and infinitely extendable domain. (Soaring Peaks’s sister project is The Highlander: slightly more “traditional,” but working on the same premises nonetheless of what one might describe as all the comforts of cave in the wilds of nature.) One of the best illustrations in Larson et al.’s Urban Cliff Revolution: Origins and Evolution of Human Habitats has to be the photo from a North Carolina tourist brochure. It shows a grand prospect, an overlook to a valley and mountain range. In the front, left hand side, is a rock-face, with inset elevator buttons. The “P” for penthouse (somewhere over the 30-storey range) is prominently placed at the top. It signals safety, comfort, and “arrival”: ‘tis a lucky sod who can survey his (or her) domain from such a refuge.

Larson's hypothesis suggests that the pleasure or desire for this sort of prospect-refuge nexus is hard-wired into our brains – when we left the arboreal regions, which shrank due to climate change and desertification, we found the savannah, which was nice enough for foraging, but didn’t provide enough refuge from other carnivores, particularly at night. Nor did it give us naked apes much shelter or comfort during night-time temperature drops, or provide security when we slept or copulated. We found our refuge and security in rock outcrops and caves. The higher up, with additional prospect (which allowed surveying of the savannah below), the better.

So, could one say that darwinian economics is pushing these “prospects” into our suburbs, while our downtown squabbles over tiddlers in the 15-storey range? Maybe we’re still cavemen after all, stuck in downright primitive mindsets? Sustainable? Not likely.