Julian Smith, architect and urban planning guru, on healthy cities
The Canadian architect and conservator talks sustainable cities, cultural heritage and why the world is looking to Canada to lead
JJulian Smith, the dean of faculty at Willowbank School of Restoration Arts in Queenston, Ont., has spent his career working on major heritage conservation projects in Canada and around the globe, including restoring the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France. As the world prepares for Habitat III, the third UN conference on housing and sustainable urban development, in Ecuador in October, Smith discusses the meeting, his work and what the future holds.
On Habitat III and sustainable cities
Most of the people there will be urban theorists and planners, and they’ll be talking about how to design a better sustainable city. But there’s relatively little interest in that group in how to deal with existing cities, even though sustainability is presumably about connecting past, present and future.
How can you build the ideal sustainable city if you have no proof that it will be? If you have an 18th-century city that has survived with amazing qualities, and you can think about how you can make it more energy efficient and more friendly to pedestrians and alternative forms of transportation, then you have a basis for thinking about sustainable patterns.
On the connection between cultural heritage and sustainability
If you don’t realize that the idea of sustainability varies across cultures, or that cultural diversity is itself a key component of sustainability, just as biodiversity is, then you’re working to create the ideal city as though everybody who lives in it is anonymous, just an urban dweller in an abstract sense, with no culture of heritage.
On Canada’s role in the evolution of a sustainable city
A city evolves when it embraces a broader array of ways in which we live in it. When I travel the world, there’s this sense — which has really been reinforced since the federal election — that Canada is working to understand what a true multicultural society looks like. People say to us, “You better figure this out; we’re watching and learning from you because you have the resources. You’re a wealthy, multicultural country and you have the perspective of the First Nations, for whom culture and nature have always been indivisible.” That’s finally being understood as the key to sustainability. That puts a responsibility on us to take advantage of that situation.
Read an extended version of this interview at cangeo.ca/oct16/smith.