Carbon modernity or "carbon form" describes human-made objects, technologies, or social constructs that prescribe the combustion of fossil fuels. The commons in Elisa Iturbe’s guest edited issue of Log 47 on overcoming carbon form, defines it as the “self-governance relative to a specific resource" but suggests instead that it should be “a social practice where a community of users govern and manage a specific resource.” This redefinition creates an opportunity for a new urban form that can facilitate a transition from carbon modernity to a new human ecology. The development of the new urban form responds to the challenges of modern (largely suburban) development possible only through carbon form expenditure as well as the utopian experiments proposed by Metabolists and the stylistic emphasis of the New Urbanists. The new urban form asks what we can learn from Metabolism’s 1960 Masterplan for Tokyo by Kenzo Tange without its rigid structure and New Urbanism’s walkable mixed-use zoning, while embracing diversity. Is it possible to adopt a pre-carbon city without nostalgia and at a scale appropriate for the number of people living on the planet today? The project speculates on how a postcarbon form urban landscape might re-imagine monotonous modern grids as a framework that encourages genuine human interaction and a social practice of governance to local resources. The diagrams below attempt to reconciliate program archetypes into a framework that produces a more heterogeneous combination on a human scale. Adjoining and overlapping these also teases new programs that may be more suitable to the zeitgeist today
