Vision Statements from Invited Cultural Experts
Arts and Transition towards Sustainability of Cities1
By Marco Kusumawijaya2
My interest in both arts and environment stems from the source of my
curiosity: cities. I started studying cities from architectural discipline, and
ending up looking at architecture from the city’s perspective. The issue on
sustainability of cities is appealing not only because of its urgency with
regards to climate change, but also because it offers an opportunity to
think of, and search for, new ways to live wholly sustainably by also taking
care of other problems pre-existing in cities. This opportunity challenges
societies to be humane again, to take care of other ecological and non-
ecological problems that have been outstanding in cities, such as poverty,
social justice, and migrant workers. Confronted with the predominant, yet
ineffective, urban planning approach that failed to make our cities a better
place for all, I have for the last ten years turned to arts and other
disciplines to search for alternative ways to engage urban societies.
A dynamic definition of culture and an expanded definition of
urban sustainability.
As more than half of humanity now live in urban conditions, and
urbanisation seems to be irreversible and intensifying, much works needed
to actualise that opportunity are in the cities.
Sustainability of cities concerns not only ecological, but also social-cultural
and economical dimensions. It is impossible to imagine a city as
sustainable only ecologically without its population having social justice,
cultural freedom and minimum equitable welfare.
Indeed, if we moved to save ourselves from the climate change, we
become only better animals, because that way we save ourselves only
from a basic threat to the whole species. It is an instinct for survival. We
will become better human beings only when we solve also those problems
1
Written for Asian Europe Foundation (ASEF)‘s call for papers “Culture for the Future and the Future of Culture:
The Transition towards an Ecological Age 2050.”
2
Architect-urbanist, Director of Jakarta Arts Council, Indonesia.
such as poverty, human rights violations, cultural repression and others,
because they require active compassion unique only to human beings.
However, of course it is true that no society can exist without a
sustainable physical environment. Environment is a resource without
which any social and economical entity cannot exist. There can be no
trade-off between environment and others, because it is simply the
existential basis for the latter.
To be sustainable, a city needs to be whole in its relationship to the
environment and its intercultural society. The principles of craddle-to-
craddle3 and Japanese mottanai treat waste from a process as a resource
for the next processes. Diversity should be encouraged for its intrinsic
goodness, and to counter globalized standardisation and homogenisation.
Citizens should be actively engaged in decision-making process through
participatory democracy. A city should grow together with its local
resources and context, so that it would be rooted in its environment, and
become a place with identity. The city needs build a future based on
renewable energy. An endogenous development, with growth based on
maximal use of local knowledge and resources, is possible when a city is
embedded in its region.4
To achieve such a sustainable city, changes will have to take place at
different levels, at practical behavioural pattern as well as at values, and
at everything else in between them, including our systemic supports such
as urban infrastructure, industrial complex, and democratic institutions.
We need to recreate appropriate values, consensus and trust, as well as
re-invent our daily life. There is a whole set of nitty-gritty works that needs
our creative capacity and personal commitment to change individually and
collectively.
Opportunely the world has come to understand culture as something
active: a way of life, and a way of living together in a dialogical
coexistence, creatively adjusting to changes and encouraging them.5
3
William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Craddle to Craddle, North Point Press, New York 2002.
4
John Friedmann, The Wealth of Cities: Towards an Assets-based Development of Newly Urbanizing
Regions, This paper was given in 2006 as the First UN-HABITAT Award lecture at the Third World
Urban Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
5
UNU-IAS and IICRC, 2002, “Kanazawa Resolutions on culture in sustainability of cities, in Report of the
International Congerence on Culture in Sustainability of Cities II, Kanazawa: IICRC, p.98. As quoted in M.
Such a view makes it possible to see that arts could help us to change, to
engage in the transition towards sustainability of cities.
The required changes.
We can see the required changes as broadly distinct at the supply and
demand side. At the supply side we are concerned about energy source
and production system. At the demand side we are particularly concerned
with changes in consumption pattern. Although theoretically it is possible
in the future to have unlimited sources of renewable energy, change in
consumption pattern is required immediately. Moreover, climate change is
not the only ecological problems. Bio-diversity, for example, is decreasing
due to both over-consumption and neglect of certain species because of
standardisation and homogenisation in our industrialised consumption.
Even if the age of “free and clean energy” would be achieved completely
sometime in the future, changes towards sustainable consumption are a
necessity. This concerns values and daily decision-making process. Even if
the sun is free and available all daytime, one still have to decide to
sunbathe in the morning or the whole day.
Both our political and economic spaces have not been always successful.
We must continuously and diligently feed values and will to direct both the
state and the market. We cannot just relinquish too much power to both
and become passive afterwards. We have to keep on working as civil
society to reclaim the state to be more responsive and the economy to be
more substantive, to primarily fulfil our needs, not to make maximum
profits of any resource.6
Position and role of arts in civil society.
Arts could position itself to help build a humane society that actively and
Nadrajh an Ann Tomoko Yamamoto ed., Urban Crisis, Culture and the Sustainability of Cities, p. 37.
6
Karl Polanyi’s substantive economy: people acquiring material means by having an impact on the
natural environment and/or through relationships of mutual interdependence in order to satisfy their
various needs that arise as they engage in their day-to-day lives; and economy in formal sense: the
process of obtaining the maximum effect by making the best use of a scarce means, in Makoto
Maruyama, Sustainable Economy and Urban Sustainability, in Hidenori Tamagawa, ed., Sustainable
Cities, United Nations University Press, 2006, p. 771-72.
continuously think and take care of the welfare of the whole humanity, not
just the majority of it, and that which perceives the problems of a few as
collective problems of the whole humankind. Consequently we need a
“responsible society” that actively takes into their hands the nitty-gritty of
works that need to be done for that purpose, a society that has the
necessary capacity to continuously respond to outstanding and emerging
problems, both in direct actions and advocacy to reclaim state policies and
market directions, a reinvigorated civil society that coordinate its actions
in dialogue in public space, to work on both practical level and continuous
recreation of values to guide state’s policies and market’s directions.
Given the inevitable frequent market failures and often inert political
stalemates vested with power webs, the third sector, civil society, both as
public space and as associations of active, self-organised individual
citizens or groups, will have to take up those challenges. In rapidly
densifying cities with diversifying diversity, those challenges could be
either easier or more difficult, depending on how well civil society is re-
organising, vis-à-vis the political and economic spaces.
Aspiration for sustainability of cities may make politics more complex, but
also potentially more focused with a sense of urgency. It re-asserts the
very basic of democratic processes, transparency and accountability, in
almost scientific sense. With recent progress in technology and
collaborative institutions, humankind is actually well equipped to face the
challenge successfully. We can undo global warming while develop new
ways of living better. However it requires that the challenge be responded
actively, by changing the current unsustainable patterns.
The first role of arts is therefore to use its creative capacity to help
breaking the current pattern, and deconstructing current values, in order
to change towards sustainability.
Values offered in public space have their origins in private space of
individuals or communities. Public space depends on private spaces for
feedings into its content. Arts critically process values in private space,
then feed them into the public space of civil society, and through it into
the political and economic spheres. Arts are at the core of civil society. It
strengthens civil society at its base, the values creation that is
fundamental to its capacity in owning the state and the market.
In doing that, arts fullfil human needs that are not necessarily
instrumental, but somehow fulfill human needs: mimetical communication
with nature, with bodies, aspiration to live in solidarity with others, and a
will to experience non-pragmatic communications with others.
In our changing societies there are always values to be reproduced. There
are always gaps between values and their realisation through our modern
institutions. Arts and artists do develop strong sensitivity towards values
and gaps because to produce successful creative works, artists must
satisfy the conditions of authenticity and originality.
The role of arts is to help build a responsive civil society to feel the gaps,
to beyond the instrumental use of arts to promote “awareness”, beyond
arts as mere communication “technique”, or arts as the “cute” way to
understand the urgency and the order of things.
A society in need of urgent change towards urban sustainability should not
just use arts as its reflection and force it into straightforward
instrumentality, but gives arts a chance to be its dialectical anti-thesis to
promote genuine humane progress while at the same time fulfil human’s
need for non-pragmatic relationships with others, including the nature. The
recent increasing infusion of arts into design (of daily products and
architecture), for example, show how arts are not only reflecting on, but
are offering critical forms as anti-thesis to available forms of daily life.
Artistic projects are both personal and offering open alternatives that are
generously left to be questioned and deliberated in public spaces.
Arts, by its quest for authenticity and originality, could also help society to
change in genuine way with commitment at personal level.
I would argue that civil society should take advantage of arts in the above
capacity, and reproduce that capacity into public space. And I would
recommend that we create more spaces for artists to interact in concrete
ways with civil society and our common problems, and encourage their
free, creative investigations into them, and facillitate their creative works
to enter into much more interactive public spaces. Artists could play their
role as relevant “public intellectuals” by offering their arts and thoughts
into public space. As such they also exercise the existence of public space,
at the same time strengthening it and the society that it serves. Arts and
thoughts could substantiate non-violent public spaces. On the other hand,
artists cannot exist as public intellectuals without the existence of healthy
public space. Public space is the necessary engagement between artists
and their societies to prevent it from being defenselessly instrumental
such as in the case where artists try to by-pass the public space to serve
power directly.
The transition into ecological age might have violent moments in its
process, due to its depth and the given brief period of a generation. This is
an other important motivation for engagement of arts to strengthen non-
violent and critical public spaces, to moderate exchanges in the transition
process.
In different parts of the world, public spaces are undergoing different
crises. They are non-existent in non-democratic countries such as
Myanmar, a great deficit. In advanced industrialised countries they might
have become too formalised and over-mediated with very few chances of
direct interactions. In newly emerging democracies such as Indonesia they
are abundant, euphoric and in a very fluid stage. Each will pose a different
challenge to artists and other public intellectuals.
