Background
I am an Environmental Development and Urban Systems Undergraduate student with a deep interest in human-earth relationships. My Building 21 project aims to answer the question: What could a post-consumption city look like? The cumulative component is to host a dinner party set in an ideal version of Montreal, fifty years from now, where we've overcome the environmental crisis and a world shaped by massively-disruptive AI. Why host a dinner-party? Well, this project aims to create a narrative of hope for our future by having wildly different groups looking eye-to-eye to create a discussion of how we want to harness the technologies and current global trajectories to create a more beautiful and healthier city. The goal is to fill the void left by only focussing on zero-sum narratives and to get as many residents of Montreal from as many walks of life and sectors of expertise at one table. The dinner party is only one component of a project that will curate a body of work and events, including interviews, artistic renditions, pot-lucks, and finally the post-consumption dinner party to begin dying the threads that make up the tapestry of stories of what Montreal could look like in 2070.
Montreal 2070: What does a post-consumption urban-system look like?
First, we must define what we mean by design, second, we must define what we mean by post-consumption, and third, we have to define what we mean by urban-system. Design, according to the Oxford dictionary, is the general arrangement of the different parts of something that is made. How do we want to arrange our city? What values do we hold that will affect the blue-print? Does good design increase human empathy? The adjective ‘post-consumption’ (as in post-consumption school, post-consumption workplace, etc.) is the idea that in the future, to follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report guidelines and the recommended trajectories, we must decrease our consumption in many sectors. It’s much more complicated than that, but yet the simple reality that growth cannot be unlimited on a closed-system like Earth feels ignored by policy-makers and government officials. This is disheartening to regular citizens who feel that they have simply become a number, customer #456723445. The goal is that by 2070 the hierarchy flattens to allow for community agency.
