City - Nature

[Images: "St Pauls- A late afternoon plunge,"by Jonathan Glancey]

[Images: "Aqualta: Times Square at Night, NYC,"by Studio Lindfors]

[Images: "Terminal 2 - Fryderyk Chopin International Airport,"by Kobas Laksa]

The common point of these pictures, which illustrate a future flooded London, New York City after a catastrophic flood and Terminal 2 at Warsaw airport when there are few flights, is all the artificial city space goes back to nature.

People always have a dream of living in a garden city or countryside in order to get in touch with nature. This kind of dreams do come true in these pictures and many science fiction films such as ‘Twelve Monkeys’, ‘I’m a legend’, in which plants grow out of the concrete while lions wander in a library. However, it is cruel to tell the differences between these scenes and people’s dream, that is people have to live in another way.

Factories would be abandoned once a city is no longer an industrial city, while airport would be out of use due to an unaffordable price of oil. Then wild cats appear together with weeds in these man-made buildings. In the same way, after some catastrophe, the city would be reshaped by the nature while human could do nothing. That time the city space will be occupied by nature really.

The conversion from city to nature is in conjunction with the break down of the contemporary system. Once the usual city working style doesn’t exist anymore, people will be forced to change the mode of living. In my opinion, if men really want to be close to nature while they are still inside the city, they need to change the living way, which could result from a new viewing way of the environment.