The post-oil city as transition to what comes after: Imbuing Urban Green Deals with architectural value.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a contribution to evolving the human urban environment, which the city represents, through understanding the post-oil period as transitional toward a new paradigm. This paper interweaves post-oil transition, the urbanity of the city, and architectural value and the practice of its provision. It describes a transformational moment enabled by the ‘post-oil’ period, whereby ‘post-oil’ is understood as counter to the use of oil and not yet the period that will follow. The end of mineral oil energy and material indicates such a change, which climate change, biosphere collapse and the vulnerability that the 2020 pandemic, which is crushing the economy so simply, signal to us. City is proposed as an intensity of urbanity, while urbanity extends around the globe. Supplying the city with resources extends over the horizon, deep into the ocean and perhaps soon into space. The web of urban connectivity is global, but the character, depth and breadth of non-city urban is often not considered. The words ‘city’ and ‘urban’ are commonly used interchangeably, tacitly opposing urbanity-as-city to the rest of the world. All the land, nature and its life is urbanized through technological valuation as quantification and narrowly appropriated qualities; the urban is ubiquitous state of dwelling in the world. This ubiquitous state is based on parameters that do not comprehend what cannot be asked as a scientific question. What cannot be addressed becomes exterior to, or concealed in, our culture. Urbanity is part of this thinking. Nature’s reality eludes the technological urban-encoded landscape. The unspoken, un-integrated and concealed aspects of world include almost everything that makes us human, such as questioning nature’s not-systems and purpose, the source and nature life, love, consciousness and its purpose. Architecture was part of humanity long before our present machine ages mineral hydrocarbon and electricity based economy. Today's technology has evolved from its antecedent forms and it must change again. Conceptual project-based thinking of architectural practice to facilitate the provision of architectural value, informing any scale in the world-as-urban, comprehends the limit of technological urbanism. This paper engages the ‘Understanding Urban Metabolism’ track’s terms of approach to support “continuous improvement of urban material, environmental, social and economic conditions” by “leveraging improving the urban quality and efficiency” in terms of resolving specifically: “separation of urban functions (1), low environmental quality (2) , unequal development (3) or insufficient support for urban renewal (4)”. Accepting the possibility of a future after-technological transformation, we develop these 4 elements to express leveraging cities’ “metabolic quality and efficiency” in terms of architectural value, developing them as an architectural project to form a path toward well being of human conscious aspiration beyond mere health and psychological wellness. Human being is essentially without limits. We question what that means with an interdisciplinary range of practical approaches in philosophy, architecture, planning, and spirituality in its positive sense of wonder and discovery. This paper concludes how the post-oil city is potential for the cooperative whole of city elements (1), defining high quality as architectural value that translates acquisitive quantified economic value to architectural value that gives measure to well being and daily life satisfaction (2), to support socially integrated purpose (3) for investment in urban environments (4). Urban Green Deals may become environmental and social threshold events of greater and transformational technological change.