Architectureweek 5.

Can a boom town be green? was the question for yesterdays Debate London talk at the Tate. This time it wasn’t half a good as the one before though… The chairman simply did a lousy job in moderating the debate, by trying to talk more himself than he let the people at the panel do. Obviously the debate was about how we can make London a sustainable city. The whole discussion got lowered by that the panel couldn’t even agree on the simple fact that there is a environmental threat today. If we can’t agree upon that, then there is not a whole lot to discuss really. Alejandro Something from Ove Arup was there and talked about the negative carbon city they have been working on just outside of Shanghai, which I of course found really interesting. Unfortunately he got cut of most of the time by the moderator… It could have been a fantastic debate, one that actually managed to lift the often really dumb debates about sustainability to a higher and intelligent level, but once again it failed. People are picky, if we can’t even manage to have an interesting debate about it at the Tate, in a perfect setting, with interesting, famous people, then when and how are we going to raise awareness, joy and interest for the topic, to a wider audience than skogsmullarna?