| Abstract |
Architect Cedric Price raised a critical voice already in 1966, stating that “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?”—Today, we need to reframe the question of human society, cities, and nature to understand their interdependencies in order to create a more humane and sustainable both man-made and natural environment in the future. Narratives represent collective wisdom in a nutshell, they encapsulate complex information into a compact and memorable form. Climate change is one collective narrative and thread that should be written into a legend. What kind of narrative could be powerful enough to save the planet and us in the future? I have proposed a new urban narrative, the Nature Smart City, based on the theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner. Nature Smart is one of the seven human intelligences, and it is an essential element of our nature connection. By applying nature wisdom, we can create more sustainable, livable, and lovable cities. However, single cities are not enough when reframing the future planetary problems; instead, we need an all-encompassing perspective, a new meta-narrative for a more sustainable future, doing and living well. By combining local ecological, environmental, individual, and social information, data, and wisdom through systems thinking, we can start to build a powerful future meta-narrative, that of the nature smart society, which is based on nature wisdom and the quest for human-nature wellbeing. It confronts the prevailing meta-narrative of techno progress and replaces it with a narrative of harmony, health, humanity, and hope. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG. |
