Living City: The Anatomy Of A Green Capital

Understanding the city as a living, breathing organism: an innovative new exhibition from the Architecture Centre, Bristol, explores the health and well-being of the city and its inhabitants.

Our ability to be healthy and happy as individuals is directly affected by the city that we live in. So how do we make both city and dweller as healthy and happy as possible?

Just as the health of individuals relies on a balance of body, mind and spirit, the health of the city also relies on a shared condition of physical mental and social well-being. Applying the mind, body and spirit analogy to the city, architecture in all its fullness – infrastructure, buildings, places and landscape – represents the body of a city, allowing the Architecture Centre to invite exhibition-goers to think twice about the future development and maintenance of our shared built environment.

Following the success of Bristol: Retrofit City (2012) and Bristol: Ambitious City (2013), this year’s Spring Green programme looks at the body, mind and spirit of the healthy city, in the lead up to Bristol’s role as European Green Capital, 2015. In a year of significant strategic planning and focus on issues of health and sustainability, Living City: The Anatomy of a Green Capital will help people see significant relationships between the health of a city and the health of the people who occupy them.

Living City: The Anatomy of a Green Capital introduces the mind, body and spirit of the city, using the concept of city as anatomy, for example, Nose: Air quality - how can we clean up the air we breath?, Digestive System: waste and recycling - How can we make more of the things we discard?, and Heart: Communities and culture - What are we passionate about and what do we love?

For exhibition-goers who want facts, figures, examples and more information, each body part will be explored further, outlining existing exemplars and opportunities for change that exist in our cities. This deeper content will build on extensive research carried out by partner organisations into the concept of healthy cities.

Living City: The Anatomy of a Green Capital marks the launch of Building Health, an exploration of the links between the built environment and our health and happiness, and builds on six years of Spring Green, the Architecture Centre’s annual season of exhibitions and events focusing on sustainable innovation in the built environment.