"每年，纽约城市学院的“城市设计研究生项目”组都会前往世界上某个正在经历揭露问题形式的压力的城市。2006年1月——基多卡特里卡大学的学生和教职员工与纽约城市学院（CCNY）的建筑和景观计划一起——这个团体的目的地是厄瓜多尔亚马逊盆地的Nueva Loja小镇。当时，近100,000的人口正在呈指数增长。

本书中的项目描绘这样一个地方的一系列问题。因为它们期待一个和谐与繁荣的时代，所以它们是乌托邦式的，但是由于它们源于特定的人和地方，并利用简单，历史上和本地的技术，而不是任何魔术，所以它们是非常实用的。

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"Each year, the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York travels to a city somewhere in the world that is experiencing a revelatory form of stress. In January of 2006 - joined by students and faculty from the Universidad Catolica in Quito and from the architecture and landscape programs at CCNY - the destination of the group was the small town of Nueva Loja in the Amazon basin of Ecuador. At the time, a population of around 100,000 was expanding exponentially.

Nueva Loja was the fastest growing municipality in the country * There was one reason for this: the oil boom. Indeed, almost everyone calls the place ""Lago Agrio"" - Bitter Lake, after the town in Texas that houses the headquarters of Texaco, the first petroleum giant on the scene. There's no little irony in this name.

As the endless lawsuit against Chevron, Texaco's successor, has made abundantly clear, Lago's growth has come at the cost of extremely bitter consequences. The group was inspired to visit by a more particular observation: Lago's projected rate of growth would see the population exceed 150,000 at just the moment the oil ran out. And so, they decided to investigate what might happen then, how Nueva Loja could move beyond oil to an economy and urban pattern that embrace renewed harmony with the natural environment and is dedicated to creating an intensely humane and supportive place for its inhabitants.

The projects in this volume represent a series of propositions for such a place. They are utopian in that they look to a time of harmony and prosperity but intensely practical in that they stem from the specifics of people and place and utilize simple, historical, and local technologies, not any magic fix.

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