Jon Goodbun | Royal College of Art (original) (raw)
Papers by Jon Goodbun
Taking Action Transforming Athens’ Urban Landscapes, 2023
In this paper I will weave together a number of different stories, all of which circulate around ... more In this paper I will weave together a number of different stories, all of which circulate around and through the semio-ecological entity known as Αθηνα. Some of these stories concern the changing cli-mate and environment of the city of Athens, its bioregion and geo-political context. Other stories concern the changing lives of people who live there. As we shall see, these interacting changes present ever more significant – and potentially existential – challenges to the city and its inhabitants. One central story for us concerns the setting out of a specific environmental architecture design research project. Conceptually organised around The Ecological Semiotics of Air Pollution and Heat in Athens, and practically organised around A New Tower of Winds, this is an action-research-based design process which explores the potential for a network of urban passive-energy, evaporative-cooling structures to reduce the ex-tremes of heat and pollution that the airs of Αθηνα will increasingly be forced to express. I welcome some recent initiatives, statements and documents produced by Athens’ former Chief Heat Officer (CHO) and Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) Eleni Myrivili and Athens’ current CHO and CRO Elissavet Bargianni, and in particular, I offer this paper, and the associated design research projects outlined within, as a contribution to the dialogue initiated by the Athens Resi-lience Strategy for 2030 (City of Athens, 2017), and recent initiatives such as #coolathens.Ecological SemioticsWhat does it mean to talk about a city as a semio-ecological entity? At stake in this claim is a much bigger claim: that there exist all kinds of non-human and more-than-human ecological intelligences or eco-mental systems...
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Editions, 2022
This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual ... more This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual study material in a more speculative mode, through a series of worldbuilding and worlding fictions workshops. We imagined worlds more or less similar to our own (and researched our own planet's biology, geology, meterology, cultures, environmental disputes, land forms, systems, etc as the basis for our fictions.) Although many of these worlds were superficially very different from our own, all inevitably resonated with it. Some worlds appeared to maintain relatively stable homeostatic 'plateaux'. Others were undergoing systemic changes. One narrated the final months and weeks of an Earth, as it was slowly ejected from its orbit in the solar system. We coined 'Geopoiesis' as a heuristic research concept, to map and discuss both our own work, and a wider field of related 'world-building' and 'worlding' practices. We conceived of 'world-building' in relation to collective political imaginaries, and 'worlding' in relation to the construction and performance of political subjectivities. A quick survey of the geopoietic field might include, in no particular order: science fiction, fantasy and counter-factual fictions, IPCC reports, Green New Deal proposals, Gregory Bateson/Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies, Benjamin Bratton/Strelka's Terraforming programme, Arturo Escobar's pluriversal politics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's 'bringing forth of worlds', Donna Haraway's multi-species worldings, and the Zapatista call, recently repeated by the Red Nation, for 'a world in which many worlds fit'. Some of our references are poetic and nebulous. Others synthesise the peerreviewed work of innumerable contributors. For example, the future scenario planning and world-building models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contain significant quantitative data analysis, combined with all kinds of qualitative evidence and interpretation, in for example both its SSPs: Shared SocioEconomic Pathways (which build a series of five scenarios based upon an increasingly diverse range of voices and disciplines), and also its RCPs: Representative Concentration Pathways (which describe four scenarios based on estimated increases in radiative forcing by the year 2100 (compared to pre-industrial levels) ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 W/sqm). The IPCC world-building exercises are significant artefacts. Still problematic? Yes, of course, but nonetheless incredibly impressive pieces of trans-and multidisciplinary thinking, managing with relative transparency and clarity a manifold of methodological, epistemological and practical difficulties of staggering complexity. Importantly, the work of the IPCC is increasingly resonant with the demands and framing of the Just Transition/Global Green New Deal movement. Indeed, this MA EA Geopoiesis project here springs out of our work on Green New Deal in recent years, which asked : What kinds of world-building imaginaries might we need to develop, if we are to grow a Global GND Dialogue that can mediate the future scenario models that we have from the IPCC, through the needs of situated social movements that are increasingly engaging in local environmental disputes that have systemic planetary implications, and are simultaneously imagining alternative socio-ecological futures around the planet?
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Making Futures, 2021
In these two papers, written in 2019, and 2020, I review the development of Green New Deal thinki... more In these two papers, written in 2019, and 2020, I review the development of Green New Deal thinking over the last decade, referring in particular to the growth of a more radical Global Green New Deal, the work of DiEM in Europe, and the engagement of indigenous activists such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and The Red Nation. I review questions about the very possibility of planning that thinkers such as Gregory Bateson can help us to see.
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Architectural Design Green New Deal, 2021
Urgent and far-reaching steps are necessary to reorient global economies to address the global en... more Urgent and far-reaching steps are necessary to reorient global economies to address the global environmental and climate emergency. Both IPCC and Paris Agreements commit industrialised nations to drastic reductions of their CO2 emissions so as to keep the rise in global average temperature to well below 1.5 °C. At the same time we know that the environmental emergency is not simply a matter of CO2 emissions, but of feedback loops between multiple metabolic rifts. The challenge is one that requires systematic transformations in planning for sustainable and just modes of coexistence across the planet, in such a way that is globally equitable, while able to both mitigate the impacts of climate breakdown, as well as creating reliable and dependable plans for the future.
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Footprint, 2021
In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its comple... more In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education.
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Caliper Journal, 2020
ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM BEYOND THE PANDEMIC INTERVIEW WITH DR. JON GOODBUN EDITORIAL N... more ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM BEYOND THE PANDEMIC
INTERVIEW WITH DR. JON GOODBUN
EDITORIAL NOTE:
When we first read this insightful interview, we were struck by the clarity with which Goodbun and Lemon were able to draw threads of connection between COVID-19 and the greater ecological crises of modern capitalism in which architecture is caught.
Goodbun identifies in no uncertain terms the absolute necessity of action on environmental destruction even as the world convulses in the grips of pandemic. In this interview there is no disconnect between the reaction of global “disaster capitalism” to COVID-19, and to the environmental crises that come careening towards us.
In both cases, capital exploits crisis towards its own ends, enrichment and misdirection from its own complicity.
For us, is a chilling reminder of capitalism’s ability to, snakelike, distort its form to internalise and reclaim world-shaking crises as instruments of it’s own perpetuation.
This interview is a powerful reminder of the intricate web of connections between capital’s destructive impulses and the environment-worlds that it ravages.
https://caliperjournal.online/TOM-LEMON-DR-JON-GOODBUN
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Making Futures, 2019
The call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change ... more The call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change will be played out through class, gender, race and neo-colonial structures, articulates an essential socialisation and politicisation of what is at stake in thinking through our responses to ecological crisis.
However, any demand for environmental justice must be accompanied by a certain mourning, as there will be – in a basic sense – no justice. There will be no reckoning, no making good. There are clear culprits – individuals, classes and corporations – responsible for the production of the uneven relations of scarcity and power which are absolutely structural to the operational behaviour of capitalism, and we should demand some kind of justice in navigating towards futures beyond this economic form. It is just that a simple restitution is generally impossible, for obvious reasons.
There is another scale of ecological thought which suggests that the very concept of environmental justice, the very idea of a reckoning, is not just ultimately impossible, but is itself an environmental problem.
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Gregory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology in vol4-issue1 F... more Gregory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology in vol4-issue1 Field Journal Special Issue on Ecology (whole issue as pdf)
Goodbun, Jon, 2010, Journal Article, Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics - an addendum to Urban Political Ecology Field Journal, 1 (4). pp. 39-47. ISSN 1755-068
Following a paper given at the 2008 Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 'Agency' conference, Goodbun was invited to submit a paper to the peer-reviewed international AHRA online architectural journal 'Field'. The paper was accepted for publication in the fourth issue of the journal, which was on 'ecology'. The published paper is a synopsis of key aspects of his PhD research, which informed his contribution to the SCIBE research project and the AD ‘Scarcity’ publication. This paper was the first publication of much of his thinking with regard to this material, and is referenced in recent PhDs (eg Jody Boehnert and Doug Spencer), and university reading lists (including the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the seminars of Peter Harries-Jones, a leading Bateson scholar).
The paper considers how ecology – a term that emerged into popular consciousness in the 1960’s as a byword for holistic/ systemic thinking – has returned to prominence in recent years across disciplines beyond its original terms of use, including design theory and practice. Within the natural sciences, ecology is above all characterised by a holistic approach that focuses on organisation and the internal/external relational dynamics of ‘wholes’ or ‘assemblages’ such as ecosystems. Goodbun reviews how the concept of ecology has developed historically, and defines ecology by drawing together the ecological aesthetics in the work of Gregory Bateson, and the urban political ecology of contemporary neo-Marxist geographers such as Erik Swyngedouw, David Harvey and Matthew Gandy. He adds to a growing body of research relating political conceptions of ecology at an urban and planning scale to the possibility of an aesthetics of ecology more directly related to architectural and design-based thinking.
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Architectural Design, 2012
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Ecology and cybernetics, in their everyday folk meanings at least, might seem to be completely di... more Ecology and cybernetics, in their everyday folk meanings at least, might seem to be completely dissociated fields: the first suggest- ing the study of living organisms in their environments, and the other conjuring images of automation, machines, and their con- trol and management. They share however a concern with under- standing systems, and as even the most cursory study shows, the histories of these concepts are intimately intertwined with each other. In fact, I argue that they have a common structure in a certain abstract spatial imaginary which determines think- ing about systems in modernity. This spatial abstraction itself emerges through a new division of labour which transformed our production and thinking about bodies, machines, and buildings. This is the story of three architectural typologies—the bounded cell, the networked field, and the observatory tower—, a story which raises questions about the nature of architecture and its relationship to other forms of technical and scientific knowledge, and to systems theory in general.
This is published as a chapter in Andreas Rumpfhuber (Ed.), INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN (DPR Barcelona, 2017)
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Here is the text I prepared for an workshop event co-hosted by the Atacama Foundation and Royal C... more Here is the text I prepared for an workshop event co-hosted by the Atacama Foundation and Royal College of Art Lithium Triangle research project, held in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile February 2018.
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We apologies for not being with you in person. We are writing in response to the short opinion pi... more We apologies for not being with you in person. We are writing in response to the short opinion piece by Iain Borden on this Oxford Conference, sustainability and architectural education, which is circulating amongst delegates, and which is going to be published in the September issue of Blueprint. We are also writing to report back on the major international pan-disciplinary design research conference held in Turin earlier this month, 'Changing the Change', to which we contributed. In his piece, Iain refers to 'a certain sense of unease' that he feels at the 'clarion call' of sustainability. His uneasiness is shared by many colleagues. Indeed, we have been watching with some fascination the real sense of fear that the 'environmental question' has instilled in many architectural educators in recent years. For many design tutors this fear is well founded, as they are in no way intellectually equipped to deal with the practical demands of students, nor the critical demands of the issues at stake. We find ourselves in the curious position of watching design tutors demanding their right to autonomy, that is to say, demanding their right to social irrelevance, and we wonder with Marx, who will educate the educators? Yet the challenges ahead might prove to be architectural and design education's greatest moment. To understand why this is, we need a sober reflection upon where we are now, and the nature of the intellectual, social and political struggles that we face. Firstly, let us be clear, the 'environmental question' is of a completely different order to any other issue that we are facing. This is because the environmental question forces us to confront the question of value production in capitalism head on, in a way that no other contemporary issue does. Iain wonders whether, " global health, intercultural interaction, and well-being " , might be " other challenges of equal or perhaps greater significance. " These are all important issues, and indeed for many thinkers they are inseparable and fundamental to the question of sustainable living. However, they will all be completely determined by outcome of the confrontation between 'the environmental question' and capitalist production. Period.
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Commentary upon a conference upon Manfredo Tafuri at Columbia University 2006 Published in Radic... more Commentary upon a conference upon Manfredo Tafuri at Columbia University 2006
Published in Radical Philosophy 138 July/August 2006
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These brief notes were given by me at an event on the anthropocene at the University of Westminst... more These brief notes were given by me at an event on the anthropocene at the University of Westminster on Tuesday 25th November 2014. (see http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2014/the-anthropocene-cities-politics-law-as-geological-agents) I should probably start by saying that I claim no particular expertise in this area. The anthropocene is a concept that I have to deal with… mostly in the context of students who want to use it. Occasionally I use it myself, though generally in a heuristic sense, to explore the ways that the concept is being deployed, the political stances and potentialities that it contains. The following is a series of notes that have emerged from my engagements with the concept (in teaching both design studio, and history and theory, as well as recent research projects that I have been involved with, notably the scarcity project, and more recent work around questions of energy)). Hopefully this will provide some material to discuss what is at stake in the concept. how is the concept being deployed today and by whom, and perhaps most importantly for us this evening, whether the concept of the anthropocene might actually be conceived in such a way that it has useful conceptual structure that we can all do some work with, in our different fields. The basic proposition of the concept of the anthropocene is a simple one: that the collective productive labour of the human species has become a global, geological force. The evidence can seem compelling: humans move more rock and earth than all of the Earth's glaciers and rivers combined, we fix more nitrogen in the soil than microbial activity does, we consume in various ways vast quantities of the biological, material and energetic resources of the planet, and of course, we have our own sedimentary layer, what has become known as 'Anthropocene rock—the concrete, steel and bitumen of the planet's cities and roads'. One of the biggest problems encountered with the anthropocene concept is that it is too easily adopted in a simplified form, as simply referring to this quantitative aspect, often all too enthusiastically by those who seem to take a rather adolescent male delight in the idea that at last (or once again) mankind has overcome his imagined nemesis in mother nature. We might start by saying that this is by far the most trivial and conservative reading of the term, and one which none of the initial authors (Paul Crutzen 2002) or primary users of the concept actually deploy. Nonetheless, one often encounters this kind of boosterish reading – which of course, is particularly ironic, given that the anthropocene – should we chose to accept the term – could well be the geological era in which humanity becomes extinct! Paradoxically, we need to be careful that the anthropocene concept does not in fact naturalise, in terms of political ideology, our current way of being in the world. But one of the problems with the concept is that it can seem to promote a naive and one-dimensional mode of Prometheanism, there are other problems too. Its is, it is hardly worth saying, a anthropocentric concept. Yet one wonders what it even means to say anthropocene when we learn that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain human DNA – is it already anachronistic, a legacy of outmoded ways of thinking about life. Concepts such as anthropocene often obscure as much as they illuminate, making us forget that every other living process on the planet also feeds into the anthropocene, and that this is an unfolding process that that ecological systems theory tells us we can in no viable way control. There is perhaps also a danger that the concept acts to underplay more important categorisations. It might be more useful to think in terms of the difference between a biotic and abiotic planet, or a pre and post language planet. The anthropocene concept can act to compound our broader difficulty in recognising the complexity of other forms of species-life and who knows, other forms of species-being that are in the world. One often hears that the anthropocene designates the first time that a single species has had such a global effect. Again, this is dubious. We are certainly not the first species to have had a transformational geological affects at the scale of the planet. We might note for example that the Earth's atmosphere is a non-equilibrium mixture of 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen, and 1% other gases (mostly argon), including the all important carbon dioxide which makes up a mere 0.4%. However, 2.4 bn years ago the Earth was a very different place, there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and a great deal more carbon dioxide. This condition was transformed into the kind of atmosphere that were have today through what is known as the Great Oxegenation Event – the fundamental transformation of the oceans and atmosphere brought about through the photosynthetic activities of phytoplankton, such as cyanobacteria in the ocean, which produced sugars from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight, with oxygen as waste. In this process the anaerobic life forms that had existed on the planet were wiped out in the first great mass extinction event, but which opened the way to the explosion of oxygen based life that we have on the planet today (well..). Right now, 98% of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced on an ongoing cyclical basis, through the photosynthetic labours of plants, trees and still primarily sea based organisms. If we are impressed by our sedimentary activity in anthropocene rock, then we might do well to remember how much of our own landscape here on this island was directly produced out of the bodies of other species, producing limestone, and granite.. materials that we might think of as geological, but which are absolutely organic too. These materials of course, have provided the basis for our own anthropogenic building activity, both directly in the form of stone structures and claddings, but also indirectly as concrete.
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A review of Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, ... more A review of Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011, published in Radical Philosophy 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)
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What is concrete? Loved and loathed in equal measure, this building material, as soon as we try t... more What is concrete? Loved and loathed in equal measure, this building material, as soon as we try to define it, to specify it, to describe it, becomes, well, not very concrete at all, but rather fluid and surprisingly abstract! Concrete is a material which has been going through an interesting intellectual and practical renaissance in recent years, in no small part driven by the convergence of several different kinds of technology-driven manufacturing changes-ranging from computer aided manufacturing of formworks, to photograph etching, to engineering software, to nano-and biochemistry to 3D printing-which have opened up new worlds of realizable, expressive and performance optimised form. The demands posed by anthropogenic climate change, energy use, resource scarcity, and the environmental question more generally, have equally transformed the technologies and industries that are now feeding into developments in this material. On its own though, that is not enough to understand the revival in interest. In this paper I will argue that there are indeed profound relationships between capital, modernity and concrete. However, I will suggest that in order to really start to grasp these relations, we will need to explore some ways of thinking about concrete that have not been developed so far within the recent literature on the material. Notably I will develop an ecological approach to thinking about what concrete is, and in so doing redefine this material as a particular form of mud, or mudcrete: a material which is deployed by both human and non-human builders. I will note the ecological energetics and extended materialities of mudcrete, and will reflect upon the conceptual 'forms' or 'patterns' of this matter as a particular modality of the production of nature. Mudcretes always internalise in particularly interesting ways I argue, their external relations, the extended networks of materials, skills, labours and energies that go into their production. Mudcretes frequently stage fascinating bio-semiotic performances, whichever species or processes are dominant. But when the mudcretes in question are the product of human labour, they always act as social media.
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In the 20th century, the diverse work of Gregory Bateson was hugely influential in many fields. N... more In the 20th century, the diverse work of Gregory Bateson was hugely influential in many fields. Now his thinking and writing could offer an essential guide to the future of architecture and urbanism
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New Ecologies New Constellations, 2013
one of the most compelling extensions of ecological thought can be found in the late work of feli... more one of the most compelling extensions of ecological thought can be found in the late work of felix guattari. although he does leave various clues, guattari is indebted to the work of the nomadic scientist gregory Bateson. Deleuze and guattari’s seminal text “a thousand Plateaus” references Bateson’s work, and their metaphorical model of rhizomes is a reworking of Bateson’s relational “ecology of mind”.
i aim to contribute to the ecosophical project through a brief consider- ation of Bateson’s work within the broad context of ecological thought.
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Taking Action Transforming Athens’ Urban Landscapes, 2023
In this paper I will weave together a number of different stories, all of which circulate around ... more In this paper I will weave together a number of different stories, all of which circulate around and through the semio-ecological entity known as Αθηνα. Some of these stories concern the changing cli-mate and environment of the city of Athens, its bioregion and geo-political context. Other stories concern the changing lives of people who live there. As we shall see, these interacting changes present ever more significant – and potentially existential – challenges to the city and its inhabitants. One central story for us concerns the setting out of a specific environmental architecture design research project. Conceptually organised around The Ecological Semiotics of Air Pollution and Heat in Athens, and practically organised around A New Tower of Winds, this is an action-research-based design process which explores the potential for a network of urban passive-energy, evaporative-cooling structures to reduce the ex-tremes of heat and pollution that the airs of Αθηνα will increasingly be forced to express. I welcome some recent initiatives, statements and documents produced by Athens’ former Chief Heat Officer (CHO) and Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) Eleni Myrivili and Athens’ current CHO and CRO Elissavet Bargianni, and in particular, I offer this paper, and the associated design research projects outlined within, as a contribution to the dialogue initiated by the Athens Resi-lience Strategy for 2030 (City of Athens, 2017), and recent initiatives such as #coolathens.Ecological SemioticsWhat does it mean to talk about a city as a semio-ecological entity? At stake in this claim is a much bigger claim: that there exist all kinds of non-human and more-than-human ecological intelligences or eco-mental systems...
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Editions, 2022
This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual ... more This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual study material in a more speculative mode, through a series of worldbuilding and worlding fictions workshops. We imagined worlds more or less similar to our own (and researched our own planet's biology, geology, meterology, cultures, environmental disputes, land forms, systems, etc as the basis for our fictions.) Although many of these worlds were superficially very different from our own, all inevitably resonated with it. Some worlds appeared to maintain relatively stable homeostatic 'plateaux'. Others were undergoing systemic changes. One narrated the final months and weeks of an Earth, as it was slowly ejected from its orbit in the solar system. We coined 'Geopoiesis' as a heuristic research concept, to map and discuss both our own work, and a wider field of related 'world-building' and 'worlding' practices. We conceived of 'world-building' in relation to collective political imaginaries, and 'worlding' in relation to the construction and performance of political subjectivities. A quick survey of the geopoietic field might include, in no particular order: science fiction, fantasy and counter-factual fictions, IPCC reports, Green New Deal proposals, Gregory Bateson/Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies, Benjamin Bratton/Strelka's Terraforming programme, Arturo Escobar's pluriversal politics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's 'bringing forth of worlds', Donna Haraway's multi-species worldings, and the Zapatista call, recently repeated by the Red Nation, for 'a world in which many worlds fit'. Some of our references are poetic and nebulous. Others synthesise the peerreviewed work of innumerable contributors. For example, the future scenario planning and world-building models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contain significant quantitative data analysis, combined with all kinds of qualitative evidence and interpretation, in for example both its SSPs: Shared SocioEconomic Pathways (which build a series of five scenarios based upon an increasingly diverse range of voices and disciplines), and also its RCPs: Representative Concentration Pathways (which describe four scenarios based on estimated increases in radiative forcing by the year 2100 (compared to pre-industrial levels) ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 W/sqm). The IPCC world-building exercises are significant artefacts. Still problematic? Yes, of course, but nonetheless incredibly impressive pieces of trans-and multidisciplinary thinking, managing with relative transparency and clarity a manifold of methodological, epistemological and practical difficulties of staggering complexity. Importantly, the work of the IPCC is increasingly resonant with the demands and framing of the Just Transition/Global Green New Deal movement. Indeed, this MA EA Geopoiesis project here springs out of our work on Green New Deal in recent years, which asked : What kinds of world-building imaginaries might we need to develop, if we are to grow a Global GND Dialogue that can mediate the future scenario models that we have from the IPCC, through the needs of situated social movements that are increasingly engaging in local environmental disputes that have systemic planetary implications, and are simultaneously imagining alternative socio-ecological futures around the planet?
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Making Futures, 2021
In these two papers, written in 2019, and 2020, I review the development of Green New Deal thinki... more In these two papers, written in 2019, and 2020, I review the development of Green New Deal thinking over the last decade, referring in particular to the growth of a more radical Global Green New Deal, the work of DiEM in Europe, and the engagement of indigenous activists such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and The Red Nation. I review questions about the very possibility of planning that thinkers such as Gregory Bateson can help us to see.
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Architectural Design Green New Deal, 2021
Urgent and far-reaching steps are necessary to reorient global economies to address the global en... more Urgent and far-reaching steps are necessary to reorient global economies to address the global environmental and climate emergency. Both IPCC and Paris Agreements commit industrialised nations to drastic reductions of their CO2 emissions so as to keep the rise in global average temperature to well below 1.5 °C. At the same time we know that the environmental emergency is not simply a matter of CO2 emissions, but of feedback loops between multiple metabolic rifts. The challenge is one that requires systematic transformations in planning for sustainable and just modes of coexistence across the planet, in such a way that is globally equitable, while able to both mitigate the impacts of climate breakdown, as well as creating reliable and dependable plans for the future.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Footprint, 2021
In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its comple... more In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education.
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Caliper Journal, 2020
ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM BEYOND THE PANDEMIC INTERVIEW WITH DR. JON GOODBUN EDITORIAL N... more ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM BEYOND THE PANDEMIC
INTERVIEW WITH DR. JON GOODBUN
EDITORIAL NOTE:
When we first read this insightful interview, we were struck by the clarity with which Goodbun and Lemon were able to draw threads of connection between COVID-19 and the greater ecological crises of modern capitalism in which architecture is caught.
Goodbun identifies in no uncertain terms the absolute necessity of action on environmental destruction even as the world convulses in the grips of pandemic. In this interview there is no disconnect between the reaction of global “disaster capitalism” to COVID-19, and to the environmental crises that come careening towards us.
In both cases, capital exploits crisis towards its own ends, enrichment and misdirection from its own complicity.
For us, is a chilling reminder of capitalism’s ability to, snakelike, distort its form to internalise and reclaim world-shaking crises as instruments of it’s own perpetuation.
This interview is a powerful reminder of the intricate web of connections between capital’s destructive impulses and the environment-worlds that it ravages.
https://caliperjournal.online/TOM-LEMON-DR-JON-GOODBUN
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Making Futures, 2019
The call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change ... more The call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change will be played out through class, gender, race and neo-colonial structures, articulates an essential socialisation and politicisation of what is at stake in thinking through our responses to ecological crisis.
However, any demand for environmental justice must be accompanied by a certain mourning, as there will be – in a basic sense – no justice. There will be no reckoning, no making good. There are clear culprits – individuals, classes and corporations – responsible for the production of the uneven relations of scarcity and power which are absolutely structural to the operational behaviour of capitalism, and we should demand some kind of justice in navigating towards futures beyond this economic form. It is just that a simple restitution is generally impossible, for obvious reasons.
There is another scale of ecological thought which suggests that the very concept of environmental justice, the very idea of a reckoning, is not just ultimately impossible, but is itself an environmental problem.
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Gregory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology in vol4-issue1 F... more Gregory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology in vol4-issue1 Field Journal Special Issue on Ecology (whole issue as pdf)
Goodbun, Jon, 2010, Journal Article, Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics - an addendum to Urban Political Ecology Field Journal, 1 (4). pp. 39-47. ISSN 1755-068
Following a paper given at the 2008 Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 'Agency' conference, Goodbun was invited to submit a paper to the peer-reviewed international AHRA online architectural journal 'Field'. The paper was accepted for publication in the fourth issue of the journal, which was on 'ecology'. The published paper is a synopsis of key aspects of his PhD research, which informed his contribution to the SCIBE research project and the AD ‘Scarcity’ publication. This paper was the first publication of much of his thinking with regard to this material, and is referenced in recent PhDs (eg Jody Boehnert and Doug Spencer), and university reading lists (including the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the seminars of Peter Harries-Jones, a leading Bateson scholar).
The paper considers how ecology – a term that emerged into popular consciousness in the 1960’s as a byword for holistic/ systemic thinking – has returned to prominence in recent years across disciplines beyond its original terms of use, including design theory and practice. Within the natural sciences, ecology is above all characterised by a holistic approach that focuses on organisation and the internal/external relational dynamics of ‘wholes’ or ‘assemblages’ such as ecosystems. Goodbun reviews how the concept of ecology has developed historically, and defines ecology by drawing together the ecological aesthetics in the work of Gregory Bateson, and the urban political ecology of contemporary neo-Marxist geographers such as Erik Swyngedouw, David Harvey and Matthew Gandy. He adds to a growing body of research relating political conceptions of ecology at an urban and planning scale to the possibility of an aesthetics of ecology more directly related to architectural and design-based thinking.
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Architectural Design, 2012
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Ecology and cybernetics, in their everyday folk meanings at least, might seem to be completely di... more Ecology and cybernetics, in their everyday folk meanings at least, might seem to be completely dissociated fields: the first suggest- ing the study of living organisms in their environments, and the other conjuring images of automation, machines, and their con- trol and management. They share however a concern with under- standing systems, and as even the most cursory study shows, the histories of these concepts are intimately intertwined with each other. In fact, I argue that they have a common structure in a certain abstract spatial imaginary which determines think- ing about systems in modernity. This spatial abstraction itself emerges through a new division of labour which transformed our production and thinking about bodies, machines, and buildings. This is the story of three architectural typologies—the bounded cell, the networked field, and the observatory tower—, a story which raises questions about the nature of architecture and its relationship to other forms of technical and scientific knowledge, and to systems theory in general.
This is published as a chapter in Andreas Rumpfhuber (Ed.), INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN (DPR Barcelona, 2017)
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Here is the text I prepared for an workshop event co-hosted by the Atacama Foundation and Royal C... more Here is the text I prepared for an workshop event co-hosted by the Atacama Foundation and Royal College of Art Lithium Triangle research project, held in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile February 2018.
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We apologies for not being with you in person. We are writing in response to the short opinion pi... more We apologies for not being with you in person. We are writing in response to the short opinion piece by Iain Borden on this Oxford Conference, sustainability and architectural education, which is circulating amongst delegates, and which is going to be published in the September issue of Blueprint. We are also writing to report back on the major international pan-disciplinary design research conference held in Turin earlier this month, 'Changing the Change', to which we contributed. In his piece, Iain refers to 'a certain sense of unease' that he feels at the 'clarion call' of sustainability. His uneasiness is shared by many colleagues. Indeed, we have been watching with some fascination the real sense of fear that the 'environmental question' has instilled in many architectural educators in recent years. For many design tutors this fear is well founded, as they are in no way intellectually equipped to deal with the practical demands of students, nor the critical demands of the issues at stake. We find ourselves in the curious position of watching design tutors demanding their right to autonomy, that is to say, demanding their right to social irrelevance, and we wonder with Marx, who will educate the educators? Yet the challenges ahead might prove to be architectural and design education's greatest moment. To understand why this is, we need a sober reflection upon where we are now, and the nature of the intellectual, social and political struggles that we face. Firstly, let us be clear, the 'environmental question' is of a completely different order to any other issue that we are facing. This is because the environmental question forces us to confront the question of value production in capitalism head on, in a way that no other contemporary issue does. Iain wonders whether, " global health, intercultural interaction, and well-being " , might be " other challenges of equal or perhaps greater significance. " These are all important issues, and indeed for many thinkers they are inseparable and fundamental to the question of sustainable living. However, they will all be completely determined by outcome of the confrontation between 'the environmental question' and capitalist production. Period.
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Commentary upon a conference upon Manfredo Tafuri at Columbia University 2006 Published in Radic... more Commentary upon a conference upon Manfredo Tafuri at Columbia University 2006
Published in Radical Philosophy 138 July/August 2006
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These brief notes were given by me at an event on the anthropocene at the University of Westminst... more These brief notes were given by me at an event on the anthropocene at the University of Westminster on Tuesday 25th November 2014. (see http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2014/the-anthropocene-cities-politics-law-as-geological-agents) I should probably start by saying that I claim no particular expertise in this area. The anthropocene is a concept that I have to deal with… mostly in the context of students who want to use it. Occasionally I use it myself, though generally in a heuristic sense, to explore the ways that the concept is being deployed, the political stances and potentialities that it contains. The following is a series of notes that have emerged from my engagements with the concept (in teaching both design studio, and history and theory, as well as recent research projects that I have been involved with, notably the scarcity project, and more recent work around questions of energy)). Hopefully this will provide some material to discuss what is at stake in the concept. how is the concept being deployed today and by whom, and perhaps most importantly for us this evening, whether the concept of the anthropocene might actually be conceived in such a way that it has useful conceptual structure that we can all do some work with, in our different fields. The basic proposition of the concept of the anthropocene is a simple one: that the collective productive labour of the human species has become a global, geological force. The evidence can seem compelling: humans move more rock and earth than all of the Earth's glaciers and rivers combined, we fix more nitrogen in the soil than microbial activity does, we consume in various ways vast quantities of the biological, material and energetic resources of the planet, and of course, we have our own sedimentary layer, what has become known as 'Anthropocene rock—the concrete, steel and bitumen of the planet's cities and roads'. One of the biggest problems encountered with the anthropocene concept is that it is too easily adopted in a simplified form, as simply referring to this quantitative aspect, often all too enthusiastically by those who seem to take a rather adolescent male delight in the idea that at last (or once again) mankind has overcome his imagined nemesis in mother nature. We might start by saying that this is by far the most trivial and conservative reading of the term, and one which none of the initial authors (Paul Crutzen 2002) or primary users of the concept actually deploy. Nonetheless, one often encounters this kind of boosterish reading – which of course, is particularly ironic, given that the anthropocene – should we chose to accept the term – could well be the geological era in which humanity becomes extinct! Paradoxically, we need to be careful that the anthropocene concept does not in fact naturalise, in terms of political ideology, our current way of being in the world. But one of the problems with the concept is that it can seem to promote a naive and one-dimensional mode of Prometheanism, there are other problems too. Its is, it is hardly worth saying, a anthropocentric concept. Yet one wonders what it even means to say anthropocene when we learn that only 10% of the cells in the human body contain human DNA – is it already anachronistic, a legacy of outmoded ways of thinking about life. Concepts such as anthropocene often obscure as much as they illuminate, making us forget that every other living process on the planet also feeds into the anthropocene, and that this is an unfolding process that that ecological systems theory tells us we can in no viable way control. There is perhaps also a danger that the concept acts to underplay more important categorisations. It might be more useful to think in terms of the difference between a biotic and abiotic planet, or a pre and post language planet. The anthropocene concept can act to compound our broader difficulty in recognising the complexity of other forms of species-life and who knows, other forms of species-being that are in the world. One often hears that the anthropocene designates the first time that a single species has had such a global effect. Again, this is dubious. We are certainly not the first species to have had a transformational geological affects at the scale of the planet. We might note for example that the Earth's atmosphere is a non-equilibrium mixture of 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen, and 1% other gases (mostly argon), including the all important carbon dioxide which makes up a mere 0.4%. However, 2.4 bn years ago the Earth was a very different place, there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and a great deal more carbon dioxide. This condition was transformed into the kind of atmosphere that were have today through what is known as the Great Oxegenation Event – the fundamental transformation of the oceans and atmosphere brought about through the photosynthetic activities of phytoplankton, such as cyanobacteria in the ocean, which produced sugars from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight, with oxygen as waste. In this process the anaerobic life forms that had existed on the planet were wiped out in the first great mass extinction event, but which opened the way to the explosion of oxygen based life that we have on the planet today (well..). Right now, 98% of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced on an ongoing cyclical basis, through the photosynthetic labours of plants, trees and still primarily sea based organisms. If we are impressed by our sedimentary activity in anthropocene rock, then we might do well to remember how much of our own landscape here on this island was directly produced out of the bodies of other species, producing limestone, and granite.. materials that we might think of as geological, but which are absolutely organic too. These materials of course, have provided the basis for our own anthropogenic building activity, both directly in the form of stone structures and claddings, but also indirectly as concrete.
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A review of Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, ... more A review of Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011, published in Radical Philosophy 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)
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What is concrete? Loved and loathed in equal measure, this building material, as soon as we try t... more What is concrete? Loved and loathed in equal measure, this building material, as soon as we try to define it, to specify it, to describe it, becomes, well, not very concrete at all, but rather fluid and surprisingly abstract! Concrete is a material which has been going through an interesting intellectual and practical renaissance in recent years, in no small part driven by the convergence of several different kinds of technology-driven manufacturing changes-ranging from computer aided manufacturing of formworks, to photograph etching, to engineering software, to nano-and biochemistry to 3D printing-which have opened up new worlds of realizable, expressive and performance optimised form. The demands posed by anthropogenic climate change, energy use, resource scarcity, and the environmental question more generally, have equally transformed the technologies and industries that are now feeding into developments in this material. On its own though, that is not enough to understand the revival in interest. In this paper I will argue that there are indeed profound relationships between capital, modernity and concrete. However, I will suggest that in order to really start to grasp these relations, we will need to explore some ways of thinking about concrete that have not been developed so far within the recent literature on the material. Notably I will develop an ecological approach to thinking about what concrete is, and in so doing redefine this material as a particular form of mud, or mudcrete: a material which is deployed by both human and non-human builders. I will note the ecological energetics and extended materialities of mudcrete, and will reflect upon the conceptual 'forms' or 'patterns' of this matter as a particular modality of the production of nature. Mudcretes always internalise in particularly interesting ways I argue, their external relations, the extended networks of materials, skills, labours and energies that go into their production. Mudcretes frequently stage fascinating bio-semiotic performances, whichever species or processes are dominant. But when the mudcretes in question are the product of human labour, they always act as social media.
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In the 20th century, the diverse work of Gregory Bateson was hugely influential in many fields. N... more In the 20th century, the diverse work of Gregory Bateson was hugely influential in many fields. Now his thinking and writing could offer an essential guide to the future of architecture and urbanism
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New Ecologies New Constellations, 2013
one of the most compelling extensions of ecological thought can be found in the late work of feli... more one of the most compelling extensions of ecological thought can be found in the late work of felix guattari. although he does leave various clues, guattari is indebted to the work of the nomadic scientist gregory Bateson. Deleuze and guattari’s seminal text “a thousand Plateaus” references Bateson’s work, and their metaphorical model of rhizomes is a reworking of Bateson’s relational “ecology of mind”.
i aim to contribute to the ecosophical project through a brief consider- ation of Bateson’s work within the broad context of ecological thought.
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