Gregory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology vol4-issue1_Ecology.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
Intersecting disciplinary frameworks: the architecture and ecology of the city
Introduction: While many studies have explored the link between ecology and urban design, this paper examines two major conceptions that can promote deeper connections between architecture and ecological science. Outcomes: Rather than providing a comprehensive review, the paper explores in detail two frameworks that have not yet been exploited as foundations for a bridge between these fields. One is the seminal work of Aldo Rossi on the architecture of the city, as opposed to a more traditional architectural focus on specific buildings, lots, or specific clients. The complementary framework for ecological science is the ecology of the city, developed to support and explain a new era of more integrated social-ecological study of urban systems than had existed previously. Discussion: This paper draws heretofore unexamined parallels between architecture as represented by the work of Rossi and the ecology of the city as represented by the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology. The ecology of the city has become a widely used framing in the science of urban ecology, while the architecture of the city continues to influence a deeper understanding of the built environment as a whole. The parallels provided by the architecture of the city and the ecology of the city help to understand the historical interrelations between nature and culture. Conclusion: Intersecting the two conceptual frameworks of the architecture and ecology of the city can help satisfy the call for an actionable ecology for the city. This call demands both disciplines integrate their conceptual frameworks with communities in the collective enterprise of creating urban ecosystem health, justice, and sustainability.
Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology
Diogenes, 1978
While environment has become a popular topic in many circles conservation, legislative, corporate, community, and international, it has not often provoked a reflective inquiry into its philosophical meaning and significance. Indeed, in the increasing regard for environment, a crucial aspect of the subject has often been either disregarded, circumscribed, or trivialized: the aesthetic. And when aesthetic interests do receive attention, they are usually judged as a belated and desperate effort to save the beauty of our natural world from the irrecoverable ravages of exploitation and from the disfigurement and loss that follow. Recognizing aesthetic values in environment should lead, however, to more than opposition to clearcutting and the desecration of pristine lakes by ringing them with cottages and resorts. An aesthetic interest in environment means more than neighborhood cleanup campaigns. It involves more than appreciating gardens, parks, or urban vistas. It requires even more than preserving the architectural heritage of our cities and rebuilding their wastelands of physical and social decay. Important as all these are, they are still restricted by a limited focus. For the aesthetic is crucial in our very perception of environment. It entails the form and quality of human experience in general. The environment can be seen as the condition of all such experience, where the aesthetic becomes the qualitative center of our daily lives. If a concern for environmental quality is to result in more than a program for removing billboards, camouflaging junkyards, and replacing slums with the tenements of the future, it must go beyond mere palliatives of comforting images of prettiness, cleanliness, and order. A serious concern for environment must also articulate and develop the convictions and values that have aroused these efforts; it must encourage the support of goals that are both richer and more substantive. Doing this might seem to require an act of philosophical creation ex nihilo, for philosophers have never devoted much attention to such questions and, with the exception of a few thinkers like Kant, Schelling, Ruskin, and Santayana, have tended to ignore the aesthetics of nature altogether. For the most part, philosophical aesthetics has turned to nature for illustration, only rarely recognizing experience there comparable in significance and profundity to the experience of art.
Ecological Urbanism, revised edition (2016)
2016
While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of this book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed as an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities. Ecological Urbanism, now in an updated second edition, considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together practitioners, theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policymakers, scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of providing a multilayered, diverse, and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban. This book is also part of an ongoing series of research projects at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design that explore alternative and radical approaches between ecology and architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urbanism.
While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of this book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed as an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities. Ecological Urbanism considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together practitioners, theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policymakers, scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of providing a multilayered, diverse, and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban. This book is also part of an ongoing series of research projects at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design that explore alternative and radical approaches between ecology and architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urbanism.
ECO-AESTHETICS: BRIDGING ARCHITECTURAL AND ECOLOGICAL MOTIVATIONS (2007)
This paper argues for aesthetic principles that would bridge between purely ecological design motivations and purely architectural ones. I will show that the rift between these two value spheres has explicit terms, but also that those explicit distinctions are in fact dialectical and complimentary forms of thought. Eco-aesthetics is thus proposed here as the bridge which weds the two. To construct this link, I will rely on two definitions of aesthetics as posed by the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer and the English philosopher and architectural aesthetician Roger Scrutton. Both of these definitions can be said to position aesthetics as the link between our appreciation of beauty and our intellectual understanding of it. In other words, they connect the real world with our quest for the ideal one. Applying these definitions to an abductive and hermeneutic process of reconciliation, I then propose a naturalistic basis of design as an eco-aesthetic that is rooted in our present understanding of cosmic truth: systems theory and complexity science.
Concrete Jungles: Urban Ecology & Its Design (ETH Zurich, Spring 2018)
Far from being antithetical to nature, cities are places where human and nonhuman actors come into intense contact and form complex assemblages, where resources are highly concentrated, and where various ecological principles are neglected, reinvented, or put to extreme test. A majority of writing on “the city,” however, leaves nature by the wayside. Meanwhile, the natural sciences, including ecology, often treat the urban context, and the social more generally, as external to their purview. This course—co-taught by a natural scientist and an arts and humanities scholar specialized in the built landscape—takes a hybrid approach, putting a number of specific urban ecological design projects at the center in order to begin unpacking the various issues at stake, especially by addressing them from the respective vantage points of design and ecological thinking. Among other topics, we will investigate: efforts to revitalize cities by way of greening them, wherein natural metaphors and economic imperatives collide; terrain vague, a concept with which both architecture and ecology have had overlapping, if somewhat differently-articulated, multi-decade love affairs for its promise of liminal, as-yet underexplored spaces as well as the potential for a kind of ruinous, postnatural re-wilding (or self-organized healing, depending on one’s perspective); and the growing fortification of cities by built and green infrastructure meant to ward off rising sea levels, urban heat islands, and other perceived environmental threats. Through this, we will consider, in shared step, key concepts and debates within ecology (e.g., restoration, ecosystem services, resilience, wild nature) and the humanities (e.g., social nature, climate justice, green capitalism) today. By switching between alternative, co-dependent, and sometimes conflicting, viewpoints, we aim to hone the skills for engaging in trans-disciplinary dialogue about the role of design in shaping urban nature, especially in a world characterized by ever more intensive urbanization and extreme ecological instability. Special events: field trip to Lettenpark; guest talks by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA), Ashley Dawson (USA), Lara Almarcegui (ESP/NL), Stalker (IT), and Michael Beuttler (DE).