Seminar: New Ecologies: Urban Nature(s) and Survival in a Rapidly Changing World
Instructor: Associate Professor Joern Langhorst
Description:
This course will explore relationships between ecology and humanity, focusing on urban space where human needs and desires and the expression of other-than-human systems interact closely and generate new interrelations with what is commonly referenced as “culture” and “nature”.
This course will look at various examples of ecologies emerging in urban conditions, with a look at whether and how these might provide insights into developing new ideas and practices for design and planning fields that can model new socio-ecological assemblages to develop more resilient, sustainable, just and equitable cities and other aspects of human life and transcend concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as opposites or dichotomies. The course will combine theories and practices, engaging a multidisciplinary range of critical frameworks, lenses, and methods, including emergent voices, authors, perspectives and backgrounds that have thus far been suppressed, marginalized or underrepresented.
A key question is how the threats of economic, ecological and socio-cultural collapse are unsettling and dislocating dominant understandings of the human, life, and futurity – concepts, realities and materialities fundamental to the practice of architecture, landscape architecture and planning, and how our disciplines can respond to these existential challenges.
Far from engaging in apparently unavoidable doom-and-gloom scenarios, we will attempt to lay out alternatives that are empowering and optimistic, rooted in perspectives that are rigorously cross-, trans- and interdisciplinary.
