Landscape Urbanism lecture series updated
Each year, an international and diverse range of speakers are invited to offer new perspective on the issues that concern the practice of Landscape Urbanism at the Architectural Association. This will open up the possibility of actively contributing to the (re)definition of landscape urbanism as a new operative field. This year the lecture series will run from the 26th may to the 17th of June and speakers will include: Chris Reed, Alex Wall, Alberto Clementi, Steve Graham, Erik Swyngedouw, Alejandro Zaera, Simon Marvin, and Mike Hodson.
LANDSCAPE URBANISM LECTURE SERIES: ERIK SWYNGEDOUW
Nature and its more recent derivatives, like ‘environment’ or ‘sustainability’, are ‘empty’ signifiers. There is no such thing as a singular Nature around which an environmental policy or an environmentally sensitive planning/architecture can be constructed and performed. Rather, there are a multitude of natures and a multitude of existing, possible or practical socio-natural relations. The obsession with a singular Nature that requires ‘sustaining’ or, at least, ‘managing’, is sustained by a particular ‘quilting’ of Nature that forecloses asking political questions about immediately and really possible alternative socio-natural arrangements. I conclude with a call for a politicization of the environment, one that is predicated upon the recognition of the indeterminacy of nature, the constitutive split of the people, the unconditional democratic demand of political equality, and the real possibility for the inauguration of different possible public socio-ecological futures that express the democratic presumptions of freedom and equality.