Lecture_4 | The City’s Ecology: Dirt and the Garbage Tree

Instead of the assumption we are used to of the city as a mere machine of consumption, a closer understanding of the life cycles sustained?which also include animals, plants, and bacteria?should reframe the city as a construct that also produces energy and resources.
This lecture invites us for a mental walk in the wild, the urban, the natural, and through the resource systems of the city. It links together Persian water systems, mangrove habitats, fish farms, and the making of earth and air, along with the way alpine forests, meandering rivers, and lagoons can become ?role models? for the construction of habitats where life-forms exist in mutual support. The lecture touches upon models and examples that, borrowing Irénée Scalbert?s words, ?offer an account of the city in which the human and the non human and the social sphere are created together and are mutually dependent.?

This series is composed of five lectures in 2017|18:
Lecture_1: 30.10. | Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression
Lecture_2: 13.11. | Sun, Shit, Compost, and Air
Lecture_3: 27.11. | Worlds of Animals and Humans
Lecture_4: 11.12. | The City’s Ecology: Dirt and the Garbage Tree
Lecture_5: 15.01. | The City’s Natural History