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Urban metamorphosis

  • Publish On 17 January 2022
  • Emanuele Coccia
  • 4 minutes

A specialist of the living, philosopher Emanuele Coccia imagines how architects could make the cohabitation between species possible without necessarily having to carry out an act of ecological repentance or abandoning modernity. A “building as a forest” and a city as a natural reserve are a few examples of the irruption of fantasy within the city.

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Transforming the City into a Museum for Contemporary Nature

Emanuele Coccia

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Transforming the City into a Museum for Contemporary Nature

As we are reconsidering our place as humans within nature, philosopher Emanuele Coccia investigates the natural phenomenon of metamorphosis and develops it into a philosophical concept that enables us to think about ourselves as part of a single breath of life that passes from one life form to another. Opposed to a penitential vision of environmentalism, he disagrees with the idea that the living should be viewed as fundamentally subsumed in the issue of ecological balances, life being a perpetual metamorphosis, poles apart from any notion of equilibrium. He champions the idea of a transformation of cities into “museums of contemporary nature” in order to overcome the conventional nature—culture divide and reinstate an urban interspecies approach focusing on cohabitation between all life forms and biodiversity.

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Urban Co-evolutions

Pascal Picq

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Urban Co-evolutions

Through the long-term perspective specific to paleoanthropologists, Pascal Picq can analyze the evolution of the human line in view of the parallel and sometimes jarring history of its habitat. In particular, he highlights how changes in ways of working have been a driver of the radical transformation of urban forms throughout history. He considers that the conditions for a new wave of change that could thoroughly transform our cities are already established, and he calls for new forms of nomadic living, in terms of housing and ways of moving around, as well as lifestyles organized on the basis of fusion-fission models of society. He also calls for a return of anthropology into the city, in order to make it easier for residents to reclaim their space.

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Vidéo

Reversing the image of the world

Frédérique Aït-Touati

Vidéo

Reversing the image of the world

The historian of science recently co-edited, with Emanuele Coccia, the collective work Le cri de Gaïa, penser la Terre avec Bruno Latour. Here she opens the way to an unprecedented exploration, that of a “New New World” that disrupts the codes of cartography and learning.

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