Output details
16 - Architecture, Built Environment and Planning
University of Westminster
Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics - an addendum to urban political ecology; Ecological Subjects.
This output comprises two related papers addressing the primary question of how a new conception of ecology that draws upon both Marxian and neocybernetic intellectual traditions might be useful for thinking about architecture and urbanism today. The first was first given at the AHRA Agency conference at Sheffield University in 2009. The paper was subsequently developed further in various lectures, and was given at the ACSA New Constellations New Ecologies in San Francisco in 2013. Written during a period when the suffix '-ecology' was being widely used in architectural theory to signify all kinds of things, these papers were part of an attempt to map out a more critical theoretical and historical engagement with ecology as both a discipline and a paradigm. This work draws upon Goodbun’s broader interpretations of the neo-Marxian scholarship around Urban Political Ecology and Critical Geography (notably Erik Swyngedouw and David Harvey). However it extends this through the conception of ecological aesthetics that emerges from a reading of the philosopher of ecology Gregory Bateson, producing a distinct relational and political critique and extension of ecological systems theory in the context of architecture and urbanism.
