Ecological Nature of the City: “Ecologicality”

To enhance their resilience against global environmental and economic challenges, cities require an ecological upgrade that leverages the city as a key strategic scale for urban ecology. We must thus consider the ecological nature of the city from the vantage point of a complex adaptive system that has evolved its relationship with the natural environment over time due to various factors, including physical, structural, demographic, economic, and technological. Many strategies and interventions at different spatial scales have cast the city within a fixed image that risks reducing the city’s ecological nature to its physical dimension. To counteract reductionist framing, this paper adopts an eco-critical perspective, viewing the city as a hyperobject (as defined by Timothy Morton), which comprises five dimensions: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. The paper aims to unpack these five dimensions as they pertain to the ecological disposition of cities (i.e., their ecologicality), to pave the way for tackling the question of the naturalization of the city beyond a systems thinking approach of a regenerative paradigm to an assemblage thinking that grasps the hyperobjectivity of cities.

Iñaki Abalos

Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Orazio Carpenzano

Dean, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome

Yung Ho Chang

Professor of Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Winka Dubbeldam

Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture at Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Brian Ford

Professor Emeritus, Department of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Hsinming Fung

Professor, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles CA, USA

Carlo Gasparrini

Professor of Urbanism, Dipartimento di Architettura, Universita' degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

Marco Imperadori

Professor of Design and Technological Innovation and Chancellor’s Delegate for the Far East, Politecnico di M

Rahul Mehrotra

Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Antoine Picon

Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Mónica Ponce de León

Dean, School of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA

Jane Rendell

Professor, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK

Peter Rich

Professor of Architecture, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa

Michael Speaks

Dean, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA

Martha Thorne

Hon FRIBA, Hon COAM, Director of Strategic and Institutional Relations, the Gallery Institute, Portugal

C David Tseng

Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan

Li Xiangning

Deputy Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Ecological Nature of the City: “Ecologicality”

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