The edited collection, Eco Culture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse, opens a conversation about the mediated relationship between culture and ecology. The dynamic between these two great forces comes into stark relief when a disaster—in its myriad forms and narratives—reveals the fragility of our ecological and cultural landscapes. Disasters are the clashing of culture and ecology in violent and tragic ways, and the results of each clash create profound effects to both. So much so, in fact, that the terms ecology and culture are past separation. We are far removed from their prior historical binaric connection, and they coincide through a supplementary role to each other. Ecology and culture are unified.
'Instead of tuning the consumer to the machine we can now tune the machine to the consumer' This edited collection of essays, now in its second edition, brings together the author's key writings on the cultural, technological and theoretical developments reshaping Modern architecture into a responsive and diverse movement for the twenty-first century. Chris Abel approaches his subject from a wide range of knowledge, including cybernetics, philosophy, new human science and development planning, as well as his experience as a teacher and critic on four continents. The result is a unique global perspective on the changing nature of Modern architecture at the turn of the millennium. Including two new chapters, this revised and expanded second edition offers radical insights into such topics as: the impact of information technology on customized architecture production; the relations between tradition and innovation; prospects for a global eco-culture, and the local and global forces shaping the architecture and cities of Asia. Chris Abel is an architectural writer and educator, based in Malta. He has taught at major universities in the UK, North and South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and is a contributor to numerous international journals and other publications. He currently holds visiting appointments at the University of Malta and the University of the Phillippines.
This book engages recent scholarship on trans-corporeality, disability studies, and environmental justice. Ray argues that environmental discourse often frames ecological crisis as a crisis of the body, therefore promoting ecological health at the cost of social equality. Ray urges us to be careful about the ways in which we construct “others” in our arguments to protect nature.
Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures. Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived experience and site-specific performance. Kuppers invites us to become moths, sprout gills, listen to our heart’s drum, and take starships into crip time. And fantasy is central to these engagements: feeling/sensing monsters, catastrophes, golden lines, heartbeats, injured sharks, dotted salamanders, kissing mammoths, and more. Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel “environments,” Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge. Traditional somatics teach us how to fine-tune our introspective senses and to open up the world of our own bodies, while eco soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the reach between self, others, and the land. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a method that allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others.
In this challenging and highly original book, the author tackles the dynamic relationships between physical nature and societies over time. It is argued that within each eco-cultural habitat, the relationship between physical nature and society is mediated by specific entanglements between technologies, institutions, and cultural values. These habitat-specific entanglements are neither ecologically nor culturally predetermined, but result from mutual adaptation based on variation (trial and error) and selection. It is shown how a variety of eco-cultural habitats evolves from this coevolutionary process. The book explores how these varieties come into being and how their specific characteristics affect the capacity to cope with environmental or social problems such as flooding or unemployment. There are two case studies illustrating the potential of a coevolutionary understanding of the society-nature nexus. In the first, rural and urban settlement structures are conceptualized as distinct paths of eco-cultural adaptation. It is shown that each of these paths is characterized by predictable spatial correspondences between dwelling technologies, modes of social reproduction, cultural preferences, and related patterns in energy consumption (i.e. social metabolism). The second case study deals with flood protection in liberal and coordinated eco, welfare, and production regimes, drawing on lessons from the Netherlands and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As a contribution to theory in environmental sociology, the coevolutionary perspective developed provides deeper insights into the intricate interplay between physical and social nature.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. The editors introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries: Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes. Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality. Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities. Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere. Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division.
As cities undergo vast changes due to industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, environmental considerations assume a growing importance in the urban planning processes of an increasing number of governments around the world. Several cities and regions around the world have already enacted policies that signal the emergence of a paradigm
The ancient pairing of architecture and books has always been an interesting topic for debate, and the increasing popularity of electronic books has recently added fuel to the fire. However, the bonfires built for the printed version remain unlit. Research undertaken for this publication suggests that the traditional reading room is currently enjoying a renaissance in many different guises, with print and digital media enjoying a symbiotic relationship. The digital revolution is just one of the many challenges faced by the library architect. To satisfy the varied requirements of library users, flexible, future proof, indoor and outdoor spaces must now support both passive and active pursuits. These often contrasting demands can vary dramatically from quiet, contemplative reading to audible public performance. This publication explores in detail the evolution of the eco-library, focusing on how design teams cope with diminishing resources in diverse geographic and climatic conditions. The featured projects demonstrate measurable reductions in both construction and operating costs through innovative designs that utilise the ecology of a selected site in a positive way. A library development will now inevitably seek to lead by example, visibly demonstrating sound environmental practice, and providing an enhanced user experience for increasingly more discerning patrons. Eco-Library Design provides a worldwide perspective on 21st century trends in library architecture.
