Socio-Ecological Urgencies: Time in the Anthropocene

Contributors, Densities, Energy and sustainability, Essay, Formats, Low Density, Pratt School of Architecture, Topics, Urban Paradigms.

America, Capitalism, Climate change, Colonialism, Consumption, COVID-19, Crisis, Cultural legacy, Ecological activation, Environmental protection, Food, Global Awareness, Health, Inequality, Knowledge, Mapping, Participation, Production, Project, Race, repair, Research, Social dynamics, Spatiality, Transportation, Urban growth, Violence.

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” (2017) ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (4): 761–80.

Kathryn Yusoff, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene,” e-flux. https://www.eflux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/

Mary Annaïse Heglar, “2020: The Year of the Converging Crisis.” Rolling Stone (October 4, 2020).

Fullilove, Mindy T., Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2004).

As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd remind us, human-induced environmental damage is not a recent event, but a continuation of colonialism and its “practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years.”[1] Building, land use, and urbanization have been instruments of this global expansion of colonialism, modernization and capitalism, contributing to the loss of diverse human cultures and their traditions, as well as the diversity of the Earth’s ecologies that had been home to those societies. As the geographer Kathryn Yusoff writes: “The Anthropocene as a new rendering of time, subjectivity and agency announces both a break in and consolidation of modernity’s temporal arc.”[2] Could the present moment of reckoning be a potential turning point?