Cities & Rivers: Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture by Margarita Jover
Event Date: Oct 12, 2020; Event City: Margarita Jover, cofounder of the Barcelona-based firm aldayjover architecture and landscape and associate professor in architecture at Tulane School of Architecture, will deliver the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts' annual Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture, titled Cities & Rivers. Cities are complex coupled human and natural ecosystems (Alberti 2007). The 20th-century single-use urban infrastructures such as levees and channels planned for "predictable" water performances are becoming obsolete because climate change patterns are uncertain. Today's socio-economical context of an eroded public sphere is leaving infrastructures with low to no maintenance, while their occasional privatization—as is the case with prisons or food systems—tends to augment the prospects for profit by scaling up in size and avoiding redundancy. In this context of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, intense suburbanization dynamics, and less resilient urban infrastructure, the conflicts are latent and the catastrophe recurrent. Lessons from ecological thinking such as strategies of resilience, redundancy, integration, cohabitation, and interdependence should become the new drivers for innovation and urban reform of public spaces, infrastructures, and architecture in the city. aldayjover’s research-based practice has been designing "cities & rivers" as spaces of cohabitation for two decades now, as well as the urban integration of infrastructures of mobility and energy. The book Ecologies of Prosperity (Wall & Jover, 2016) argues in favor of globally establishing a new condition of a citizen of the planet, a planetzen. This new condition should lead us to reform cities with the imperative to make them "digest" their wastes, and co-produce their energy and food at an intermediate scale. Design fields should commit to questioning the validity of 20th-century infrastructures increasingly large and out of sight, such as landfills, prisons, and powerplants that often harm citizens and regions bearing the burdens. Architecture as a design field can innovate, searching for new architectural archetypes to respond to today's socioecological crises. Read the full post on Bustler
Event Date: Oct 12, 2020; Event City:
Margarita Jover, cofounder of the Barcelona-based firm aldayjover architecture and
landscape and associate professor in architecture at Tulane School of
Architecture, will deliver the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts' annual Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture, titled Cities & Rivers.
Cities are complex coupled human and natural ecosystems (Alberti 2007). The 20th-century single-use urban infrastructures such as levees and channels planned for "predictable" water performances are becoming obsolete because climate change patterns are uncertain. Today's socio-economical context of an eroded public sphere is leaving infrastructures with low to no maintenance, while their occasional privatization—as is the case with prisons or food systems—tends to augment the prospects for profit by scaling up in size and avoiding redundancy. In this context of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, intense suburbanization dynamics, and less resilient urban infrastructure, the conflicts are latent and the catastrophe recurrent. Lessons from ecological thinking such as strategies of resilience, redundancy, integration, cohabitation, and interdependence should become the new drivers for innovation and urban reform of public spaces, infrastructures, and architecture in the city.
aldayjover’s research-based practice has been designing "cities & rivers" as spaces of cohabitation for two decades now, as well as the urban integration of infrastructures of mobility and energy. The book Ecologies of Prosperity (Wall & Jover, 2016) argues in favor of globally establishing a new condition of a citizen of the planet, a planetzen. This new condition should lead us to reform cities with the imperative to make them "digest" their wastes, and co-produce their energy and food at an intermediate scale. Design fields should commit to questioning the validity of 20th-century infrastructures increasingly large and out of sight, such as landfills, prisons, and powerplants that often harm citizens and regions bearing the burdens. Architecture as a design field can innovate, searching for new architectural archetypes to respond to today's socioecological crises. Read the full post on Bustler
