Civic Ecologies

Catalog description

Modern urban life is tied to a vast array of technologies and material systems. Under the demands of increased global urbanization, city life increasingly influences how critical components of planetary ecologies flow, survive, die and are sometimes reborn anew. What, who and how we choose to incorporate and include (and, therefore, what we reject and exclude) as part of city ecosystems and infrastructures is essential. Civic Ecologies forms a temporary, situated community in Berlin—inclusion into which will itself form part of our discussions—undertaking comparative studies and depictions of the local and global ecologies we are all, already, integrated into and partially responsible for. Emphasizing this central topic of ‘integration’—a difficult term that nonetheless evokes how beings, materials, energies and ideas are permitted, prohibited, and eliminated—we explore how to meld with one another, with systems and with natural ecologies, in designing and creating integrative physical experiences, installations, media, as lived metaphors and renewed, modern myths.