How can we cultivate a holistic, complex, and systemic perspective on what we call home? How can we produce new ways of valuing and recognizing non-hegemonic cultures? What are the pathologies of the systems we are taught to believe in, and how can we create new forms of perception and action that recognize the interconnectedness of life’s production and organizational systems?
The world’s primary problems stem from how nature functions and how people think: what would it mean to change the way we think? Ideas, after all, are linked to how we inhabit the world. We exist on Earth in a manner that is profoundly destructive to natural ecosystems: what impact are we causing by engaging in processes of pollution and exploitation? How can we practice a life that is interdependent with ecological systems?
The course “Urban Ecology: From Body to Territory” proposes an investigation into a new and possible ecological way of acting in the contemporary condition, in the face of a planet impacted by urbanization and its consequences. This ecological action stems from the generous, situated, and appropriate application of artistic, technical, socio-ethnographic, and biochemical knowledge—the fruits of traditional and scientific wisdom, a heritage we must revere and use as a guide. It is an updated way of thinking about the foundation of human projects, to review the principles of meta-projects that guide the collective construction and transformation of the landscape. It is our choice how we see and live in the world, but change does not happen in isolation. How do we organize ourselves to create structures and ecosystems that allow for other ways of inhabiting what we call the city in contemporary times? How do we create other values, habits, and cultures?
