171123-24 - CIRCLING THE SQUARE

::: Los próximos 23 y 24 de noviembre participaremos en el Worksho Internacional ‘Circling the Square: Re-designing nature-cultures in a changing urban climate’ en TU Munich. Nuestra presentación se titulará: Urban Pets and Open Black Boxes: Political Ecology Matters in Squares / Next November 23rd and 24th we shall be taking part in the International Workshop ‘Circling the Square: Re-designing nature-cultures in a changing urban climate’ at TU Munich. Our contribution will be entitled: Urban Pets and Open Black Boxes: Political Ecology Matters in Squares :::

“The aim of this presentation is to explore new ways of integrating technology, nature and infrastructures into squares. This is done through case studies which are presented as models to explore a novel urban political ecology, and a way to unfold what we could possibly call a cosmopolitical design. […] ”

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About Circling the Square…
Urban planners, architects and designers are increasingly confronted with highly complex socio-ecological dynamics and challenges. These do not just involve new levels of vulnerability caused by heat island effect and anthropogenic climate change. Cities have also become refugiums for many species which flee habitat loss, agrochemicals and monoculture deserts, while globalized “invasive” species are showing the limits of techno-scientific control in more and more frequently destabilizing urban green infrastructures.

Public squares and parks play a central role in current efforts to meet these socioecological challenges. However, our imaginations of what squares should be, our analytical models of their uses and functions, are still profoundly anchored in modern conceptions and divides between nature and culture, the technical and the social, the urban and the rural, the public and the private: technological infrastructures are to be held invisible, “nature” has to be ornamental and provide ecological services, public life should not be dirtied with traces of productive activities, etc.

In the workshop, we would like to initiate a conversation with architects, designers and social scientists interested in circling the square, in sharing projects, experiences and reflections on how to attempt what seems impossible: to reimagine the public squares of our cities beyond the modern constitution and explore alternative conceptualizations of urban squares and/or approaches to designing within socio- ecological assemblages.

We welcome contributions that in one way or another relate to the following issues, although we are open and interested in other lines of reflection:

Scientific Comittee
• Prof. Dr. phil. Ignacio Farías, MCTS, TUM
• Prof. Dipl. Ing. Regine Keller, LAO, TUM
• MSc. Elisabeth Rathjen
• M.A. Felix Remter, MCTS, TUM