95691 - LANDSCAPES OF POST-URBANITY: NATURE, INFRASTRUCTURE, SEMANTICS

Learning outcomes

A novel landscape has emerged during the last century beyond the traditional boundaries of contained settlements. Infrastructures have crawled over rural fabrics, agricultural systems, and natural features, grounding new cultural formations along. Symmetrically, new forms of post-urban citizenship have arisen. Some assert that the world has become one city, but the divide between the privileged and the unprotected has grown incrementally crude. By the end of the course, the student can: read a contemporary landscape and its constitutive components, i.e., natural, structural, and societal; interpret the relational logics of such a heterogeneous mosaic across the spheres of its spatial configuration, metabolic functioning, and semantics; frame the attributes of the post-urban condition, vis-à-vis the evolving notion of the universal rights of individuals, communities, and the newly acknowledged agencies of our age, such as animals, flora, and natural features.

Course contents

The Winter 2024 edition of this course will be involved in an academic exchange project of Unibo and Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).

The teaching activities of weeks 2 and 3 will be jointly conducted by the home instructor and a visiting faculty member from Concordia University. Extra activities at Concordia will be made available online for the ones interested.

Course contents:
The course addresses a series of conceptual nuclei engaging the contemporary space (or landscape continuum) and our living condition in it at a planetary scale: urbanity and post-urbanity, i.e., the attributes of citizenship today in the context of rural areas, suburbia, city, world city, and mega region; morphology and physiology, i.e., correspondences between spatial patterns and functional processes in our territories; ecology, biodiversity, ecosystem services, sustainability, the anthroposphere and its metabolism; first, second, and third nature, collective memory, territorial heritage; production, degrowth, and happiness vs. GDP; rights of the non-human, i.e., the agency of animals, natural features, things, cyborgs, and hybrids.

Landscapes of post-urbanity:
Under the denomination of landscapes of post-urbanity, the course analyzes the contexts of our everyday life, the built landscape continuum of our present, where natural and artificial systems intertwine. The exploration is organized around the major spheres of nature, construction, and culture. The pristine natural platform has been altered by human activities to gain habitability. An artificial network of structures and infrastructures has grown incrementally at a geographic scale. This organizational and material weft carries aggregates of societal and cultural values imposed over the land as a semantics, that is, a collective narrative, or even a mythology, and a meaning.

Approach:
Through lectures, collaborative activities, debates, and site visits, the course offers tools and methods for interpreting spatial morphology, physiological metabolism, and semantic charge of the contemporary landscapes in the operative perspective of orienting future transformative actions.

Readings/Bibliography

Bibliography for attending students:

• W. Steffen et al. (2018) ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, PNAS 115(33): 8252-8259
  
• N. Brenner, N. Katsikis (2020) 'Operational Landscapes: Hinterlands of the Capitalocene', AD 90(3): 22-31
  
• J. Sachs (2015) ‘Ch.11 Resilient Cities’, in: The Age of Sustainable Development, Columbia University Press, pp. 355-392
• E. Wilson (2016) ‘Part III. The Solution’, in: Half-Earth, Liveright, pp. 169-212

Additional bibliography for non-attending students:

• J. Sachs (2015) ‘Ch.1 Introduction to Sustainable Development’ + ‘Ch.6 Planetary Boundaries’ + ‘Ch.14 Sustainable Development Goals’, in: The Age of Sustainable Development, Columbia University Press, pp. 1-44, 181-218, 481-512
• E. Ellis (2015) ‘Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere', Ecological Monographs ESA 85(3): 287-331
• E. Wilson (2016) Half-Earth, Liveright

Further reading suggestions if you are interested (not required):

• P. Baccini, P. Brunner (2012) [1991] The Metabolism of the Anthroposphere, MIT Press
• S. Latouche (2009) [2007] Farewell to Growth, Polity Press

Teaching methods

The class sessions will take different formats. Regular sessions will be subdivided into two lectures supported by visual presentations, each followed by substantial class discussion/debate. Seminar sessions will be organized according to active and collaborative learning dynamics: students work in a team or individually on specific activities to present and discuss the results with the rest of the class. Special sessions will be devoted to exploring selected landscapes through site visits (in the absence of circumstantial impediments). Others will host invited experts' contributions on specific themes.

Short preparatory readings will be assigned for each session to favor critical participation. The course calendar released at the beginning of the course will report the format and preparatory readings for each session.

Please, be aware that in the I-Contact program the use of generative artificial intelligence for the creation of papers is considered a form of plagiarism.

Assessment methods

The ability of the student to achieve a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the topics addressed by the course, to critically assess them and to use an appropriate language will be evaluated with the highest grades (A = 27-30 con lode). A predominantly mnemonic acquisition of the course's contents together with gaps and deficiencies in terms of language, critical and/or logical skills will result in grades ranging from good (B = 24-26) to satisfactory (C = 21-23). A low level of knowledge of the course’s contents together with gaps and deficiencies in terms of language, critical and/or logical skills will be considered as ‘barely passing' (D = 18-20) or result in a fail grading (E).

Teaching tools

Projections illustrating written, cartographic, and photographic sources, general, additional, and specific bibliographies, digital and printed didactic material.

Students with a form of disability or specific learning disabilities (DSA) who are requesting academic adjustments or compensatory tools are invited to communicate their needs to the teaching staff in order to properly address them and agree on the appropriate measures with the competent bodies.

Office hours

See the website of Roberto Pasini