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

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

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.

Contenuti

Landscapes of post-urbanity:
Under the denomination of landscapes of post-urbanity, the course analyzes the contexts of our everyday life, the contemporary continuum 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.

Course contents:
Through lectures, collaborative activities, debates, and site visits, the course addresses a series of conceptual nuclei engaging the contemporary landscape and our living condition in it at a planetary scale: urbanity and post-urbanity, the attributes of citizenship in the context of rural areas, suburbia, city, world city, and mega region; morphology and physiology, spatial patterns and functional processes; ecology, biodiversity, ecosystem services, sustainability, anthroposphere and its metabolism; first, second, and third nature, collective memory, territorial heritage; serene degrowth and the agency and rights of things, animals and natural features.

Approach:
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.

Testi/Bibliografia

Short excerpts from the following sources are provided on "Virtuale" as Preparatory Readings to each class:

• A.v. Humboldt, A. Bonpland (2009) [Fra 1805]. Essay on the Geography of Plants. University of Chicago Press.
  
• R.T.T. Forman (2008). Urban Regions: Ecology and Planning beyond the City. Cambridge University Press
  
• W. Steffen et al. (2018). ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 115, no. 33, pp. 8252–8259
• IPBES (2019). The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES Secretariat.
• P. Baccini, P. Brunner (2012) [Eng 1991]. The Metabolism of the Anthroposphere. MIT Press.
  
• M. Agnoletti (2013). Italian Historical Rural Landscapes. Cultural Values for the Environment and Rural Development. Springer Netherlands
  
• A. Corboz (1983). ‘Land as Palimpsest’. Diogène n. 121, pp. 14-35.
• J.D. Hunt (2000). Greater Perfections. The Practice of Garden Theory. University of Pennsylvania Press
• S. Marot (2003). Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory. AA Publications
• P.G. Rowe (2012). Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities. Birkhäuser
• A. Magnaghi (2005) [Ita 2000; 2010]. The Global Village. A Charter for Democracy and Local Self-sustainable Development. Zed Books
• B. Latour (1993) [Fra 1991]. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press
• S. Latouche (2010) [Fra 2007]. Farewell to Growth. Polity Press 

Metodi didattici

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.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Attending students:
Oral exam: individual interviews of about 30’ test the acquaintance with and capacity of critical elaboration on the topics addressed in the sessions and preparatory readings. Weighed factors contributing to the final evaluation of each student: proactive and collaborative participation in the class sessions, including lessons, discussions/debates, activities (30% = 9 points out of 30); assimilation of notions and topics (25% = 7.5 points out of 30); ability to critically process such notions and topics (ability: 25% = 7.5 points out of 30); terminological appropriateness of argumentative and dialectic expression (20% = 6 points out of 30). Outstanding performances will be awarded ‘cum laude’.

Non-attending students:
Oral exam: individual interviews of about 30’ test the acquaintance with and capacity of critical elaboration on the topics addressed in both the preparatory and additional readings. Weighed factors contributing to the final evaluation of each student: assimilation of notions and topics (40% = 12 points out of 30); ability to critically process such notions and topics (40% = 12 points out of 30); terminological appropriateness in argumentative and dialectic expression (20% = 6 points out of 30). Outstanding performances will be awarded ‘cum laude’.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

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

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Roberto Pasini