Urban-Rural Projects HIGHLIGHTS 2005-2015
back to Urban-Rural Projects Systems Thinking In Stockholm’s Archepelago
Fifty [continue …]
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Wild work: connecting the social and ecological by design
A week of workshops at California College of the Arts, [continue …]
Grottole, Italy
Many city people yearn to reconnect with nature and the [continue …]
Sustainable Finance vs the Real World
These are curious times. Even as the world burns, sustainable [continue …]
Back To The Land 2.0: Some JT Videos
Mapping Local Resources. Connecting Growers & Citizens. New Co-operatives. Urban-rural reconnection. (These videos introduce the annual Back To The Land 2.0 summer school, in Sweden, that I run together with Konstfack).
Sustainability You Can Touch
I was stupefied when I read this text in 2020: [continue …]
From Control, to Kinship: Ecological Restoration in a More Than Human World
(Keynote talk in China) A just transition will happen when we see nature differently, relate to nature differently, and understand the purpose of development differently. So, can AI foster new ways of knowing and being in the world? Can it be medium of attention; a medium of connection; a medium of relationship with the living world?
Newsletter: Microbes and Social Equity. Tools for Changemakers. Meetups & Offsites
Microbes and Social Equity | Tools for Changemakers | Multi-Species Cities | Design for Planet School for Village Hosts | Meetups/Retreats | Offsites for Teams |
Design for Multi-Species Cities
What would it mean to practice design in the knowledge that the well-being of humans, and non-humans, is inter-connected? Here are the results of a design workshop at Milan Polytechnic: practical ways to make cities hospitable for all of life, not just human life.
“An inspiring design”
Twenty landscape students were given an unusual design brief: regenerate the soils of the Camargue bioregion - its rhizosphere - as a biological, living entity. Do do this, they were told, by creating new associations between, people, animals, vegetation, and weather.
My newsletter: Meetup dates | Regenerative Design in China | Back To The Land 2.0
Dates for my Meetups/Retreats in 2022 | YouTube Channel | Nature Reconnection: Hour of Ecology | Project Regenerative Design in China | School for Village Hosts in Europe | Back To The Land Summer School in Sweden | Recent Publications |
Beyond Calculation: AI and Sustainability
(Keynote talk in China): Even before AI came along, “what’s good for humans” helped shape an economy that extracts vitality, as well as resources, from the planet’s living systems. This cultural disconnection – between the living world, and the economic one – explains why we either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as natural ‘resources’ whose only purpose is to feed “the economy.”
The relationship of my texts to a dead fish
(A conversation with John Wood, professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and joint editor (with Julia Lockheart) of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice). I question why artists and designers should be encouraged to write in an intellectual way. After all these years, I still don’t understand the need to converse in abstruse language.
Urban-Rural: The New Geographies of Innovation
In this China keynote I describe three enabling conditions for system change: a capacity for ecological thinking; a focus on social infrastructure (rather than the concrete kind); and a shift of focus from place making, to place connecting.
Articles in Resilience
Social Food Forum | The Internet of Things and Earth Repair | Design Agenda for Bioregions | Peak Car | Re-wilding the Bauhaus | The City as a Living System (a selection of my texts selected for publication by Resilience magazine)
The City as a Living System: A Design Research Agenda
Paving over the soil, and filling our lives with media, obscured our interdependency with living systems. We must learn to think of the places where we live as ecosystems, not as machines. (This was my first keynote in Shanghai)
From Oil Age to Soil Age: Pathways to Sustainability
The word ‘transformation’ sounds uncontroversial - but does any of us has the right to transform somebody else’s life without them being part of the process? (An interview at Alison Clarke's Victor Papanek exhibition in Barcelona)
December Newsletter
Tree-consciousness | Cotton Capitalism in India | 32 Case Study Collections | Learning journeys | Water museums | Social fermentation | Shanghai’s BIOfarm | Bioregional fiber economies
Urban-Rural: 10 Takeaways
Takeaways from the big Urban-Rural exhibition I curated in China: Urban and Rural are one place, not two | the same goes for Analogue and Digital | A farm is not a factory - it's a social and ecological system | my definition of 'Sustainable Fashion' | Old knowledge and new tech are not a choice - we need both.
Press Release: Urban-Rural exhibition in Shanghai
(Press Release) Many people want to reconnect with nature and rural life - but cannot move out of the city for good. Zhangyan Harvests Festival in Shanghai, in November, is filled with practical ways to reconnect the two worlds. Located in a beautiful high-tech agricultural dome, an exhibition called Urban-Rural features a dazzling array of real-world projects.