Designing urban futures? Eco-cybernetics, or, how to govern the Anthropocene

Session Description

Recent decades have seen design shifting its concern from objects to processes, systems and futures. Design orients thought and action not towards questions of how something came to be, but rather what something might become, crafting new futures from within, rather than outside, the present (Cross 1982; Buchanan 1992). These “designerly” sensibilities are overtly and covertly reconfiguring how human-environment relations are studied across all scales, attuning urban governance around the world to a technocratic variant of the Anthropocene and to the “urban age” promulgated by complexity theory. The post-historical impulses of resilience and smartness govern the urban as eco-cybernetic systems, discarding utopias and declaring politics and planning as obsolete (Grove 2018; Krivy 2016).

From New York City’s Rebuild by Design to the quantified community of Hudson Yards, from the Global South's rare earth metal mines to post-socialist smart cities, design becomes infrastructural while channeling data and matter (Halpern 2017). The Anthropocene's catastrophic imaginary converges with a speculative interest of academia, policy makers and corporate world in "bits and atoms," jointly heeding not to "let a serious crisis go to waste" (Mirowski 2014).

This panel session will explore the challenges and limits to design as a form of governing emergent futures in the urbanized world of the Anthropocene. What are the histories and geographies of designerly futures and who are their subjects?

References

Buchanan, R. 1992. Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues.
Cross, N. 1982. Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies.
Grove, K. 2018. Resilience. Routledge.
Halpern, O. 2017. Hopeful resilience. e-flux architecture.
Krivy, M. 2016 Towards a critique of cybernetic urbanism. Planning Theory.
Mirowski, P. 2017, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Verso.

Agenda

Presenters

Session Types

Sponsor Groups