Here is the edit of the documentary film ‘Urban Evaporative Cooling and the Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens’ made for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 with Greek subtitles
Tag: planning
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Three new papers on Gregory Bateson and eco-mental systems
Hopefully I will have time to finish three new (or mostly new) papers for the final deliverable from our Bateson research project (https://www.enactingecologicalaesthetics.com), which will I think be a significant new collective contribution positioning some of Gregory Bateson’s thinking in relation to contemporary questions regarding the challenges facing ecological design, strategy and planning in an era of extreme socio-ecological uncertainty. The abstracts of my three papers:
Goodbun – Bateson Book Chapters
Gregory Bateson and the Political
This paper below has evolved out of an introductory paper of the same name, written for a dialogue panel led by the author with Phillip Gudemmi and Fred Turner, hosted by Systemic Design Association at the RSD11 conference in 2022, and which can be found online. The original paper was thus written before the start of the research project which this book is a product of. However, this paper provided a significant framing for some research questions that were taken on, including a repositioning of Gregory Bateson, not as the a-political figure that he is so often presented and received as, but instead, as someone rather more complex, who moved through a series of distinct situated practices which had significant political aspects.
I argue in this paper that there are two periods of quite significant political engagement, where Bateson directly reflected upon, and made real contributions to, significant strategic and meta-political (not a-political) questions (many of which contain significance for design and planning today). The approximate chronology I proposed defines a younger period from the mid thirties until the end of the war in 1945, and a second period which really gets going with his participation in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in 1967, until his death in 1980.
Importantly, this paper also brought into focus as a new area of Bateson research, the significance of his reflection upon the ‘lack of a theory of action’ found in the widely overlooked and then out-of-print paper from what was considered to be his ‘failed’ 1969 Wenner Gren symposium on the ‘The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation’. I use the framing of ‘-action’ to name the three distinct periods outlined above: Naive Action, Actionless-Action, and Wise Action.
In this revised and extended paper, I have expanded upon some of the key contributions of the paper noted above, and I have removed some sections – such as the cross reading with Felix Guattari’s work – which whilst relevant, are now dealt with in another chapter in this book.
The Two Orders of the Three Ecologies –
An Introduction to Gregory Bateson and the Double Binds of Design
In this paper I try to answer the question: Why should we read Bateson today? I give an overview of both Bateson’s own trajectory, and his influence upon many of the environmental humanities thinkers who are so important to us today. Noting that Bateson is both everywhere yet strangely absent, I suggest that it is perhaps his critical extensions and revisions to all three of the great intellectual patriarchs of western modernity: Marx, Darwin and Freud, which has made him both easy and difficult to consume. Building on arguments introduced in ‘GB and the Political’, I further unpack Bateson’s position by exploring what I call his ‘Three Ecologies’ period, in particular through a reading of his 1969 paper ‘Pathologies of Epistemology’, and the cosmology of ‘eco-mental systems’ which he proposes therein. I suggest that the call to action (!) to the therapist community that he concludes the paper with, was heard by at least one activist-therapist – Felix Guattari – and I spend some time in a close parallel reading of Bateson’s and Guattari’s three ecologies. I ask, with Bateson and Guattari, how ‘selves’ are produced transversally across three systemic ‘types’ or ‘scales’ – individual organisms, social organisations, and environmental worlds – and how these must all be understood in relation to a quite different ecological dualism that Bateson reveals, between the material-energetic and the informational-semiotic (hence ‘the two orders of the three ecologies’). I conclude with Bateson that some kind of ‘ecological therapy’ is needed (for both ecological disciplines, the ecosystems that are their subject matter, and anyone with goals to act in such contexts), and I wonder in passing if this might also be a way of reimagining what ‘design’ is? In closing, I suggest that ‘Surrealism,’ which historically positioned itself as a synthesis of Marx and Freud, might provide the basis for a new ecological project across the two orders of the three ecologies: an ecological surrealism, this time based in a Batesonian rather than Freudian unconscious.
The Ecological Aesthetics of Empathy and Alienation
‘So by ‘aesthetics’ I mean responsiveness to the pattern which connects. The pattern which connects is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalisation that indeed it is patterns which connect.’
Gregory Bateson
‘The senses become theoreticians in their immediate practice’
Karl Marx
Building upon my conclusions in ‘The Two Orders of the Three Ecologies’, in this paper I suggest that we can indeed define a Batesonian ‘ecological aesthetic’, but that this is not a style guide, or a design tool or anything like that. Rather, it takes as its basis a totemistic/animistic empathy or mimetic metaphor, as the core semiotic process of acting-perceiving organisms engaging with a world which is always their unconscious. As such, a Batesonian ecological aesthetic is also the basis of what we might call a Batesonian science – or a Batesonian re-imagining of the project of science.
For Bateson, the concept of empathy was key to the ethico-aesthetic practice of perceiving patterns that connect. This in turn was central to the possibility of learning how to act-with-wisdom within ecological and systemic complexity. It is not clear to what extent Bateson knew the etymology and history of the word ‘empathy’, but in this paper I explore that history, and the surprising connections between the concept of empathy and firstly, the concept of space in a particular tradition of architectural aesthetics, and some recent returns to that, via the neuroscience of spatial perception. Secondly, between Marxian conceptions of alienation and mimesis.
I use these readings to approach three very different case studies. Firstly, with the help of one of Bateson’s favourite references – Carl Jung – I consider the ecological aesthetics of the phenomena of UFO/UAPs. Secondly, I find some empathy building tools in some of the props and diagrams that Bateson used in his teaching practice. Finally, I consider the implications of an ecological aesthetics of totemistic empathy with damaged eco-mental systems in relation to a particular situated design research project on Urban Evaporative Cooling and the Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens.
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Steps Around a Theory of Action: Notes on Seven Bateson Conferences
I’m really happy to see the online publication of a joint piece that I’ve been collaborating on with the ‘archive team’ (myself, Dulmini Perera, Simon Sadler and Ben Sweeting) from our ‘Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design’ AHRC-DFG funded research project (which also includes Joanna Boehnert and Marie Davidova). This piece was conceived and led by Dulmini, who also worked with Leonie Link, Florian Tudzierez, and later Paola Ferrari and Stefanie Huthoefer on the associated interactive graphic component. See: https://www.enactingecologicalaesthetics.com/batesons-cosmos/
The piece draws upon previously unpublished archival material around a series of conferences that Gregoray Bateson was involved in through the late 60s and early 70s and provides a series of framings which help to make this period of Bateson’s thinking available to us today, as we continue to confront the practical and political questions around the possible forms (social, political, spatial) of human adaptation within a context of multi-scalar ecological complexity.
Dulmini gives an introductory text to the project. I contribute short texts concerning two conferences, the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress, and the 1968 Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation. There then follows a series of brilliant short texts by Ben Sweeting, Dulmini Perera and Simon Sadler.
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‘Urban Evaporative Cooling and the Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens’ research-in-progress to be exhibited at Venice Biennale 2025
Very happy to announce, after several months of discussions, that our work on evaporative cooling, heat and pollution in Athens, will be exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale.
The curator Carlo Ratti has set the theme Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., which connects well with the ‘eco-mental’ and semiotic framing I have given our broader urban evaporative cooling research…
The curators asked if it was possible to construct a full scale tower, which would have been amazing, but which would not have worked well without complete reimagining, as Venice is already evaporatively cooled by the canals and lagoon!
Instead, we are enjoying working on a two screen film installation piece which will be presented in the ‘Artificial Intelligens’ section, in the Corderie building of the Arsenale, in one of the curator Carlo Ratti’s main curated spaces on ‘Intelligens’.
The core project team is myself as Project Lead and P-I (at both RCA and Rheomode, where Dimitra Vlami is helping to project manage), Aran Chadwick from Atelier One structural engineers, Flora McLean, also from RCA (Fashion and textiles), and Rosa Schiano-Phan and Juan Vallejo from University of Westminster. In addition we are working collaboratively with the filmmakers Gemma Riggs and Linn Phyllis Seeger on producing material for the installation and online.
Many thanks to the Royal College of Art – both the Research Office and the School of Architecture in particular – for supporting this project, and to the University of Westminster and Atelier One for additional support.
Many thanks also to the support of local allies such as Latraac Skate Bar and Urban Garden and Zachos Varfis, artist-writer James Bridle, the Municipality of Athen Heat Officer Elissavet Bargianni and UN Habitat Heat Officer Eleni Myrivili.
Filmed at Latraac Athens during pre-prototype testing July 2024 -
The Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens
I had the pleasure of being invited to participate as a guest researcher, contributing to the joint Chair of Sustainable Urbanism at TU Munich and NTUA Polytechnic Athens project on the transformation of urban landscapes led by Norbert Kling, Tasos Roidis and Mark Michaeli, which was supported by a three year grant from the Schwartz Foundation from 2020. We had a series of great workshops with a great team of core and guest researchers, and which resulted in the publication of the excellent book ‘Taking Action: Transforming Athens’ Urban Landscapes’, published by Jovis in 2023.
The book can be purchased as a hardcopy or downloaded for free as a PDF, following the link here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783986120139/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOoq7Typpq9Zb4i2smndAheBGoBJ6NAIwUR3tBaWLcWR1fc7nbWqV
In my chapter in the book, PDF below, I bring together a few of my research strands… firstly, I try to use my understanding of Greory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics and ecology of mind , to frame thinking about our environments as our extended unconscious… our extended eco-mental systems, or extended mind. I take on the concrete case of the contemporary city of Athens in Greece, and its various conditions and pathologies (in particular urban heat island and pollution island effects), and use my recent work on what I’ve described as ‘The Two Orders of The Three Ecologies’, as well as more Marxian and climate and environmental justice rooted approaches to looking at the city. Finally I bring in my longstanding and ongoing work (with a shifting collective team of co-researchers) looking at the possibility for a new kind of urban air conditioning ‘collective equipment’ using passive energy evaporative cooling devices.
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GEOPOIESIS
This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual study material in a more speculative mode, through a series of world-building and worlding fictions workshops. We imagined worlds more or less similar to our own (and researched our own planet’s biology, geology, meterology, cultures, environmental disputes, land forms, systems, etc as the basis for our fictions.) Although many of these worlds were superficially very different from our own, all inevitably resonated with it. Some worlds appeared to maintain relatively stable homeostatic ‘plateaux’. Others were undergoing systemic changes. One narrated the final months and weeks of an Earth, as it was slowly ejected from its orbit in the solar system.
We coined ‘Geopoiesis’ as a heuristic research concept, to map and discuss both our own work, and a wider field of related ‘world-building’ and ‘worlding’ practices. We conceived of ‘world-building’ in relation to collective political imaginaries, and ‘worlding’ in relation to the construction and performance of political subjectivities.
A quick survey of the geopoietic field might include, in no particular order: science fiction, fantasy and counter-factual fictions, IPCC reports, Green New Deal proposals, Gregory Bateson/Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, Benjamin Bratton/Strelka’s Terraforming programme, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal politics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s ‘bringing forth of worlds’, Donna Haraway’s multi-species worldings, and the Zapatista call, recently repeated by the Red Nation, for ‘a world in which many worlds fit’.
Some of our references are poetic and nebulous. Others synthesise the peer -reviewed work of innumerable contributors. For example, the future scenario planning and world-building models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contain significant quantitative data analysis, combined with all kinds of qualitative evidence and interpretation, in for example both its SSPs: Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (which build a series of five scenarios based upon an increasingly diverse range of voices and disciplines), and also its RCPs: Representative Concentration Pathways (which describe four scenarios based on estimated increases in radiative forcing by the year 2100 (compared to pre-industrial levels) ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 W/sqm).
The IPCC world-building exercises are significant artefacts. Still problematic? Yes, of course, but nonetheless incredibly impressive pieces of trans- and multi-disciplinary thinking, managing with relative transparency and clarity a manifold of methodological, epistemological and practical difficulties of staggering complexity. Importantly, the work of the IPCC is increasingly resonant with the demands and framing of the Just Transition/Global Green New Deal movement. Indeed, this MA EA Geopoiesis project here springs out of our work on Green New Deal in recent years, which asked : What kinds of world-building imaginaries might we need to develop, if we are to grow a Global GND Dialogue that can mediate the future scenario models that we have from the IPCC, through the needs of situated social movements that are increasingly engaging in local environmental disputes that have systemic planetary implications, and are simultaneously imagining alternative socio-ecological futures around the planet? Moreover, how should we even think about the models of planetarity presented to us by NASA, the IPCC, Google Maps and so on, which themselves platform out of the networks of remote sensing satellites, laboratories, vast data sets navigated through machine learning and algorithmic analysis, and ultimately metabolised through the labour of innumerable workers, technicians, scientists and observers of all kinds around the planet? What other potential configurations are latent in the affordances of these stacks and platforms? We know that the contradictory world-building ideologies of neoliberalism– nationalism and globalisation – are in crisis, while the environmental emergency demands a new kind of multi-scalar, multi-perspectival and multi-species planning wisdom-within-ecological complexity. The Geopoiesis project is thus one of Re-Imagining the Project of Planning.
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ADS5 at RCA Show 2012 and ‘Between the A12 and River Lea’ exhibition.
It has been a great first year teaching MA/diploma studio at the Royal College of Art with Justin Lau and Kenny Kinugasa-Tsui. The (rather out of date) studio blog is at http://ads5.wordpress.com/
Particular congratulations to final year students Jack Wates, Joseph Deane (who will represent the RCA in the RIBA Silver medal awards) and Emma Emerson (who was awarded the NLA prize by Peter Murray).
The work is on show at the RCA Show 2012 until July 2nd, and at the exhibition ‘Between the A12 and River Lea‘ at Assemble’s studios, which is open until July 8th as a part of the London Festival of Architecture.
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Landscapes and Critical Agency Symposium
I am giving a paper at the Landscapes and Critical Agency Symposium at UCL on 17th February 2012
See landscapeandagency.wordpress.com/
My paper is: Landscapes, Complexity and re-imagining the Project of Planning
In this paper I will argue that the proto-ecological thinking that can be found in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, when reconsidered in the light of more recent theorisations of systemic complexity, demands a critical and political re-imagining of the very possibility of the project of planning cities, landscapes and economies today.
A number of contemporary theorists – including David Harvey, Neil Smith, John Bellamy Foster and Erik Swyngedouw – have turned to consider the conceptions of ‘nature’ in the texts of Marx and Engels, with regard to pressing questions concerning our environments. Typically, their work elaborates upon the dialectical conception of metabolism that was developed by Marx out of the work of the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig. For Marx, as for these more contemporary re-readings of his work, metabolism becomes a critical term for understanding the interaction of human and non-human labours and processes in ‘the production of nature’. Indeed it provides the basis for comprehending as a specific historical form of ‘metabolic rift,’ the ecological crisis that capitalism has instantiated.
In this paper I will develop further these insights through a reading of a fascinating passage from Engels, in which we find a rather sophisticated account of the effects of human activity upon the development of landscapes. Drawing upon a range of historical geographies from around the planet, Engels describes the necessarily unpredictable nature of complex landscapes, noting for example that:
‘The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons … ‘
For Engels the implications were clear, and using terms that anticipated the cybernetic language of systemic feedback that would be developed a century later, he suggested that we should not ‘flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature … Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first.’
What are we to make of this problematisation of human intentionality by Engels? Socialist thinking has so often argued that rational planning is both a possible and necessary response to the ‘irrational’ forces of both markets and untamed environments. Equally of course, technocratic tendencies within capitalism have made similar presumptions. But we know today, whether considering our own ecological and economic plight, or indeed the insights of recent systems theories, that Engels was basically right.
Landscapes are examples of what neocybernetician Stafford Beer described as ‘exceedingly complex systems,’ and as Engels observed, understanding and managing such systems can present problems for more conventional conceptions of planning. However, I argue that this very complexity of landscapes, and the multi-scalar agencies that they contain, also means that they provide an important new model for re-imagining the project of planning in general. This involves accepting the impossibility of old conceptions of mastery and control, and instead asks how we might democratise and mediate a new and open relation to the future, valuing the work of both humans and the many other agents with whom we labour. Ultimately any such critical-complex conception of agency and planning can only be a practiced as a new political landscape.
