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.