A Thinking-With Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti
Organised by the Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group
Ecologies of Architecture research group
TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment
8 December 2023
The Masterclass is focusing on the urgent question of our ‘becoming-with’ environments. It seeks conceptual tools for redirecting future architecture and urban design towards a more sympoietic direction that may mitigate the increasingly complex crises in the Anthropocene. As the posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, the environmental, social, and technological transformations that define the present can no longer be addressed separately by the sciences, humanities, and engineering. This disciplinary separation along divisions of nature, culture, and technology prevents the approach of these immense and irreversible problems as processes that are created, co-constituted, and co-individuated by design. The concept of sympoiesis elaborated in Donna Haraway’s well-known work critically extends autopoietic notions of self-organising systems by attending more closely to the forms of co-evolution in which things always ‘become-together-with’ other things.
PART ONE: Posthumanism
https://youtu.be/B4gIDEnsdlI?si=pEN66z23ho59F1ve
14:00 Setareh Noorani: Introduction
31:05 Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni: “The Sea as Island: Borderscaping the Mediterranean Basin”
38:43 Johanna Just: “An Earthly Writing of Space – Exploring more-than-human Relations in the Upper Rhine Plain”
49:35 Molly Anderson Fiero: “Othering time: tuning in to more-than-human animals in the theory and practice of landscape architecture”
58:32 Jere Kuzmanić: “Urbanism as social ecology: Reconstructing the continuous influence of anarchist ideas on the history and present of urban planning”
01:06:48 Chris F. Julien: “Thinking as environment”
01:18:38 Ricardo Avella: “Modernizing the Venezuelan Amazon – Rural housing as an instrument of Cold War era colonization”
01:26:25 Rosi Braidotti: Response
01:39:05 Discussion
PART TWO: Sympoiesis
https://youtu.be/JtnEQZrH3Hw?si=4sPwzndtkpx6RNPF
00:00 Bruce Clarke: “Gaian Technics: Sympoiesis = Symbiosis + Autopoiesis = Natural Technicity”
29:31 Victor Muñoz Sanz: “Cowborgs in the polder: how the design of farm buildings, animal bodies and technologies transformed Dutch dairy landscapes”
38:04 Alina Paias & Catherine Koekoek: ”Sympoietic conditions for change”
46:59 Amina Chouairi: “Venice in a lagoon: shifting perspectives in an ‘insoluble labyrinth’”
55:47 Gert van der Merwe: “Water: Flow, Code and Stock – A rhizomatic genealogy of the Political Ecology in Namibia”
01:04:31 Maria-Dolores Heinrich: “Becoming-with: Genealogising Collective Futures.”
01:13:01 Katerina Stavridi: “The Subject of Rescue: Producing the Nation through Transnational Dog Rescue Mobilities”
01:24:50 Donna Haraway: Response
01:46:00 Discussion
02:25:51 Closing
