Ecosystems in conflict: what city model do we need?

With Sergi Cot, Enric Cassú, Mike Duff, Ramon Faura, Andrés Hispano, Xavier Monteys, Frederica Matelli, Marc Rosdevall

Cities are complex systems that must respond to long-term social dynamics, the challenges of the global agenda and the contingencies of day-to-day life. This February, Donald Trump’s declaration of an energy emergency to promote fracking coincides with the review of the 2019 Climate Emergency Declaration by Girona City Council and the approval of the first carbon budgets.

Today’s cities must face often antagonistic challenges: the displacement of masses of tourists, emigrants and refugees (political, climatic, economic…), the creation of sustainable cities, the dialogue between ecosystems… This puts urban planning under pressure towards new debates.

This seminar takes up this challenge and does so within the framework of the exhibition “Brutal/Feral: Architectures of Survival” dedicated to two imaginaries in apparent confrontation, that of brutalist architecture and that of feral cities, forest cities or feral cities.

New visions of the old dichotomy between nature and culture open the way to understanding everything as a single reality, natural or post-natural, far from narratives that understand the human and technological outside of the natural, magical and wild.