Designing the post-anthropocentric world: Microbiological landscapes and cities as super-organisms
by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto
published in Topos no112 September 2020, p. 23-30
It is timely in the Anthropocene, and even more so during a global pandemic, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing. Adapting to a post-coronavirus world means re-designing our society from the point of view of the viral ecosystems that are now inhabiting it. From this new perspective, nature appears as disconnected from its picturesque image and becomes hardwired into the complex infrastructures and non-linear digital processes that drive organisation in contemporary cities, the so-called Urbansphere. How does green technology evolve in a creative framework unburdened by dualistic or picturesque notions of the human and the natural?