9. Urban Ecologies: Where’s Nature in the City? — with John Thackara & Gavin Van Horn

Written By alexa firmenich

“It doesn't start with being in awe or having an epiphany. It starts with everyday intimacies that build our capacity for care, extending our empathic imagination into other spaces that we're a part of.”

- Gavin Van Horn

“We’ve learned too slowly that telling people things isn't the same as them getting it. So now my work is focused on how to enable people to have living embodied relationships with nature.”

- John Thackara

 

SYNOPSIS:

How can people who dwell in urban settings engage with a teeming and vivid animal world – right on their doorsteps? How can cities be the best of both worlds, providing high social connectivity amongst humans and non-humans? Can we design cities from the perspective and the lifeworlds of other species? And by the way, where does the city even begin? How can animals disrupt our associations of what cities are ?

By 2050, over 2/3 of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. Nature deprivation systematically affects lower income families, creating a damaging feedback loop that hits hardest at those already struggling to keep pace. But cities are also beautiful, and our guests today bring us stories of engagement and positive action. 

Gavin Van Horn is the Executive Editor of the Center for Humans and Nature Press, and is the author of two books City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness and The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds. His story teaches a potent medicine for urban alienation, by honing our awareness to species like coyotes, robins, pollinators, and degraded urban forests. We talk about everyday intimacies, wild mutual gazes, the resplendence of pigeon feathers and examples of mutual healing when people repair urban lands and make nature whole. 

John Thackara, writer, curator and professor, develops design agendas for ecological restoration, urban-rural reconnection, and multi-species environments.  He curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years, and was commissioner of the UK Social Innovation Biennial and the Urban-Rural Expo in Shanghai. John’s expertise lies in the realm of futures design and next economies, and in our chat he shares compelling examples of urban rural reconnection, such as designers experimenting with microbial lives, the viral phenomenon of weed watching, celebrity farmers in china, and placefulness as a doorway into caring.

Together, their examples prove that there is indeed a middle path, and it has as much to do with honing certain perceptions and acuities than it is about smart urban design.

 
 

GUESTS BIOS:

Gavin van Horn is Executive Editor of the Center for Humans and Nature, and is the author of the books The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds and City Creatures: Animal Encounters In The Chicago Wilderness.

As a story forager, Gavin develops and directs transdisciplinary projects that illuminate what it means to become human within a more-than-human world. He received a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his doctorate from the University of Florida with a specialization in Religion and Nature. His dissertation research examined the religious, cultural, and ethical values involved in the reintroduction of wolves to the southwestern United States.

Gavin wants stories to navigate with and get lost within—stories that crack shells, melt wax, and sprout wings. Stories that open paths to living well in a living world.a collaboration and a living together with the bees.

John Thackara is a writer, curator and professor whose work focuses on developing the design agenda for ecological restoration, urban-rural reconnection, and multi-species design.

He curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years, first in Amsterdam, later across India; he was commissioner of the UK social innovation biennial Dott 07, and the French design biennial City Eco Lab; and in 2019, he curated the Urban-Rural expo in Shanghai. He is Visiting Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, School of Visual Arts in New York, and Politecnico di Milano, and is a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art.

He is a 2022 Design For Planet Fellow at Design Council, UK, and curator of the Social Food Forum. His last book was How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today.

QUOTES:

John Thackara

  • Just telling people things is not enough. They need to experience connection, or lack of connection, through an embodied understanding. So now my work is focused on how to enable people to have living embodied relationships with nature.

  • The task of design isn’t to get people to do things, but to get them to uncover other worlds.

  • It's not about just going to a forest and feeling sort of green. I think that people should be given tasks to do. These tasks should be productive tasks, that are beneficial to the place.

  • You don't have to give people lectures about biodiversity. You just say, yeah, do you want to be part of growing food?

  • The trick is to be inspired. To learn how incredibly resourceful nature is without feeling some kind of compulsion to turn that into a design action. I think the need to make things is not necessarily always consistent with leaving an ecosystem healthier.

  • I had to let go of the notion that only mass solutions were important.

Gavin Van Horn

  • It doesn't start with being in awe, or somehow having an epiphany. It starts with everyday intimacies that build our capacity for care, our capacity for extending our empathic imagination into other spaces that we're a part of.

  • Having our gaze returned or hearing the languages of other species is a reminder that we're not alone, that we are not a species that is apart from other species. We're not the only ones telling stories about them, they're also telling stories to each other about us.

  • It all started with thinking like a bee.

  • Think about a bee seeing an ultraviolet spectrum. Think about a hawk, being able to see pinpoint precision two miles away to see a mouse. Think about the speed of a peregrine falcon through the air. Think about all the perceptual attributes that other animals have that we do not. What's it like to be an elephant and perceive the world through our feet?

  • I think it also is helpful to follow good old Aldo Leopold's advice and try to think like a mountain. How do we think like a landscape? How do we think like a river? How do we imagine ourselves into these other types of being which would expand our empathic imaginations?

  • It's humbling to see all the different ways that life can express itself in bodily form. Eight legs, four legs, two legs, no legs, wings and fur and fin and feathered - it’s all just overwhelmingly beautiful and amazing to me.

LINKS

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