Listen to the episode:

You can find the shownotes through this link.

---

Are you interested in aesthetics for sustainable progress?

Our summary today works with the article titled Aesthetics of Sustainability: a transdisciplinary sensibility for transformative practices from 2011 by Sacha Kagan, published in the Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how transdisciplinary and complex approaches can inform aesthetics of sustainability. This article presents aesthetics of sustainability and its importance for a global environmental transformation process towards more sustainable societies.

[intro music]

Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

[music]

How can a sensibility to transdisciplinarity and complexity inform aesthetics of sustainability? Why does this matter for a global environmental transformation process towards more sustainable societies? Systems thinking and a transdisciplinary understanding of complexity may contribute to heal the fragmentation of our modern thinking and engage us into cultures of sustainability. Knowing in this sense needs to transcend the conscious mind and become a way of connecting ourselves with the complex world around us. Specific artistic expressions and aesthetic practices can enhance our selves of belonging and sustainability.

Unsustainability characterises the multi-dimensional dimensions of the contemporary global crises of civilisation, mostly in environmental, economic and social dimensions. Cultural aspects which are part of modernity are rarely mentioned. Problematic aspects of such modern thinking includes: traditional and non-contradictory logic operating at single levels of reality; fragmentation across disciplines and social sectors, excesses of abstract knowledge which is reduced by small-mindedness, and an overall simplification of knowing.

Kagan brought up Edgar Morin, French philosopher and his three basic modes of simplifying thought:

1. One is to idealise it, to believe that reality can be reabsorbed in the idea, that the intelligible alone is real
2. Two is to rationalise it, to want to enclose reality in the order and the coherence of a system, to forbid it all overflow outside the system
3. And three is to normalise it, that is to say to eliminate the strange, the irreducible, the mysterious.

Sustainability is not a fixed utopia, but a search process for dynamic balance. Sustainability as a search process should address all dimensions of unsustainability, environmental, economic, social and cultural. It unfolds itself differently according to the specific contexts, allowing the emergence of resilient cultural-natural complex systems. Since its introduction to policy, sustainability has several contradicting definitions, depending on what the speaker wants to stress on. From a cultural perspective, sustainability can be understood as the search for alternative sets of values and knowledge of the world, reforming thinking and founding an understanding of patterns that connects the economic, social, political, cultural and ecological dimensions of reality. The cultural dimension thus has a foundational value for the whole search process of sustainability.

To handle this complexity, genuine transdisciplinarity is needed, which means complementing and overtaking the limits of each discipline with other fields and through processes. Only then can the paradigm of simplicity be overcome and macro-concepts to be constructed. This complexity is present in our everyday life more than in any elaborate cybernetic system. But what does this all have to do with art and aesthetics?

We need aesthetics of sustainability to learn not to be afraid of complexity. The aesthetics of sustainability must include complexity and the interconnectedness of social, political and economic aspects of modern societies. Although modern societies have numbed this sensibility, in historical terms, the sensibility to intelligence of the non-human has been a huge part of how humans lived in their environments. We need to rediscover this numbed reflexive sensibility and the arts and culture can help with such a fundamental awakening. Aesthetics for Kagan means the experience, pointing at personal affectivity in everyday life and at human being’s overall interrelationship with their environment. Ecological aesthetics aims to highlight the form and meaningfulness of natural processes, and our inescapable interconnectedness with other people, society, economy and environment.

Aesthetics of sustainability should not merely be based on a holistic sensibility, over-emphasising the unity and integration of the biosphere or universe, replacing the disjunctive paradigm of modernity with a simplistic new age paradigm, but rather should be attentive to complexity. It needs to combine and contrast unity, complementarity, competition and antagonism. According to Kagan, aesthetics of sustainability is to be understood as a subset of aesthetics, meaning a form of relation and process-centred aesthetics which basis itself on a sensibility to patterns that connect at multiple levels, across species and silos. Aesthetics of sustainability also highlights the beauty of the complementarity of antagonism which is crucial to democracies. One shall also be open to chaos. Life’s creative evolution emerges not from computational capacities alone, but from the ability to deal with disorder and ambiguity. An aesthetics of sustainability, which is open to the generativity of chaos, implies a sensibility to emergence.

Ecological art is one the most interesting art movements from the perspective of aesthetics of sustainability. Ecological art emerged from the late 60’s in North-America and Western Europe. Ecological art embraces an ecological ethic in both its content and form and materials, highlighting the interrelationships in our environment, creating works that employ natural materials and environmental forces. Ecological art can reclaim, restore, and remediate damaged environments, inform the public about ecological dynamics and the environmental problems we face, and re-envision ecological relationships for new ways of co-existence, sustainability and healing.

Aesthetics of sustainability are however not only relevant to the practice of ecological art. They also relate to very basic and transversal practices of everyday life, such as walking. Why can walking be connected to aesthetics of sustainability from the perspectives of transdisciplinary sensibility? Walking stimulates embodied experiencing and learning and allows contextual perceptions locally and transversally at a slow pace enhancing attention and fostering serendipity. Walking bears potentially social and political value in dealing with shared spaces and public spaces. It may combine exchange ideas for example due to encounters with others, while also provide an opportunity for people to introspect which is enhanced by the physical activity. Finally, it is available to all, low-tech and open to non elite-wisdoms from all human groups.

In consumer culture, walking is limited to shopping spaces, amusement parks and dedicated half-a-day footpaths for the holidays. However, if one takes the time and effort that some more walking requires and does it with care and attention, one can be learning, observing, smelling, touching, attentively one’s surroundings during walking. People in this way can eventually manage to interpret the most subtle and nearly un-noticeable signs on the road sides, readily discovering what one was not looking for. Walking can become a genuinely transversal method of knowing, sensing and changing the realities of local communities. Transformation may then also occur as the reshaping of the form of reality.

[music]

---

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

---

[music]

Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Specific artistic expressions and aesthetic practices can enhance our selves of belonging and sustainability.
2. We need aesthetic sustainability to learn not to be afraid of complexity and the aesthetics of sustainability must include complexity and the interconnectedness of social, political and economic aspects of modern societies.
3. We all can experience our environment in this paradigm shifting way through simple walking when we become more conscious of our environment, probably leading some transformation in our surroundings.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What do you think of the aesthetics of sustainability? Has it captured your imagination before?
2. What do you think ecological art looks like in your area and city? Is there any ecological art you are very proud of or an area which would need some care in the form of ecological art?
3. How do you connect with environment while walking? What do you see, sense, recognise, notice?

[outro music]

---