Monstrous algae meets gentrification: a Tale of Invasion
More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversaly’. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by ‘degenerate’ images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology.
Donald Trump and his ilk -another form of algae - are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents, and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.
Felix Guattari, Three Ecologies, 1989
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What captured our attention
What if we tell a different history
What if “Nature” does not exist
What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
What do you think?
Where does Europe begin and Where does Europe end
Collections that include this source
Imagine an Ecosystemic Europe
Imagine an Altereurope
Keep exploring
Cross Idea
We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for citie …
# 3
Constructing cities of refuge
We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for cities of refuge. Is this possible? […] How can the right to asylum be redefined and developed without repatriation and without naturalisation? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law? […]
If the name and the identity of something like the city still has a meaning, could it, when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in anew and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)? Under the exemption itself (en général), the statutes of immunity or exemption occasionally had attached to them, as in the case of the right to asylum, certain places (diplomatic or religious) to which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of injustice.
Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 2021
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Where does Europe begin and Where does Europe end
Collections that include this source
Imagine an Altereurope
Keep exploring
A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … C …
