Architectures, Natures & Data:

The Politics of Environments

Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts
Tallinn, Estonia
April 20-23, 2017
Call for papers
Two themes stand out prominently in discussions, projects and strategies that are at the
forefront of contemporary urbanisation. It is, on the one hand, the question of ecology,
where the city and architecture are reconceptualised in green terms, such as sustainability, resilience, metabolic optimisation and energy efficiency. On the other hand, there
is the cybernetic question, where the futures of architecture and urbanisation are staked
upon the pervasive use of digital communication, interactive technologies, ubiquitous
computing, and the big data. Moreover, these two questions have become increasingly
intertwined as two facets of a single environmental question: while real-time adjustments, behaviour optimisation and smart solutions are central to urban environmental
agenda, the omnipresent network of perpetually interacting digital objects constitutes
itself as a qualitatively new environment within which urban citizens are enfolded. But,
as digital networks become our second nature, we also hark back to the models derived
from the first nature.
There is growing pressure on architects, urbanists and planners to deliver ecological and
techno-informational solutions, with (self-)monitoring of citizens behaviour, optimisation of the buildings performance and smoothing of urban flows, along with the
respective substitution of democratic politics by automated governance models. As such,
it is ever more important to interrogate the historical, theoretical, methodological and
epistemological assumptions beneath the above set of processes that can be described,
following Michel Foucault, as environmental governmentality. These questions will be
explored under three thematic tracks.
Optimised urban ecosystems
While urbanisation had for centuries relied on nature as its constitutive outsideas a
resource and as a fantasyit is only during the 1970s that the urban-nature dichotomy
was subjected to the paradigm of limits and risks. Protection, conservation and sustainability had been institutionalised as regulative planning ideas in the following decades
and the city itself was thereby reconceptualised as an ecosystem. More recently, however,
urban ecosystems are being subjected to the criteria of resilience, and the ideals of harmony and balance replaced with emergence and complexity. Urban planning and development are transformed into variants of metabolic governance, the objective of which is to
optimise energy flows, smooth eco-infrastructures, and stimulate ecosystemic self-organisation, even at the price of insulating the optimised, smooth and self-organised from the
labour on which it essentially rests.
What are the histories and futures of sustainability, resilience and ecological optimisation

and how can they be addressed as epistemic categories beyond their implied solutionist
imperative? What roles have architectures and urbanisms played in these epistemic
transformations? What are the broader political consequences of thinking the city as an
ecosystem and urbanisation as a metabolic flow? To what extent is the widely analysed
shift from planning and government to management and governance (or from Fordism to
post-Fordism more generally) itself rooted in the urban ecological imperative of the last
40 years?
Architectural turn to nature?
In terms of their relationship with nature, urbanisms and architectures today are caught
in a peculiar paradox. On one side these disciplines recognise that there is no pure nature,
that nature has been planetary urbanised. On the other hand, they are drawn to the idea
of pure nature as a blueprint for spatial action. The morphology and morphogenesis of
biological organisms inspire ostensibly resourceful tectonic solutions and efficient material performance. The evolutionary model and the ecological cycling of nutrients inspire
ostensibly non-deterministic, open-ended models of urbanisation.
But why and how have biomimesis and ecomimesis come to constitute an unquestioned
ideal for architecture and urbanism in the first place? What is a more fundamental historical and epistemological stake underneath their biomimetic and ecomimetic impulses?
Why has nature, as described by natural sciences, been appropriated as a model and a
teacher? Why is nature viewed as inherently efficient and intelligent and how does current architectures turn to nature differ from earlier such turns? What are the social
costs of urbanisms green, clean-tech imaginations?
Big data and urban subjectification
Similar questions can be directed at the notions of human nature and subjectivity. As the
proliferation of data de-stabilises human subjectivity, rendering individuals into profiles
and substituting individuation with algorithmic personalisation, the idea of a humanfriendly city continues to inform urban design. While we expect that big data will help
us to better design for people and make cities more liveable, we tend to ignore how
these data simultaneously undo the very meaning of people and life. The ultimate embodiment of this paradox is the smart city, wherein puerile idea of a desirable urbanity
correlates with the transformation of life into a data stream.
How have the environmental powers of architectures and urbanisms mutated since these
disciplines started to unfold subjects in cybernetic environments? Who are the past,
present and future subjects of digital governmentality-through-environments? Who is
the smart, optimised, efficiently behaving and algorithmically desiring citizen? And, in
what sense, if any, can they be called a democratic citizen? Have social classes and political parties been replaced by de-territorialised swarms? Has government been replaced by
environmental modulation?

Authors are welcome to submit analytical papers, theoretically well-grounded case studies,
or architectural counter-projects for presentations while indicating their preference for
one of the above tracks. At the same time, we ask that their contributions consider specifically how natures and data are intertwined in architectural and urban politics today, how
the politics of environments is simultaneously ecological and cybernetic.
Please submit your proposal (max 400 words) and a short bio (max 50 words) to
architecturesnaturesdata@gmail.com by November 1, 2016.
For further information, please visit www.architecturesnaturesdata.com.