Terraforming for urbanists ursula heise

#research/newmaterialism #research/more-than-human #research/urbanism

[[heise-terraformingforurbanists2016.pdf@#heise-terraformingforurbanists2016.pdf]]

heise-terraformingforurbanists2016.pdf

Anthropocene

“Considering these and many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch. The impacts of current human activities will continue over long periods,” they summarized (17).

Seen from this perspective, the Anthropocene is a sci-fi trope that calls on us to see the Earth as an alien planet—terraformed by beginners who did not quite know what they were doing but who might be trained to do better in the future.

Terraforming is political

2312 shows how humans have created/designed with their landscape (e.g. Mercury) incorporating continuous change/movement. They later return to Earth and find that all land is contested.

Is Ursula Heise suggesting that we need a reality check in light of unstoppable, increasing urbanisation to the point that we reconsider our role in relation to designing urban green space. That we can consider more utopian idea (e.g. 2312) about human intervention in a positive way?

terraforming decisions that are easy in environments not naturally hospitable to human life turn out to be very difficult on Earth, where every acre of land is contested territory in terms of ownership rights, historical memories, cultural traditions, and current uses.

Contested spaces.

Novel ecosystems

With increasing urbanisation conservationists, amongst others, pay more attention to urban green spaces

“gray spaces,” large numbers of empty lots that often spontaneously turn into habitat for plants and animals.

Gray spaces are similar to ruderals or probably contain them.

Beyond that, urban ecosystems are also known to have ecological properties of their own: they generate their own temperature environments and sustain particular mixes of native and nonnative biodiversity.

The notion of “novel ecosystems” proposed by Australian ecologist Richard J. Hobbs, which refers to ecosystems that were altered by humans but now sustain themselves, might be adjusted also to include the urban ecosystems that are sustained through continuous human intervention (Hobbs, Higgs, and Hall).