The Environment Forum with Emanuele Coccia | Metropolitan Nature: How Different Species Build Cities

THE ENVIRONMENT FORUM
SPEAKER: Emanuele Coccia
Moderator: Robin Kelsey

About the Event

Human beings were able to develop a stable relationship with the land and abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle only when some communities decided to faithfully and stably tie their existence to a relatively small number of trees and shrubs that could provide them with food and shelter. This is how the first city was born: it was this strange act of spatial fidelity to plant life that gave rise to the urban environment. That means that the relationship between different species is not tangentially urban. It is the original urban fact. If this is true, then what we call the countryside is a form of urbanism in which, in addition to the number of people and stones, we also have to conceive how many plants should exist, which ones, how fast they should grow, and so on. Consequently, any form of opposition between city and countryside (or the wilderness") is illusory. The solution to climate change lies not in replacing cities with the countryside or “wilderness,” but in designing cities more radically: extending the culture of urban congestion to a culture of species congestion and biodiversity density. How can we rethink the technological urban model to build planetary interspecies density?

About the Speaker

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).

Robin Kelsey joined the Harvard faculty in 2001 and has been Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography since 2009. From 2016 to 2024, he served as Dean of Arts & Humanities, and prior to that he served as Chair of the Department of History of Art & Architecture.

About the Series

The Environment Forum is dedicated to exploring new work in the arts and humanities that reframes or reimagines the relationship of humanity to the rest of nature. The Environment Forum at the Mahindra Center is convened by Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

See also: Environment Forum, Public