Ecosemiotics of the City. Designing the Post-Anthropocene
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2612-0496/14623Keywords:
Anthropocene, Ecosemiotics, Holobiont, Nature/Culture, PosthumanAbstract
The city was thought as the place of culture, a boundary of separation from the wilderness. Recently, ecosemiotics has shown that every kind of space is a habitat for those who survive in it. Thanks to a semiotic reading of the city, especially the urban park, we will try to deconstruct the opposition between nature and culture. Moving beyond this dualism it means to intersect every form of life that make up the city. This essay will attempt to rethink our time in a multi-species project aimed at the post-Anthropocene. Along this path we will try to imagine a posthuman that can survive the catastrophe. In the proposal we will see what can be done to live together with non-humans. For this reason we must think a new space for a peacefully coexistence. The ultimate question is: is it possible project the city by the relation between human and non-human? In the conclusion we will ask: is it possible to live as a holobiont?
References
Balding, Mung and Williams, Kathryn. “Plant Blindness and the Implications for Plant Conservation”. Conservation Biology, 30 (6) (2016): 1192-1199. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12738
Barbieri, Marcello. “A Short History of Biosemiotics”. Biosemiotics, 2 (2009): 221-245. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-009-9042-8
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Baridotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso, 2018.
Cimatti, Felice. “Quando entra in scena l’animale. Perché l’animalità, e perché proprio ora?”. Fata Morgana, 14 (2011): 123-140.
Ciuffi, Valentina. “Terrains vagues: il rovescio dei vuoti urbani”, in Linguaggi della città. Senso e metropoli II: modelli e proposte d’analisi, edited by Marrone Gianfranco and Pezzini Isabella. Milano: Meltemi, 2008.
Clément, Gilles. Manifeste du Tier paysage. Paris: Sujet/Objet, 2004.
Coccia, Emanuele. Metamorfosi. Siamo un’unica, sola vita. Torino: Einaudi, 2022.
DeGiuli, Matteo and Porcelluzzi, Nicolò. Medusa. Storie dalla fine del mondo (per come lo conosciamo). Roma: Nero, 2021.
Farina, Almo. Il paesaggio cognitivo. Una nuova entità ecologica. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2006.
———. Ecosemiotic Landscape: A Novel Perspective for the Toolbox of Environmental Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Farina, Almo and Belgrano, Andrea. “The Eco-Field: A New Paradigm for Landscape Ecology”. Ecological Restoration, 19 (2004): 107-110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-1703.2003.00613.x
———. “The Eco-Field Hypothesis: Toward a Cognitive Landscape”. Landscape Ecology, 21 (2006): 5-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-005-7755-x
Favareau, Donald. Essential Reading in Biosemiotics. Cham: Springer, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1
Ferrando, Francesca. Philosophical Posthumanism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350059511
Flyn, Cal. Island of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. New York: Viking, 2021.
Foucault, Michel. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France. 1984. Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
Geddes, Patrick. Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. New York: Harper & Row, 1915.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q
———. Le promesse dei mostri. Una politica rigeneratrice per l’alterità inappropriata. Roma: Derive Approdi, 2019.
Ingold, Tim. What is an Animal? London: Routledge, 1998.
Krampen, Martin. Meaning in the Urban Environment. London: Routledge, 1979.
Kull, Kalevi. “Semiotic Ecology: Different Natures in the Semiosphere”. Sign Systems Studies, 26 (1998): 344-371. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.1998.26.15
———. “On the History of Bio with Semio: F. S. Rothschild and the Biosemiotics Rules”. Sign System Studies, 27 (1999): 128-138. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.1999.27.06
Kull, Kalevi, Emmeche, Claus and Favareau, Donald. “A Biosemiotic Question”. Biosemiotics, 1 (2008): 41-55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-008-9008-2
Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil. Material Ecocriticsm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Latour, Bruno. “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts”, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
———. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2015.
———. After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021.
LeCain, Timothy. “Against the Anthropocene. A Neo-Materialist Perspective”. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3 (2015): 1-28. https://doi.org/10.18352/22130624-00301001
Lotman, Juri. Culture and Explosion. Berlin: De Gruyter Mounton, 2009.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1970.
Mancuso, Stefano. La pianta del mondo. Milano: Laterza, 2020.
Maran, Timo. “Deep Ecosemitoics: Forest as a Semiotic Model”. Semiotic Inquiry, 38/39 (2019): 287-303. https://doi.org/10.7202/1076237ar
———. Ecosemiotics. The Study of Sign in Changing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
———. “The Ecosemiosphere is a Grounded Semiosphere. A Lotmanian Conceptualization of Cultural-Ecological Systems”. Biosemiotics, 14 (2021): 519-530. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09428-w
Maran, Timo and Kull, Kalevi. “Ecosemiotics: Main Principles and Currents Developments”. Geografiksa Annaler: Serie B, Human Geography, 96 (2014): 41-50. https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12035
Marchesini, Roberto, “Ospite”, in A come animale. Voci per un bestiario dei sentimenti, edited by Leonardo Caffo and Felice Cimatti. Milano: Bompiani, 2015.
Margulis, Lynn and René, Fester. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Marrone, Gianfranco. Addio alla natura. Torino: Einaudi, 2011.
Mazzucchelli, Francesco. Urbicidio. Il senso dei luoghi tra distruzioni e ricostruzioni nella ex Jugoslavia. Bologna: BUP, 2010.
Morton, Timothy. Humankind. Solidariety with Nonhuman People. London: Verso, 2022.
Oreggioni, Matteo. Filosofia tra i ghiacci. Viaggio verso la fine di un mondo. Milano: Mimesis, 2021.
Sebeok, Thomas. “Communication in Animals and Men”. Language, 39 (1963): 448-466. https://doi.org/10.2307/411126
Schilthuizen, Menno. Darwin Comes to Town. How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. New York: MacMillan, 2018.
Tsing, Anna; Heather, Anne; Elaine, Gan; Nils, Bubandt (eds.). Arts of Living on a Damage Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
von Uexküll, Jacob. Umwetl und Innerwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Springer, 1921. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-24819-5
———. “The Theory of Meaning”. Semiotica, 42 (1982): 1-87. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1982.42.1.25
Wandersee, James and Schussler, Elisabeth. “Preventing Plant Blindness”. The American Biology Teacher, 61 (1999): 82-86. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450624
Zengiaro, Nicola. “Eco-Realism at the Time of Catastrophe: Imagining Multi-species Points of View to Photograph the History of the World”. International Journal of Anthropology, 35 (2020): 23-35.
———. “From Biosemiotics to Physiosemiotics. Towards a Speculative Semiotics of the Inorganic World”. Linguistic Frontiers, 1 (2022).
———. “The Time of Materials: Reading the Anthropocene from Stones”. Versus, 134 (2022a).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Nicola Zengiaro
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
