Jane Jacobs and Sustainable Practices

2020

International Journal of Art and Design Education, 2016

Recent studies of sustainability draw attention to the impact art and culture have on communities. The Earth Charter, which originated in 1968, fostered the idea of ‘a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace’. This article supports the idea that art can make a difference to society and examines four case studies which explore the infra-ordinary within the immensity of social, political, historical and physical non-art places. The stance adopted is that of an artist, anthropologist and storyteller casting light onto a cultural landscape that is so ordinary as to be not noticed at all. Whilst the methodology is slow and often undramatic, this meticulous approach is essential in that it allows the artist to develop a respect for both people and place or, as explained by Kuspit : ‘to recover a sense of human purpose in art making, engaging with the realities of life as it is actually lived’. Whereas All i...

Cultivating permaCultural resilience (pCr): The permaCultural dérive 1 as an Itinerant's approach to a techne of becoming. This chapter is presented as the transcript of an imagined interview between an artist A.Mckeown and Art Services Unincorporated (ASU). ASU is a device, used like a character to represent the ideas and contributions from the many people encountered during the process of Cultivating permaCultural resilience (pCr) - a research project that sought to develop a systemic approach to Creative Placemaking (Landesman, 2009). Creative Placemaking is the latest effort to embed an arts-led process of engagement into community regeneration. As an imagined conversation the transcript acts as the documentation of an approach to develop a critical praxis for process-driven Creative Placemaking. This is reflected in its, at times, meandering form, which is how the process can be - it is not ordered or sequential, but more like a journey - it can be unruly and chaotic. As the documentation of a nonlinear process, the text may seem unclear or leave questions unanswered or answered later in the text than expected. Through the creation of ASU’s ‘temporary commons’, liminoid spaces are created to reveal, share, remix and disseminate multiple intimacies; the interrelated knowledge, both physical and social of ourselves, others and a situation. Liminoid spaces: Secular threshold spaces, an in between facilitating movement from one form to another e.g. from potentiality to actuality . ASU informs and encourages a co-produced process of Creative Placemaking to develop and present multiple narratives of place and encourage self-organisation in pursuit of greater resilience. Initiated as an analogue process, the interview re-presents the exploration of an approach to an arts-led, place-based engagement that integrates permaculture design principles into a situated arts practice. Piloted in London, New Mexico and Dublin, and drawing on open source culture, a situated, networked place-based co-production was developed. This is offered as an initial step towards a situated ‘techne’ of becoming where the craft of Creative Placemaking is applied to actualise latent potential. Becoming: To become more and more of what one is or capable of through the dissolution of normative values or understanding of one’s self and context. Techne, in this instance, is understood as the human ability to make and perform place, collaboratively and is discussed further in the text. The conversation moves towards outlining the potential of a digital tool that would enable a feedback loop that goes from analogue to digital, and back to analogue again. A process of gathering, synthesising and reflecting on a context’s ‘deep data’ (important or meaningful information) rather than ‘big data’ (lots of information) to develop a way for a context to see or re-imagine itself and actualise latent potential, a place-based digital facilitation of sharing the techne of becoming.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020

Studies in Art Education, 2012

In this article, the philosophical theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are juxtaposed with the research and practice of environmental artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison in order to explore and examine correspondences between their respective ways of thinking and performing sustainability. The complex and contradictory alliances and movements of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic assemblage, body without organs, and schizo-analysis are compared with the dynamic plurality of conversational drift, an altruistic process of environmental discourse that the Harrisons’ perform in and through their work in collaboration with leading experts in the sciences, ecology, the arts, public policy, and their most important interlocutor, the earth and its biologically diverse characteristics.

How might we begin to explore the concept of the " sustainable city " in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable. INTRODUCTION We need, in short, to examine the way in which new materialities influence the cultural constructions we place on the environment (Redclift 2005:225).

Art, EcoJustice, and Education. Intersecting theories and practices., 2019

This book introduces the importance of contemporary art forms to realizing the primary objectives of EcoJustice Education, a set of theories and pedagogical practices that begin from the fundamental acknowledgement that humans are utterly dependent upon a complex and diverse ecological system (Bowers, 2001; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015). Everything that we do, make, use, or rely upon ultimately comes from the natural world of which we are a part. From this vital recognition, we also understand that damages to the ecological system are damages to ourselves. Environmental and social impoverishment can be traced to the same deeply embedded cultural ways of thinking and being that our industrialized systems use and are created from. The very symbolic systems that we come to take for granted as given or inevitable produce the structures—material and ideological—that must be exposed to begin the process of needed change to current policies and relationships causing harm. Art can be a crucial practice in this work.

A host of recent artworks and exhibitions have confronted real-world ecological issues while at the same time seeking to advance ecological discourse itself. Such endeavors often emphasize the social, political, and economic dimensions of seemingly “scientific” matters, thereby calling for more critical forms of environmental thinking and action. This essay focuses on artist-generated research platforms, wherein self-organized groups probe complex, cross-disciplinary ecological subjects through the development of structures for sustained investigation, exchange and production—not only addressing (political) ecological matters, but also forging “ecological” modes of art making.

Leonardo, 2012

At a time when the world is beset by ecological crises, ecological art offers inspiration, insight and innovation. This essay provides an overview of the artistic and scientific roots of the practice and illustrates the significant role that ecoart can play in the formation, development and promulgation of a culture of sustainability

2009

Jacobs argues that economies follow the same rules as ecological systems. They behave in the same way as systems in nature: as dynamic systems of interdependency. The core of Jacobs' argument is energy, whether it is manifest in ecological systems or in economic systems. Our contention is that Jacobs' argument applies to cultural systems (and we take it that the arts, both practice and research, are aspects of cultural systems). In this paper we are seeking to revisit Jacob's framework and think about the extent to which her observations might also form a methodology. Our hunch is that Jacobs' careful unpacking of ecology as a construct might be useful for artists and researchers to grasping the relationship between method, artistic creativity and art research.