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Maria Kaika: Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future
Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future
(p. 251 – 262)

Maria Kaika

Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future

PDF, 12 pages

  • contemporary art
  • ecology
  • global ecology
  • art theory

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English

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English

Maria Kaika

holds a PhD in Urban Geography from Oxford University, and an MA in Architecture and Planning from the National Technical University of Athens. She is the Chair in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning, at the University of Amsterdam and is also Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, Honorary Fellow of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, and co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In 2012 the architect and geographer was endowed with the Professorship of the City of Vienna. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Paris Est (LATTS), KU Leuven, University of London and TU Vienna. The focus of her research lies on urban political ecology, urban radical imaginaries, cities and crisis, and land financialization. Her work has been awarded funding from national and international research councils and organisations (including the British Academy, the EU Framework Research Programme and the Marie Curie programme). Kaika is Principle Investigator for the European Network for Political Ecology ENTITLE. Amongst her academic publications are City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (Routledge, New York 2005) and, as co-editor with Nik Heynen and Erik Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Metabolism of Urban Environments (Routledge, London 2006).
Other texts by Maria Kaika for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Maria Muhle (ed.), ...: Hybrid Ecologies

The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In its present reformulation it refers to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, i.e. to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. The book Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time raises questions not least concerning its genealogy. The interdisciplinary contributions seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular. The present publication is the result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

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