Editorial
Philippe Chiambaretta
Since its inception,
Stream has been a tool for the exploration and the analysis of the major issues of our time, at the forefront of which is the environment, the future of our planet and our own, which are at the core of the idea of the Anthropocene. In
Stream 03 our analysis of the evolution of global urbanization during the twenty-first century had taken us further than the simple observation of our urban condition to the even more implacable fact of our entry into the era of mankind as a geophysical force. Despite the more formal debates, the awareness and understanding of both our responsibilities and the scope of the challenges we face has become generalized, inviting us to consider new ways of inhabiting the Earth. Throughout our research and exchanges, a picture of the ontological relationship between mankind and nature started to appear. Not a picture of the adjustments made, but one of a profound shift, the radical overthrow of the subject-object and society-nature dualisms that are at the root of Western modernism.
How can we grasp this complex world, this uncertain and hybrid condition? We had observed that for a generation of experimental artists and architects, the model of the living had become a source of inspiration and emulation, not through the classical notion of biomorphism, but through an analogy of its generative processes. In a quest to determine new ways of cohabiting on our planet—rather than trying to dominate it at all costs—the starting point for
Stream 04 is the idea that this paradigm of the living is the key to today's challenges, that understanding our paradoxical relation to this model will allow us to find lasting solutions.
By observing the living, we are not passive victims of the Anthropocene. This allows us to not be frozen in the face of a condition which, on the contrary, requires us to find the position to act beyond the modern dualisms by coming up with new, paradoxical, and sometimes antagonistic relationships with the living world. Taking the living into consideration, thinking and building with and for nature, these are our new frontiers. As human beings, we have gained in humility, we have no more privileges, and we fear the consequences of our actions, but the situation is such that it paradoxically forces us to examine ways in which we can intervene. But based on which representation of nature, according to which approach, methods, and interactions?
We must try to comprehend the way in which the idea of the living can grow beyond the simple metaphor and become a scientific reality that is both philosophically sustainable and a source of tangible solutions. Despite being directly concerned with these issues, architecture and urbanism—with the exception of their experimental fringes—do not have the proper intellectual and technical tools to grasp this anthropological revolution.
Stream 04 is therefore a report, an observation of how the knowledge of the living affects the urban fabric. Like its predecessors, this issue is a collection of prospecting texts that explore the many fields that deal with the living. The philosophers deal with the evolution of our relationship with nature, the biologists with the breakthroughs of our understanding of the living, the researchers with the impact of new technologies on the urban domain, the urban planners with the role of nature in the city, the architects around new shapes and sustainable processes, and the artists with their experiences of creation with the living.
Stream has invited them all to tackle this subject around three main themes: mankind's evolution in comparison to other living things and its relationship with biodiversity and other beings; the limits of the living, those that are being shaken up, hybridized by the development of digital technologies, nano-biotechnologies, and artificial intelligence; and the consequences on the urban landscape of the shift from a machine-oriented vision to one of organic and physiological analogies that reactivate its complex metabolic approaches.
What are the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the metaphor of the living? At the crossroads of knowledge and technology, theory and practice, what is being exchanged? What role does the digital world have to play in these new alliances? How do artists work with the living? Landscapers, architects, town-planners, all these designers of technologies, how do they take the measure of these scientific, environmental, and social mutations? What lessons can be learned from the processes of the living to foresee the city's growth and hybridization? How can we find new ways of grasping all artefacts to allow us to revisit the onto-geographical relationship of humanity with its territory?
The answers of the living to a disrupted and globalized world, at the border between new technology and a revolution in thinking, lay the groundwork for an era of responsibility and common good, an era of “working with” rather than “working against,” an era where piloting replaces domination. Mankind, in rethinking how it occupies and inhabits, establishes new partnerships, especially with the living, taking it is a model, a tool, an ally. Our future rests upon these modes of interaction based on a regard and an understanding of the living, but also upon researching new ways of influencing it, orienting it without confining it, giving it a lasting setting without dominating it, initiating new processes with it that are hybrid and evolving.
Philippe Chiambaretta
