‘Green infrastructures’ form a crucial part of Paris’ plan climat: ‘urban forests’ to fight the effects of heat islands, and commercial scale agriculture for future food security. What are the tensions between the performance or imposition of these ideas of sustainability through state-led green infrastructure, and the real ecological transitions they bring about? What kinds of society are imagined, imposed, or forgotten in the configuration of new infrastructures and the repurposing of old ones?
Anna-Louise Milne (ULIP) Andrew Bingham (Engineer) Anneleen Arnout Aude Vuillominet (UCL) Barbara Palacios Eamon Drumm (UNESCO) Eleonora Schiavi (ENSA-PV Fredrik Rönnback (ULIP) Hadley Beeken (ULIP) Leon Hughes (ULIP) Louis Lazaroo (ULIP) Nicole Edwards (ULIP) Pushpa Arabindoo (UCL) Ryan Montgomery (ULIP) Marco Veneri (Kingston University) Zane Datava
Credit: Aude Vuillominet
Credit: Aude Vuillominet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww3MUtil89c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jUOW8GbZdg
The presentations by Marco Veneri and Pushpa Arabindoo focused respectively on urban agriculture and roads as elements of urban infrastructure capable of metabolically reconfiguring the ecological conditions of cities. Marco Veneri’s presentation on urban farming in London and Madrid discussed the strategic aims of temporary urban farming projects in terms of their contribution to trajectories of urban change, but also the sometimes quite different aims of those running them, as well as the ways unexpected outcomes and varying ideas of temporality that emerge through their operation.
Before the walk I proposed to think about a set of language for reading green infrastructure, and in relation to specific sites in the walk, informing the mapping exercise proposed by Eleonora Schiavi. Participants collected sketches and objects in response, that were collated into a collective sensorial mapping of the route.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1idIjeFPbuBzrcBwJwxVMYJzpdt3dtGU&usp=sharing
Collective mapping of the walk by all participants, collated by Eleonore Schiavi