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Is "the Anthropocene" a genuinely useful concept for illuminating contemporary culture and our environmental predicament?

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#1

If so, what kind of conceptual avenues does it open up?

#2

it is sure an useful concept especially for architecture and urban fields. it enlarges the layers of the form of architecture and urban concept.it also removes the obstacles of post-structural theory that is based on the criticism of dualistic structures embodied within the criticism of modernity. so, in one hand Anthropocene is also a method beside a concept in which an analyze of representation is not enough to understand subject and objects.

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#4

I don’t think so. It seems to me that the anthropocene concept is essentially climate scientists making a political statement, combined with the hangover of a few centuries of humanism. I think it’s exciting for social scientists, academics in the humanities, artists, etc because tactically, it provides a renewed importance for social and cultural research which has taken a back seat to the STEM fields.

If anything, what is most revolutionary is the way the anthropocene concept has shown how arbitrary and bureaucratic much of the scientific classifications we take for granted are (species distinctions, boundaries between life and death, geologic cycles, etc).

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#6

yes.but I claimed in urban and architectural context. is useful.
anthropocene do not only cover only the scietific realm of climate scientists although it is presented like that by art institutions.

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#7

What do you think the anthropocene concept adds to the urban and architectural context that isn’t encompassed within the idea of the novel ecosystem, or post-equilibrium ecology more broadly? It seems to me that a nature/culture binary had been outmoded long before Crutzen et al. started making political maneuvers vis-a-vis climate change, no?

#8

The living moment of spatial experience is projecting the past and future utopias as well as dystopias.
Spending working times of writing and reading in a studio this winter that is just near to Arata Isozaki’s building dated 1974, Public Library (Kitakyushu) awaken my inevitable interest to dwell deeper in the current and future heritage of Metabolism and other utopian ideas in architecture in our current time of anthropocene.