URBAN TALK
July 6 2021, 11:00 | Online Talk

Critical Care.
Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet

by Elke Krasny

The event will be held online via ZOOM under the following ZOOM-Link

Meeting-ID: 673 5379 7055
Kenncode: 655128

The Anthropocene-Capitalocene is straining the planet to its breaking point. The planet is exhausted, drained, depleted, damaged, broken. Therefore, we need new planetary imaginaries rooted in critical care in order to repair livability and to regenerate inhabitability.
Architecture and urbanism are at the heart of the modern project of capitalism. Modernist aspirations in architecture promised to build a better future. Today, we live in the ruins of this promise. Following Joan Tronto’s political notion of care as everything we do to maintain and repair ourselves as well as the environment, this lecture understands architectural care as central to repairing the future. Architectural and urban examples presented in the lecture provide evidence that through a perspective of care social and environmental justice can be understood, recognized, and practiced in their interdependence.

Bio
Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Krasny’s work focuses on questions of care at the present historical conjuncture with an interest in emancipatory and transformative practices in art, architecture, urbanism, transnational feminisms and politics of memory. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, together with Angelika Fitz, published by MIT Press, introduces a care perspective in architecture addressing the anthropocenic conditions of the global present. Her 2020 essay “Staying with the Crisis: Feminist Politics of Care for Living with an Infected Planet” was published in Escritura e Imagen.