Eager to share more generously the fruits of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, a digital research and innovation magazine that explores the making of the metabolic city.
To understand the living, you need to understand the invisible. This is what Véronique Mure, a botanist specializing in Mediterranean landscapes, is convinced of. By focusing on the relationship that people have with plants, she raises awareness on the importance of soil and roots and invites us to take care of them, like gardeners.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
Cities, like asphalt jungles, are dense inhabited spaces. Yet this density also helps limiting urban sprawl. Jeffrey Raven is a professor at the New York Institute of Technology and an architect specializing in resilient urban design. He advocates for the positive aspects of urbanization and seeks to resolve urban heat island effects by exploring the form, function, materiality and vegetation of the urban fabric.
“ Biomimicry applied to the neighbourhood means taking inspiration from the way an ecosystem functions. ”
“ Biomimicry applied to the neighbourhood means taking inspiration from the way an ecosystem functions. ”
Biomimicry consists in reproducing not the forms but the functions of nature. On a neighborhood’s scale, it involves drawing inspiration from an ecosystem’s dynamics, which Eduardo Blanco, environmental engineer, calls “regenerative urban projects.” But how can we evaluate the effectiveness of this design method and how can we measure its success over time? READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Diego Landivar is a lecturer and researcher in economics and the founder of the Origens Media Lab, a “third place” research lab developed to address critical situations. More flexible and responsive than conventional research laboratories, Origens focuses on the far-reaching transformations brought about by the environmental crisis and supports civil society in its struggles.
The notion of urban metabolism can be viewed in several ways. From a quantitative perspective, by considering flows; from a political ecology perspective, by considering social factors; and from an urban design perspective, by considering the sum of intertwined environmental and social ecosystems beyond administrative borders. In each of these approaches, urban technologies and the availability of data provide exciting prospects. To read the extended version : Do cities metabolize?
The star of the stage of the recently concluded Design Week in Paris, plastic seems to have moved beyond the disdain it had been experiencing lately. Thanks to recycling, its environmental footprint is now better controlled, which has turned into a real selling point. But beyond the material itself, it is an entire production logic that should be “recycled” to extricate ourselves from the dogma of newness and disposability.
Michel Blazy is a tamer artist, whose work results from collaborations with snails, mosquitoes, molds or bacteria. Exhibited at the Portique (Centre d’art contemporain du Havre) until December 18, he questions, through his living works, the temporality of art and the borders between the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial. Extract of the article Encouraging the matter published in STREAM 04 : The paradoxes of the living
Virginie Maris is an environmental philosopher. In Nature à vendre – les limites des services écosystémiques (Nature for Sale – The Limits of Ecosystem Services), she questions the relevance of monetary valuation of services rendered by nature. You would never calculate how much your relationship brings you, so why do it with nature? Extract from the article Considering Separation Beyond Dualism, published in Stream 05: New Intelligences
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!