The architecture of the extended mind: towards a critical urban ecology

Goodbun, J. 2011. The architecture of the extended mind: towards a critical urban ecology. PhD thesis University of Westminster School of Architecture and the Built Environment https://doi.org/10.34737/8zy32

TitleThe architecture of the extended mind: towards a critical urban ecology
TypePhD thesis
AuthorsGoodbun, J.
Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the difficulties that the discipline of architecture has encountered in thinking about and articulating ecological questions in recent years. I argue that it is precisely because the problems posed by the environmental question have so many personal, political and social dimensions, and are so radically trans-disciplinary, that architectural discourse and its metropolitan mediations is well positioned to reflect upon, articulate and stage as a new modern project, this multi-disciplinary and socio-ecological complexity.
The content of this thesis therefore crosses a number of different fields within the arts and sciences. I scrutinise a series of contemporary and historical moments in the development of systems thinking – or what Alfred North Whitehead described as “the philosophy of organism” – with particular reference to a socio-political re-conception of architecture, urbanism and the wider environment today. I describe a network of relationships which traces the surprisingly dynamic histories of a series of concepts – including nature, matter, organism, ecology, network, mind, emergence, system and dialectics – as they unfold across a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, cybernetics, Marxist theory, ecology and the cognitive sciences.
Ultimately, this thesis suggests that critical urban ecology – the architectural investigation of ecological aesthetics and urban political ecology – will be a key field of both theoretical investigation and practical design activism in the coming years, as the deep contradictions of capitalism unfold at an ever more intensified global scale.

Year2011
File
PublisherUniversity of Westminster
Publication dates
Published2011
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.34737/8zy32

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Goodbun, J. 2003. Public/private pedestrianship: towards a critical experientialism of the inhabitable image. in: Jaschke, K. and Otsch, S. (ed.) Stripping Las Vegas: a contextual review of casino resort architecture Weimar, Germany Bauhaus University Weimar Press. pp. 151-168

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S. Greer
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Introduction
Cunningham, D.I., Goodbun, J. and Jaschke, K. 2001. Introduction. Journal of Architecture. 6 (2), pp. 107-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360122179

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