URBAN NATURE - Episode 1: Emanuele Coccia and Gabriel Kozlowski

In this episode of URBAN NATURE, Emanuele Coccia and Gabriel Kozlowski talk about the relationship of ecology with economy and politics, both in history and in the present. Coccia argues that we call natural environment is a form of artifact, artificially produced by living beings, and that the solution to our future is a spatial one, as a form of new modes of cohabitation between species.

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Welcome to the first episode of URBAN NATURE, hosted by Gabriel Kozlowski, Brazilian architect and curator working on urbanization from the perspective of political ecology. The Series presents guests from a diverse set of disciplines—including Anthropology, Biology, Philosophy, Political Science, Political Theory, Geography, Architecture, the Arts, among others—that have been reflecting on the relationship between humans and nature.

The first guest to inaugurate the series is Emanuele Coccia, a philosopher with interest spanning from ecology to arts and fashion. Coccia has a background in agricultural sciences. When he first got exposed to botany, chemistry and biology, the influence of which becomes evident in some of his philosophical works is he's the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018) and Metamorphosis (2021). He is currently working on a book on the history of ecology.

"We forget that ecology and economy are twin sisters. In the sense that they are sciences that share the same name—remember: ecology starts as "economy of nature"—, they share the same concepts, the same epistemological frameworks, and the same metaphors. (…) for instance, the metaphor of invisible hand that produces an order, a balance, was present from the start in both ecology and economy." -Emanuele Coccia

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Episode recorded on Zoom in March 2022. 

Produced by ISTANBUL'74.