Theme

THEME

CARING FOR INHABITED MILIEUS Towards new kinds of project that take care of inhabited milieus

SHIFT OF PARADIGM AND ATTITUDE: MAINTAIN/REPAIR/PERPETUATE
Climate emergency, overexploitation, pollution, inequality and iniquity – all these ills, upheavals and disorientations demand philosophies of “caring” that attend to the coexistence and interweaving of all the elements of the living world, and thus mandate a radical shift in paradigm. Joan Tronto, one of the chief political theorists of the “ethic of care”, defines caring as “the characteristic activity of the human species which includes all that we do in order to maintain, perpetuate and repair our world so that we can live there as well as possible.” Sensitivity, responsibility and creativity are all elements of caring for others.

THE PROJECT AS A WAY TO CARE FOR INHABITED MILIEUS
New ways of thinking, feeling and doing call for variants of transformation for the purpose of maintaining, repairing and perpetuating. They are applicable to a multitude of always specific situations and scenarios. These situated possibilities coalesce and amplify decisive lines of force:
– Making living places and milieus habitable;
– Linking fragmented territories and spaces;
– Highlighting other types of communal space: public, shared and common;
– Inventing dynamics of proximity by means of interwoven scales and creative economies;
– Adapting to climate change

The new kinds of projects, with their focus on caring for inhabited milieus, bring into play new conceptions and new tools that are both more sensitive and more ethical. In terms of project scales, “caring” combines territorial reflection on major ecological issues with the architectural and landscape scales of proximity spaces : thinking territories and designing architecture / landscape.