INVITE: On Critical Care for a Broken Planet, Lecture by Elke Krasny on 26th June

Professor Elke Krasny will be coming to the University of Brighton on 26th June to give a lecture titled  On Critical Care for a Broken Planet –Architecture and Urbanism beyond the Capitalocene, an event sponsored by the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics.

In medical terms, critical care, also known as intensive care, is a specialized branch of medicine dedicated to diagnosing and treating life-threatening conditions. This term is used here to address the planet’s life-threatening condition. The planet has made headlines throughout the twenty-first century. And the news is not good. The diagnosis is bleak. The condition is critical. We have come to understand that the planet is much, much worse than merely weakened. The planet we live on and we live with is exhausted, drained, depleted, damaged, broken. In short, the planet is urgently in need of critical care to repair livability and its continued existence in the future. Modernist aspirations in architecture were based on the promise of building a better future. Today, we live in the ruins of this promise. This lecture asks in what ways architecture and urbanism can contribute to such critical care taking acknowledging that there is no promise of a better future, but much rather a process of permanent repair.

Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen worked with Professor Krasny on her exhibition Hands-on Urbanism 1850–2012: The Right to Green for the Architekturzentrum Wien and later shown at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Viljoen and Bohn contributed material from their research work on urban agriculture in Cuba.

This is a public lecture. Please do feel welcome! Lecture details: Wednesday 26th June 2019, 1pm, Grand Parade, M2 lecture theatre.

For further information on the lecture see the University of Brighton’s aia blog.

For information on Elke Krasny’s work see here.

Image: Bohn&Viljoen’s Cuba exhibit at Hands On Urbanism (source: Elke Krasny 2013)