Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice

The term ‘sustainability’ has become an overused umbrella term that encompasses a range of climate actions and environmental infrastructure investments; however, there is still an urgent need for transformative reform work. Scholars of urban studies have made compelling cases for a more-than-human conceptualisation of urban and environmental planning and also share a common interest in translating theory into practical approaches and implications that recognise (i) our ecological entanglements with planetary systems and (ii) the urgent need for multispecies justice in the reconceptualisation of genuinely sustainable cities. More-than-human sensibility draws on a range of disciplines and encompasses conventional and non-conventional research methods and design approaches. In this article, we offer a horizon scan type of review of key posthuman and more-than-human literature sources at the intersection of urban studies and environmental humanities. The aim of this review is to (i) contribute to the emerging discourse that is starting to operationalise a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development, and; (ii) to articulate a nascent framework for more-than-human spatial planning policy and practice.

Sensibility First

In the practical realm just as in the theoretical realm, everything comes down to human sensibility as an equally empirical and non-empirical primitive starting point that constitutively motivates, intentionally pervades, and intentionally structures our innately-specified yet also “human, all-too-human” capacities for theoretical and practical rationality, all the way up. Strong Kantian non-conceptualism says that according to Kant, the faculty of human intuition or Anschauung, that is, human inner and outer sense perception, together with the faculty of imagination or Einbildungskraft, jointly constitute this sensible starting point for objective cognition and theoretical reason; and Kantian non-intellectualism says that according to Kant, human affect, desire, and moral emotion—in a word, the human heart—jointly constitute this sensible starting point for free agency and practical reason. Conjoined, they provide what I call the Sensibility First approach, which, in a nutshell, says that human rationality flows from the groundedness of our discursive, intellectual, and embodiment-neutral powers in our sensible, non-intellectual, and essentially embodied powers, without in any way reducing the former to the latter. If I’m correct about all this, then the result is a sharply non-classical and unorthodox, hence “shocking,” nevertheless fully unified and textually defensible approach to Kant’s proto-Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1768 to 1772), Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1781 to 1787) and post-Critical philosophy (i.e., from the late 1780s to the late 1790s) that encompasses his theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike.

Liberal Education

The sleepy liberal arts colleges that upperclassmen attended went through dramatic changes by the twenty-first century, both in the growth of numbers of students and in the focus of study: mainly technical, scientific, and commercial education. The liberal arts play a key role in Catholic education. The purposes of liberal education are discussed. One way to describe that purpose is not only to learn about history and literature but also, even more importantly, to learn from history and literature. In the Catholic intellectual tradition, moral formation, abandoned at most secular universities, remains important and strengthens virtuous habits, both intellectual and moral. Liberal education liberates the “fly in the bottle,” gives perspective through the study of history, and deepens human sensibility through literature and theological studies. In that tradition, the transcendent dimension expands the horizons of relevance and deepens sympathy for the human condition. In an age of social media, the relevance of liberal education becomes ever more obvious.

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment (both natural and cultural) are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behaviors.

Cabiria, opera d'arte autonoma

Cabiria is ‘an autonomous work of art’, between aesthetical and stylistic peculiarities. In order to legitimately recognise these specificities, we should not exalt the high level of the technical cleverness mixed with ‘tricks’ or mechanisms of technological artificiality. On the contrary, we should – first and foremost – be aware of the identity of the movie, expression of the figurative art which combines painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and cinematograph, constitutive nucleus of a poetics of the marvellous, created by d’Annunzio’s fervid fantasy and by the director Pastrone, invention – though in a real historical context – precise as regards the chronological limits, of forms, visible signs, allegories and symbols of the Jungian ‘collective subconscious’. Visions of a tangible reality, concrete, recovered by the truth, but raised to the realm of dream, in the oneiric atmosphere of the unreal, conquer the human sensibility. It is like the idea by de Chirico, who thinks the picture as a mental theatre, stage and ideal container of a moving drama that conveys the familiarity of the represented environment with figurative clarity. Thus, the work of the master-director-demiurge becomes an organic solution of all the arts between innovation and modernity.

Materiality and Sensibility: Phenomenological Studies of Brick As Architectural Material

An incessant challenge for the architects nowadays is how to design architectural projects that support the creation of meaningful experiences, benefitting from the interconnection between building materiality and human sensibility. The purpose of this study is to provide a phenomenological understanding of brick as an architectural material and how people perceive its architectural space and interpret its architectural meaning.Method of phenomenological analysis from Moustakas (1994) is adopted to guide the whole research procedures; using in-depth and multiple interviews with the users of three different buildings who shared experiences in inhibiting and interacting with the environment created with brick as an architectural material.

Development of a Process for Perceptual Index Establishment based on Axiomatic Design

With the increasingly intense competition in the market, more attention has been paid to customer’s perceptual requirements. Combining human sensibility and technology, Kansei Engineering plays a crucial role for industrial designers in making decisions at an earlier design stage in product development. However, sometimes it is challenging to define the customer requirements during the market research phase, especially for the perceptual requirements. Given this problem, this paper develops a process for establishing perceptual indexes based on the axiomatic design approach to improve design efficiency. To achieve this, an initial perceptual index is first built based on data previously collected from designers or design agencies. Then, the theory of axiomatic design is used to classify the schemes. The final perceptual index is filtered and built according to the frequency of occurrence.

The Person of Christ

Treatments of Christology begin with the exploration of the Person of Christ, with who he is. Prima facie, Christ is often seen as an offense to human sensibility. The deep offense is that Christ is both a specific human agent in history and the second Person of the Trinity. The first seven ecumenical councils tackle a network of issues related to this offense and stand by the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is fully human and fully divine. Given this conviction it is apt to speak of the virginal conception and to initiate a subtle historical-theological quest for the real Jesus of history and faith.