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Circular Prototypes for Urban Futures: The Fab City and Recursive Interventions within Infrastructures.
This presentation is based on a paper I co-authored with the Fab Lab activist Kazutoshi Tsuda. By taking up the Fab City Global Initiative that aims to make cities self-sufficient, we explore the role of the circular as figured in grassroots efforts to reconfigure urban infrastructures. Circularity serves as the central imaginary in these forms of activism for sustainability from permaculture to the maker movement. These movements commonly feature the practice of Do-It-Yourself “making” as a basis for realizing a circular society. This paper analyzes a key challenge within the Fab City movement by focusing on the recursive nature of grassroots redesign of infrastructures. While the Fab City aspires toward reconfiguring urban infrastructures by devising various prototypes, their activities inevitably draw on existing infrastructures, which they aim to replace in the first place. We examine this recursive trap and characterize the Fab City as a particular kind of inquiry of the condition of its own existence by means of making.
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Presented by Anthropology Department at The New School for Social Research.
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After working on the global knowledge network of hydrology and water management, Atsuro is currently working on Japanese sustainability movements and their efforts to remake infrastructures. His recent publications include: “Being Affected by Sinking Deltas: Changing Landscapes, Resilience, and Complex Adaptive Systems in the Scientific Story of the Anthropocene” (co-authored with Wakana Suzuki, Current Anthropology), The World Multiple: Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds (co-edited with Keiichi Omura, Grant Otsuki and Shiho Satsuka, Routledge), and Infrastructure and Social Complexity: A Companion (co-edited with Penny Hervey and Casper Bruun Jensen, Routledge).
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