About the course
The Studio 2: Urban Futures course was instructed in 2020 by Maros Krivy, Kaija-Luisa Kurik, and Sean Tyler for the urban studies master's program at EKA. The course was segmented into three main parts: a reading workshop, a design competition, and the final projects (presented through this webzine publication).
To begin the course, the eight students visited Käsmu for a three-day reading workshop. The students read and analyzed a collection of texts from the past two decades evaluating urban political ecology (Swyngedouw 2015), deep time (Gandy 2018), restoration and preservation (Katz 2005), ecofeminism (Gaard 2015), wilderness and wildness (Malm 2018), and alternative spaces (Nicolosi 2020). Together, the texts provided a foundation of the contemporary discourse on the natural environment as a production and reproduction of capitalist urbanization.
With this body of work added to their academic repertoires, the students reassembled back in Tallinn where the Eesti Loodusmuuseum had recently announced a design competition for an environmental installation. The students developed proposals in groups and entered the competition. While the museum decided not to carry out a winning design, three awards were granted to design proposals, one of which belonged to three students in the studio course.
As the museum design proposal awards were announced, the global covid-19 pandemic forced the studio to transition to an online format. From March to May, the students commenced research work on new, individual projects related to the question of how we value nature. To initiate this turn from group competition proposals to individual work, the students read a collection of work about the variety of geographic scales such as the practice of gardening (Cupers 2020), the biopolitics of scale (Stanek 2013), geographies of scale (Swyngedouw 2004), and turfgrass monocultures (Robbins and Sharp 2006).
The course culminated in an online exhibition of the students' final research projects, which are hosted on this website in the multimedia formats ranging from videos and mappings to collages and photography collections, each of which approach the studio's overarching question of the valuing (and re-valuing) of nature at unique scales.
References
Cupers, Kenny. 2019. “Gardening as geopolitics.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, 14:3
Gaard, Greta. 2015. "Ecofeminism and Climate Change." Women's International Forum 49: 20–33.
Gandy, Matthew. 2018. "Cities in Deep Time." City 22 1: 96–106
Katz, Cindi. 2005 [1998]. “Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the ‘Preservation’ of Nature” in Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium edited by Braun, B. and N. Castree, 45–62. London: Routledge.
Nicolosi, Emily. 2020. "Counterspaces Against the Odds? The Production and Emancipatory Potential of Alternative Spaces." Geoforum 108: 59–69.
Malm, Andreas. 2018. “In Wildness is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature.” Historical Materialism, 1–35 Leiden: Brill
Robbins, Paul and Sharp, Julie. 2006. "Turfgrass Subjects: The Political Economy of Urban Monoculture" in The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, edited by Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw. London and New York: Routledge
Stanek, Lukasz. 2013. “Biopolitics of Scale: Architecture, Urbanism, the Welfare State, and After.” in The Politics of Life: Michael Foucault and the Biopolitics of Modernity edited by S.O Wallenstein and J. Nilsson. Stockholm: lapsis.
Syngedouw, Erik. 2004. “Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place, and the Politics of Scale” in Scale and Geographic Inquiry, edited by E. Sheppard and R. McMaster. (Blackwell Publishing).
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. “Urbanization and Environmental Futures. Politicizing Urban Political Ecologies” in Handbook of Political Ecology edited by T. Perrault, G. Bridge, and J. McCarty, 609–619. London: Routledge