Un/Building the Future: The Country and The City in the Anthropocene, University of Warwick, UK, June 14–16, 2023

Science fiction (SF) frequently invites us to step into realms other than our own and observe what happens within these new conditions. Philip K. Dick defines the genre as one that builds on the possibilities opened by “conceptual dislocation,” or degrees of estrangement from one’s familiar experience(s).1 Contemporary post-anthropocentric inquiries from across the humanities and social sciences often combine science-fictional thought with practices of exposure and regrounding within unfamiliar, unwelcoming, or changing natural landscapes. Such imaginative and cross-disciplinary modes and instances of conceptual and physical displacement were at the core of the Un/Building the Future: The Country and the City in the Anthropocene. Held at the University of Warwick in June 2023, Un/Building the Future aimed to trouble and reform the dichotomy between urbanity and rurality, particularly within the present context of accelerating ecological decay. Furthermore, the conference muddled distinctions across academic fields, instead favoring interdisciplinary cross-pollination, or a commoning of knowledge, across a wide variety of sectors. These included architecture, such as in the panel “Climate Change and the City,” chaired by Jing Zhao (University of West England), which engaged with prospects of rethinking lived spaces in light of environmental challenges; law, as discussed by Alessia Vacca (University of Lincoln) in relation to EU regulations on sustainability; farming and agriculture, as covered during a panel of the same name, which included experts from China (Chen Zhou, University of Amsterdam), Luxembourg (Ivonne Weichold, University of Luxembourg), and the UK (Rob Booth, University of Birmingham); and literature, through fruitful discussions on themes that included water, islands, forests, minerals, solarpunk fiction, and more.The aims of Un/Building the Future were closely aligned with its methodology. Each day, participants were invited to (re)think spaces and their occupants by stepping outside the university and taking collectively to alternative sites of critical engagement. On day one, participants took part in a walking tour from Coventry Cathedral (see Figure 1, previous page), led by scholar and poet Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths University). The Cathedral, destroyed during World War II and subsequently rebuilt, merges Gothic and postwar architectural and artistic ideas, representing the prospect of reconciliation through and within ruination. The tension between wrecking and rebuilding proved central to several discussions carried out during the conference such as, during the panel “Junk and Salvage,” where Mateusz Borowski (Jagiellonian University), Megen de Bruin-Molé (University of Southampton), Ana Tejero Marín (University of Salamanca), and Louise Jammet (University of Bordeaux) explored speculative and tangible examples that captured the prospects and challenges of dwelling among capitalist ruins, or salvaging spaces that appeared to exist somewhere beyond hope.While at the Cathedral, participants were offered tea produced from its gardens and were invited to think about the material implication of human bodies in processes of hybridization between urbanity and rurality. Throughout the conference, acts of drinking, eating, and other forms of material engagement reconnected the participants’ bodies to the sites and timelines of changing ecosystems. Each of the conference lunches contained different types of haricot beans (Godiva, Capulet, and Olivia), bred by Eric Holub from Warwick’s Crop Centre.2 The daily recipes made using the Crop Centre’s beans embodied the precarious dichotomy between the city and the country, providing hybridization across human/urban and nonhuman/natural domains. This theme was echoed by Chen Zhou (University of Amsterdam) during her talk, which reflected on how ideas of rural authenticity are imagined and enacted around the Beijing Farmers’ Market under the current state of ecological crisis. Zhou offered participants a tea, brewed in the conference hall, containing produce, such as rose buds, originating from the Beijing’s Farmers’ Market as an embodied experience of her topic.The first keynote, delivered by Tim Waterman (University College London), similarly reflected on the degrees of separation, exchange, and co-constitution between the country and the city, as well as human and nonhuman bodies. In his talk, Waterman encouraged us to rethink our terminology Land/Scape Citizen/ship and friendship/comradeship, viewing the landscape as a landship where there is a reciprocal relationship between place and space. Dynamic exchanges between urbanity and rurality sat at the core of Waterman’s talk. He reminded the audience that the landscapes of capitalism are sites of never-ending labor and practices that, though sometimes unseen, bear strong ties to ecocide, genocide, as well as varied forms of structural oppression. Waterman stressed that the rural tends to spill or find its way into the urban, such as through city parks and green spaces. Here, the interplay between the laws of urbanity and the disruptive presence of nature leads to strangely regulated sites, which complicate the possibility of enforcing neat separations. Waterman concluded by stressing the centrality of academic efforts and discourses to critical processes of rethinking and reinvention. Building on Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible (1986), he invited participants to become drivers of explosive change, which begins within but ripples out of the confines of academia, calling for further sites of generative meddling and exchange.That afternoon, participants were given a chance to follow Waterman’s invitation to momentarily step outside of the enclosed spaces of academia to enter, in this case, into the unfamiliar realm of the swamp (see Figure 2 below). The immersive “Welcome to the Swamp” workshop took participants on a journey to Tocil Woods, a nature reserve on campus. This was to be a transitional utopian space led by Kirsty Lumm (Goldsmiths University) and Heather McKnight (Magnetic Ideals Collective). Participants were led through the process of becoming “swamps amongst swamps” through ritualistic movement and expressive painting. The swamp ritual involved weaving around the clearing, moving to a sheet of paper, using gestures, movement, splatting mud, dripping paints, and scraping across the paper (see Figure 3 below). Berries, spices, and mud made the paints and dyes. Sticks, feathers, and grasses were used for mark-making. This was not a solitary practice; people moved from paper to paper, abandoning their original creations to add to the work of others as we created collaborative artworks. For many, it awakened the inner child who used to play in the mud and paint with their fingers, an unbuilding of the constructed and separated self. This dynamic exploration of bodily biodiversity and relationality provided a means for participants to contest and subvert the paralyzing impact of eco-anxiety.The process of breaking down barriers between the human body and its various, changing environments continued on day two, with a panel on gardens, plants, and forests, during which Owain Burrell (University of Warwick) discussed Fiona Mozley’s novel Elmet (2017). Drawing on ecocritical perspectives, Burrell painted the forest as a site of resistance to tyranny, as in the myth of Robin Hood, and resistance to urban encroachment, typified by the Charter of the Forest of 1217. More broadly, Burrell argued that Elmet is symptomatic of a wider turn in literature toward envisioning a radical Englishness that is based in the forest. Following the Gardiner and Stone model of the Scottish lithosphere, he posited Elmet as the imaginative genesis of an “English xylosphere,” a site of communal degrowth, as well as rupture and reimagining beyond British state urbanism.The tension between individuality and communing, urbanity, and rurality, building and unbuilding was maintained throughout this panel. Paul Dobraszczyk (University College London) asked what cities might become if we negotiated a “natural contract” between plants and architecture, discussing the strangling of cities though rupture and renegotiation between architecture and the unruly agency of plants. He encouraged us to imagine strangler figs (a species of tropical figs) creating buildings and called into question traditional ideas of construction, challenging the material basis of architecture as separate from the organic. Dobraszczyk showed examples of living bridges in Meghalaya, Northeast India, where structures grown from rubber trees and aerial roots of plants are trained to grow onto bamboo tubes. These centennial structures trouble understandings of “building” as a human endeavor, pointing to the ways our lived spaces often engage in more-than-human relations that distort and augment their original design.Day two also saw us move from the land to the sea, with a panel on water, islands, and ice, thinking beyond the traditional domains of human construction. Eleonora Rossi (Birkbeck, University of London), and Caleb O’Connor (University College Dublin) respectively spoke of alternative ways of envisioning urban spaces by investigating sites of renegotiation with water. In O’Connor’s talk, waterfronts were placed at the center of a discussion on queer ecology, Indigenous poetry, and sustainable development projects. O’Connor contextualized waterfronts within joint histories of pollution, toxification, and deterioration, and the marginalization of queer communities and spaces in capitalist urbanity. As spaces that have historically been less policed than other urbanized areas, waterfronts have provided queer communities with generative interruptions from the terrestrial logics and biases that are often interlinked with masterful and oppressive pursuits. At the waterfront, queer and other marginalized communities gain space and time to engage with the prospect of futurity.In her talk, Rossi moved from the waterfront into the abyss, to discuss how engaging with aquatic spaces can help us decenter human hegemony, envisage alternatives to urban life, and rethink anthropocentric utopias that posit various degrees of protective separation from the natural environment and its nonhuman agents. Building on recent research in the interdisciplinary and intersectional field of the blue humanities, Rossi relied on the image of a drowned world in Abi Curtis’s novel Water and Glass (2017) to think about impending water challenges to urban and domestic spaces, and the inadequacy of existing frameworks for meeting unprecedented crises. Amidst uncontrollable floods, a group of humans and animals embark on a journey to salvation on board a large submarine. At the core of this vessel, a father and son endeavor to rebuild fallen cities that now exist only underwater. Using ancient glass-blowing techniques, the two men create fragile models of equally frail urban spaces, which exist alongside rising and withdrawing, polluted and disorderly bodies of water that contest notions of human mastery over the natural environment. Here, Curtis speaks of human failures to live with (rather than in opposition to) the natural environment.In the same panel, Fatma Aykanat (Cappadocia University) delved into further instances of dystopian built environments and their precarious protection from the natural environment. In her talk “Cities That Don’t Think Like Planets,” Aykanat explored the ecologically challenged and urban fabric of J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), a space of environmentally problematic cartography and a metaphorical urban island composed of rubble and shreds of metal scrap. The ground on the concrete island is covered in human-constructed articles, litter, and cigarette butts, which gesture toward the impact of human action on the planet and its natural spaces. Yet, in Ballard’s narrative, nonhuman elements, such as a storm, bring metal scraps together, reenergize the city’s grasses, and ultimately reveal that the island is, in fact, alive. Here, gardens, parks and yards are presented as hybrid spaces, where human and nonhuman presence coexist in tension with one another. Aykanat encouraged us to reflect darkly on the characters alienated from their once-pristine natural habitat, isolated in the built environments of their own creation, and trapped in the Sisyphean cycle of their anthropogenic ecological fate.While the conference explored ruination of built and natural spaces, it also offered sites and methods of hopeful thinking and collective rebuilding. These were captured in Amy Butt’s (University of Reading) keynote speech, “Held in Common,” on day three. Butt spoke of the call of the commons as a way of untangling architecture from the mere building of walls, and of troubling the distinctions between the urban and rural, of public and private. She noted that walls of ownership are built as a defense against the commons, which Stefano Harney and Fred Moten note are “beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure.”3 Butt invited us to challenge the purported solidity of these walls, highlighting their intrinsic porosity and the revolutionary promise of holding space open for alternative ways of coming together against and beyond the logic of ownership. Building on histories of enclosure and exclusion within the UK, as well as on the instances of resistant commoning, Butt urged participants to think about how ownership occurs against common interests, and how it can be addressed, critiqued, rethought.Much of the work at the conference was underpinned and informed by either direct or indirect references to trauma, and our emotional responses to it. Fabienne Viala’s (University of Warwick) day two keynote highlighted space and kinship in contemporary climate fiction and focused on reading Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle) (2015), and Erick J. Mota’s Habana Underguater (2010). In her keynote, Viala highlighted how we need to learn from resilience as well as trauma. In this, she highlighted the importance of recognizing the strength, experiences, and resilient skills of previously enslaved and oppressed people, not to annihilate the trauma but instead to pose the question: what can we do with it? Here memory operates as a reservoir of tropes that enact reparation symbolism, and the chosen texts highlight that memory is inseparable from trauma. Climate fiction allows us not just to retell the trauma but to also look at futuristic tales of the Caribbean; this challenges the traumatic and anthropocentric natures of time, space, nature, and species to offer new stories from environmental futurism.Viala highlighted the temporality of how these two novels envision reparation in the present as a form of embodiment of the future rather than a revisioning of the past. Both novels are set after major ecological disasters with the themes allowing a double shift in memory and temporality. At the same time, they demonstrate shifts in time, shape, space, and gender—allowing human and nonhuman characters to exist beyond anthropocentric methods of life and death. These texts use cyberpunk to look at Caribbean memory, not to talk about the trauma (repeating and reliving it and retraumatizing) nor is it to go through a process of creating victimhood. Instead, the emergent philosophy is based on protection, to protect yourself, to find a means to survive. Here, we are encouraged to imagine life and death at the planetary scale. Empathy operates beyond programmed economic growth. The reader is invited to feel within another digital or supernatural realm, thus envisioning a different future from environmental destruction. Within these fictitious spaces, we see how multiple extinctions drive reparative action across time and space, between time travel and present embodiment. While they project readers into a worse reality, there is scope in the plot enclaves that are not at the center of a traumatic story. Viala noted that these novels are critical utopias, making room for hope that the presented dystopia can be transformed into a different world.Toward the end of the third and final day, Filip Ryba (Jagiellonian University) presented a deeply moving presentation posing as its title: “Does Beirut Portray a Future of Cities?” He highlighted how political, economic, and other emergent ecological crises (including the energy crisis) have transformed Lebanese everydayness and landscapes. Ryba noted that you can imagine there is no crisis if you look at Beirut from the right perspective. Stores and supermarkets are full of products; however, crisis is the main topic of conversation. Electricity shortages have led to a different Beirut at night, one beset with darkness as the government cannot keep the streetlights or traffic lights on; darkness equals danger and chaos, and citizens carry torches after dark. Ryba how the government project to create a city center for and Beirut become a in the fabric of the city, a and a space to the of only a social Beirut as a speculative as of world and as she speaks of with the there is a need to look at new ways to and be with Beirut become a ground for the future of crisis. The between Ryba and University of who of collaborative and part of her research in with and the context of the crisis. 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