I could have dropped Salammbô of Gustave Flaubert, my very first book and first mind blowing reading when I was a kid. Or I could have dropped some text of Bourdieu or Durkheim which have been helping me in developping my thoughts and my critics towards our modern societies. The fact is I don´t know too many english academics writing and I wanted to share with you a text of Dogma, an architecture and urban design office from Italy who wrote an essay called "The forest and the cell: Notes on Mosej Ginzburg's green city".
This article talked about the notion of disurbanism and the attempt of installing green cities as a decentralized, distributed and cityless way of living within a territory. This concept made in the 1930's by soviet architects was an attempt to contest urban cities seen as a capitalistic approach of life.
I enjoyed this text as it explained that 100 years ago, we were already trying to think further the ways of understanding our territory and it makes me wonder what could have happen if this idea would have go through and spread all over the world. Would we have the same contemporary interrogations? And would we be fighting climate change?
Unfortunately I can't share this article as I couldn't find it online. But if anyone is interested, I can make a copy of my book. The article was originally published in the n°45 "Into the woods" of Harvard Design magazine
Otherwise I can this text of Niina Käyhkö, Olavi Granö and Maunu Häyrynen called "Finnish landscape studies – a mixture of traditions
and recent trends in the analysis of nature-human
interactions". The text is neither thought provoking nor pleasing to read but it gave me a really good compelling approach of what is done in Finland for my thesis research. It also gives loads of references for continuing research.
