Urban Sub-Natures
Entire industries have developed to design, manufacture, and install sophisticated, technologies that ensure sanitation, efficiency, and safety within urban environments. Despite these efforts, unwelcome environmental phenomena pervade today's cities. Each intrusion proves that human prowess has failed in its efforts to halt measly pests from breaching its concrete, steel, and glass borders.
David Gissen identifies these intruding phenoma as ‘subnatures‘. These uncontrollable urban invaders are typically reviled as filthy and fearsome. In his book, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments, Gissen addresses twelve, allocating them between three categories:
Atmospheres (dankness, smoke, gas, and exhaust)
Matter (dust, puddles, mud, and debris)
Life (weeds, insects, pigeons, and crowds)
All twelve are prime candidates for consideration by eco artists. Indeed, they could provide an inspiring and edifying syllabus for a studio eco-art course because they encompass such a broad range of provocative eco-art issues.
Smoke and exhaust might generate art that rectifies polluting behaviors.
Puddles and mud might produce art that channels rain and runoff into gardens.
Weeds and insects provides the opportunity to redefine species from objectionable ‘pests’ to valued ‘producers’.
Debris can be presented as innovative recycling and repurposing strategies.
Pigeons and crowds are examples of disorganized, noisy, waste-producing urban populations.
Dankness, gas, dust could be benign and mysterious, or they could evoke urban conditions that are toxic and grim.
In all, sub-natures rarely languish in the sub-conscious of urban dwellers. Despite their frenetic life styles, these phenomena are persistent sources of mental disquiet as well as physical discomfort. They intrude into our thought and feeling centers, as well as our work and living spaces. Beyond the personal, they impact the state of the environment.