Welcome to a K3 seminar with Maria Hellström Reimer, Professor of Design in Theory and Practice at K3. The title of her talk is:

Park Politics – Environmentalities, Eco-Aesthetics, and Green Mobilization

It will be held on Wednesday, September 13, at 10.15-12.00 room NIB 0501 in Niagara.

Below you can find an abstract for the talk:

Park Politics is a project focusing on urban public parks as aesthetically, politically, and ethically multidimensional, thereto from a climate perspective increasingly urgent, public spaces. The project identifies a number of controversial situations, where the park unfolds as a border phenomenon. Through experimental mapping and artistic/participatory interventions, the aim is to contribute to an aesthetic-political theorizing of contemporary ‘green’ urban forms of government and eco-mobilization. While the park in the modern city was legitimized with reference to its naturally recreational function, its contemporary role is rather that of a more or less disputed projection surface for different green and blue governmentalities or environmentalities. The theoretical assumption is that mentalities always rest on aesthetic grounds, in other words constitute aesthetically formed, and socially formative, experiential foundations or worldviews, which are expressed not only in the design of new environments but also in the managing and evaluation of existing areas. In relation to increasingly strained climate politics, urban public parks have come to occupy a symbolic and strategic position, idealized and mythologized, but also presenting an urban ‘elsewhere,’ to a certain extent excepted from strict urban rationality. The question raised therefore concerns the different performances of the park, as green capital, as a materialization of environmentalities and as a site for the mobilizing of alternative ‘cosmologies.’