Şevin Yıldız’ın John May ile röportajı NCR-07 [Ekoloji] sayısında

ŞY : In your previous writings, you argue that sustainability as a concept is incoherent and politically inadequate therefore it leaves enough room for various kinds of perversions. Are these perversions fueled by our common fear of ecological risks? And even after so many various catastrophes we witnessed in the last 10 years, are those risks still being deliberately mismanaged in urban sphere to open up space for illegitimate interventions?

JM : It’s important to establish two dimensions, or registers, along which a concept like “sustainability” loses its bearings today. The first is a rather straightforward ethico-political dimension, in which it is often intentionally and insincerely employed as a marketing slogan. To my mind, there is nothing terribly complicated or surprising in this process, and not much separates it from propaganda more generally. I think we all recognize that it happens, and it doesn’t require any sophisticated theoretical operations to understand and unmask it.

But there is a second register, constituted by the unfolding of a slightly different and more concealed problem. One that, because it resides beneath our language, is far more difficult to outline; namely, the collapse of a scientific worldview organized by the dream of a stable conception of Nature. That worldview rather rapidly lost its bearings over the course of the previous century, and now it’s disoriented and confused. Today, when it tries to voice its most precious goals and truths—progress, development, growth, efficiency, innovation, production, invention—it secretly knows full-well the consequences of such truths. This quandry isn’t simply a kind of ‘problem’ that can be easily or immediately defined or solved, but rather an enormously thick historical-philosophical condition, which holds entire ways of life in its gravitational field.

In other words—to use the language you’ve posed in your question—this second register is defined not so much by the ‘mismanagement’ (deliberate or otherwise) of our so-called ‘environmental problems,’ but rather by a now-undeniable dimension of modernization itself: that by confidently positing technoscientific management as the solution to life’s uncertainties, modernization has exposed flaws in its own conception of “the natural.” Who today can use that phrase seriously? And yet it remains lodged in our language and reasoning, and in fact the whole field of ecology is caught in the tension between the theoretical purity of Modernity’s Nature and the very real, practical failings of having intervened in the world on that basis for several hundred years now.

ŞY : Your statement about the optimism of glossy images for Fresh Kills park redevelopment example and the lack of interest towards processes remind me of the position that Giancarlo de Carlo was fighting for in the 60s. He had advocated for an architect’s ethic that does not necessarily comply with the standards and briefs (one example for him was social housing standards) laid out and rather open the process that leads to the brief into discussion. Is it getting even harder to put on this role because of the all the scientific environmental change data that is fed into media and urban policy?

JM : In a sense, yes—if I’m understanding you correctly. The situation today is almost impossibly confusing for any practitioner who is willing to open their eyes to the world around them. They have been trained on a healthy diet of technical reasoning, which holds certain ideas in high regard—again progress, innovation, efficiency, performance, etc.—and which has provided a kind of model for architectural reasoning more generally for as long as we can remember. And yet clearly that way of thinking can no longer be accepted uncritically; the book of environmental history has simply grown too thick with accounts of Modernity’s ‘unintended consequences.’ That leaves the design fields (like many other fields of praxis) in a difficult situation, because of course for us any simple-mindedrefusal of technological engagement is unthinkable. Soconsequently an almost unavoidable ambivalence is injected into one’s relationship with scientific and bureaucratic processes.

But there’s no reason for this to paralyze the design fields if they’re willing to conceive of themselves as more than simply an extension of various managerial apparatuses; if they’re able to refuse being reduced to that role by positing themselves as somethingelse—perhaps as a medium capable of organizing and projecting ways of life that are not caught in the cycle of technical catalysis that plague modern environmental reasoning; material philosophies that experiment with a more fecund understanding of what it means to live in the world. I’ve never suggested that we should not be optimistic, only that we should beware of false optimisms that will drown our practices in a confused morass of simulated naturalisms.

ŞY : Do you think the debates revolving around resilience in urbanized areas are real process-oriented attempts to fill in the vague position that sustainability held? Is this an answer to what you formerly stated as the urgency of “constant reconceptualization”?

JM :To be honest, I’m deeply suspicious of such language—‘resilience,’ ‘process-oriented,’ etc. To my mind they are simply the latest iteration of a now worn-out equation: that the techno-bureaucratic management of so-called ‘natural and artificial processes,’ if guided by the inalienable authority of modern scientific principles, will eventually lead towards the gradual perfection (or at least to a “sustenance”) of our modern ways of life. The problem here of course is not the pursuit of scientific truths, but rather the notion that those narrowly conceived principles will be adequate for projecting an entire image of existence. We’ve tried that for too long, and to simply call it another name—efficiency, or performance, or resilience—will likely make little difference if the naming does not also entail a full accounting of its own genealogy. If, on the other hand, ‘it’ (‘resilience,’ or any other such conception)can gradually be made conscious of its own epistemic affiliations and resemblences—then it may be made to confront its past and expand itself. What price have we paid for conceiving of life as an infinite series of processes, all of which must be made ever more regular and efficient? If the proponents of ‘urban resilience’ can really come to terms with the terrible weight of that question, then they may finally begin to open up our practices to a necessarily unmodernimage of life.