Ethics and Politics of the Built Environment

This book proposes and defends the practice of urban gardening as an ecologically and socially beneficial, culturally innovative, morally appropriate, ethically uplifting, and politically incisive way for individuals and variously networked collectives to contribute to a successful management of some defining challenges of the Anthropocene - this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process, or system escapes the reach of human activity - including urban resilience and climate change.

Autorentext

Marcello Di Paola is Research and Teaching Fellow at LUISS "Guido Carli", Rome, and PostDoc Researcher in the FWF Project New Directions in Plant Ethics at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. His background is in political and environmental philosophy, with a focus on climate change and urban sustainability. He has co-edited, with G.Pellegrino, Canned Heat: Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change (Routledge 2014); Plant Ethics: Principles, Norms and Applications (Routledge 2018), with A. Kallhoff and M. Schorgenhumer; and is currently completing The Global Environment: Ethical and Political Issues (Routledge 2018). He is the founder and President of Minima Urbania, and observatory on urban sustainability hosted at LUISS University in Rome.

Inhalt

Chapter One: Gardens and the Anthropocene.- What this book is.- What this book is not.- Aims and structure of the book.- State of the art.- The Anthropocene.- The planet and I.- Chapter Two: Gardens and Cities.- Cities.- Food.- City Gardens.- Ecological benefits of urban gardening.- Social benefits of urban gardening.- Concluding remarks.- Chapter Three: Gardens and Culture.- The nature/culture divide.- Human exceptionalism.- Anthropocentrism.- Concluding remarks.- Chapter Four: Gardens and Morals.- Individual moral obligations in the Anthropocene.- Self-offsetting.- Urban gardening and systemic reform.- Why gardening.- Concluding remarks.- Chapter Five: Gardens and Ethics.- Virtue.- Environmental virtue.- Virtue in the Anthropocene.- Virtues for the Anthropocene.- Concluding Remarks.- Chapter Six: Gardens and Politics.- Governance Challenges.- Legitimacy challenges.- The Anthropocene and the public/private distinction.- Environmental pragmatism, agrarianism, and civic republicanism.-Gardens, public goods, and operative democracy.- Concluding remarks.- Conclusion.