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Critical Care, Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. MIT Press.

Invitados por Elke Krasny y Angelika Fitz editoras del libro Critical Care publicado por MIT Press, os presentamos el artículo "Affective Economy. Transition to an ecological citizenship." Una reflexión en torno a las ideas y prácticas del proyecto Mares de Madrid que fueron editadas para este maravilloso libro. Os dejamos el texto más abajo para que podáis disfrutarlo.


Image of the Critical Care Book By ElKe Krasny and Angelika Fitz, MIT Press, 2019



A broad definition of “care” informs this book of essays and building case studies, which accompanied a recent exhibition of the same name in Vienna. While discussing interactions—among people, things, and values—with regard to acts of maintenance, repair, or sustenance, the editors, Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, explore what care means as it relates to architecture and urbanism. In particular, they are inspired by current environmental crises, as well as ongoing anxieties around social justice and inequality.


The two have gathered an assortment of contributors—architects, urbanists, political theorists, and specialists in sustainability and economic geography, among others—who suggest that we should view buildings and cities not simply as objects but as collections of relationships, an unfolding process that extends both backwards and forwards in time. We should ask, where do materials come from? Who will use, change, and maintain a structure in the future?


The built environment is designed, in part, by architects and planners, but buildings and cities are really the result of a complicated set of negotiations about what kind of world a society wants to create. For instance, the energy embedded in a structure and its materials represents the vast majority of its lifetime resource-consumption impact—even a perfectly controlled passive building has usually amassed enormous debts of fuel and other resources.


The ethics of architecture, if they exist, are only revealed over a long course of time. The editors and contributors are aware of inherent tensions, but the results are best seen as an initial effort at suggesting how to make and interpret architecture in a more careful way.



  • Gil-Fournier, Mauro “Affective Economy” artículo en el libro Critical Care. Architecture and urbanism in a broken planet. Eds. Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien. MIT Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-262-53683-7





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