ABSTRACT
The second chapter in this section is focused on the idea of an artistic way to repair or restore the quality of habitat for animals, plants and human beings either in cities or in rural areas. These practices are creating new art forms and, sometimes, different kinds of living beings. This opens the dialogue to sustainable alternatives to the formerly closed structures of creative endeavour. Let’s first go to the cities and see how artists have been dealing with urban spaces. Aside from the fact that the cities have become the environments in which the bulk of this planet’s inhabitants dwell – a contemporary dwelling mode – urban environments are also colossal consumers of natural resources both far and near, exporters of their problems and waste, and predators without any real contact with the ‘soil and nature’ that nurture them. The city is a specific environment; a technical environment in both senses of the term. First, it encompasses the implementation of numerous technologies (as borne out by the success of eco-housing and eco-technologies, amongst others). This is also demonstrated by a certain number of urban and ‘city-design’ professions. Making cities is an art in itself and architects cannot be held solely responsible for the failures of the modern city. Second, the urban environment is a technical milieu for urbanites – the city may even be considered the ultimate technical milieu. As long ago as 1953, the sociologist Georges Friedman explained that:
By natural milieu, we mean the milieu of pre-machinery civilisations or communities in which man reacts to stimulations emanating mostly from natural elements – earth, water, plants or seasons – or from living beings that include both animals and humans. In this milieu, the various tools comprise the direct extension of the body, adapted to the body, fashioned by the body using processes underpinned by overlapping biological, psychological and social conditioning … However, by technical milieu, we mean those which have developed in industrialised societies and communities since the beginning of the pre-industrial revolutions, in other words since the end of the eighteenth century in the case of Britain and the beginning of the nineteenth century for the Continent. In this technical milieu, the proportion of stimulations described previously decreases but at the same time, increas-
ingly closes in around man and a complex network of techniques tends towards automatism.
