pdf version

The whole unabridged transcript is available upon request.

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Alexis Gonin & Mattias Kärrholm

Forthcoming with Edward Elgar Publishing

The book seeks to contribute to the debate on the political and societal impact of climate change, with a focus on the new epistemologies that are being developed to recompose and expand ecological thinking. The approach is interdisciplinary across the humanities and social sciences (philosophy, social theory, sociology, anthropology, architecture, political ecology, and human geography). The discussion is theoretically-led and theoretically informed, with rich ethnographic case studies included to provide grounding for analysis. Through a number of “terrestrial stories”, a notion of “terrestrial politics” is developed so as to clarify the role of territories in the current planetary transition. Issues of globalisation, coloniality, ecology and territoriality are here explored through the modes of knowing and experiencing that correspond to them. The book thus enriches the current discussions on climate change and climate politics by emphasising the role of territories in prefiguring an emergent terrestrial politics suitable for conceptualizing an ecological civilization.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Theorizing Terrestrial Politics

Part I. Debating Terrestrialism
1. Luigi Pellizzoni, Mess of a problem. The climate crisis debate as a governmental dispositif
2. Michael J Shapiro, The Ecological Sublime
3. Jeanne Etelain, Towards a Terrestrial Nomos of the Earth: Rethinking Planetary Politics in the Age of Gaia
4. David Blanchon, Sentinel territories

Part II. Terrestrial Stories
5. Andreas Blok and Casper Bruun Jensen, Re-Placing Latour’s Eco-Politics: Cosmopolitics in Cambodian Territories
6. Emile St-Pierre, Living with the unthinkable: System failure, ecology and energy practices in Hokkaido
7. Giuseppina Forte, Raising the Ground, Climbing the Trees:
Territorial Irreversibility and Its Contestation in East River Park
8. Konstantinos Avramidis, Taking Care of Refugee Estates, Refugee Estates of Care. Design Scenarios in Nicosia
9. Priyam Tripathy, Planetary Crisis and Uneven Worlds: Air, Heat, and Infrastructures

Endorsements

‘“Thinking globally, acting locally” is not as straightforward as it seems in the face of the climate emergency. While a great variety of globalizing views dominates ecological debate, this book proposes an alternative: terrestrialism “as a sensitivity that does not take the Earth for granted”. Combining innovative conceptual reflections with regionally nuanced analyses, this is an important contribution to ecological scholarship.’
– Peter Wagner, Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and University of Barcelona, Spain

‘Groaning glaciers, floods, tremors, and extra-human kin jostle alongside cybernetic systems, feral infrastructures, protests, and refugee camps. This diversely populated collection invents a territoriology for sharing the earth equitably. Refusing the Anthropocene’s totalizing conceit, it offers environmental stories grounded in the critical zone. Here, an urgent cosmopolitics reminds us what is at stake for diverse worlds on this badly damaged planet.’
– Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne, Australia

Paul Auster

Videorecording available at https://www.youtube.com/live/P8ZSYzYg7Lo?feature=shared&t=10883

Out on August 18, 2025 – See : https://www.routledge.com/A-New-Index-for-Public-Space-After-Distancing/Hatuka-Brighenti/p/book/9781032555836

With four generous endorsements from:

“This erudite and provocative book melds social and political theory with design thinking to produce a new set of terms to understand both the nature and the phenomenology of publicness. Inspired by the challenges of physical distancing that accompanied the global pandemic, the authors show the durability of the public realm while offering new ways to interpret and produce a range of disordered, agonistic, and spatially-situated interactions that will continue to make public spaces the lifeblood of cities.”

Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard Graduate School of Design

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“How can we talk about public space and make sense of its continuous mutations in contemporary cities? As the authors suggest, we need to explore patterns of experience and affect along with efforts to conceptualize sociospatial crises. This book is an inventive and highly successful experiment in analyzing publicness that offers to city dwellers and planners alike an index of terms to be used in thinking about city life as a multifarious set of realities and possibilities.”

Stavros Stavrides, Professor of Architectural Design and Theory, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens

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“Triggered by the contemporary challenges and appreciation of the post-pandemic future of urban space the authors continue the quest to understand and assess public space. Through a new index they introduce us to a series of fresh and inspiring methods and prompts that traverse disciplinary boundaries and help explore the experiential and phenomenological dimensions of public space. The book is a welcome addition that introduces researchers, teachers, and students in the built environment and social science disciplines to innovative ways of examining the future of public space and eventually to show new ways to “read” the city.”

Vikas Mehta, Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design, and Professor of Urban Design, University of Cincinnati

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“This is a playful book on how public space negotiates distance and propinquity amongst human and nonhuman bodies. It is a truly exciting cornucopia of affects, memories and desires that crisscross one another like a boardgame. But like most good boardgames, here too there is wisdom, depth and astute observation of all the things that compose ourselves and our lives. The authors have managed the impossible: to create an intensely visual, lyrical, ludic net of possibilities about our post-Covid world in way that is both celebratory and cautionary, visionary and sobering. In many ways, through its innovative form, its collaborative process of writing, and its ground-breaking content, this book opens up an entirely new way of being in public. This is a fundamentally beautiful and useful book.”

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster, UK; Artist and Fiction Author

Chek it out at : https://www.losquaderno.net/?p=2409

+ info | https://www.pin.unifi.it/eventi/1488-evento-di-apertura-delle-lezioni-dei-corsi-di-studio-in-pianificazione-di-architettura

Also at : https://shs.cairn.info/les-temps-qui-restent-2024-1-page-647

PDF version here

A summer symposium in Toblach, June 10-12, 2024