ICS Seminar Series - Anthony H Fry
Date: Thursday, 2 April 2020
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: This seminar will take place ONLINE via Zoom. Please join via the following link: https://uws.zoom.us/j/702272050
Cities: Thinking and Acting in Time with Futural Practices
Presenter: Professor Anthony H Fry (University of Tasmania)
Discussant: Associate Professor Abby Mellick Lopes
Abstract
The dominant way that cities are understood and seen are as place.As such they are dominantly viewed as being emplaced with a ground of permanence. Buildings come and go, the peri-urban grows but ground,as idea and locus, remains. However, changing worldly conditions are slowly undoing this perception. Many cities will be displaced, settlementwill be/is being undercut by unsettlement. To support and illustrate this claim, two very different examples will be presented – Miami and Jakarta.
In the unfolding circumstances of ‘the now’ other ways of seeing cities and acting futurally in and with them are needed as directed by two imperatives: acting in time and toward sustainment. In support of the argument to be made, two transformative ways of viewing and understandingcities will be presented that inform new practices. The first is ‘city as event’, the second is ‘metrofitting’.
Biography
Anthony H Fry is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Tasmania (Architecture and Design), visiting professor at the University of Ibague (Colombia), and director of the Studio at the Edge of the World (a research studio). He has held academic positions in Australia and internationally and is the former director of the EcoDesign Foundation, Sydney (1991-2002). Tony has worked on projects directly related to the presentation, including: directing an AusAid research post-conflict project in Timor-Leste (2008-2012), membership of a city move project in Gallivare, Sweden (2008), environment risk mapping for the city of Cincinnati (2011), directing workshops on sea-level rise impacts in Southern Florida, in Fort Lauderdale (2012), and design responses to the impact of sea level rises on the Pearl River Delta (Master’s program, Hong Kong Polytechnic University 2016-17). Anthony is the author of 14 books. The most relevant to the topic are: City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate (London: Routledge, 2015) and Remaking Cities, An Introduction to Metrofitting (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). A reprint of Tony’s 1999 book, Defuturing: A New Philosophy is at press (Bloomsbury, June 2020).
