Hybrid Architecture: Cyborg Ecology and Cosmopolitics of Urban Life

Abstract

In this article the "cyborg ecology" discourse is considered both in social sciences and in architecture and planning theory and practice. This city language appeared in the middle of 2000ths and was based on insights of actor-network theory, political ecology and assemblage theory. The conditions of its occurring are following: globalization, multiculturality of contemporary cities, an increasing of material and informational complexity in them as well as ecological agenda in city policies. Cyborg ecology as a discourse aims at the widening of repertoires of actors and including in this list entities of nature (living organisms, climate conditions, material objects). At the same time, this discourse overcomes modernist difference between nature and culture, and ignoring the view of cities as anti-natire. By reenacting the nature in city, it demonstrated complex networks of technologies (mainly, city infrastructures), politics and policies, culture (consumerists and medical discourses), and living organisms (human bodies, viruses, animals, plants), which creating temporal and flexible assemblages of biological life in cities. Cyborg metaphor by Matthew Gandy is widely disseminated also in architecture and planning theory and practice, and this process is illustrated by examples.