Urban Ecosophy for a Post-Colonial Ecohumanism of the City

Abstract

Ecosophy traces its etymological roots to the ancient Greek wisdom (sophia) of the household (oïkos), and can be understood as a form of ethics to inhabit the earth. Reflecting on the current challenges of the city, like the relation to the nature, or the social and ethnic inequalities in the urban space and through the ecosophical gaze of Arne Næss and Felix Guattari allows us to address core issues of an urban ecosophy. Within Næss ecosophy of the “self-realization”, the paper is pointing the link with his ontology of the relation with Gandhi´s insight on non-violence and the importance of the “sense of place” with the understanding and identification to the local environment. Guattari´s ecosophy as the paper will show, leads also to the concepts of relation and of the “Tout-monde” from the post-colonial thinker, and friend of him, Edouard Glissant. Furthermore, Stiegler´s concept of neguanthropocene and considering cities as “complex exorganisms” echoes Guattari´s urban ecosophy with the emergence of the “data city” performing a new kind of colonialism with data in the urban space. Finally, the essay will demonstrate how the urban ecosophy, as a practical ecosophy, in correspondence with ecohumanism, is proposing a decentring of humanism by considering the ecology in the city. It makes then possible to reconcile a modernist philosophy of individual and collective emancipation and deployment of subjectivities in the city, the idea of universalism with a world citizenship, with an emerging philosophy of respect and ethic for the living.