Variations on a Theme: Temporality, Cities and the Environment

Abstract

One and six times. More-than-human time, deep time, past and future time, time control(led), waiting time, imagined time, before and after. One and six times - one and many times. One in multiple layers of (inter-)disciplinary vantage points on urban time(s) from a historian, an archaeologist, a geoscientist, an architect, a landscape architect, an urban planner. We cannot ever deal with only one time. We will always be faced with the challenge of integrating the geological and the biological, the historical human and more-than-human, the artefact and the material, the simultaneity of before and after, of experience and expectation, into one, very subjective and ever-changing, urban experience as we walk, breathe, live and study the city. Any city.