Inaugural Lecture: Professor Tim Waterman

About

Tim Waterman delivers his inaugural professorial lecture, hosted and introduced by Jacqui Glass, Dean of The Bartlett Faculty. This lecture will take place in the Christopher Ingold Auditorium, UCL at 18:30 GMT followed by a reception in The Bartlett School of Architecture Exhibition Space, 22 Gordon Street. 

Please note capacity is limited and seats are first come, first seated. You will need to show your Eventbrite ticket on entry. Due to popularity this lecture will now take place in the Christopher Ingold Audiotorium not the Gustave Tuck LT as previously advertised. 

This lecture will livestreamed to Zoom. Regsiter to attend online:

Register on Zoom

Abstract

Reworlding: Planetarity and Future Imaginaries

Earthliness, worldliness, and globality all provide different frames for thinking about life on our planet. They also provide different frames for ‘worlding’—the creation and maintenance of shared mental worlds that both arise from and result in earthly landscapes of everyday life. This talk will range from landscape representation and colonialism to utopianism and resistance to show how crucial it is to understand and remake ways in which worlds are made in the architectures. These are worlds not merely found in buildings—edifices, landscapes, infrastructures—but inside our heads. The project(s) of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and globalisation are the product of shared geopolitical imaginaries propagated through literature, the arts, science, and politics.

Enlightenment ideas which were at once poetic and romantic, toxic and destructive, created the framework for building the liberal and biblical ‘city on a hill’ in the New World, while laying waste to whole continents, peoples, and ecologies. These utopian ideals shaped both city and countryside through processes of building and plantation, but also through the disindigenation of landscapes, ecocide, and genocide. The tools and techniques of empire-building have been ways of bringing new worlds into being which can, despite their terrible legacy, model the world-making imaginaries needed to bring about the scale of earthly transformation required for human and ecological survival in the face of the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and fascism 2.0.  

Biography

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. This forms the basis for explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life, taste and manners, and foodways in community and civic life and landscape. His work scaffolds between world-making imaginaries and practices of everyday life, to effect the transformation of both. He has published, in addition to essays and journalism, several books, most recently The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design. He is currently at work on a tetralogy of related monographs, the first of which is Reworlding: Planetarity and Design Imaginaries. This will be followed over the next few years by The Magical Extraction of the Curse of Labour, Good Things, and Frugality’s Futurity: On Grace.  

More information

Image: Still from “Globemaking: How the World is Made”, British Pathé, 1955.