METABOLISM OF CITIES: AN INVITATION TO EXPLORE NATURE’S METABOLISMS & THE METABOLISMS OF OUR BUILT WORLDS; DISCOVERING THE PROBLEMS AND FINDING THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR TRUE SUSTAINABILITY.
Our built environments, driven by consumption, mimic and employ part of Nature’s metabolism, but disconnect from it at the point where we create the waste stream. This disconnection triggers a cascade of issues socially, culturally, environmentally, and economically.
Metabolism of Nature runs the living planet with each organism playing its part; sustaining, optimizing, recovering, breaking and building, under the unnegotiable laws of Nature.
SOILS: are the dynamic force supporting all life that runs the planet.
Integrating them back into the built environment reconnects us to the non-built environments, making soils the fundamental opportunity for metabolism repair, enabling true sustainable development for human and environmental health & wellness.
This is a platform bringing together different disciplines, sectors, and backgrounds for discussion and building action items together. We are inviting you to bring your projects, ideas, research, stories, and explorations to share.
Soils Unite!
November 16, 2023 Session - The clay exchange!
Thursday, November 16, 2023, 9:30 am - 5 pm EST at the LMCC Arts Center, Governors Island, New York City
Lunch and Refreshments provided; Beer & Wine Happy Hour
From a scientific standpoint, clay is a particle size classification, but it is by far the most charismatic one of all. Through infinitesimally small pieces, clay is able to exit the realm of purely matter and become something else entirely. It is equal parts substance, chemistry and electricity, and through these unique properties, is able to channel both biochemical and creative exchange.
Clay multiplies the reactive surfaces of other larger particles in the same way the Amazon Rainforest would to the surface of the moon. Rocks eventually decompose to clay, and clay proceeds to archive the developmental history of the broader soil, much the same way your kitchen sponge remembers the pasta bolognese from three weeks ago.
Clay is a governor of water and capillarity, and a prophet of ecosystem functions, with properties varying greatly according to origin, structure and charge.
Slippery, sticky, expanding, plastic-hard, clay changes as it is worked, fired, or mixed. Art and industry understood the dynamics of clay and its unusual characteristics to produce glass and ceramics for millennia, long before scanning probes and atomic force microscopy sought to demystify it. Nonetheless, the intuition of a skilled clay artisan often evades even the most rigorous laboratory analysis.
A world of mysteries is still to be uncovered exploring the phenomena of clay. One thing for certain is that clay is both a material and metaphor facilitating conversation among science, art and culture.