Mesopolis #3, 2021
Story of an ecosophic, generative and resilient expe-topia, 2021.
Design- and theory-fiction experience including a text and a series of photomontages (one published) published in Bad To The Bone Review #14 Theme “Oikos”, October 2021.
To order the review: http://badtothebone.website/shop/
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In this illustrated story, Raphaële re-stages the RA (Religious Anonymous) Movement she had imagined in her book “Paris Ars Universalis, a fiction scenario of the Greater Paris metropolis” (Avant-garde collection, L’Harmattan publishing, 2017) and previous works on the Mesopolis concept:
See her exhibition « Mesopolis », Atelier Martel Architecture, Paris, 2013.
See her performative conference « Occupy the Sky » (which shows a Mesopolis) in « Gardening the Sky Water » international symposium, Art & Sciences chair, Ecole Polytechnique / ENSAD, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, 2019.
See her conference « Mesopolis Lab, designing new future imaginaries of urban and territorial resilience » in 4th international Symposium ICHT (Imaginer: Construire et Habiter la Terre) / Megalopolises, metropolises, towns in the countryside, shrinking towns:
what “imaginary world” for the city of tomorrow?
Conference program: https://urbanimaginary.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1
About Mesopolis Lab
Mesopolis Lab is one of LIID Future Lab’s research threads looking at how to design new urban utopias to inspire human action and territorial transformation.
The lab started in 2011 with initial research on the future of the City of Tehran, through an approach combining urban design, ecology, and art. The Mesopolis concept emerged from the idea to see it as a live and entangled milieu (meso) and to promise it an “ecosophical” future – i.e., according to Felix Guattari who coined that term, mixing three forms of ecology, natural, social and mental -, thus allowing to address as much its material, sensorial and human dimensions as its cognitive, informational and imaginary layers – a specificity of LIID Future Lab core approach. In front of the extreme pollution of this concrete intensive metropolis, this ambition was manifestly a utopia, i.e., a purely conceptual urban model, and so we decided to make it travel, to explore how it could be embodied in other parts of the world.
The following lab research steps consist in conducting design fiction experiments to test possible versions of a Mesopolis utopia, and to deepen its theoretical relevance in regards to current urban reflections (resilience, mesology, generative city, learning city, creative city, smart city, etc.).
