AMP

The ethical landscape : What if sustainability is just colonialism wearing green ?

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-10-04T22:07:45Z

The ethical landscape : What if sustainability is just colonialism wearing green ?

In conversation with Dr Alban Mannisi.

Cities of Tomorrow Podcast

What if sustainability is just colonialism wearing green ?

In Episode 08 of Cities of Tomorrow, Dr Hamed Tavakoli joins Dr Alban Mannisi for a thought-provoking conversation about ethical landscape design, sustainable urban planning, and the political forces shaping our cities. When ideas developed in one cultural context are presented as universal solutions, can sustainable development reproduce the inequalities it promises to address ?

Drawing on his international experience in landscape architecture, teaching, and research, Alban explores how local cultures, histories, and relationships with the environment challenge conventional approaches to urban design. Together, Hamed and Alban discuss what it means to design with communities, respect Indigenous knowledge, and question assumptions about progress, development, and environmental responsibility.

Topics include :

• Sustainability and colonialism : How externally imposed models of sustainable cities can overlook local priorities, cultural values, and existing environmental practices.
• The political philosophy of landscape : Why landscape architecture involves more than physical spaces, encompassing memory, identity, power, and the ways people live together.
• Cultural diversity in urban design : How experiences across Europe and Asia challenge the idea that one planning model can work everywhere.
• Ethical landscape design : The importance of listening, understanding local contexts, and recognising communities' existing expertise before proposing solutions.
• Community participation : Why consultation must offer people a meaningful opportunity to influence—and fundamentally change—a project.
• Indigenous knowledge and coastal resilience : What designers can learn from custodianship, relationships between land and water, and established approaches to environmental management.
• Green capitalism and regenerative design : Whether greener projects transform underlying systems, and why regeneration requires understanding how places became degraded.
• Artificial intelligence in architecture and design : The ethical risks of AI-generated imagery that misrepresents real places, communities, and environmental conditions.
• Advice for emerging landscape architects : Practising humility, embracing cultural differences, and adapting design as communities and ecosystems change.

For listeners interested in sustainable cities, landscape architecture, environmental justice, community-led planning, and the future of urban design, this episode asks a central question : whose vision of sustainability are we building—and who gets to decide ?

Voir en ligne : The ethical landscape:The ethical landscape : What if sustainability is just colonialism wearing green ?

Souveraineté environnementale. Écosophies florissantes en Asie

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-09-22T20:55:09Z

Asian Cities
Professeure Pijika Pumketkao-Lecourt
École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville

20 novembre 2026 | 14h00–16h00 (UTC+1)
En ligne | En français

Souveraineté environnementale. Écosophies florissantes en Asie

Les crises ontologiques mondiales ont renouvelé l'observation et l'intérêt pour les régions où les écologies sociales sont relativement épargnées par les impérialismes environnementaux occidentaux. Ces modes d'existence, ancrés dans une autre compréhension de leur biosphère, remettent en question la colonialité des savoirs écologiques. À travers plusieurs situations en matière d'aménagement du territoire et de communautés humaines/non humaines, comme le renouvellement des éthiques environnementales au Japon, le désaveu de disciplines corporatives en Corée du Sud, la revitalisation des pratiques maritimes indigènes à Singapour et la persistance de la spiritualité écologique à Bali en Indonésie, nous explorerons l'existence, la résistance et la transmission de ces humanités et ingénieries environnementales indigènes qui nous aident à mieux comprendre les fondements de nos bouleversements écosophiques.

KOREAN WORLDLINESS natural peninsula intelligence

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-07-21T02:40:52Z

Program

Sharing 1-3 pm
Walking 3-6 pm
Dinning 7-9 pm

Contributors

Kyung-sook Yoon & Ju-hyup Cha. Architects. Korea
Kyung Jin Zoh. Academic.Landscape Architect, Korea
Alban Mannisi. Academic. Landscape Urbanist, France
Mina Chu.Designer. Korea
Sem Vermeersch. Academic. Religious Studies. Belgium
Youngai Seo. Academic.Landscape Architect, Korea
Hyeyoung Choi. Academic.Landscape Architect, Korea

What would we like to hear about South Korea's built environment achievements today ? What can we learn from its ability to absorb Global North models and customs, integrating Western soft power into new energies that demonstrate alternative approaches ? Do we expect Korea to continue to ‘cope with Western mechanisms' or to revitalise its indigenous humanities and engineering ? And is there something unexpected that only Koreans can explain to us ? Its current maturity enables us to think beyond more intimate and singular constructs.

Within the grounded community Dosigsgga, in Anyang, we will explore various ways of advocating for innovative and sometimes, uneasy to grasp, ways of existing in present-day Korea.

Voir en ligne : KOREAN WORLDLINESS natural peninsula intelligence

NARCISSUSCAPE Biopolitics Narratives Survey

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-07-20T05:50:57Z

60 Years of Design Survey” International Workshop

Organised by Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Memorial Kanazawa Architecture Museum
In cooperation with ARCHI-DEPOT Corporation

September 16 (Wed) and 17 (Thu), 2026

Kanazawa Future City Creation Center
3-11-1 Nomachi, Kanazawa City, 921-8031

From the mid-1960s to the 1970s, comprehensive surveys were conducted by architecture and urban planning experts to re-evaluate traditional Japanese villages and cities. It all began with the 1965 Kanazawa survey by the University of Oregon, which, backed by detailed measured drawings and thorough data on how people lived, came to be known as the “Design Survey.” This movement was widely shared with the public through architectural journalism and later influenced the conservation of historic districts by the national and local governments. The Museum of Architecture, Kanazawa, has inaugurated an exhibition titled “60 Years of Design Survey – Where the Vernacular became Architecture” from June 20, and plans to hold lectures and forums this summer. As part of this, on September 16 and 17, experts from different countries will gather for discussions that cross architecture, cultural landscapes, and cultural anthropology.

with
Riichi Miyake (director, Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture, Kanazawa)
Naofumi Yamada (curator, Yoshiro and Yoshio Taniguchi Museum of Architecture, Kanazawa)
Anri Ito (auditor, NPO Regional Support Network)
Benoit Jacquet (faculty, Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient)
Kiwa Matsushita (professor, Shibaura Institute of Technology)
Alban Mannisi (Associate Researcher ENSAPLV, Paris, France)
Tomoki Takada (associate professor, University of Hyogo)
Yukiko Katagiri (associate Professor, Kanazawa Institute of Technology)
Ichiro Mizuno (professor Emeritus, Kanazawa Institute of Technology)
Jin Myong-Suk (associate Professor, Jeonbuk National University)

Alban Mannisi : NARCISSUSCAPE. Biopolitics Narratives Survey

Design Survey, a philosophy of attention that examines the economy of relations between present reality and the historicity of its past. It reflects both the technical conditions and political ambitions embedded in a territory, operating as a continuous dialogue between what a society chooses to preserve and what it projects into its future—often revealing less a stable reality than contested horizons of possibility. Through the study of diverse regions and biospheres, we will investigates how vernacular cultural landscapes and social ecologies express the decisions and preferences of past societies and seeks to understand the 20th-century mutation of these references and their evolving transformations today.
Beyond a critical theorisation of these temporal mechanisms, what we consider essential is the support of impartial strategies that prevent surveys from being shaped by the biases of their historical moment. Without resorting to universal claims, which are widely critiqued today, how might we ensure that the spatial curriculum is understood in its full complexity, encompassing its tangible, intangible, and spiritual dimensions, so that it may continue to flourish ?

Voir en ligne : NARCISSUSCAPE. Biopolitics Narratives Survey

Pluriverse Civil Societies

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-07-14T12:58:07Z

Art & Communication
AccScience Publishing
Singapore

Submission timeline :
Abstract : 31 August 2026
Full paper : 31 January 2027
Publication : 31 May 2027

This special issue emerges from the Ottoman Parallax gathering (11–13 June 2026, Ankara, Türkiye), which brought together artists, scholars, cultural practitioners, activists, designers, and community organizers to examine how artistic and communicative practices contribute to more just, plural, and sustainable futures amid ecological, political, and epistemic transformations.

At a time when dominant institutional narratives and political imaginaries appear increasingly exhausted, the issue explores how art, visual culture, media, and creative practice can help reimagine collective life, foster dialogue and community engagement, and more plural futures.

The collection foregrounds situated cultural expressions, Indigenous and vernacular artistic practices, visual storytelling traditions, and community-based knowledge production. It examines how artistic, visual, and communicative practices represent, negotiate, and transmit alternative cosmologies, relational ways of being, and local understandings of governance, ecology, and coexistence. Across diverse contexts, communities are generating new ways of representing, preserving, and transforming collective experience in response to homogenizing structures of power.

We are particularly interested in the transmission and representation of cultural practices, values, and relationships—human and more-than-human—that have evolved over generations. How are these worlds expressed through art and culture ? Why are aesthetics and creative practices central to community identity, celebration, resilience, and continuity ? We also welcome contributions that examine how artistic and communicative practices enable these forms of knowledge to be shared, interpreted, and sustained across communities.

Contributions are invited that explore how art, design, media, and cultural production challenge colonial epistemologies, technocratic rationalities, while creating new possibilities for communication, representation, public dialogue, and collective imagination. Topics may include Indigenous arts, vernacular visual cultures, creative resistance, community arts, participatory communication, cultural memory, decolonial aesthetics, ecological imagination, and creative approaches to environmental and social justice.

By creating a platform for voices, images, stories, and practices often marginalized within mainstream institutions, this issue seeks to advance debates on decolonial aesthetics, artistic activism, cultural resilience, ecological imagination, visual culture, participatory communication, and the transformative potential of art-based community engagement.
The issue welcomes theoretical, empirical, interdisciplinary, and practice-based contributions from scholars, artists, activists, designers, practitioners, and community organizers worldwide.

Themes and Potential Topics

Pluriversal epistemologies & post-Western futures
Epistemological anarchism & knowledge pluralism
Indigenous governance, commons, & alternative civil societies
Decolonial aesthetics & art as knowledge production
Participatory communication & community media
Visual culture, oral traditions, & cultural memory
Ecological imagination & more-than-human worlds
Indigenous, vernacular, & community arts
Design justice, participatory design, & social transformation
Digital sovereignty, arts-based research, & decolonial futures

Voir en ligne : Pluriverse Civil Societies : Epistemological Anarchism, Indigenous Governance, Art, Communication, and Post-Western Future

DISSIDENCE world ecosophy shift

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-06-27T04:50:13Z

The relationship between human beings and their environment has become an increasingly critical subject of reflection as this connection has progressively weakened over the past centuries. Since the Western Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, societies have undergone a process of gradual disengagement from their natural, social, and urban environments—whose impacts are now deeply felt in everyday life.
Thus, numerous studies have emerged since the early twentieth century, a period marked by the flourishing of the social sciences such as anthropology, ethnography, and psychology. In the twenty-first century, Environmental Humanities have further advanced this body of knowledge by deepening and critically reassessing disciplines that were too often developed within privileged, educated Western societies—nowadays referred to as the Global North.
This pedagogy seeks to deepen understanding of the diverse movements in cognitive knowledge and contemporary epistemologies worldwide that address relationships between humans and their human / non-human environments across the multiple disciplines of the Built Environment. It draws on recent studies while also engaging with the revitalization of ancient and generic knowledge systems, demonstrating their continued relevance despite their historical marginalization by dominant modes of thought. Through this lens, the course examines how distinct environments and milieus give rise to different cultural landscapes and pluriverse cognitive(s), while also revealing shared foundational principles through which these perspectives intersect.

Voir en ligne : Dissidence

OTTOMAN PARALLAX other existence praxis

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-05-18T13:31:46Z

Ottoman Parallax is a three-day international gathering in Ankara that brings together built environment scholars, designers and institutions from Australia, Japan, France and Turkey to explore native ecologies, other modes of existence, and planetary futures in our Anthropocene era. Through conversations on pluriverse environmental ethics and cultural coexistence, the gathering examines how colonial modernity, environmental imperialism, and overlooked knowledge systems continue to shape contemporary life, while opening space for more adaptive, inclusive, and resilient ways of living in a rapidly changing world.

With the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1921, the 21st century inherited an enclosure of multiple modes of existence that once adapted to constantly shifting environments. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new nation-states would come to symbolise what is now called the Global North. Under the guise of universal laws and moralities, Indigenous humanities and engineering were suppressed through an ontological colonialism rooted in imperial warfare. Beneath the appearance of global stability, a political ecology cold war is unfolding : critics of Western imperialism are silenced, and millennia of Indigenous knowledge that sustain planetary biodiversity are being erased—an ongoing genocide, ecocide, and urbicide legitimised as civilisation.

As seen during COP 30 in Brazil, growing recognition of other modes of existence has highlighted the social, environmental, and atmospheric diversity needed for planetary survival. Yet environmental imperialism makes such recognition increasingly difficult. Resistance to its aristocratic and colonial power structures confronts entrenched elites who defend privileges reproduced through institutions and educational systems. The worldwide acknowledgement of Indigenous Ecologies—what Alberto Magnani calls “globalisation from the grassroots”—echoes Article 12 of Nagoya's report The Future of Our Environments from Indigenous Customs and Ethics. Both remind us that Enlightenment universalism, post-war internationalism, and contemporary market-society globalisation reiterate earlier authoritarian forms of Western imperial governance. While some societies that have over-tamed their environments face slow decay, others remain attuned to Gaia's volatile rhythms, where chaos can be both destructive and rejuvenating.

It is within this geopolitical crossroads—the Turkish capital, Ankara—that we aim to examine such movements of thought. As the heir to the Ottoman Empire, whose last sultan anticipated a century of turmoil, Ankara now hosts refugees. Are we living in the twilight Gramsci described, a lingering moment unfolding across multi-scalar crises that multiply like bacteria ? And what does it mean to reflect from within it ?

Bringing together participants from Turkey, Japan, Australia, and France, this gathering invites exploration of the Anthropocene's pedigree through the connections and frictions among diverse contexts. We will consider other existence praxis—forms of knowledge that arise from chaos—not because they are more numerous, but because they resonate at the core of how we understand and reconstruct our built environments.

Voir en ligne : OTTOMAN PARALLAX other existence praxis

Indivisible HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-02-10T10:29:37Z

L'engouement croissant pour la formation et la gestion des « paysages culturels » symbolise l'accélération de la perte de notre histoire spatiale et environnementale (Spatial Curriculum/ Kukan no Rireki), ainsi que la toxicité de nos ontologies politiques à leur égard. Il est de plus en plus douteux d'entendre des vœux de justice et de respect pour ces mondes et modes de vie autres, émis par ceux-là mêmes qui s'engagent corps et âme dans leur annihilation, en raison d'aspirations illibérales.

Les contestations observées dans le monde contre la centralisation du pouvoir et colonialité du savoir interrogent l'intérêt que nos experts portent à nier ces savoirs naturels qui, jusqu'alors, permettaient de soutenir nos sociétés de manière responsable, équitable et innovante. L'abandon, pour cause de financiarisation, de ce qui constitue la présence des paysages mémoriels au cœur de notre patrimoine (cimetières), l'usage de matériaux issus de nos écosystèmes naturels (bambou), ainsi que les pratiques et coutumes fondées par des millénaires d'empirisme naturogenique suscitent aujourd'hui des questionnements légitimes quant aux bénéficiaires de cette negation du reel.

Nous aborderons les alternatives existantes qui se détachent des mécanismes délétères et anxiogènes de l'ingénierie exogène technofile. Nous évoquerons ces créateurs, penseurs et pédagogues qui assument les dérives des pédagogies environnementales et territoriales utilitaristes et prônent des éthiques pluriverses bienveillantes.

ٱلْخَالِي Rubʿ al-Khālī FILLING ONE'S OWN VOID

Mannisi, Alban — 2026-01-04T08:57:41Z

ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي Rubʿ al-Khālī
FILLING ONE'S OWN VOID

Alban Mannisi. PhD
Guest Lecture

17 February 2026

Invited by Prof. Simona Azzali
Canadian University of Dubai
Department of Architecture
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Twenty-first-century post-cities rely on best practices inherited from declining Western governance models, originally encoded through early artificial intelligence–driven planning. This comes alongside a wealth of exogenous knowledge appropriated from indigenous humanities and engineering, that are now being re-indoctrinated to vulnerable native populations. Ecopiracy, parachute science encompassed by the neoliberal ecology of Sustainable Development over the past decades have accelerated these misdeeds which new subaltern advocates are now questioning vigorously.

These dynamics of decolonization of environmental ethics and revitalization of genuine customs and practices require constant support due to the ecosophical alternative realities fog produced by corporate built environment narratives. In contact with these subaltern movements in various parts of the world, we will showcase some of their accomplishments and the natural intelligence of their design philosophies, which have shaped cultural landscapes worldwide from the distant past to the present day.

We will also attempt to understand why built environmental experts constantly, and increasingly, ignore the just, ethical and equitable naturogenic management systems established by sovereign people worldwide. Instead, pursuing techno-engineering, which lead to our current ecological and ontological crises. Through a critical examination of mainstream communication design in the Global North, the final survival apparatus of a moribund ecosophy, we will explore the cognitive pluriverses that constitute Gaia's richness.

DEGENERIC edgy in)discipline(s

Mannisi, Alban — 2025-12-26T05:16:04Z

Pleased to share my current dynamic with the Art, Design and Architecture faculty at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

With Degeneric : edgy in)discipline(s, I will briefly present some of my design philosophy throughout my initiatives, focusing on my current inquiry : Ottoman Parallax. Other Existence praxis.