Urban Ecosophies. Marseille or the City as a Body without Organs

Abstract

Cities are not only inhabited by humans. In them there has always existed a collaboration or a struggle between human and animal nature, manifested in the continuous drift between two types of urban space: one, the planned space of the city, striated by the organicist axiom of functionality and commodification. The other, is a smooth, spontaneous and disorganized space, produced by the autonomous development of animal life. In the context of the current ecological crisis, the functional city is seen as an agent of displacement and obliteration of animal life. Beyond its predatory and appropriating expansion into the rural realm, urban planning is often haunted by a lack of keys, tools and technologies to accommodate cooperative forms of habitation between humans and animals. The following article proposes the vindication of a new Urban Ecosophy, that is, of a new paradigm of biophilic integration of urban life, capable of effecting a physical and ontological desegregation between human and non-human nature in cities. The root of this segregation will be sought in the project of consolidation of the middle classes after the world war and where the brutalist work of F. Pouillon (1912-1986) in Marseilles (1949) is a pioneer. Starting from the premise of a necessary de-splinttering of post-pandemic urbanism and after the crisis of the middle classes in general (which contemplates a crisis in the centrality of private property for class continuity) and through Felix Guattari's text The Three Ecologies (1989), a new model of urban design of reconciliation between the human and the animal will be advocated.