Environmental cosmopolitanism: rethinking the networks of otherness

Date

2025-7-16

Author

Gülhan, Kübra

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As climate issues become increasingly urgent, the relationship between humans and their environment grows more complex. In this regard, the study explores environmental cosmopolitanism as a theoretical framework for addressing contemporary spatial and climatic challenges in the post-Anthropocene era. Cosmopolitanism - traditionally explored through various frameworks, disciplines, and practices and fundamentally tackled as individual world citizenship - is here speculated through the lens of environmental justice and viewed as a comprehensive framework that might connect various levels of climate issues. Discussions initially examine cosmopolitanism's spatial theories and practices, from Derrida's concept of hospitality to Beck's notion of border proliferation, by focusing on the issue of how to inhabit the 'other.' Subsequently, through analyzing Taut's climate-based universality, Ebeling's ‘Der Raum als Membrane’, and Esra Akcan's notion of ‘Open Architecture’, this discussion explores how architecture can either reinforce or challenge environmental justice. Finally, it employs Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an analytical tool for testing the capacity of architectural practice as a network creator that facilitates connections between human and non-human actors. By rethinking these examples - from abstract spatial concepts to concrete spatial experiences - not only does the architecture discipline raise critical questions and dichotomies that shape the spatial scope of environmental cosmopolitanism, but also, environmental cosmopolitanism reveals new perspectives that both critique and potentially guide architecture's crucial role in the post-Anthropocene era.

Subject Keywords

Cosmopolitanism, Climate Crisis, Spatial (In)Justice, Architectures of Networks and Otherness

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115562

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis