From ecological idealism to ecological relativism (…or ecological ethics): A comparative tale on William Lever’s Port Sunlight (1888) and Enrico Loccioni’s Leaf Community (2007).

Landi, Davide

Abstract

A characteristic of the 21st century for urban and architectural knowledge is dealing with contemporary challenges such as a failure of traditional economic models, a technological turn, a human displacement across territories, and a shift in environmental forces. Whilst these challenges describe an emerging regime, they are nothing new from a historical perspective. Over time, urbanism and architecture have attempted to solve these conditions by hosting other disciplines and transposing visions of single, or groups of, minds to inform ideal urban and architectural settlements. Company towns, for instance, have been constructed as ideal experiments in urbanism, architecture, and their socio-cultural, technological, environmental and economic organisations. Despite their inventors and ideals, company towns have dynamically explored urban and architectural responses to profound economic, socio-cultural, technological, and environmental challenges facing the West and the rest of the world.

Drawing on the ideas of an evolving interrelationship of disciplines, thereby urbanism and architecture, this paper investigates the constitution of company towns as ecologies. By welcoming a comparative review of past and present company towns such as Port Sunlight (1898) near Liverpool by William Lever and, more recently, Leaf Community (2007) in the Marche region of Italy by Enrico Loccioni, this paper touches upon aspects of urban and architectural design, and dwelling practices, visible only insofar in their systemic coupling with their founders’ code of conduct. Consequently, the analysis will use Ecological ‘Idealism’ and ‘Relativism’ to explore ethical discrepancies between disciplines, living creatures, and their environment. This paper provides a laboratory for the definition of ‘Ecological Ethics’ with their own latent trans-critical position equally concerned with individual and collective agencies, technocratic castes and democracies, most and least privileged forms of everyday life, humans and non-humans, planning of and caring for the planet as a reaction to a consumer anthropocentric civilisation as it currently exists.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: SITUATED ECOLOGIES OF CARE - Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) The 20th International Conference
• Start Date: Oct 25, 2023
• End Date: Oct 27, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jan 21, 2024
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11530767