The video of my interdisciplinary workshop The City and the Wild is now up!
Category: Video
Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky
We are celebrating the centenary of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (published 1921) and the bicentenary of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s birth (born 1821).
This video is my tribute to both. I aim to show that there is more that connects these thinkers than accidental numbers. The video is based on Chapter 1 of my book.
Cities and Alienation from Nature
Why Garden?
Many of us are dreaming of a garden in these pandemic times. But why is this so? What makes us desire gardens and why do we garden at all? My newest video discusses just this.
Video: Transcultural Urban Aesthetics
Asian cities are usually seen as chaotic. However that is because those of us who grew up in Europe and North America are accustomed to linear orders of things, be they buildings or written words. In my new video I talk about the logic behind Asian urban aesthetics.
Video: Urban Aesthetics
Urban aesthetics is a marginal, though emerging field. This is surprising since it addresses a fairly common intuition that cities can be breathtakingly beautiful, and in a different way than paintings are beautiful. In my new video I talk about recent developments in the field and suggest that cities are not only beautiful because of their looks but also because of the dreams they allow us to dream and the stories they afford for our life.
Video: Cities on Mars
Elon Musk has some pretty concrete plans for the Red Planet. However, he mostly discusses technological and financial obstacles. I’m more interested in psychological and political challenges to living on Mars. And I found most insightful considerations from an unlikely source: Plato.
Plato’s Laws is about starting a new colony, the fictional city of Magnesia, on an isolated Cretan island. Many of the psychological and political difficulties that Magnesians would face can be juxtaposed to potential settlers on Mars.
The latest video on my YouTube channel is on possible cities on Mars.
Tea Lobo 