Cities of Individuals

Abstract

While humans keep being reluctant to give up their consumption patterns, human’s refusal to learn and to consider other alternatives to perceive our planet is the most extreme violence against nature. A revolutionary new phase on our planet has begun, the Capitalocene. It has been unleashed by corporations and they carry out their actions motivated by solely economic reasons. The moral code of human beings has become obsolete, and we need some radical thinking to turn the world upside down. To rethink our relations among non-human elements and the metaphors we use to describe them, can shift how we value our surroundings and thus change how we aim to protect our natural environment. This text will challenge how modern-western societies conceive of the material world, and this proposition will be based on the commonality between humans and non-humans. The purpose of this research is to rethink and to understand life more broadly and understand that there are other patterns to follow instead of the Keep-Moving-Forward-Movement as an individual. In my thesis, I focus on how we as individuals can change our behavior into becoming collaborators. Non-human elements have the power to teach us this, because of their evolution. They have a long history, they are far better capable of adapting and benefitting from the ecosystems that we drastically are trying to eradicate. I will therefore search for alternative ways to relate to the non-human world. What has been the problem so far, is that we have not archived a way for humans to represent an altruistic way to behave in nature and pioneer such an alternative way towards all species and our common future.