The main question of our age is how we live our lives. As we struggle with this question, we face others. How do we handle ideas and knowledge, both our own and those of others? What relationship to ideas do we want? Whose ideas do we want to be surrounded by? Where do we want to think? Most choose, or have the choice made for them, according to what family, colleagues, and friends do and say and what we read about, and a more or less rational calculation of the odds. Modern ecology results from the shift in thinking generated by quantum physics and systems theory, from the old view based on reductionism, mechanics, and fixed quantities to a new view based on holistic systems where qualities are contingent on the observer and on each other. This perception changes how people treat ideas and facts, certainties and uncertainties, and affects both art and science. Worldwide it is part of the process of understanding the current crisis in the environment, and the balance of economy, creativity, and control required in our response. The book's starting point is the growing role that information has played in industrial economies since the 1800s and especially in the last thirty years. It is an attempt to identify ecology of thinking and learning. It is also based on the need to escape from old, industrial ways and become more attuned to how people actually borrow, develop, and share ideas. Throughout the book, Howkins asks questions and offers signposts. He gives no guarantee that creative ecologies will be sustainable, but shows what should be aimed for.

Architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot examines how the discipline of architecture is theorized and practiced at the periphery. Eschewing a conventionally direct approach to architectural objects – to iconic buildings and big-name architects – she instead explores the background of architectural practice, to introduce the creative ecologies in which architecture exists only in relation to other objects and ideas. Consisting of a series of philosophical encounters with architectural practice that are neither neatly located in one domain nor the other, this book is concerned with 'other ways of doing architecture'. It examines architecture at the limits where it is muddied by alternative disciplinary influences – whether art practice, philosophy or literature. Frichot meets a range of creative characters who work at the peripheries, and who challenge the central assumptions of the discipline, showing that there is no 'core of architecture' – there is rather architecture as a multiplicity of diverse concerns in engagement with local environments and worlds. From an author well-known in the disciplines of architecture and philosophy for her scholarship on Deleuze, this is a radical, accessible, and highly-original approach to design research, deftly engaging with an array of current topics from the Anthropocene to affect theory, new materialism to contemporary feminism.

This book explores an exciting range of creative engagements with ecologies of place, using geopoetics, deep mapping and slow residency to propose broadly based collaborations in a form of ‘disciplinary agnosticism’. Providing a radical alternative to current notions of interdisciplinarity, this book demonstrates the breadth of new creative approaches and attitudes that now challenge assumptions of the solitary genius and a culture of ‘possessive individualism’. Drawing upon a multiplicity of perspectives, the book builds on a variety of differing creative approaches, contrasting ways in which both visual art and the concept of the artist are shifting through engagement with ecologies of place. Through examples of specific established practices in the UK, Australia and the USA, and other emergent practices from across the world, it provides the reader with a rich illustration of the ways in which ensemble creative undertakings are reactivating art’s relationship with place and transforming the role of the artist. This book will be of interest to artists, art educators, environmental activists, cultural geographers, place-based philosophers and postgraduate students and to all those concerned with the revival of place through creative work in the twenty-first century.

Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.

Creativity is the fastest growing business in the world. Companies are hungry for people with ideas - and more and more of us want to make, buy, sell and share creative products. But how do you turn creativity into money? In this newly rewritten edition of his acclaimed book, leading creative expert John Howkins shows what creativity is, how it thrives and how it is changing in the digital age. His key rules for success include: Invent yourself. Be unique. Own your ideas. Understand copyright, patents and IP laws. Treat the virtual as real, and vice versa. Learn endlessly: borrow, reinvent and recycle. Know when to break the rules. Whether in film or fashion, software or stories, by turning ideas into assets anyone can make creativity pay.

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

This book offers a socio-cultural examination of contemporary creativity studies. Drawing heavily on posthumanist, new materialist and affective theoretics, the author argues in favour of an expansive and sustainable approach to creativity which contributes to an emergent ‘creativity studies’ inter-discipline. It seeks to establish a broader consideration of creativity in socio-culture, that extends beyond, or indeed refutes, the narrowing aperture of entrepreneurship and innovation as synonyms for creativity in economic, cultural and educational contexts and discourses. Drawing on multiple case studies of creative relational and creative ecological empirical research, this book integrates a concern for personal, planetary and geo-political collaboration, as an antidote for ‘innovation for innovation’s sake’.

Community music around the world reflects the growing and diverse ways humans collectivise and express themselves in ways that articulate our cultural, social, and environmental complexity. Revisiting, redevising, and reimagining some of the field’s approaches, ideologies, and contexts, this co-edited volume investigates beyond generalist intercultural and internationalist concepts to reveal the complexity of social ways people come together to make music and to making music be central to this sociality. The authors explore the role community music plays out around the world and how various instrumentally based music-making communities operate as ecologies that allow notions of social, political, and cultural agency and identity/ies. Chapters cover various instrumental community music ensembles, observing how they, as social microcosms of change and stasis, provide working methods new and old, extol values, and model ethical behaviours that are fluid and dynamic, steadfast and unyielding, and that contribute to the ebb and flow of people and their agency that remains under-researched. Insights are provided on variously functioning ensembles throughout the world, showing how myriad instrumental music communities act as drivers, complex environments, and apparati for musical and social expression that accommodates the musical aspirations of their members. Taken as a whole, this book explores community music as local, glocal, global phenomena, critically discussing the redefinition of community music and what music-making means to people in the twenty-first century.

This book crtitically examines the reciprocal relationship between creativity and the built environment and features leading voices from across the world in a debate on originating, learning, modifying, and plagiarizing creativities within the built environment. The Companion includes contributions from architecture, design, planning, construction, real estate, economics, urban studies, geography, sociology, and public policies. Contributors review the current field and proposes new conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and directions for research, policy, and practice. Chapters are organised into five sections, each drawing on cross-disciplinary insights and debates: Section I connects creativity, productivity, and economic growth and examines how our built environment stimulates or intimidates human imaginations. Section II addresses how hard environments are fabricated with social, cultural, and institutional meanings, and how these evolve in different times and settings. Section III discusses activities that directly and indirectly shape the material development of a built environment, its environmental sustainability, space utility, and place identity. Section IV illustrates how technologies and innovations are used in building and strengthening an intelligent, real-time, responsive urban agenda. Section V examines governance opportunities and challenges at the interface between creativity and built environment. An important resource for scholars and students in the fields of urban planning and development, urban studies, environmental sustainability, human geography, sociology, and public policy.

From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people’s lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world. Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.