Ewa Rewers

This article explores approaches to wilderness in contemporary urban spaces and the demarcations drawn through the concepts of nature vs culture, politics vs art, science vs narratives, city vs wild life in urban studies, philosophy and environmental art. The argument about the new forms of wild life, such as charismatic animals and weeds in cites, impacts the way in which we think about the encounters between posthuman philosophy, urban ecology and art. The paper seeks to pose the questions of post-natural world anew, in ways that allow for a resolution of the tension between contrary concept of wilderness and urban practices. It argues that all forms of life (human and wild) are connected, reassembled and exposed both materially and discursive in urban socio-ecological systems. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions and scales of urban life and is transferable from urban ecology to environmental art, from philosophy to politics, from popular culture to urban environment.

This paper explores the phenomenon of university town in Poland and Europe. More specifically, the paper illustrates cultural base of conflicts and debates connected with cooperation between city and university, and methods of it researching and solving. It is argued that there is a significant difference between visions of the university produced by humanities and sciences. In recent years, this difference has also emerged in several universities which locate campuses and student communities outside the city. Such a process is a result of the geographical, economic, social and cultural promotion of higher education in the end of 20th century. Enlarged student populations should be integrated into communities characterized by much the same styles of life, modes of consumption, inherited cultural capital and “good taste”. Students are dispersed to different parts of towns and cities. Process of studentification generate gentrification in the middle of the city, but it has also a positive impact on city dwellers and local communities. In many ways, these young communities signified lucid exemplars that the city-university relations seek to engender. The paper concludes by considering some possible issues of cooperation characteristic to the university town.
 

The way in which cultural approach operates though disciplines of knowledge and urban theories is a central theme of this article. If cultural approach in urban studies worked largely through cultural turn ideas in the end of 20th century, recently works through reinterpreted and expanded concept of culture as a structure/infractructure of urban life. Reflecting the crisis of cultural turn in urban theory in 21st century some authors and disciplines became more interested in the study of the urban political economies, urban political ecology and critical urban theory. Research seeking to explore recent urban crisis as a result of climate changes, growing social inequality and lack of solidarity in global scale has unsurprisingly been diverse and varied. Analitically this moment is compelling because it emphasizes the weakness of cultural factors in the process of articulation of a new urban ideas. This, however, raises a question with respect to much of the most visible results of urban studies and urban theory: are its proponents inclined to accept again the offer of cultural oriented urban studies in terms of cultural materialism, eco-criticism, eco-philosophy, ethics and aesthetics? Are they ready to rethink the relationship between economic and extraeconomic causality in the conditions of global multilevel crisis? This article is therefore primarily a theoretical attempt to articulate how urban theory might be moulded by global urbanisation in crisis.

The emergence of different kinds of urban protests in the 21^th century profoundly renewed our understanding of power of things and spaces. It is clear that many of the most successful urban protests represent reactions to the well-documented mistakes of the governments. For the last three decades new ideas of aesthetization, symbolic economy, public culture and global cultural industries have been continually developed by cultural urban studies and urban policies. Situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an political mutation of cultural connections between things, signs and space. So the three thesis I propose consider in this article: 1. Protest is the only one of everyday practices in the city life; 2. Everything you have on one, you can use to say „No”; 3. Agora is there when you are standing. The rationalisation of urban space produces a new ontologies of things, individuals, societies and spaces. The idea of public cultures posthuman performativity requires an active reformulation of urban protest as an ‘ugly’ crowd.