The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our (...) standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Eric Katz and Robert Elliot have argued against ecological restoration on the grounds that restored landscapes are no longer natural. Katz calls them “artifacts,” but the sharp distinction between nature and artifact doesn’t hold up. Why should the products of one particular natural species be seen as somehow escaping nature? Katz’s account identifies an artifact too tightly with the intentions of its creator: artifacts always have more to them than what their creators intended, and furthermore the intention (...) behind some artifacts might explicitly be to allow things to happen unpredictably. Indeed, to build any artifact is to employ forces that go beyond the builder: in this sense all artifacts are natural. Recognizing the naturalness of artifacts can help encourage the key environmental virtues of self-knowledge and humility. (shrink)

This article draws the city into the limelight of social studies of technology. Considering that cities consist of a wide range of technologies, it is remarkable that cities as an object of research have so far have been relatively neglected in the field of technology studies. This article focuses on the role of obduracy in urban sociotechnical change, an issue that, it is argued, has considerable importance for both students of the cities and the daily practice of town planners and (...) architects, and, at the same time, forms an important theoretical debate in science, technology, and society studies. The article provides an overview of theoretical conceptions of obduracy in both technology studies and urban studies and proposes a heuristic model for the analysis of this phenomenon. In this way, this article aims to contribute to the establishment of a common interdisciplinary playground for these disciplines. (shrink)

Although debates about the shape and future of the built environment are usually cast in economic and political terms, they also have an irreducible ethical component that stands in need of careful examination. This paper is the report of an exploratory study in descriptive ethics carried out in Atlanta, Georgia. Archival sources and semi-structured interviews provide the basis for identifying and sorting the diverse value judgments and value conflicts that come into play in a rapidly growing metropolitan area. The goal (...) of the project is to expand and refine a draft framework for grappling with the ethical complexity of the situations from which individuals and communities make important decisions about their surroundings. The success of the framework is to be measured by its usefulness in informing the judgment of professionals and citizens, and in facilitating a robust normative debate about the built environment. (shrink)

Environmental philosophers should look beyond stereotypes to consider American suburbs as an environment worthy of serious philosophical scrutiny for three reasons. First, for better or worse, the suburbs are the environment of primary concern to most Americans, and suburban patterns of development have caught on elsewhere in the industrialized world. Second, the suburbs are much more of a problem than many environmental theorists suppose, in part because suburban patterns of development are entrenched and difficult to change, and in part because (...) they pose an important challenge to the very idea of an environmental ethic. Third, the search for sound policies and practices for metropolitan growth involves two crucial tasks for which philosophers may be particularly well suited: grappling with the ethical complexity of the suburbs, and fostering a robust and nuanced normative debate about the future of the built environment. (shrink)