Assistant Professor John J. May was recently interviewed for the journal New City Reader's Issue no. 7, "Ecology". According to Archizines.com, the online and print journal (which is affiliated with the Istanbul Design Biennial) is a "newspaper on architecture, public space and the city. It was originally conceived as a performance-based editorial residency for The Last Newspaper, an exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2010, and will be repeated in different cities internationally."

The interview, entitled "In the Aftermath of Modernity's Nature", delves into May's views on terms such as "sustainability" and "resilience". May outlines his concerns for these fashionable words, saying, "To be honest, I’m deeply suspicious of such language—‘resilience,’ ‘process-oriented,’ etc. To my mind they are simply the latest iteration of a now worn-out equation: that the techno-bureaucratic management of so-called ‘natural and artificial processes,’ if guided by the inalienable authority of modern scientific principles, will eventually lead towards the gradual perfection (or at least to a “sustenance”) of our modern ways of life."

"The problem here of course is not the pursuit of scientific truths," May continues, "but rather the notion that those narrowly conceived principles will be adequate for projecting an entire image of existence. We’ve tried that for too long, and to simply call it another name—efficiency, or performance, or resilience—will likely make little difference if the naming does not also entail a full accounting of its own genealogy. If, on the other hand, ‘it’ (‘resilience,’ or any other such conception) can gradually be made conscious of its own epistemic affiliations and resemblences—then it may be made to confront its past and expand itself. What price have we paid for conceiving of life as an infinite series of processes, all of which must be made ever more regular and efficient? If the proponents of ‘urban resilience’ can really come to terms with the terrible weight of that question, then they may finally begin to open up our practices to a necessarily unmodern image of life."

Read the full interview online as well as the print version.