Future-Fitting the Past | Marcello Di Paola | TEDxLUISS

Through the example of urban gardens, Marcello Di Paola, Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Global Politics at LUISS University in Rome and expert in sustainability theory and political philosophy, illuminates us on sustainability as doing things differently, and, indeed, as innovation. Anyway, in his inspiring Talk, he explains that innovation for sustainability, in reality, does not necessarily entail doing or making new things, rather to re-elaborate the past to make things that last.

Marcello Di Paola is Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Global Politics at LUISS University in Rome. He has studied at University College Utrecht and at the London School of Economics, and works on sustainability theory and political philosophy. He is the author of Gardens of Consequence: A Philosophy of Urban Environmentalism (out in 2016), Cambiamento climatico: una piccola introduzione (in Italian, 2015) and the co-editor of Canned Heat: Theoretical and Practical Challenges of Global Climate Change (2014, with G. Pellegrino). His main philosophical concentration is in the role of individuals in the face of global sustainability challenges, and on their search for meaning in a complex, interconnected world. This has fuelled his interest in garden-based urban sustainability – along with the fact that, having been born and raised on a cactus farm, he is also an expert on arid plants and the realization of water-wise gardens.