Györgi Gálik – Structuring Structures: Infrastructures of Social Scale

Media Evolution

This century will be defined by society’s capacity to respond to climate breakdown. It’s not going to be like the movies, a CGI spectacle of eschatological earthquakes and meteorites. Climate breakdown is a slow and terrifying disaster. Györgi Gálik, City Transitions Co-Lead at Dark Matter Labs, emphasises our need to have an honest understanding of the challenge we face in order to make informed decisions to address it.

To take the temperature of society, Györgi points to everyday political talk as a primary site for people’s ‘world-making.’ Current conversation on climate veers from hedonism to nihilism, technological optimism and denialism. To those who seek to sequester themselves on a farm in the Nordic archipelago, “we are way beyond planting cucumbers.”

How do we ready ourselves for resilience? Györgi advocates we update frameworks of governance to pledge greater diversity, develop versatile skill sets, and adapt our language use to encompass mutual codependency and co-security. She highlights already existing examples – cornerstone indicators that measure satisfaction with vehicle-free life and key project objectives that explicitly include poverty alleviation.

What type of citizenry do we wish to practise? We can expand our collective imagination to embody a diverse, participatory, and resilient citizenship. Györgi concludes with a guiding principle – faced with an obvious answer to a complex question, be suspicious.