Episode 08: The ethical landscape: What if sustainability is just colonialism wearing green?
In Conversation with Dr Alban Mannisi: Founder and Director SCAPETHICAL
About the episode:
Everyone loves sustainability. Greener cities, greener buildings, more trees. Who could possibly be against that? But what if some of the ways we “do” sustainability are actually a new form of colonialism?
In episode 8 of Cities of Tomorrow, we sit down with Dr Alban Mannisi, a French landscape architect, urbanist and educator, who joined us from Jeju Island in South Korea. Alban has spent more than twenty years arguing that landscape is never neutral. It is political, it is cultural, and sometimes it is quietly colonial.
We talk about what happens when a model of the “sustainable city” is copied from one side of the world to the other without asking the people who live there. Alban explains why community consultation so often feels like manipulation when the design has already been decided, why Australia’s cities still read as British landscapes, and how “green” can become just another way to keep the same economy running. It’s an honest and sometimes uncomfortable conversation, and an important one for anyone who designs, plans or cares for places.
Key topics:
- What is eco-apartheid? Eco-apartheid uses imaginaries like “sustainability” to safeguard the future of an elite minority, while institutionalising a legal, political, and economic structure built around the idea of “national security.
- Sustainability or colonialism? What happens when “best practice” from one country is copied into another without asking the people who live there?
- The political philosophy of landscape: why history, memory, culture and belief matter as much as soil, slope and drainage.
- Ethical landscape: why consultation often feels like manipulation, and how Alban uses film and sound recording to rebuild trust between experts and communities.
- Maritories and Indigenous knowledge: what coastal and island communities already know about living with rising seas.
- Empire in the landscape: how old empires and colonisation still shape our streets, from Europe to Melbourne.
- Green capitalism and regenerative design: why, in Alban’s words, “if we would like to regenerate, we need to understand why it degenerated”.
- AI and reality: when AI images help, and when they distort what is really happening on the ground.
- Advice for young designers: humility, listening, and accepting that a landscape is never finished.
About the guest:
Dr Alban Mannisi is a landscape urbanist and academic whose work sits where landscape meets politics and ethics. He specialises in applied environmental ethics, political ecology, landscape urbanism, Indigenous environmental mediation, climate urbanism and the political philosophy of landscape.
Alban trained in fine arts in Nantes and in landscape architecture in Bordeaux, and completed his doctoral research in Tokyo (PhD, Université Paris Nanterre). Over two decades he has practised and taught across France, Korea, Japan, Thailand, China, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Italy and Türkiye. He has worked with global firms such as EDAW as well as smaller studios such as Mass Studies.
Around 2008 he founded SEIWOOO, an urban planning and landscape architecture practice in Tokyo, which became SCAPETHICAL in 2015. He is Director of the Custodian Heuristic Institute of Applied Environmental Ethics and a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo.
His research ranges from Indigenous Australian ecosophy to displaced coastal communities across Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean. His work includes the film Hokkien Mee Diplomacy, about how Singapore’s food depends on landscapes across the border in Malaysia; Maritorium Biocracy, which reads coastlines as living territories rather than property; and Ottoman Parallax, a new study of how empire still shapes landscape today, which he began while a visiting professor in Ankara.
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