AUTHORS: Michael Thompson
Originally a professional soldier, Michael Thompson studied anthropology (University College London and Oxford) while also following a career as a Himalayan mountaineer (Annapurna South Face 1970, Everest Southwest Face 1975). His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique, or a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage (Rubbish Theory, Oxford University Press 1979), diverted him into teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and at Portsmouth University's School of Architecture, and from there to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an East-West think-tank in Austria. There he worked on energy futures, on risk perception and on environment and development in the Himalayan Region, the key-unifying concept in all that being "plural rationality": people doing very different things and yet still behaving rationally, given their different sets of convictions as to how the world is and people are.
With his mis-spent youth continuing into (and way beyond) middle-age, Michael Thompson is still teasing out the various ideas of fairness that underpin the different rationalities and that are so seldom given adequate recognition in global-level decision-making, devising ways of clumsifying and democratising international development aid, and enquiring into how urban infrastructures (those, for instance, that handle human waste by putting it into the water cycle) can be re-engineered so as to make cities into "forces for environmental good". |
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