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In modern times, Western industrial civilization spread into China which impacted the traditional construction system. Tianjin is the city with the largest number of concessions in modern China, and it is also one of the main cities and pioneers of modern transformation in China. With the introduction of Western construction technology, the import of building materials, and their integration with native craft, new building cladding materials emerged in the concessions of modern Tianjin, which became one of the important factors characterizing the transformation of modern Chinese architecture. As a representative area within the concessions of modern Tianjin, the Wudadao historical area represents the latest and advanced construction materials and technology of that time. This article takes the historical buildings in Wudadao area as a case study on the use of building cladding materials, by discussing their type, texture, color and construction, and presenting the development and evolution of architecture in modern Tianjin at the micro-level.

The final chapter examines the future of industrial agriculture given the decline of the fossil-fuel era and the likely collapse of industrial-based civilization, as the material base on which the entire system depends disappears. This section discusses that a perceived and increasingly artificial, hyper-technologized, gray, and disarticulated future—like the images of Hollywood cinema—responds to linear scenarios, based on the idea of scientific and technical progress and the preconception of the city as the ultimate goal. However, given the impossibility of continuing to feed energy into the dynamics of accumulation, we face a critical disruptive scenario, in which the system must self-organize in another way. If we take seriously the inevitable depletion of the energy and material sources that underpinned the growth of industrial civilization and capitalism, then we can imagine many other possibilities for the future: deindustrialized, de-urbanized, and greener, smaller-scale societies, with simpler technologies, and a massive return to rural settlements. Without trying to prophesize, I argue that in any potential scenarios, agroecology will accompany our transition to other forms of civilization. In fact, I think this is an opportunity to dream of other landscapes with forests integrated into an agroecological rhizome and with human populations living in their interior. In any case, other future possibilities different from the imaginaries of progressive artificialness would require not only a change in the technical and political-economic platform but also a profound ontological and spiritual change.

The epistemology of the 20th century concentrated mostly on problems of knowledge justification, verification or falsification, putting aside the issues of knowledge creation, even if at the end of the 20th century a few works emerged stressing the necessity of understanding issues related with the creation of knowledge, see e.g. Searle (1992), Motycka (1998). This problem area became more actual and urgent because of the growing civilization change, a turn from the industrial civilization to a new society and civilization based on information and knowledge. Therefore, other disciplines than philosophy (knowledge management and systems science) developed so called micro-models of knowledge creation processes for the needs of today and tomorrow. This chapter presents a review of such models.

If we select a typical monograph on the philosophy of technology from the turn of the 20th and 21st century, e.g. (Scharff and Dusek 2003), then its reading must fill a technologist with a tremendous worry. This anthology of philosophy of technology, edited in Oxford, very comprehensive and thus and appearing to be authoritative, contains 55 papers. Most of them are devoted to a criticism of a badly defined entity called ‘technology’ which, after a deeper analyais. turns out to be the criticism of the socio-economic system of using technology in industrial society. This chapter contains a critical discussion with several books of philosophy of technology that are more neutral towards ‘technology’