2021 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

In his series of Podcasts on the end of the world, Timothy Morton explains one of the main challenges in theorising the anthropocene: the video game logic. There is a certain mentality, often white, often middle class, often male, which rolls up its sleeves, sits down and goes — right, let’s bloody solve the climate emergency (did you see how many carbon points it scored in just that one move?).

Whilst recognising the gravity of our situation, we write from a site of resistance to all-encompassing, utilitarian, efficient, and heroic pedagogies. We believe in the transformative potential of pedagogies, but oppose the handing down of methodologies that simply decarbonise buildings or make our products “greener”. Like Donna Haraway, we are convinced of the need to ‘stay with the trouble’ and accept that the so-called climate emergency cannot be solved and is not new — it is entangled with colonial, exploitative practices that extract value from world resources and peoples.

In this ethos for a slower reflection on the long tentacles of climate change, we argue for an understanding of the way that our designed world has (ill) effects on the health and wellbeing of humans and non-humans. Climate health/care does not score many points but instead aims to address the way that climate change affects populations unequally, especially those that lack agency: people of colour, migrants and refugees, the homeless and certain species of animals bear the brunt of the emergency, whilst the elite are protected by wealth and the guise of a high carbon point score. Whilst certain natural environments are disappearing, our constructed environments – homes and healthcare settings – are often poorly conceived, positioned and constructed and do little to protect those most at risk of flooding, weather disasters, damp, mental distress and poor health. Further, our hierarchical attitudes to the planet, and its climate, which suppose that humans are superior – also seen in the high carbon point ‘solutions’ to climate emergency discussed above – and hence prioritise humans over non-humans, dangerously undermines the nuanced ecologies we inhabit. We eradicate other life forms at our peril.

Here we discuss climate health/care pedagogies, rooted in our background as creative and humanities practitioners/theorists, to engage with the intersections of design and health. Following the ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’, our approaches include creative-biological methods to understand the bio-social, to narrative writing that makes close readings or micro-histories that speculate on the personal existences of different people, animals and places of health, to instruments constructed and constantly reconfigured to understand health anxieties. We use these tools to reflect on the state of the thesis curriculum at the two institutions where we collectively teach, The Bartlett and Sheffield School of Architecture. We discuss the shortcomings and opportunities to open up the definition of climate care to include health interactions between humans and non-humans and  reflect as much as we speculate on the ways we can raise awareness and invite conversation and kinship.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)

Maria Puig de Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)

Timothy Morton, We’re Doomed! in The End of the World has Already Happened, BBC Radio 4 (2020)

Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017)

In Lebanon, inefficiencies of infrastructures and the deterioration of the natural environment, from negligence and lack of sustainable governmental strategies, are rapidly spiraling out of control leading to severe impacts on the local community. This is particularly evident in water environments, fresh water supply, and infrastructure, where the situation has led to polluted waterways and increased shortage in supply despite high rainfall and snow levels. Though geographically rich with high mountains, rivers, and springs, Lebanon in 2019 was listed by the World Resource Institute¹ (WRI) as one of the countries with the most severe water stress levels. The relatively small country is further delineated by powerful  neighbors, where the interconnection of waterways and fluid networks results in further restrictions and constraints on this natural resource. Fears of political corruption and inflated costs for projected mega infrastructures by the government have as a result mobilized the local civil society into action.

Within such framework, I teach an advanced elective for undergraduate architecture students, that pushes them to use design and visualization as advocacy tools to affect change on infrastructural systems in Lebanon. In the past session of the course, we focused on water as an urgent concern, and expanded the research and proposals to problematics affecting the geopolitics of water: from territorial scales of conflict and negligence, to local infrastructural deterioration, and the urgency for action and design engagement.

The proposals developed by the students focused on approaches of agility and alternate scales for new water systems, moving beyond mega-scale infrastructures to more resilient alternatives. They tackled and dissected local areas of dispute and potential, both for water and collective opportune. Through research and visualization developed into a design pamphlet, the student proposals attempted to situate and respond to local freshwater needs through a distributed network of small hybrid interventions that additionally activate a spatial social or cultural function. Each project focused on a particular lens of investigation, from polluted sources, lack of rainwater collection or water treatment systems, to cross-border conflict and water regulations. The proposals further tackled specific keys sites: from the Litani river’s toxic basin, Beirut’s roofs as water collection reservoirs, the Assi river’s geopolitical constraints, the Hasbani river’s water conflict, to the problematic Bisri Dam project and its necessary demise. Integrating advocacy with visual research, each of the students’ visions set forth an operative trajectory for water and spatial hybrids, incorporating performances such as rainwater collection systems, adaptable irrigation, toxicity indicators, ground water recharge and others.

This paper thus reflects on the developed work and the necessity to employ design agency towards environmentally aware and responsive projects that cross spatial and social needs with infrastructure. It presents the case of Lebanon and the envisioned main tactics for water potentials through the course’s approach and student results. It further positions a responsibility on the architecture field to expand beyond the immediate bounds of the discipline to address essential environmental and infrastructural needs through applied design research.

1 – Rutger Hofste, Paul Reig and Leah Schleifer, “17 Countries, Home to One-Quarter of the World’s Population, Face Extremely High Water Stress”, World Resource institute (WRI), August 2019, viewed at

In the Anthropocene thesis, human activity has affected all ecologic, geologic and biological systems and has eroded the boundary between human and non-human life and between nature and culture, with catastrophic impacts on the Earth that have brought us to a point of climate crisis.  Nature is partly a human creation.   As recent texts have argued, the current social and health crises are direct resultants of human actions dating back to the time of Western colonization.

Human pollution of world’s ecosystem is responsible for global warming and the threat of rising waters as well as damage to the earth’s atmosphere. This crisis has also exposed the wastefulness of the building industry, where structures fall into disuse and are demolished and dumped into landfills at astonishing rates. As the pandemic of COVID-19 continues to show, the health of people, animals, ecosystems and the environment are intimately linked. This crisis has also exposed weaknesses in our global supply chain network for consumer goods. Localizing food production and storage for easy distribution is a key strategy of urban resilience in times of crisis.

This graduate architecture studio project proposes additions to and reuse of existing urban infrastructure to locally situate small-scale food production and storage facilities squarely within the dense urban fabric of major metropolitan areas as a retrofit embedded inside existing building fabric within the public realm.  Seafood aquaculture, aquaponics, hydroponics, and algae farming processes produce high yields in relatively compact environments without the necessary access to light and space that typical crops require. Hard grains and legumes can be stored for use as emergency food supply.  Seeds are stored to preserve species against depletion or destruction from natural disasters and as libraries of genetic resources.  Oyster aquaculture can produce food as well as seed for filtering oyster beds that are critical for the cleansing of polluted waterways.

Our test site for this project is Brooklyn’s industrial waterfronts of Red Hook and Sunset Park.  Student projects explore the linkages across ecosystems, people, and animals through the lens of an architectural construct—a speculative addition and alteration to abandoned industrial buildings in these neighborhoods.  Over the course of the first half of the 20^th century, these neighborhoods shifted from being the busiest freight ports in the world to being abandoned once containerization changed the processes, storage, and distribution networks for shipping goods.  Retail-focused adaptive reuse has saved some buildings in the neighborhood but at a cost of higher real estate prices that threaten to drive out local residents.  Community groups including Uprose have successfully argued in favor of green energy and food production in industrial zones to create jobs and keep real estate in check.  This approach to develop industrial mixed use buildings has the potential to keep food and supplies locally available for citizens in disaster scenarios like covid-19.   Adapting these buildings to new uses that combine storage, production and public community space is the focus of these investigations.  Anamorphic projection techniques produce interventions with specific orientations toward both human and non-human occupants.

Lewis, Simon, Maslin, Mark.  The Human Planet:  How We Created the Anthropocene. London:  Penguin Books Ltd, 2018.

Lightfoot, Kent G., Panich, Lee M. Schneider, Tsim D., Gonzalez, Sara L.. “European colonialism and the Anthropocene:  A view from the Pacific Coast of North America, Anthropocene.  vol. 4, December 2013.

Morse, S.S., Mazek, J.A.K., Woolhouse, M., Parrish, C.R., Carroll, D., Karesh, W.B., Zambrana-Torrelio, C., Lipkin, W., Daszak, P. “Prediction and Prevention of the Next Pandemic Zoonosis. “ The Lancet  Vol. 380, Issue 9857, December 2012.

Schlicting, Kara Murphy.  New York Recentered:  Building the Metropolis from the Shore.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Purdy, Jedidiah.  After Nature:  A Politics for the Anthropocene.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2015.

Yusoff, Kathryn.  A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.  Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

https://criticalposthumanism.net/anthropocene/

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/08/a-memo-from-the-year-2050/

https://billionoysterproject.org/reefs/

DiPaola, Francesco, Inzerillo, Laura, Pedone, Pedro, Santagati, Cettina.  “Anamorphic Projection:  Analogical/Digital Algorithms.” Nexus Network Journal, November 2014.

How would architects design the city if it was only designed for the most vulnerable of us? This seemingly obvious question proved a fertile ground for questioning the most fundamental assumptions about the design process. By thinking deeply and broadly about one specific but large vulnerable group, children, this course revealed the power of a complete change in perspective in inspiring deep empathy in design. As Juliet Kinchin, curator at MoMA said, “We have been periodically reminded how the forces of modernity shape design and childhood in ways that are extraordinary and exhilarating yet also complex and contradictory.” (2012) In a time of social unrest and ecological degradation, children are disproportionately impacted by every crisis in this world, and yet they are seldomly the subject of architectural research or education, unless it involves building typologies specific for them. Their existence in design is typically limited to schools, daycare, and playgrounds – the spaces where they are segregated into. What if instead of making special accommodations or spaces for children, we designed the entire city for them? This graduate research studio started with the premise that designing the city for children would make the best environment for everyone. Students had to examine a simple question: what is the ideal experience for the child in the city? This is a question designers rarely ask when designing urban spaces and buildings. Yet there is ample evidence that an immersive experience in natural landscapes is important for the cognitive, physical and emotional development of the child. Because this idea seems potentially at odds with the benefits of dense and compact urban development, and the patterns of extreme urbanization, this raised a question that is often asked for very different reasons: how to integrate “natural” experiences in everyday life beyond the traditional and centralized park space. The liberating  paradox is that the most significant and historically consequential natural spaces in urban environments are completely constructed, so why not invent a entirely new urban landscape from the perspective of the child? If for the child, learning happens everywhere, what planning principles and design strategies could guide the design of everyday spaces for mobility, dwelling, working, and leisure? Students engaged with these critical questions during the research phase. They examined pedagogical concepts and metaphors for play and environment-based learning. They reviewed evidenced-based  principles from child development sciences. Through site visits, interviews with experts, and field work, students developed a framework of themes representing the biggest challenges in design today: from health to risk aversion to resilience. This served as a point of departure for engaging in individual design investigations that explored the potential for a new constructed urban landscape for childhood in contemporary cities. The projects were unexpected in range and scale: from new street design guidelines to hybrids of infrastructure and school, to coastal resilience planning.

The global pandemic reveals the imperative for designers to collaborate with health professionals. Designers can and must understand the role the built environment plays in health outcomes for individuals and populations; and design educators can and must develop the knowledge and skills needed to position nascent design professionals to become leaders who advance systemic change towards health equity, which is helping all people have a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. (Braveman et al., 2017)

Designers already contribute to health outcomes through the design of hospitals and medical devices, however, if we consider that health is influenced by the places that one lives, works, and plays, the role of the designer in health is much more expansive. Health is not just about treatment of disease and illness. A range of factors, like access to education, employment, and healthy food, housing, and social cohesion, collectively known as the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), play a significant role. (Daniel et al., 2018) Housing, workplaces, bus stops and corner stores, for example, are therefore parts of healthcare design. If equity is the goal of the designer and design professions broadly, then the necessary role of the designer in advancing health equity becomes obvious.

Transdisciplinary collaborations between health and design professionals and educators in each domain must not only be advanced but prioritized to effectively address the complexities of health equity, the built environment, and the SDoH. For designers, this means that the territory of design in health must be broadened to include spaces and places not commonly thought of as healthcare design; and design educators must teach students to articulate the ethical ramifications of their designs and understand their agency as designers. Design decisions shape health. Consequently, design educators must prepare their students to marshal the power of design to advocate and realize systemic change, by improving health outcomes and ultimately creating an equitable and just 21st century built environment.

As an initial response to this emerging opportunity, we introduced a novel course open to students across design disciplines, Vital Design. Students created a proposal for a transdisciplinary intervention and evaluate intersections of the built environment and the SDoH, identify challenges faced by individuals and populations within the context of impacts of the BE/SDoH on health outcomes, define an opportunity to improve those outcomes, and propose a collaborative intervention. Student work was assessed by a panel of health, medical, ethics and design professionals.

This course and additional transdisciplinary education pilots between 2017-2020 at the College of Architecture Planning and Design at KSU, Manhattan, KS and the Florida International University College of Medicine in Miami, forms the foundation of transdisciplinary design and health curricula. We will present a pedagogy supported by the outcomes of these educational interventions. Such serves as a transferable model for a transdisciplinary approach to teaching the SDoH in design and medical education, with the goal of promoting broader public health, empowering design and medical professionals to work collaboratively towards a just and equitable built environment.

Braveman, P., Arkin, E., Orleans, T., Proctor, D., & Plough, A. (2017). What Is Health Equity? And What Difference Does a Definition Make? [Report]. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Daniel, H., Bornstein, S., & Kane, C. (2018). Addressing Social Determinants to Improve Patient Care and Promote Health Equity: An American College of Physicians Position Paper. Annals of Internal Medicine, 168 (8), 577-578. https://doi:10.7326/M17-2441

An accelerated rate of development has left our landscapes cluttered with remnants and fragments of our built environments. These traces of our use sit idle in often contested conditions with a dramatic impact on climate. Together, building and construction are responsible for 39% of all carbon emissions globally, with operational emissions accounting for 28%, and 11% associated with materials and construction.¹ These realities raise the question: do we need to build new? The reactivation of dormant existing structures was the main focus of an interdisciplinary vertical design studio that included third-year Architecture and fourth-year Interior Architecture students. The studio addressed the synthesis and propagation of new strategies to revitalize decommissioned parts of our built environment generating speculative narratives for future cities in partnership with one of the world-leading design practices. This collaboration demarked a unique overlap between pedagogy and practice, bringing real-world climate issues into academia for collaborative problem-solving.

This partnership emerged from the design firm’s involvement in the shaping of existing and future cities. The firm is actively leveraging mobility through design to create multimodal, vibrant settings. Throughout the semester, students interacted with designers from the firm to explore multimodal thinking, climate sensitivity, and the transformative impact of adaptive reuse in the urban environment. The partnership encouraged human-centric design sensibilities, cognizant that human experience is ultimately at the center of any design problem. Together, students and professionals pursued design solutions capable of adapting to a changing world, formulating robust narratives for future settings.

Future cities rely on communal networks and shared platforms, asserting a more collective societal presence. This shift necessitates new multifunctional urban centers. As such, this collaborative studio engaged the design of multimodal transportation hubs grafted in the context of four inactive building types. The building typologies were the indoor mall, the office building, the parking structure, and the abandoned cultural icon. The selected buildings were situated in different cities. Each combination (city and building type) offered distinct challenges and opportunities for intervention within the urban fabric. Collectively, the four locations informed an agenda for resilient future cities, actively responding to the pressing realities of climate change while catering to shifting socio-economic parameters.

Within the push and pull that our new realities induce, a resetting of design processes must occur. As cities continue to navigate the complex terrain of climate change, global markets, generational shifts, and population displacement, a collaborative approach to architecture and its pedagogy is imperative. It is prudent to assume that this decade will witness hyper-political and environmental changes, world conflicts and crises, and global market and policy shifts, among other factors. Here therein, the designer’s role must undergo yet another evolution, one where mitigating, negotiating, and accommodating constant flux outweigh spatial demarcation and management. While such redirection will undoubtedly usher a shift in architectural pedagogy and practice, it will deliver a more significant impact and advance progressive agendas geared towards resilient futures.