Urban and Landscape Week 2017: [NO] FURTHER - Towards the Edge of the Anthropocene by Polis Platform for Urbanism

U R BA N & L A N D S C A P E W E E K 2017 [ N O ] F U RT H E R - TOWA R D S T H E E D G E O F T H E A N T H RO P O C E N E The following publication summarises the body of knowledge produced during the Urban & Landscape Week 2017 entitled, [No] Further - Towards the Edge of the Anthropocene. The collected articles describe a series of lectures and discussions that took place during the annual event as well as results of a student competition.

THE URBAN & L ANDSCAPE WEEK CO M M I T T E E 201 7 : Editor Neil Moncrieff Layout Reza A. Pradana Team Abdul S. Ahtar Alejandra A. Quezada Moreno Franka Fontijn Federica Sanchez Gereon Rolvering Harsh Malhotra Matias I. Piazza Timothy R. Djagiri Revision Amanda Bryant Delft University of Technology September, 2018 Polis Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft ulweek@polistudelft.nl +31 (01) 5278 4093 Support

TA B L E O F CO N T E N TS

I. ACKNOW L E D G E M E N T S

II . FOR E WO R D

II I . I NT RO D U C TI O N

IV. P ER S PEC TI V E S

IV-A / CHRISTOPHE GIROT

IV-B / JAN WILLEM PETERSEN

IV-C / G OD OFRED O PEREIR A

IV-D / COLIN WATERS

IV-E / SABINE MUELLER

IV-F / JAN JONGERT

IV-G / ADRIAN L AHO UD

IV-H / CL AUDIA PA SQ UERO

V.CO NVER S ATI O N S

104

V-A / PANEL DISCUSSION I

106

V-B / PANEL DISCUSSION II

1 14

VI . M ANI F E STO

122

V I-A / ENERGY PROD U CTION

126

VI-B / CIVIL WAR

130

V I-C / [IN]FORMAL SPR AWL

134

V I-D / RESO URCE EXTR ACTION

138

VI-E / NATUR AL DISA STER

142

VI I . R EF L EC TI O N S

1 46

I . AC K N OWLED G EMENTS

The annual Urban & Landscape Week is organised by TU Delft students with the aim of engaging the school and faculty in topics of discussion beyond those addressed in the classroom. The realisation of such an event would not be possible without the collaboration and support of students, professionals, and institutions...all interested in exploring the emerging challenges of, and possible innovative solutions to, issues in the globe’s urban landscapes. In this regard, the ULWeek committee would like to express our deepest gratitude to all those that contributed. To all speakers, students and professionals who participated in the event and shared their expertise through a series of insightful lectures and discussions. This publication is an attempt to summarise the vast body of knowledge produced. To our sponsors DIMI and Stylos, who not only assisted with funding but actively encourage knowledge exchange through international and multidisciplinary platforms. To the Bouwkunde and faculty management for advocating such events and establishing the ideal environment for the development of its students. To the Urbanism Department’s academic, research and professional staff for their endless advice and theoretical, as well as practical support. A special thanks to the Urbanism secretariat for their logistical prowess, constant collaboration and experience...the week would never have been possible without them. Finally, to POLIS and the previous years’ committees for building a bed of knowledge and setting the framework for the organisation of this traditional event. To all, a warm thanks for the insights gained and knowledge shared in this edition of TU Delft’s Urban and Landscape Week.

The ULWeek committee. 7

I I.FO R E WORD BY D I R K SI J M O NS

Living in the Anthropocene, the age of mankind, we now have the privilege of being able to look at our planet Earth from outer space. Even at night it looks totally alive, with natural and man-made electrical phenomena merging together. In the dark the urban landscape, our largest artifact, looks truly impressive. The parts of the world where people congregate are literally bathing in electric light. A seemingly endless filigree of lightlines spin a web with large and small nodes embodying the pervasiveness of human activity in the urban fabric. If we look at the earth from afar, it becomes immediately obvious that many global and environmental problems are associated with urbanisation, or at least have urban roots. This means that the solutions to these problems will also have to be found in the city. The unbridled use of fossil energy and hyper-consumerism are two of the sources of our environmental problems but the main issue is the poor functioning of the metabolism of such metropolitan regions. Cities exist because of extensive systems that provide them with everything they need on a daily basis: water, food, energy, and so on. Improving these flows and systems will transform problematic regions into anchor points of the circular economy. Designers today are mainly oriented towards the dense and dynamic aspects of the city. However, we can no longer close our eyes to the fact that worldwide urban densities are declining. We urgently need to find new solutions for the environment and quality of life, especially in urban landscapes where most of us live and where city and nature merge more and more. For centuries we thought, wrongly as we now realise, that the borders between society and nature were sealed. The fact that we even

have a separate word for nature betrays that we think we are not part of it but these boundaries are blurring. We are nature, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re inside nature and nature is inside of us. This observation provides designers with a range of fascinating implications but also calls for a new approach and for a new compass, for new formulations of responsibilities. It clears the way for the self-conscious and unabashed recognition that the city is our habitat, our ecology, our nature.

We are, Urban by Nature

Transcript for the IABR 2014 video entitled: THE WHOLE EARTH: Urban by Nature [https://vimeo.com/96466355] with kind permission of Dirk Sijmons

I I I . I N T RO DUCTION There is growing scientific and popular consensus that humanity has entered a new geological epoch, one where the drivers of planetary change are no longer out of our hands but are the consequence of our very way of life...particularly our increasingly urbanised way of life. The implications of anthropogenic planetary change on the natural systems that ultimately sustain us are generally well accepted. The social implications of climate change and an urbanising planet are less clear but no less immediate and the question is, how can the spatial planning and design professions respond to both environmental and social dilemmas as they play out in our urban ecosystems?

It is these issues that the seventh annual Urbanism and Landscape Week - [No] Further. Towards the Edge of the Anthropocene - sought to tackle in October of 2017. This threeday seminar is organised by students of the Urbanism and Landscape Architecture faculties at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and through a series of curated lectures, panel discussions and student competition, is intended to create a platform for students, researchers and practitioners to engage in an interdisciplinary discussion and critically evaluate current challenges within our profession. The 2017 event brought together speakers from all over Europe including Christophe Girot (ETH Zurich and Atelier Girot), Jan Willem Petersen (Specialist Operations), Godofredo Pereira (Environmental Architecture RCA), Colin Waters (British Geological Survey and University of Leicester), Sabine Mueller (Oslo School of Architecture and SMAQ), Jan Jongert (Superuse Studios), Adrian Lahoud (Dean of the School of Architecture at the RCA), and Claudia Pasquero (ecoLogic studio and Bartlett School of Architecture). As well as the speakers, more than 120 students and professionals attended the event and 25 students from TU Delft and Wageningen University joined the student competition to reflect on the topic and prepare a manifesto for a possible urban future in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

While the challenges presented by the Anthropogenic epoch are mounting, the realisation that we are agents of systemic change (for better or for worse) offer some hope and add an ethical dimension to any response. This was a line taken by Professor Vincent Nadin, Chairman of the Department of Urbanism as he opened the event. His argument was that our (predominantly Western) consumer lifestyles are likely the source of much of the impact accompanying urban systems and that in this sense, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;all areas of the United Kingdom are urban, as they are all possessed by a consumerism lifestyle: the urban lifestyle.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; So if the urban lifestyle is a fundamental contributor to environmental and social dilemmas and if we accept that we have the power to effect change, then it follows that our urban environments are the likely arena for this change. As such, the responses from Urbanism, Landscape and Architectural institutions and professions are critical. This publication charts some of these responses as presented by the participants of the Urbanism and Landscape Week 2017 and is intended to record the wide variety of positions, approaches and discussions that constituted a fascinating gathering of professionals, students and educators from a number of different backgrounds. We begin with the individual perspectives presented by our event speakers, then the elaboration of these views in the daily panel discussions. This is followed by a description of the competition process, results and entries before finally, we share our reflections on the event.

I V.P E R S P EC T I V E S Eight speakers from a number of European countries gave a series of lectures, participated in panel discussions and offered their thoughts to 25 students, from both TU Delft and Wageningen University, in competition. Both the speakers and competition participants were asked to reflect on the topic with reference to their practice (for the speakers) or via a manifesto (as a competition deliverable) and take a position on the possible future of our cities in the age of the Anthropocene.

THE SPEAKERS

CHRISTOPHE GIROT

JAN WILLEM PETERSEN

GODOFREDO PEREIRA

Professor & Chair of Landscape Founder & Principal, Specialist Architecture, Architecture Department, Operations ETH Zurich Founder & Principal, Atelier Girot

Programme leader, MA Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Art London

COLIN WATERS

SABINE MUELLER

JAN JONGERT

Honorary Professor, Department of Geology, University of Leicester Secretary, Anthropocene Working Group, International Commission on Stratigraphy

Professor of Urbanism, Oslo School of Architecture Founding partner, SMAQ

Founding partner, Superuse Studios

ADRIAN LAHOUD

CLAUDIA PASQUERO

Dean, School of Architecture Royal College of Art London

Professor of Landscape Architecture, Universitat Innsbruck Co-founder & co-director, ecoLogicStudio Lecturer & Director, Urban Morphogenesis, Bartlett School of Architecture Senior Faculty, IAAC Barcelona Head Curator, bioTallinn, Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017

P E R S P EC T I V E S

“

‘We produced an organ [the infrastructure] that eventually becomes our daily activity.’ These typical and standardised infrastructures are, Girot argues, a problem that creates tension between the engineers and the ecologists who are dealing with these phenomena. In this sense, the installation of a planting island underneath the spaghetti junction, which he jovially describes as nonsense, is the ironic illustration of this clash of interest. ‘[…] it’s like we are committing a crime, and then planting said island as the remorse.’

IV-A / CHRISTOPHE GIROT Professor & Chair of Landscape Architecture, Architecture Department, ETH Zurich. Founder & Principal, Atelier Girot

PROFILES.

As an academic, Girot’s focus is on the history and theory of Landscape Architecture. The emphasis of his practice is large scale landscape design and modelling along with new media in landscape analysis and perception.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

‘We are in the civilization of change. I think change is part of the game. I invite all the young thinkers to reflect about change, not just amending, but actually inducing change.’ Christophe Girot’s opening remark about civilization is made in response to Paul and Anne Erlich’s (2013) prediction of the collapse of global civilization. He argues that, if we accept this prediction, we should see the collapse of civilisation as a “point of departure” rather than “point of arrival”. Girot refers back to this idea throughout the lecture, particularly focussing on the relationship between humans and nature and more precisely, how this dichotomy is reflected in his practice and in the constant conflict between engineering and ecology. For Girot, the tension between engineering and ecology clearly manifests itself in the landscape surrounding us. One surprisingly ordinary instance demonstrating this conflict is the typology of the spaghetti junction, showing the phenomena of global urbanisation and infrastructural dominance. He adds, ‘we produced an organ [the infrastructure] that eventually becomes our daily activity.’ These typical and standardised infrastructures are, he argues, a problem that creates tension between the engineers and the ecologists who are dealing with these phenomena. In this sense, the installation of a planting island underneath the spaghetti junction, which he jovially describes as ‘nonsense’, is the ironic illustration of this clash of interest. ‘[…] it’s like we are committing a crime, and then planting said island as the remorse.’ More concisely, this tension between engineering and ecology is represented in a sculpture by French artist Pierre Huyghe. His Untitled (Liegender Frauenakt) is a nude, in which the head has been covered by a beehive. ‘We want to approach nature [the art sculpture] but we are afraid to do so’, Girot explains. It is this exact conflict that landscape architects around the globe have addressed in their projects over the past decade. For Girot, Dieter Kienast’s transformation of a derelict train yard in Basel is a sort of vanguard project of ecological landscape architecture. In the project, the landscape was transformed by introducing components with high ecological values such as dry meadows, rubble and various types of plants, letting them grow naturally in man-made structures like train tracks. After 30 years the project succeeded in returning valuable ecological life to the site, which was ironically polluted by human intervention in the first place. Ever since, these consolidating principles have been championed in a wide range of rehabilitation projects around the globe.

C H R ISTO P H E G I ROT

Image 1. Spaghetti junction in Atlanta, Georgia. February 2017. Daily Overview, source: https://www.overv.eu/spaghettijunction/

Image 2. Sculpture by Pierre Huyghe. August 2015. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), source: https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/1537

P E R S P EC T I V E S

In this context, one project of particular importance for Girot personally is his practiceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design for a landfill at the portal of the Gottard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, where he transformed seven million tonnes of excavated rock and soil into a highly-manicured meadow. The choice to deliberately differentiate the ecological diversity from that of its surroundings particularly sets the project apart from the reconciliatory approaches of interventions inspired by Kienastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s project in Basel. The siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s particular ecosystem demands regular intervention and maintenance, thus highlighting the duality of the artificial and the natural, the ecological and the engineered. This very duality is also reflected in the design process of the landfill. As an artificial landscape, its shape has to reflect the interests of environmentalists that demand a natural integration into the surrounding landscape, and of engineers in search of structural efficiency, alike. It should not come as a surprise that the negotiation between these various interests and demands led to a mediation process spanning several years. Concluding his discussion with the tension between engineering and ecology in his design practice, Girot rejects the notion of a differentiation between nature and humanity. Referring back to the Greeks, he notes that the concept of nature itself is ultimately closely related to human intervention. Consequently, the differentiation between the natural and the artificial becomes something of a moot point. Returning to his opening remarks, this thought reflects on his call to see the undeniable collapse of civilization as a point of departure to rethink our relationship with nature. Not by emphasising the difference between ecology and engineering or landscape and infrastructure or the artificial and nature, but by moderating these exact tensions.

[1] Ehrlich, P. R., & Ehrlich, A. H. (2013). Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? Proc. R. Soc. B, 280(1754), 20122845.

C H R ISTO P H E G I ROT

Image 3.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Gottard Base Tunnel project. At: http://offcite.org/ particularities-of-place-aresponse-to-the-landscapearchitecture-of-christophe-girot/

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Christophe Girot [CG] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

The theme of our event has been Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to this newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you whether you feel this notion is a helpful or a relevant one both generally and in the context of the design professions?

I think that the word Anthropocene corresponds to a need. I think people need to understand what’s going on right now, things are changing very rapidly and are very palpable. Ice caps are melting, plants are changing, so there is a sort of need to coin that phenomenon and the word climate change talks about one thing, Anthropocene talks about the correlation between human activity and that change. I think the risk behind that term is almost, sort of, moralistic condemning the activity. I think that where we have to be careful is how the word Anthropocene would be used if anything. It’s not really a new geological era, I still think we are in the Holocene. The Holocene just needs a warming up basically. But I think that what’s really new with the Anthropocene is that we are seeing very rapidly decreasing resources dramatically profiled changes, and the question is then how do you position yourself with that. I think there are basically two attitudes, one is to go with the flow. We have a lot of politicians that are going that way that they don’t even believe in environmental agencies anymore, or there are those that say they are going to try and slow things down and try to protect things. So, I think that’s the sort of two sidedness of the Anthropocene. Is that word being used simply for the second group that I just denoted or is it a term common to our civilization right now?

ULW

In terms of dealing with issues regarding the Anthropocene from a broader societal point of view do you think we should be using this term to crystalise this speeding up of events and of change? Or is it just another term that people are going to be interested in for a few years and then drift away from?

Well, I think it is a term that should be used. It’s a term that shouldn’t be substituted to the Holocene which just connotes a geological period. I think Anthropocene is a period where population growth has been logarithmic. We’re heading for ten billion people on planet earth by the end of this century. That obviously is a fundamental problem in question. How do you feed or how do you sustain ten billion people? Is that even thinkable or doable? We have the green revolution in the 1960s that brought agricultural revolution. Can we have a green revolution two that would multiply even more? I’m not doubting that we’re going to make progress through science. The fact is the Anthropocene is pointing towards a limiting factor. I think the word “Anthropo” designates man and mankind or womankind depending on how you want to coin it actually is of its time. It’s not geological, it’s really something of that moment and I think that’s going to have huge consequences on urban thinking, on poverty, on health, and on diversity. In a way diversity being the key to healthy agriculture and healthy environment.

C H R ISTO P H E G I ROT

”

ULW

Are you optimistic that we will be able to navigate these challenges? And if so, where do you think these solutions most lie? You pointed towards diversity, which was a key point of your lecture. Are there any other sort of avenues where you think we’re most likely to be able to tackle some of these changes?

I think the danger is in the multiple solution approach. We had Richard Weller come over from University of Pennsylvania last week who did a lecture on the Anthropocene which is his theme right now. He talked about countries that have decided to sprinkle aluminum powder in the sky to change and sort of shield the sun away. I think we are being sort of apprentices as to what we are doing. The real question that we should be asking ourselves before we make any kind of rash decision on major environmental modification of the atmospheric system on earth would be to really weigh the pros and cons of the decisions before they are taken. I don’t know whether we are going to be able to go that far, and the whole problem that we have is that it is obvious we are tackling a global problem. Precisely at a moment where politically countries tend to be more and more nationalistic and bounded to their frontiers, so there is a complete contradiction in terms. Of course, initiatives have been taken which at least seek to have a common dialogue on potential solutions, and I tend to be a little bit more conservative about that. What’s really going to happen the way you see the votes and the tendencies...solutions are going to be bit by bit, country by country. I’m not saying that’s a solution, but I think that’s unfortunately the reality and therefore I think that the role of the schools is to develop exemplary work, exemplary case studies that can set precedent. And of course, maintaining diversity is key, whether that’s economically viable in a world populated by seven or eight billion people is a whole other question.

ULW

One last question. During your lecture you showed an interesting slide, an artwork of Pierre Huyghes, where he installed a bee hive over the head of a reclining statue. The artist maybe suggesting a hybrid natural-cultural condition that both sort of fascinates us, and requires a sort of distance is perhaps associated with the Anthropocene. Is this suggestive as how you might see or response to these issues? This sort of uncomfortable hybridity?

Well this piece by Huyghes which is a reclining naked Venus with a beehive stuck on her head talks in a way in my interpretation about both the desire to be close. I mean the bee is one of the strongest symbols of nature or at least of our relationship to nature that we could talk about and what guarantees productive agriculture. But at the same time we keep our distance from this nature, keep our distance from the beehive. We get stung if we get too close, and I think the irony in our period and that’s what this piece shows, is that we may have the desire to return to “nature” but actually, we’re distancing ourselves more and more from it. I’m sorry to say that but I think that’s what this piece is about. In a way it is linked to that Greek heritage that we have at least in the Western world. We stepped out, took a distance from the world, and started observing it scientifically and got it into enlightenment and all the other chain reactions that ensued. So I’m not saying that in a reaction reel, but I’m saying we chose a direction culturally, economically, industrially, and it has really played a major role in the current situation. I think the next step for the Anthropocene would really be to reinstate a relationship with nature that is more direct. I’m pretty sure not one person that I was speaking to in this room today had set their hands or nails in earth in recent weeks. I mean we’re out of touch in a way with the material reality of our world.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

“

In introducing his work, Petersen begins with a question: ‘How do we engage with war-torn landscapes – as an international community?’ As an example, he highlights how the US government invested 35 billion dollars in post-WWII Germany, and a much larger amount of 117 billion USD in Afghanistan. The international community has executed over 128.000 projects and programmes in Afghanistan. The intriguing and shocking fact is that within this enormous number of projects there is no spatial expertise present in the chain of post-conflict reconstruction, orchestrated by military and diplomatic personnel and, to a lesser extent, NGO’s. Apart from that, most projects did not have a long lifespan and are deserted, unfinished, non-operational, or struggling with over-capacity.

IV-Bâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;/â&#x20AC;&#x201A; JAN WILLEM PETERSEN Founder & Principal, Specialist Operations

PROFILES.

Spatial planner, architect and researcher engaged with developing multidisciplinary strategies and shaping processes that rebuild resilient urban landscapes in conflict-affected environments.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Petersen starts his lecture off with a startling photo of the former Dutch Chief of Defence Tom Middendorp, giving a talk at the Future Force Conference 2017, entitled ‘Climate change leads to war, it’s a root cause of conflicts.’ This photo marks the primary focus of his professional practice: the war-torn landscape. Throughout his lecture, Petersen emphasises his works in Afghanistan. In introducing his work, he begins with a question: ‘How do we engage with war-torn landscapes – as an international community?’. As an example, Petersen highlights how the US government invested 35 billion dollars in post-WWII Germany, and a much larger amount of 117 billion USD in Afghanistan. This investment discrepency expresses the enormous efforts and projects that have accompanied the US presence in Afghanistan. The international community has executed over 128,000 projects in the region including facilities such as courthouses, clinics, prisons, hospitals, and schools. The intriguing and shocking fact is that within this enormous number of projects, there is no spatial expertise present in the chain of post-conflict reconstruction orchestrated by military and diplomatic personnel and, to a lesser extent, NGO’s. Apart from that, most projects did not have a long lifespan and are deserted, unfinished, nonoperational, or struggling with over-capacity. The second point of his lecture is about the position of his design practice in the post-war reconstruction of a city. The concern is to investigate the reasons that make certain reconstruction projects incredibly successful while others are not – and how designers can contribute to increasing the possibility of success. One project example is the provincial prison in South Afghanistan, built by both the Australian and the Dutch governments. He compares the dire condition prior to the reconstruction – without sanitation facilities and an improper living environment to the reconstruction designed by the Dutch that vastly improved conditions. The interesting aspect is how the profound mismatch between (western) ambitions and the local customs, rooms intended for prisoners – like a prayer space and visitors center – were cannibalised by prison staff, rendering the improvement for inmates obsolete. Petersen describes this phenomenon as ‘how good intentions of design become – to some extent – obsolete, because they do not match with how the spaces are utilised.’

JA N W I L L E M P E T E R SE N

Image 4.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Future Force Conference 2017 opening adress by Chief of Defence Tom Middendorp. Source: Future Force Conference 2017, Ministry of Defence. Courtesy of Jan Willem Petersen.

Image 5.â&#x20AC;&#x192; The change of uses by the inhabitants. Courtesy of Jan Willem Petersen.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Other examples of this “obsolete” design include a school that was stripped of its material in order to be reused as a luxury house and a second school, envisioned as an ‘open school for open society’, which was abandoned because it did not fit the local culture’s idea of openness. Along with examples, Petersen shows a clip of a soldier giving his opinions on how these reconstruction projects have changed the way the local society lives: ‘…it was worthless. It seems that they (the locals) don’t appreciate a lot of stuff that we have built for them…now they expect it (the projects), and if we don’t give them anything they will just change back (to the way they live before) and we can’t change their thought’. Reacting to this statement, Petersen argues that design can still be the instrument to change the way of thinking and society – not only to support the society but to facilitate change. The conclusion of the lecture questioned whether we as designers have the appropriate instruments to engage the post-conflicts areas. Petersen argues that with the actual forces that shape these post-conflict areas, those that influence the missions to shape those areas, there is much to learn by the designers to properly engage and develop new forces. He closes by stating that, ‘perhaps the key is in this immersive attitude (engagement with locals). Architecture should not be seen as a product but more as a process.’

JA N W I L L E M P E T E R SE N

Image 6.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Dire condition of the prison pre-reconstruction. Courtesy of Jan Willem Petersen.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Jan Willem Petersen [JWP] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

The theme of our event has been Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to this newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you whether you feel this notion is a helpful or relevant one, both generally and in the context of the design professions?

JWP

Super big question of course. I think obviously this changing landscape has a huge impact on the built environment and addresses all sorts of issues and therefore it is evidently part of the scope of the design professions and gives us new challenges to tackle as designers.

ULW

Some people have spoken of this as a new geological epoch, others in the new ways that society is impacting the world around us, do you have a particular take on the Anthropocene, at the macro or micro scale?

JWP

I think what is most interesting to me, but also the work we do as an office, is the realm of war torn landscapes. One could say for instance, that climate change is one of the root causes of conflict, of instability. If you zoom in to that particular area of expertise (war torn landscapes), you see a huge void. A huge lack of spatial thinking or the design discipline which has yet to enter this domain. For us, this is incredibly interesting because you start to collaborate in unpredictable and surprising coalitions, for instance with the military or foreign affairs. These kinds of coalitions are largely new and therefore we can speak about where architecture, or at least the role of the architect as designer, can move into.

JA N W I L L E M P E T E R SE N

”

ULW

Obviously with the Anthropocene comes this notion that we as societies are now able to effect geological and geographical change. Has this notion impacted on your work in conflict zones?

JWP

Not so much. I think what is interesting is that within the organisations we work with, there is a huge cultural shift. Let’s say the military profession’s current focus is not so much on the enemy but how they can support civilisation: the built environment, food production, the way villages and cities work. You see a monumental shift and cultural collapse of hierarchical organisation towards more collaborative organisation. We stepped in to allow design be of service to pregnant questions in a post 9/11 era.

ULW

With all these challenges that you are dealing with, are you optimistic that we will be able to navigate the challenges raised by the Anthropocene? If so, where do you think the solutions are most likely to come from?

JWP

I think the profession (of architecture and the built environment) is inherently optimistic, it is dealing with the future. But then again if you see the actual challenges we face and the instruments we have as designers, they are quite a limited scope. I am very curious if the profession and educational institutes are able to adapt over time and work with the actual forces that shape our changing environment. It is still incredibly conventional, shape and product driven. It will need to change this toward more process oriented approaches if we are to engage with increasingly complex societal issues. I strongly believe design can make a fundamental contribution to sustainable solutions as some of our projects demonstrated. Still, it’s a daily search (and struggle) to find ways forward for how design can become instrumental.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

“

‘Environmental aesthetics should accept the existing plurality of knowledge of nature. Every form of the human-nature relationship produces a different world’, allowing the constitution of a variety of problems and raising different questions. Pereira argues not to erase these worlds but to allow different worlds to exist simultaneously. ‘Environmental aesthetics cannot be predicated in the assumption of different modes of knowledge production, but has to mobilise those differences’.

IV-C / GODOFREDO PEREIRA Programme leader, MA Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Arts London

PROFILES.

Godofredo Pereira leads the Master in Environmental Architecture program at the Royal College of Arts, London and his doctoral thesis investigated political and territorial conflicts for underground resources in Venezuela and Chile. Before the RCA, he taught at The Bartlett School of Architecture and was part of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Anthropocene Curriculum & Campus, an interdisciplinary education and research platform that discusses the consequences of climate change for planetary architecture.

P E R S P EC T I V E S The origin of the word Anthropocene comes from “anthropos”, the human kind. This is the first notion in Dr Pereira’s lecture. For him, human practices such as capitalism and colonialism have brought us together but have also resulted in the domestication of the land: this in itself constitutes a form of architecture. Domestication through agriculture and urbanism has consumed vast territories, created water stress and dispossessed indigenous communities of their land. From this perspective, Dr Pereira argues that ‘architecture has always been an environmental agent’. Pereira explains that the history of colonial architecture has been the history of environmental extraction for the creation of commodities. An example of this notion is the extraction of oil in the Niger Delta. Here, pipes are horizontally positioned against soil that is in constant movement, producing frequent leakages. In cases such as this, it is essential to enable the means of communication and representation to describe these conditions, especially considering the risks of repression and censorship around environmental activism, as the murder of Nigerian activist Ken SaroWiwa, illustrates. Another important argument within this lecture is that environmental architecture should engage with environmentalism of the poor. This is essential since many environmental problems affect marginalised groups around the globe: this includes issues of gender and ethnicity. To illustrate, Pereira describes how environmental racism is evident in the United States through the allocation of toxic, polluting industries in the vicinity of black, latino or native-american communities. On a global scale, patterns in the extraction of resources reveal those who suffer the most from such discrimination. Fortunately, a number of groups have been protesting these practices with women being at the forefront of environmental claims. The Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil for instance, has fought against large scale land ownership by oligarchs and its environmental consequences. Engaging with environmentalism is essential in order to navigate the scales of environmental processes with their direct and indirect consequences. For instance, one case of indirect environmental entanglements is that of Saharan dust which, in its movement west, provides nutrients for the Amazonian rainforest. This realisation challenges two main assumptions: first, the notion of direct cause and effect by identifying causality despite a lack of proximity and second, traditional architectonic thinking in which deterministic explanations follow expectations of progress by means of transformation. Consequently, new terms such as environmental, indirect, remote, slow or dispersed violence, are emerging in the theoretical lexicon. This then facilitates the understanding of actions such as large scale deforestation as structural violence due to the organisms and institutions that allow this practice, which not only affect the natural environment but also the social ecosystem in which it is embedded.

GODOFREDO PEREIRA

Image 7.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Satellite Imagery of agricultural landscape as an example of land domestication. Source: Google EARTH. June 2018.

P E R S P EC T I V E S Creating new definitions also contributes to the validation of plural forms of spatial thinking. For Dr Pereira, we have always domesticated land across the globe and we have developed different modes of knowledge production. To illustrate, satellite imagery of the Amazonian rainforest - collected using remote sensing - demonstrates the ways in which untouched nature (as it is perceived in the west) has been occupied in sustainable ways for millennia via “cosmological urbanism”. Dr Pereira advocates the need for an environmental aesthetic. In other words, alternative means of representing different environmental concerns. He defends the notion that environmental architects require the sensibility to recognise materials, acoustics, chemicals and all forms of technologies that allow the identification of spatial interventions in a particular social and environmental process. By making use of technologies with a different framework and new perspectives, architects can ‘re-think questions and engage in the multi-scale ecologies in which architecture participates’. Technology then serves as a tool to recognise and make visible, alternative methods of knowledge production and relation to nature. Environmental aesthetics should accept the existing plurality of knowledge of nature. Every form of the human-nature relationship produces a different world, allowing the constitution of a variety of problems and raising different questions. Pereira argues not to erase these worlds but to allow different worlds to exist simultaneously. ‘Environmental aesthetics cannot be predicated in the assumption of different modes of knowledge production, but has to mobilise those differences’. As an environmentalist and activist, Dr Pereira clarifies that ‘protection of nature is the worst thing environmentalist can do’. He explains that in Western conceptions, this refers largely to nature without humans using national parks as the primary example: constituting a tool for the dispossession of land inhabited by communities around the world. Separation from nature is a concept of protection that aligns with few. In other modes of living, the understanding of nature comes from human participation as an intrinsic element of nature: there is no opposition. Recognising multiple meanings of the natural that shift from nature to environment, in which environment ‘implies, human, bacteria, animals, trees and future generations’. Dr Pereira explains that our profession, with attention to the tectonic scale, is only concerned with the interior as its environment, speculating on the necessity of a secure, protected interior. This idea, he argues, is something that architecture needs to escape from. Comfort is not dependent on the interior or a physical parameter, ‘therefore, environmental architecture rediscovers the exterior from an environmental perspective as an existential territory’. 40

GODOFREDO PEREIRA

Since the purpose of architecture is to produce an image of the future, Dr Pereira argues that it affects imagination and can later become “common sense”. But architecture can be unimaginative and resort to the interior, to separating nature and culture, and to following western expectations of what development should look like or consist of. Lately, architecture has been pervasive in creating ecocities with new low carbon technologies under an obsolete political structure. To conclude, he calls for better models of thinking and design, ‘architecture has the responsibility to decolonise its imagination. To explore futures beyond western capitalist ways of thinking’. To gain inspiration from science fiction, eco-feminism or afro-futurism, to develop futures from a non-spectacular perspective: not more sustainable but the production of decolonised futures in which positions and roles are not taken for granted.

Image 8. Source: Stanford Torus, NASA, 1975.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Godofredo Pereira [GP] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

The theme of our event has been Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to this newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you whether you feel this notion is a helpful or relevant one, both generally and in the context of the design professions?

It is a very problematic notion but it is helpful. So the answer has two sides. There has been a large discussion about the notion of limits within the Anthropocene precisely around two specific aspects. One that concerns the Anthropos and we know that concerning climate change and environmental transformation, the Anthropos is not homogenous...that humankind is actually brought together by imperialism, by colonialism and so when we put forward the notion of the Anthropos it actually flattens out all the differences and those differences should be recognised. And they should be recognised because people will be affected differently. So that is one limitation. There are several other limitations: philosophical, political, etc. Having said that, the kind of conversations that emerged and I remember googling the Anthropocene 7 or 8 years ago, it was basically non existent. All the academic funding that came with the anthropocene... it transforms disciplines, alliances between disciplines, and promotes attention to those which are not within one discipline. So all in all, it has been incredibly transformative in the practices one can do specifically with the term.

GODOFREDO PEREIRA

”

ULW

In that respect, has the notion that our society now seems to be able to effect geographical and planetary change impacted on your work and practice?

Yes of course. It impacted on my work in the sense that I was working on resource extraction and its relation with environmental change before I started engaging with the Anthropocene. It allows, from the perspective of academia and environmental activism, immediately an entire world of funding and conferences throughout Europe and the world which open up new possibilities. So the funding for conferences, writing papers, to sustain research, and more importantly funding for environmental causes opened whole sets of fields and connections that were previously a bit more closed.

ULW

With this greater interest, research, and funding towards the topic, are you optimistic that we will able to navigate the challenges raised by these planetary and anthropogenic changes? If so, where do you think the solution most likely to come from?

I don’t think there is solution, because i don’t think that it is a problem that goes away. The Anthropocene is an eruption that is not kind to us. It doesn’t recognise that some of us are guilty and others are not. It doesn’t go away and it’s not reversible. It is not that if we change something, it goes back. What we need to learn is to live differently and to expect different Earths and to expect not only the natural disasters, but migrations, military, food scarcity, land use and access to water. So we won’t find solutions, but hopefully we will find different ethics in different types of politics on how to start negotiating these problems.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

“

In 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group was established in order to ‘discover what the Anthropocene represents and try to formalise the term as a unit of geological time.’ The group’s initial 2016 announcement proposed that the Anthropocene commenced in the mid-20th century and has since attracted global attention, but what is the evidence that shows dramatic changes to our planet so recently?

IV-D / COLIN WATERS Honorary Professor, Department of Geology, University of Leicester Secretary, Anthropocene Working Group, International Commission on Stratigraphy

PROFILES.

Professor Colin Waters is a former Principal Scientific Officer at the British Geological Survey and currently holds an honorary Chair at the University of Leicester’s School of Geography, Geology and the Environment. He is secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group, established by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, and is actively working in Anthropocene research. His main research focus is on the understanding of the nature and relationships of geological strata that accumulated during the Carboniferous (~360-300 million years ago) and Anthropocene (last 70 years to present).

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Officially, we are currently living in the Holocene, an epoch characterised by a stable environment that has persisted for the last 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age. However, in the year 2000 Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggested that this epoch has ended, and he coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe his view that the Earth has entered a new and unstable condition. This is the argument that Professor Colin Waters opens the second day of the symposium with. In 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group was established in order to ‘discover what the Anthropocene represents and try to formalise the term as a unit of geological time.’ The group’s initial 2016 announcement proposed that the Anthropocene commenced in the mid-20th century and has since attracted global attention, but what is the evidence that shows dramatic changes to our planet so recently? This lecture summarises the group’s findings across three categories of key environmental signals, namely novel materials (e.g. concrete and plastic), geochemical signals (e.g. fossil fuel combustion and climate change), and biological signals (e.g. invasive species and extinctions). These signals demonstrate the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, beginning with what has been termed by some as the “early Anthropocene” of deforestation and agriculture, then the Columbian exchange of new and old world species and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. But it is the great acceleration in global population, resource consumption, global trade and technological advances that occurred post World War II, during the mid-20th century, which shows the most dramatic environmental changes and has been chosen to represent the start of the geological Anthropocene. For example, signals involving novel materials, such as the production of concrete have risen exponentially since the 1950s, resulting in current rates of materials transport (such as sand, gravel and limestone) that exceed the natural processes that transport sediments to the oceans. Another example is that the amount of aluminium produced in the past 70 years is enough to cover the surface of the United States in a sheet of foil. A similar trajectory is apparent in the demand and production of plastic, where the amount of plastic produced since the 1950s is roughly 8 billion tons, nearly enough to wrap the entire planet twice in plastic film. Geochemical signals have accompanied rising energy demands over the past 60 years and the burning of fossil fuels to satisfy that demand has led to an increase in global atmospheric carbon emissions to 90 billion tons annually. That is the highest rate in the past 65 million years. Such greenhouse gas emissions have caused a dramatic change from a 7000year trend of falling temperatures to rising world temperatures since the 1850s, with associated increased rates of sea-level rise. In terms of biological signals, the key issues are the rising rates of species extinction, invasive species transported across the world by human activity (both on purpose and accidentally) and domesticated animals that account for up to 65% of the terrestrial megafauna biomass when compared to wildlife, representing less than 3%. All of these transformations are 46

C O L I N WAT E R S

Image 9.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Cumulative curves show 500 million tons of aluminium that has been produced in the last 70 Years (red curve) and 500 billion tons of concrete (blue curve). Source: Modified from Waters et al. (2016)

Image 10.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Relative temperature change since the last ice age with the industrial revolution changing the trend towards warming temperature. Source: Modified from Waters et al. (2016)

P E R S P EC T I V E S examples of the many signals pointing towards an Anthropocene epoch. These findings by the Anthropocene Working Group were published in the January 2016 edition of Science entitled “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene” which Altmetric listed in their 2016’s top 100 research articles. To take a closer look at the urban context, Professor Waters presents his research with the British Geological Survey that sought to quantify anthropogenic modifications and deposits in central London. ‘Taking London as an example, in the late 19th century, we can see widespread modification of the subsurface and elements such as metro lines, the sewer, water and gas systems are all modifying the shallow subsurface.’ He continues to suggest that ‘we are not only building upwards, but also downwards, and as a consequence we gradually develop accumulations of artificial deposits.’ The research focuses on the central London boroughs of City of London, the site of the initial Roman development, and Tower Hamlets, an area that was largely developed after 1850. Borehole results were used as the main inventory source of this research, clear patterns were observed and interestingly these deposits were also influenced by their natural context. For example, the areas adjacent to the river Thames show greater levels of artificial deposits. This is most likely the result of the raising of the shallow subsiding floodplain land that was used for development. The results, as extrapolated from reviewing 1.44% of the city’s total area, suggest that the weight of these artificial deposits across the City of London is 17.5 Million tonnes and averages 3.74 meters thick and for Tower Hamlets is 82.2 million tonnes and averages 2.54 meters thick. Based upon this, the total weight of London’s anthropogenic deposits is estimated to be 11.25 billion tonnes. The research also relates these artificial sub-surface deposits to the building heights above ground such that, in Tower Hamlets, the taller the building the deeper the artificial deposits beneath, whereas in the City of London the reverse is true – probably constrained by stricter planning regulations in the historical centre of the city. Hence, the impact of anthropogenic activities in an urban environment significantly alters the composition of the subsurface. ‘What are the implication of the Anthropocene in urban areas? Are the production of novel materials sustainable in building our cities? Will climate change make cities inhabitable? What are the solutions for cities built on subsiding deltas affected by rising sea levels? Can built environment be used to maintain biodiversity?’ These questions close the lecture along with an emphasis on the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach to address the challenges of this epoch. The urban disciplines rely on the findings of the field of geoscience to be able to appropriately act on such problems. The drastic changes in the Anthropocene can be better explored and addressed if the epoch is formally recognised as a new formal chronostratigraphic unit within the geological time scale. Professor Waters and the Anthropocene Working Group are currently working towards this goal and this process may influence future environmental and political decision making.

C O L I N WAT E R S

Image 11.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Correlation between building height and the thickness of deposits for that plot. Source: Terrington et al. (in press) Quantifying anthropogenic modification of the shallow geosphere in central London, UK

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Colin Waters [CW] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

Currently you are involved in researching and documenting this new epoch, this new branch of science, do you think the Anthropocene is the game changer?

Certainly, the evidence that we’ve found suggests that the planet has changed its state from that time prior to 1950, where it’s very much a naturally driven system... there is a human influence admittedly. We’ve seen across the board when we look at the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere...all across the planet there are signals that suggests there has been dramatic changes happening since the mid20th century. So, for us, the evidence is there and we have to demonstrate it to our peers. There is natural deposition in oceans, lakes, soils: they are all showing signals that these changes are happening very dramatically and it means that the Earth’s state has changed from what we are familiar with, to some extent that we are experimenting with the planet in a new state where it will behave in a different way, perhaps more chaotically than it has been in the past and it is very difficult for us to predict how the changes will happen.

ULW

In terms of researching these changes, given they are happening in a more accelerated rate than typical geological changes, are there any particular challenges for the scientific community in researching and addressing a subject that seems to be gathering pace?

For many of the different aspects that we are looking at, the information has only become available in very recent years. Things like the fuel ash as a signal that was recognised for the first time in 2015; we have only two years of knowledge of this and yet it turns out to be very distinctively related to the Anthropocene. So, who knows what other areas of science would come up in the next year or two which also link to the evolution of our science. It is an interdisciplinary topic that we are feeding from new communities. Architecture is perhaps one that we have not mined sufficiently in the past that can provide information that is new to us and help build the story that we are developing.

C O L I N WAT E R S

”

ULW

Your working group is putting forward a proposal towards the recognition of the Anthropocene as new geological epoch, can you quickly summarise where you are at in the process?

The working group started in 2009 and up until last year we were just pulling together the information that was available. So looking through environmental science work that was building up the story of the changes. We are recognising different type of signals representing Anthropocene and where we can actually see those, and how long lasting we think some of those signals would be. There is no point finding a signal that will only be present in the environment for the next few decades.

We have to demonstrate that these signals will be present in the environment for a long geological time interval and that the changes that happened since 1950 will be distinct from the signals prior to it. So that anyone who is a geologist in a million years time, looking back into the accumulation of materials can quickly point their finger and say that is when it changed: from pre-Anthropocene to the Anthropocene. We think we are at that point now. It may be in certain environments that we can see the thickness of the Anthropogenic deposits are a few millimeters only; if you go to the deep ocean the rate of accumulation is very small. Then you go to somewhere such as a landfill site in a city, you may have tens of metres of Anthropogenic deposits accumulating. All with novel materials which didn’t exist in a great amount prior to 1950, such as plastic and concrete.

ULW

Some of the data of the environmental signals that you showed presents a rise since 1950s and a sudden drop in the emissions and production of these materials. Does it mean that it has an end?

Well it does and it doesn’t, there are certain things that will be permanent. For example the biological changes that have happened are irreversible. Once species are transferred across the planet, you can’t put them in a box and put them back in their indigenous state. Even things like carbon dioxide, this will last as a signal for thousands of years. Even if we are reducing our carbon emission immediately, we are still looking at emissions which are going to be elevated above natural levels for thousands of years. At the present there is no indication that we are changing that trend. It is quite acceptable in geological successions to recognise just a spike, it doesn’t have to be always a permanent change. A good example to relate to the Anthropocene is the end of the Cretaceous Period when the dinosaurs became extinct, there was a meteorite impact that resulted in a spike of iridium at that time (an extra-terrestrial element). So you find a layer of a few millimeters thick which is high in iridium and we can use that as the basis of the start of the new Paleogene Period following the Cretaceous. It is acceptable to use this spike as a tool to define a marker which can correlate from one continent to another. I think to justify a new name you have to see a state change, a game changer, to a state which now is very different from what it was before and is not recreatable to a large extent either….a step change.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

“

The lecture is entitled “After Nature”, borrowed from a book written by Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: a politics for the Anthropocene . In this book, Purdy explains that nature has become something political. The natural and artificial have merged on every scale and real nature doesn’t exist anymore. Therefore, the Anthropocene is a call to take responsibility for what we make as well as for what we destroy: for a new politics of nature that is also the starting point of Sabine Mueller’s lecture. 2

[2] Purdy, J. (2005), After Nature: a politics for the Anthropocene, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

IV-E / SABINE MUELLER Professor of Urbanism, Oslo School of Architecture Founding partner, SMAQ

PROFILES.

Architect and urban designer, professor of Urbanism at AHO, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, cofounder and principal of SMAQ in Berlin.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

The lecture is entitled “After Nature”, borrowed from a book written by Jedediah Purdy, After Mature: a politics for the Anthropocene*. In this book, Purdy explains that nature has become something political. The natural and artificial have merged on every scale and real nature doesn’t exist anymore. Therefore, the Anthropocene is a call to take responsibility for what we make as well as for what we destroy: for a new politics of Nature that is also the starting point of Sabine Mueller’s lecture. This new kind of politics of nature is echoed in a piece by the artist Hans Haacke: the Condensation Cube. This sculpture conveys that objects which influence their environments cannot be seen as isolated objects but should be considered as a part of a system. Projecting this idea onto our profession, we need to look at architectural designs, or cities as systems and Mueller’s (sometimes quite conceptual) projects reflect this way of thinking. The Bath project in Stuttgart, Germany is a park folly that suggests sustainable infrastructure is not an add-on and is only efficient when it engages the senses. A water hose is arranged on a wooden frame as shade screen, bench and water container. The water running through the hoses heats up in the summer sun, fills the bath with warm water and provokes both use and misuse. The project is carefully described as a “spatialised” solar collector where water flow and energy conversion become inhabitable. This is an expression of the anthropogenic condition in which natural and technical systems are intertwined: in this case interweaving water, sun, space and use. SMAQ’s charter for Dubai, or the “X-Palm”, is a critical manifesto for the urban transformation of an isolated urban area into a socially and ecologically open urban space. The palm, an artificial peninsula in Dubai, now contrasts Haacke’s statement in the sense that is negates the existence of the environment. According to Mueller, alongside it being a rather childish gesture of a palm tree drawn in the sea, its shape was conceived to create the maximum amount of beach-front real estate. As the desire to occupy and live in this space is dwindling, it raises the question: how can we transform the Palm into a productive environment with social and cultural diversity, instead of the current practices of exclusion? In an attempt to reinstate the relationship between the palm and its environment, particularly marine processes, SMAQ has developed a number of development alternatives. In one of the explorations, the palm is opened up towards the sea by creating soft dunes that also facilitate wildlife. At this moment, the current landscape relies on photogenic beaches and visual qualities. But in order to create a productive landscape, renewable energy infrastructures could be profitably applied to this particular landform. Solar

SABINE MUELLER

Image 12. The ‘X-Palm’ manifesto, in Dubai. Courtesy of Sabine Mueller.

Image 13. The Bath project, in Stuttgart, Germany. Courtesy of Sabine Mueller.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

panel arrays could make use of the circular shape and the well developed water bodies are highly suited for aquaculture. Water can be desalinated locally and used for the irrigation of dates, citrus fruits and olives that can be grown and harvested on the available lands. Other products can be obtained with tourism income and in this way, the 20,000 inhabitants on the island could almost become self-sufficient. In addition to these ecological issues, the palm is shaped to exclude not only its environment but to serve very few people. The island could provide for many more people if more effective use is made of the infrastructure and water surface. Floating houses could be added and parcels split to house a broader range of inhabitants: five bedroom villas could be transformed into five separate units sharing a communal space. Considering the enormous investment that was necessary for the Palm’s development (equivalent to the amount needed to upgrade all of Latin America’s slums), these measures offer solutions to maximise effect with minimal effort. The Rainmaker project on the periphery of Casablanca addresses innovative rainwater management as a new strategy for urban projects in a city experiencing high urbanisation pressures and dealing with growing water scarcity. The aim is to generate local water cycles by increasing the frequency of rainfall. Currently, water is pumped from the Atlas Mountains and then discharged into the sea after use from where only 20% is returned back to the land by the water cycle. In order to retain this water on land and prevent the land from drying out, wastewater is used for irrigation and fertilisation of large scale plantations. Closed greenhouses also secure the water needs of existing settlements and newly planned urbanisation through water reuse: a closed greenhouse irrigates plants and evaporated water condensated for re-use. By employing closed water cycles, not a drop of water will be lost to promote the area’s water and vegetable self-sufficiency. These plantations evaporate water and cool the atmosphere, encouraging condensation and rainfall…the same process as operates within the closed greenhouses. The prize-winning Cumulus project in Oslo (named after the function of a cloud rather than the appearance) accumulates and occasionally releases water as a waterfall. This mixed use neighborhood is a potential binding element between different suburbs. It has a low aesthetic value, but a lot of program. SMAQ suggested re-combining all mono-functional programs and to densify them into a programmatic surface that is open to a diverse mix of uses. The open space program is combined with high rise residential buildings whose roofs collect rainfall and use it for flushing toilets. On the annual ‘Waterfall Day’, excess stored water comes gushing down from the roofs onto the public square while in winter, this excess water freezes as a central ice-skating rink. Water therefore becomes a key factor in the

SABINE MUELLER

production of a new form of public space and urban spectacle where the different cyclical rhythms and urban circumstances of water play a role. These projects are all great examples of how to work with the environment, instead of working against it, to intertwine human-systems and ecosystems and perhaps suggest that conservation of ecosystems is of yesterday. Today, the Anthropocene liberates us to combine humanity with urban and environmental design and to turn urban and environmental design into ecosystem design.

Image 14.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Rendering of the Rainmaker project in Casablanca. Courtesy of Sabine Mueller.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Sabine Mueller [SM] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

As you know the theme of our event is Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to the newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you if you think this notion is a helpful or relevant one, in general and in context of the design profession?

I think that the term is extremely helpful. We were totally excited when it became more popular because the way that we have been thinking and also designing really corresponds to the terminology. This has to do with the fact that the Anthropocene acknowledges that nature is made and if you see this, then the design profession is almost liberated. Liberated in the sense that we don’t need to protect nature anymore but rather, that we can see it as an integral part of our design profession.

ULW

The first day of our event, Prof. Colin Waters, a scientist and geologist, told us about working on categorising what the Anthropocene means in scientific and geological terms. Yesterday, we talked about what it means in social terms. For you as a practitioner, is it useful to have this phrase that you can attach sensibilities of environmental protection and societal implications of climate change to?...in order to recognise the realm in which we’re working.

Yes, definitely. For us, it is about constructing environments. That is what the spatial design professions are dealing with. Landscape, Urbanism and also Architecture, maybe a bit less. Our profession becomes extremely productive when you take on that responsibility. Rather than saying, we stay within our own realm and what we do is “just urbanism”. It helps to integrate the different layers that are so important as a more lasting form of urbanisation and landscape.

ULW

So, from a global perspective, the Anthropocene is a recognition that human processes are effecting geological and planetary change. It might indicate a warning and make people more concerned. But at a local level, you are suggesting that this is empowering: that we can make fundamental changes and craft the landscape.

SABINE MUELLER

”

Yes, in the Anthropocene, the responsibility is ours. This makes us act and design in another way and realise that it is in our hands.

ULW

Have you noticed a recent shift in attitudes towards your work, in the last 5-10 years when the Anthropocene became more a topic of awareness, in terms of crafting landscapes?

That is an interesting question. I think that our speculative projects fit much better into the contemporary discussion. But when looking at projects that concern realworld communities, it is still extremely difficult. Here, the term has not made a big impact yet. Because the planning environment is still very much coined by laws that were made at a time when we thought of nature as something that could be polluted and needed to be protected from human activity. In some ways, we think that this is unproductive because it pushes certain natural processes out of the human realm, for example water management. This is often something that is being hidden, rather then working with it and making it part of the urban realm.

ULW

Yesterday, Christophe Girot was talking about how he sees the Anthropocene. His work is a hybrid condition of manipulated landscapes and landscapes that manipulate urban systems and societies. It sounds like that’s a similar position to your thoughts.

Yes, manipulation is obviously an important term for us. We like to think of Urbanism as effect, and trying to embed ecological systems within it. Rather than saying that ecological systems are effect and we have to be carefull operating it. Actually, coming from certain statements and knowledge of regenerative agriculture for example, one can also understand that human impact on the landscape can be positive.

ULW

So my final question was going to be whether you are optimistic that we will be able to navigate the challenges raised by the Anthropocene and where you think these solutions lie? You already hint towards that with regenerative agriculture but are there any other areas you are optimistic about?

I’ve seen projects that can really work against desertification. These kind of projects make you really happy. In terms of optimism, I am not sure if we, as all mankind, can navigate it but we should be optimistic in local projects. Even if it is just a little change in a small environment, it can generate an ecological imaginary on how to proceed.

ULW

Step by step…

Yes, that may be…

P E R S P EC T I V E S

â&#x20AC;&#x153;

As designers, we ought to increase the positive impact of fabrication processes, prolong the lifetime of manufactured goods and reduce the negative impacts on nature through design. Superuse method focuses on ways of diverting the disused material found around the project location and upcycling it. Designing with those ingredients and creating awareness with the stakeholders of the site.

IV-F / JAN JONGERT Founding partner, Superuse Studios

PROFILES.

Jan Jongert studied at TU Delft and graduated in 2003 from the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. Founder of Superuse Studios, an architecture office based in Rotterdam. Their innovative method considers design not as a linear process but as a continuous cycle of creation and re-creation, use and “super-use”. Superuse Studios strongly believes in the connection between society and nature and therefore, engage with methods and tools to make our society more sustainable.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

To begin his lecture, Jan Jongert reflects on the Anthropocene and delves into our current methods of production. He argues that as designers, we ought to increase the positive impact of fabrication processes, prolong the lifetime of manufactured goods and reduce the negative impacts on nature through design. He illustrates this via wind turbine blades. Their fabrication requires vast demand of energy and human involvement however traditionally, their operable life ends after just 10 years. This cycle ends in an incineration facility and produces a minimal amount of energy yet this approach does not validate the amount of resources used during the manufacturing process: it still generates waste. Superuse suggested to divert the material from this process of downcycling to create value. They used these wind turbine elements as part of a playground design in Rotterdam, extending the life of the blades from 10 to 40 years. Another instance of resourced-based design is the materials in timber cable spools that are normally replaced every 5 years, disposed of and transformed into a small amount of energy during the incineration process. With Villa Welpeloo, Superuse Studios converted the timber slats in the spools into a building facade material that both gives the building a unique patina but should extend the material life by up to 45 years. The studio is also exploring steel waste which is melted to produce new steel. Instead, they re-use obsolete steel elements as prefabricated pieces with a specific aesthetic quality that are still capable of performing functions such as fences and facades. These cases are prime examples of the studio’s approach, taking material from the site and extending their longevity through design. He calls this process the “Superuse method”, focusing on ways of diverting the disused material found around the project location and upcycling it. Designing with those ingredients and creating awareness with the stakeholders of the site. For this process, mapping becomes an important instrument to communicate with clients regarding the potential resources that might surround a project location, but also to communicate the material origins to visitors. Their design for the Moes Bar and Restaurant in Amsterdam also followed this approach. They called the mapping exercise the “Harvestmap” and as Jongert explains, this is one of the studio’s main strategies to approach large scale processes around the area of a project. Building on this exercise, Superuse Studios created an online platform to communicate potential resources in The Netherlands while at the same time contributing to material upcycle processes.

JA N J O N G E RT

Image 15. Villa Welpeloo Superuse Studios, Rotterdam, 2009. Courtesy of Jan Jongert

Image 16. Wikado project, Superuse Studios, Rotterdam, 2012. Courtesy of Jan Jongert

P E R S P EC T I V E S In 2016, stepping beyond the spatial realm, Superuse Studios implemented the Harvestmap in Shenzhen. Being a large productive city, not only an important source of waste resources, Shenzhen also represents a good case study for a significant decrease of negative environmental impacts. Using the map, they communicated with investors from the waste industry and illustrated the existing potential of material resources to local designers. Superuse Studios also used the Harvestmap for the Afrikaandermarket in Rotterdam where they created maps and diagrams to analyse material flows, understand the current costs, identify alternatives and engage with a circular economy. They concluded that waste management costs could be reduced by 50% with waste separation and that these wastes could become new products and allow entrepreneurs to develop new businesses. Harvestmaps are extremely useful in industrial areas given the ample production of waste. For Jongert, they also provide opportunities for new waste industries. Superuse Studios constructed a waste inventory of Binckhorst in The Hague and suggested a 10% reduction in resource use at the district scale. To do this, they focused on inventories for the waste flows of small companies such as a beer brewery and were able to redirect the waste from one enterprise (spent grain from the brewing process) to others that could benefit (such as a bakery that now makes baked goods with the brewery waste). This not only diversifies production, but prolongs the life of waste and creates the potential for a new company to manage this exchange of waste resources. Jongert insists that although circular thinking reduces waste production, it relegates humans from the production process. Based on Gunter Pauli’s “Blue Economy” and Luigi Bistagnino’s “Systemic Design”, Superuse Studios has expanded circular economy approaches to the notion of the blue economy that places people at the centre and gives them input into production practices. They applied this concept in Rotterdam’s “Blue City”. This site was a derelict water park and instead of transforming it into housing, the studio created a spatial setting for blue economy activities. The site aims to communicate with the general public about alternative production processes and to invite local and regional entrepreneurs to engage with waste reducing practices. In the building, multiple companies exchange waste, products and services thereby creating an ecosystem for resource flows.

JA N J O N G E RT

Image 17.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Blue City, Superuse Studios, Rotterdam 2015. Courtesy of Jan Jongert

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Jan Jongert [JJ] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

The theme of our event has been Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to this newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you whether you feel this notion is a relevant or a helpful one, both generally as well as in the context of the design professions?

Well I think very much, as the human impact is growing when you look at building impacts for instance, building industries are consuming one third of all the resources, a lot of energy, and producing a lot of waste. So trying to look at the human impact and to find new strategies that could influence and have a positive impact on how our flows of materials, energy and resources are travelling is very important.

ULW

So one of our speakers this morning was discussing how much concrete is being produced and how it is now a factor in moving more sediments and materials around the world than natural processes. So your practice is very much about redressing that trend and trying to come up with new ways of construction to reduce those massive flows of materials or production of new materials?

Yes, we very simply started looking at the back-end of the building industry, like where does the waste emerge and how can we actually immediately use the positive value of that to create new urban environments with as much value as possible for those that we work with. So it is more like a strategy that we developed over the past twenty years to make and test, at least for ourselves, if we could transform our way of practice. Since the last five years we see that this is picking up and more practices are working this way.

ULW

It really does seem that this idea of the Anthropocene has been gathering steam in the past five to ten years and is becoming a topic around which people can easily understand some of the more diffuse topics such as climate change, material use, and weather changes. So have you noticed in the past five to ten years a shift in perception and a more ready acceptance of your techniques and ideas?

JA N J O N G E RT

”

Well, in the first sixteen years we had to do a lot of experiments to prove that it would be possible to realise a construction practice in this way. But we see more and more trends that look from this perspective to change the building industry. The question I would have, something I addressed in the lecture as well, is if the human and industry impact is very clear, whether those industries themselves have humans in a central position? That is another question, and something I would like to challenge. Whether the Anthropocene has actually resulted in human focused design practices I’m not so sure about.

ULW

So you still feel that design practices or projects are more focused on infrastructure?

Exactly, on how to get the process done, more than what it is about. I think more than just trying to look at how we’re going to change the building industry. We are also looking at how we can change the program and activities that people have within those environments and how you can actually change the activities of different companies and entrepreneurs and inhabitants of environments in order to make an ecosystem that benefits everyone.

ULW

Is that with the view towards making our built fabric a bit more resilient to change and less short term?

Yes, resilience indeed, in a way that it is able to adapt to changes so that it is not a static new perfect environment but actually that it can really change with the changing environment. Allowing inhabitants and entrepreneurs to operate and act in this.

ULW

So, you’ve obviously been working in this field for a while and you’ve noticed some changes in attitude and techniques in practice. Are you optimistic that we’ll be able to navigate these challenges that have been thrown up by the Anthropocene and if so, where do you see these solutions most likely to come from?

I’m an optimistic person by nature, so yes. But sure, if we manage to really make the change fast enough I am not so sure about it. What is important and gives positive feedback is really seeing people being empowered and able to work in this way. So that is something that I hope will spread soon enough in order to change the sort of rusted infrastructures that have been built so far.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

â&#x20AC;&#x153;

What is complicated about the Anthropocene is that suddenly we are in the condition when the very large and the very small, the very near and the very far, the very fast and the very slow, the weak and the strong start to make a mess of conventions and our disciplinary apparatus. And pose the question of what kinds of tools, techniques, frameworks, epistemologies we use to describe the kinds of conditions that we are being faced with.

IV-Gâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;/â&#x20AC;&#x201A; ADRIAN L AHOUD Dean, School of Architecture, Royal College of Arts London

PROFILES.

Adrian Lahoud is Dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. Prior to his current role at the RCA he was director of the MA programme at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, a research fellow in the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project, studio master for the Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design at the Architectural Association and director of the MA Urban Design program at the Bartlett, University College London.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

The following is a transcript of Adrian Lahoud's lecture at the Urban and Landscape Week 2017.

It is a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me. I want to start with some thoughts to some of the presentations, I have been working on the idea of the Anthropocene for many years and in fact questions around climate change formed part of my PhD research many years ago. I want to make some initial comments before I start the lecture on what the Anthropocene means to me. I think if it means anything, it has to problematise the idea that we can speak as a “we”, as a collective group, and of the relevance that we can speak on behalf of something called humanity. There is a nice story French anthropologist Levi Strauss used to tell about when the conquistadors arrived in South America. When they started the colonisation of South America, they would send out parties of priests who would go, and they would capture natives and torture them. What they were doing was trying to find out whether these people that they had just come across had a “soul” because they clearly have a body. What the conquistadors didn’t realise was at the same time, the indigenous were capturing the conquistadors and they were taking them to the river and they tried to drown them. By drowning them, they were trying to work out if they had a “body”. Because in fact from the perspective of the indigenous, everything has a soul, plants have a soul, animals have a soul. What’s interesting about that story is the perspective of the conquistadors and the indigenous is radically different, they inhabit different kinds of worlds, they are partitioned in different kinds of ways. For the indigenous everything has a soul, for the conquistadors everything has a body. They had two different kinds of problems and interestingly they had two different kinds of scientific methods to verify which one of these claims was correct. Why is that interesting for us? I’m going to pose a challenge for you to try and put yourselves into the perspectives of others and imagine that we are in an architecture schools in Lagos or in Sudan or in Algiers or in other African countries. Do you think that the architecture students in those parts of the world would be having debates about what we should do globally or worry about the urban challenges faced by Western European cities? It is intentionally a provocation but it’s an important provocation. Why? Because our ability to speak as part of a global “we”, our assumption that somehow our role is to help the rest of the world and that we can speak on behalf of the world, we can speak on behalf of humanity as architects. It’s a legacy of colonialism and it’s precisely what the Anthropocene forces us to

ADRIAN LAHOUD

Image 18. Two different kinds of bodies: atmospheric particle (left) & human (right). Source: Adrian Lahoud. 2016

Image 19. Scale as scientific enquiry. Source: Adrian Lahoud 2015

P E R S P EC T I V E S

challenge. To decolonise our own thinking and our own perspectives with regards to the perspectives of others, to denaturalise them. It is what I want to talk about tonight through case studies. This talk is about two different kinds of bodies (image 18); the first body is atmospheric particles, as you can see here an example of an aerosol particle and the second kind of body is human beings, here is an image captured by a drone photographing a refugee boat in the Mediterranean. I want to describe that moment of contact as something incredibly important in the idea of the Anthropocene that forces us to think about our relationship to the material world. In this case each body comes in contact with each other and they set each other in a motion, a movement and a counter movement. The aerosol particle in this story would float from the northern hemisphere towards the southern hemisphere and the human bodies would float from the southern hemisphere to the northern one. The first thing that I am trying to say is that whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important in terms of thinking through the Anthropocene is the problem of scale and I want to suggest that what we need to try to do is think our way from the very small to the very large. Our disciplinary histories are organised according to scale (image 19). That is extremely true in the sciences and also in architecture, we tend to think that urban design is sitting somewhere between planning and architecture, slightly smaller than one, slightly bigger than another. That suggests that there is something around the kinds of problems that were posed historically to these disciplines that converge around certain dimensions. What is complicated about the Anthropocene is that suddenly we are in the condition when the very large and the very small, the very near and the very far, the very fast and the very slow, the weak and the strong start to make a mess of our conventions and disciplinary apparatus. And pose the question of what kinds of tools, techniques, frameworks, epistemologies we use to describe the kinds of conditions that we are being faced with. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s consider the importance of scale in climate sciences in which science has to be extracted from a vast sea of scale of variability, consider that this sea of cycles and oscillations spans from the nano-second quick flicker of infrared to half million year passage of astronomical seasons with all of the endless flux in between. Climate science has to find a way to extract individual rhythms from this cacophony, it has to work out what makes the rhythm switch tempo, play more insistently with more

ADRIAN LAHOUD

Image 20. Desertification scheme. Source: Fouad Ibrahim 1978

syncopation or just playing out of time. So climate models effectively try to explain how those different phenomena with all of the different rhythms relate to each other. Now, models of human subjectivity explain different things to climate models obviously, but we do find them quite similar. In the case of models of human subjectivity, the models of human character, the aims has always been to use the signs of external conduct that is the way that we behave, to construct the model of our internal motivations, to understand the way that our conduct emerges out of a set of dispositions. As Michel Phair has put it very beautifully ‘according to a scheme of conflict between good and bad propensities’. What is important here is actually not the specific claim that Michel Phair makes, but we have two kinds of models here; there is a model of the environment and explanation of what the environment is, how it works, and a model of human behaviour which is driven by the good and bad inside of us. The job of the government is to cultivate the good and repress the bad. This is, again, a process of getting us to imagine new kinds of models... and why do we say models? Because these things are not innate, they are constructed. A group previously (in the competition pitch) asked us

P E R S P EC T I V E S

ADRIAN LAHOUD

what do we want? What do we desire? That desire is a product of a social engineering project. So can we imagine and engineer other kinds of models? Models of subjectivity suppose to explain what causes human beings to behave the way they do. I want to quickly sketch out what happens if these kinds of environmental models intersect the models of human character. I want to start with the desertification paradigm (image 20). It was an idea that indigenous people in Africa were responsible for the drought of the 1970s. The theory went as follows: there was poor land use by the farmers that was changing the reflectivity of the surface of the earth and as it was changing the reflectivity, this was resulting in less rain. The claim at the time was that the people of the sub-Saharan in Africa had become weather makers, they had modified their own environments, they had changed their own weather patterns. Here, automatically, we can see two kinds of models: a generic explanation of human character. In the literature from 70s to 80s, when they describe farmers of Africa, they talk about their inability to reason properly, their inability to plan and to calculate properly based on a kind of irrationality and inflexibility. So they couldn’t adapt their actions to the changing circumstances, that’s the model of the African farmer. Then you have environmental model, an explanation of the behaviour of the environment in respect to their actions. Irreversible damage to the surface of the earth, triggering positive feedback to the atmosphere, resulting in less rain. You put those models together, and you have a very specific geopolitical paradigm which is man-made desertification. The consequences of this legacy, the consequences of this projection of a certain model of human behaviour and a certain model of the environment made by Western European scientists onto this region, was a disastrous set of aid packages, reforms and intervention. In fact we still see this part of the world is somehow synonymous with catastrophes whether because of terrorism or civil conflict or the consequences of drought. In the last decade, however, our thinking on what’s happening in the Sahel has shifted and started to reverse and it’s confirming the saying of the Zaghawa people in Chad who describe the expansion of the Sahara like this, ‘the world dies from the north’. In fact, the severity of the drought in the Sahel was so extreme that climate scientists from all around the world converged around it for decades.

Image 21. Aerosol particles in Earth’s atmosphere within a 14-day period. Model based on observations from August 2006 - April 2007. Source: NASA Global Modelling and Assimilation Office. 2017

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Image 22.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Cross sectional model of sand blowing from the Sahara towards the Amazon. Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. 2015

ADRIAN LAHOUD

Before climate change, the Sahelian drought was one of the main drivers for thinking in climate science. How did this story change? How did we go from one model of a relationship between the human being and the environment to a different kind of model? What follows is a really fascinating detective story. The first part of the detective story is to do with the combustion of hydrocarbons in the northern hemisphere: oil, coal, and gas as our dominant energy sources. Organic matter that we burn that has given rise to some important by-products, such as CO2, and aerosol particles. Aerosol particles are in a way the main protagonists of this presentation and they are small solid particles that circulate in the atmosphere. Whenever you burn a fossil fuel, there is always bits of it that escape and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get converted to energy. Not all aerosols are produced by human activity. For example, salt pulled out from the surface of the ocean is also an aerosol. Aerosols are also known to block sunlight, so they might produce cooling effects on the ground. A famous example of this was the year without a summer, in 1845, when Mount Tambora (a volcano in Indonesia) produced a huge eruption sending huge amounts of particles into the atmosphere and produced crop devastation throughout Europe and North America. By looking at a climate simulation (image 21) retrieved from the Goddard Space Center we can see the way aerosol circulation takes place through the atmosphere of our planet. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting about aerosols is that usually they only last in the atmosphere for a week or two. They get carried up into the air from the area which they are produced, they drift along air currents and then they get deposited. In the image, one can see the sand blowing off the Sahara, the forest fires, the sea salt coming off the water, and the white aerosols, which are the man-made industrial pollution, concentrated in the northern hemisphere. What scientists found with these images was that the aerosols that were being emitted from the northern hemisphere were hovering above the North Atlantic and, while doing that, they were interacting with incoming and outgoing solar radiation and thus changing the temperature of the ocean. Scientists discovered that the monsoon that brings rain to the sub-Saharan areas was dependent on the intensity of the turbulence, the difference in temperature and the intensity of the mixture between the hot and the cold water on the surface. The astonishing discovery, to put these episodes together, is that aerosol emission in the northern hemisphere was changing the temperature of the Atlantic. The temperature of the Atlantic was driving the monsoon in the sub-Saharan area that was affecting the amount of rainfall in the Sahel.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

That shows how an action in one part of the world is having an effect on another part of the world through a series of context mediations. It is not a simple cause and effect relationship, it is a series of diffuse probabilistic relationships. The great thing about aerosols, or the difficult thing depending on your perspective, is that every single one of them is different. All CO2 molecules are identical and last in the atmosphere for a really long time but aerosols, on the other hand, are all different. Because they differ from each other they can also tell a lot about the circulation patterns of the atmosphere, they can be used like tracers in the bloodstream. As an example, aerosols tell us that a very small dried out lake bed named BodÄ&#x2014;lÄ&#x2014; in Chad, was supplying the rainforests in the Amazon with nutrients. About five thousand years ago there was a huge lake in Africa in which all of the dead marine life of the lake dried out and is sitting there as dust. It is a big pool of dead organic matter. What happens, especially in the winter months, is the Harmattan, a strong wind current, blows between surrounding mountains and is compressed by them. As it gets compressed it accelerates. As it accelerates it starts to pick up all this dead organic matter off the ground. In the space of eight hours, up to 700,000 tons can be lifted up into the atmosphere. The Harmattan, as it picks it up the dust, it also grinds up the dust into an extremely fine powder. This is actually the cause of all the major dust storms historically happened in Africa. People have known about these dust storms for a really long time but what they hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t worked out was that the dust was also being carried all the way across the Atlantic. By looking into another image (image 22), taking a LIDAR section through the atmosphere, we can see the dust parcel being carried across the Atlantic ocean. What the image shows is that the dust was actually being carried all the way to the Amazon. More than that, the dust was actually playing a critical role in the ecology of the Amazon jungle. Because the rain in the Amazon is so intense, it continuously leeches all the nutrients out of the soil, which flow into the ocean. It was only the re-supply of dust from the Sahel, thousands and thousands of kilometers away, that was putting the Amazon back into nutrient surplus. Coming back to our case study, we realise that this initial model of the irrational african farmer interacting with a specific kind of environmental model produced a disastrous legacy of foreign intervention in Africa. But then in the last 10 or 15 years there has been an understanding that actually what is producing drought in the Sahel, for at least the last 30 to 40 years,

ADRIAN LAHOUD

has been climate change. There is something around human activity, around industrialisation, around capitalism, that has been produced in the northern hemisphere but its effects have been felt very far away in the equatorial regions of Africa. This starts to create a shift in our anthropological understanding of the character of the people in the area. The first shift is to recognise the incredible cultural and linguistic diversity of the region. The second was to recognize the diversity of forms of live, the different modes of existence in territorial practices and ethnic markers. What I am trying to say by that is that the form of life and its relationship to territory is always a kind of existential problem, where the form of life creates a different kind of world, that you inhabit...it is a lived, experienced, existential relationship. If we look at the moral geography of Darfur from the perspective of nomads, what you get is this sort of checkerboard. We see various kinds of farms which are previous examples of sedentary areas, and then we see their relationship towards that as an opportunistic occupation of the spaces between the farms. The rain variation in the sub-saharan area is moving up and down the continent, you imagine that if you are a herder, you are following that line of rain variations. What this says is that when you put these two different forms of life, these two different existential relationships to the territory, into a relationship with each other, they can coexist. But as soon as you place that relationship, those differences, under a condition of extreme environmental stress theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll start to compete for the same space. There are all kinds of other elaborations on this shift in thinking around what is happening in this part of the world, but we will talk about that a little bit later. So, the talk has this kind of architecture. There is this emission of a particle from the northern hemisphere and then there is a transformation and a production and exacerbation of a conflict in another part of the world which then produces other kinds of effects. What are those effects? One of the biggest effects is migration. Firstly, over the last 20 or 30 years there has been a huge migration from the sub-Saharan parts of Africa, primarily towards major cities along the west African coast such as Lagos. Secondly, there has been strong migration towards the Mediterranean. As a consequence, we have a situation of climate exiles who are trying to flee the sub-Saharan regions of Africa to make a better life for themselves, to flee north towards the Mediterranean Sea, towards the most highly policed waterway in the world.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

One of the things that I want to draw our attention to as we try to reconstruct this set of relationships is that of course what is happening in the sub-Saharan parts of Africa is not only caused by climate change. There is a long history of colonialism, there is a legacy of all kinds of institutional failures and corruption. But certainly, climate change is an important factor in all of those effects. In terms of why this is important for thinking through the Anthropocene, I want us to pause and go back slowly through the various kinds of perspectives that I have been trying to construct before we conclude. When I referenced Levi-Strauss and his story around the Conquistadors and the Native Americans at the beginning of this lecture, I was talking about the importance of trying to occupy other perspectives and what it means to embody different kinds of perspectives: by that I mean that we need to occupy not just cultural or ethnic perspectives but also disciplinary perspectives. This means not only to start with the perspective of climate science in the case of the visualisation and the tracking of aerosol particles but also to start from the perspective of Anthropology and how it constructs various kinds of arguments about human behaviour. To start from the perspective of law and look at the way distinctions between legality and illegality are constructed around refugee claims. It is actually occupying those different kinds of disciplinary perspectives, of speaking from the perspectives of different bodies of knowledge that, I think, is incredibly important in the context of the Anthropocene. To conclude, I am going to say a few words about an event which I think was kind of paradigmatic in its impact on me personally, but certainly also in the way we understand climate negotiations and the good faith in a global negotiation of climate: again, this good faith is precisely what we need to be suspicious of. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know how many of you remember the 2009 climate conference that took place in Copenhagen, but there was a really serious debate about what would be the acceptable average temperature increase. And at the time everyone argued over whether it was going to be 1.5 degrees, 2.5 degrees or indeed 3 degrees. However, in these negotiations, what they are negotiating over is certainly not the global average temperature, I can assure you. What they are negotiating over is the access to the planetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s carbon capacity. Why? Because that access is directly proportional to a nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capacity to industrialise. The temperature is a kind of consequence of that negotiation. By consequence, they are arguing over the GDP, making the discussion an economic argument. The negotiations were organised in negotiation

ADRIAN LAHOUD

Image 23. Sudan’s UN delegate, Lumumba Di-Aping, at the Copenhagen Climate Summit 2009, Source: Reuters

P E R S P EC T I V E S

blocks consisting of, for example, the G20 or the G77. The lead negotiator for the G77 was a Sudanese diplomat Lumumba Di-Aping. At a certain point during the Copenhagen conference he discovered that the G20 had been circulating a secret document that they hadn’t shared with the other members, that they certainly hadn’t shared with the African nations, proposing a two-degree global average temperature increase. This went against the entire spirit of the conference. In fact, it recalled the earlier conferences from the 19th century like the Berlin Conference, where the great European nations divided up the colonies amongst themselves. So again, 133 of the poorest nations in the world had been excluded from what was supposed to be the United Nations conference. The two-degree temperature increase that Di-Aping found out about would have meant roughly a 3.5-degree temperature increase for the African nations that he was representing, since different parts of the world will warm up differently. Lumumba Di-Aping calls an impromptu press conference where he says a series of quite extraordinary things. ‘Now, what do we really believe are the critical success factors that we have to unite behind? Because these are not simply negotiable for us as developing countries. The first fundamental that we have to agree upon to fight for is the issue of the 1.5-degree temperature increase. And the centrality of this is because a deal that cannot save god, humanity and nature is not a deal that we should entertain in the first place. Those who articulated a perspective and tried to persuade us that a two degree Celsius [increase] is a sound choice have made a trade-off between life, humanity and profit. It has no base in science. The very reports that they try to persuade us, do not support their thesis. […]’ That press conference became incredibly important for two reasons. Firstly, it is not on record. It is not a part of this video but he describes what happens as climate genocide, so he throws the claim of genocide back at the G20. Everyone described him as hysterical, the western media disregarded his comments as biased and incredible. He also called the process the colonisation of the sky, which I think is a really fascinating notion: how do you colonise the sky? The other reason that is really important is that he wept. As a consequence there was an absolute breakdown of diplomatic protocol. First of all, he calls an impromptu press conference, which is a break in protocol. Secondly, he makes public what is a private document and thirdly he breaks the kind of demeanour of a diplomat by weeping

ADRIAN LAHOUD

publicly. For me, this was a kind of political intervention of the absolute highest order and an incredibly inspiring moment. I think one way in which we could start to understand the presentation tonight and this idea of the difference between the global average and the aerosol particle is around the idea of scale. As soon as we stop speaking about “we” or “humanity” in a collective sense we are forced to make a decision about a certain scale. What specific group of people are we talking about? What specific group of people am I representing or part of when I am doing what I do as an architect? I think that question of scale reverberates in Di-Aping’s claim against a global average as an incredible abstraction, insisting on an interpretation that is fitting to each country individually. That is an incredibly important statement, he makes a scalar claim. And it is that moment of introducing a scale, whether it is the relationship between aerosols in the north towards the Sahel or whether it is looking at questions of migration, where it becomes important to be precise and to understand that when we make that kind of scalar claim, we align ourselves with something but also, sometimes, against something. And that kind of precision, that kind of political precision I think is really fundamental to what we are trying to do when we talk about the Anthropocene.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Adrian Lahoud [AL] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

The theme of our event has been Urbanism and Landscape Architectural responses to this newly coined epoch of the Anthropocene. Can we first ask you whether you feel this notion is a helpful or relevant one, both generally and in the context of the design professions?

Sure, there is some disagreement over what the Anthropocene means as you speak to different people and gather different perspectives, there are other propositions such as the Capitalocene etc. I have always been one less interested in a definition of the term because I could call it the Capitalocene or Anthropocene or something else. I think what is really fundamental is the effects that we are already experiencing and that we are going to experience more of in the future. So all of the climatic changes that have been taking place already, for at least a couple of decades. Recently we’ve seen the impact of hurricanes and these sorts of things in the Caribbean and in the United States and it is those kinds of events that force us to turn our attention to the way we think about what we do as architects, the way we think about cities. Regardless of whether we want to put it on the Anthropocene or not, those kinds of things are here already and we have to pay attention to them.

ULW

But do you think it’s helpful to have one all-encompassing term that you can project people’s attention towards, that deals with all of these different impacts or is it maybe a generalisation?

I think that’s a really good question and I think it depends on what you do with the term. If you use the term to generalise and to say that as a globe, as a collective mass of humanity we all need to get together. And if you start to speak in that way about the Anthropocene, i.e. if you start to think about it as a global human problem, I think you kill it. You kill the differences that lie underneath each one of those claims. But if you speak about the Anthropocene as drawing our attention precisely to those differences, with a sense of urgency and with a renewed sense of conviction, then I think that the Anthropocene is a really strong concept. So it depends on the kind of work you want the concept to do for you. I’m definitely in the camp of wanting the concept to pay more attention to those differences because I think those differences are at the core of what the Anthropocene means to me. But if you speak to people from the working group they will have a totally different definition for it.

ADRIAN LAHOUD

”

ULW

So when you talk about differences in locality and culture and the like, and the idea of scale (from the global to the local), how do you rationalise making an intervention at a small scale that we are comfortable with, knowing that it’s likely to have effects on a completely different culture? And so while being local, we are also being global but then this global starts to become an abstraction and a generalisation. How do you navigate all of these?

I think on one hand, the reason I’m interested in scale is that there is something particular about the Anthropocene that makes relationships of cause and effect change. So either effects are more dispersed, they’re not concentrated, in time or in space. Or effects are disproportionate to causes. So there is a kind of relationship between cause and effect that’s complicated and I guess that’s where your question is coming from. I think in terms of the fear about consequences, that’s probably not a bad fear to have if you take it seriously but I don’t think that fear is useful by itself unless its matched with an imagination that is directed towards working through alternative possibilities and testing them. Taking risks and risking that they don’t work and might have bad consequences, because if you don’t do that as well…if you do it cautiously, then you just end up in a very passive situation in which you just have to accept what happens to you and what is done to you without thinking about whether you can push back in any way.

ULW

So, in your lecture you suggested that you have to be quite radical and less passive in terms of forging solutions to some of these issues, could you give an example of a radical approach by an architect or an urbanist towards some of these questions that don’t just tread gently and do make some leaps?

That’s a really good question and I am going to struggle to give an example but I can explain a bit about what I meant during the lecture. There’s a lot of discourse around sustainability in architecture and the question of course is to sustain what? And if it’s our current lifestyle and our current way of understanding the mentality of having an instrumental relationship of human beings to animals to the environment, then we are in absolute trouble. If we continue to just extract and see human beings, animals and the environment as sites of extraction of value and of accumulation of value, then is that what we are trying to sustain? What is all the grey-water recycling and louvres and all the other paraphernalia of sustainable architecture trying to sustain, if that’s the case, then it’s kind of pathetic. If I’m calling for radicalism, it’s just to take the question seriously…of those histories of extraction and it’s not just about minerals, it’s about value from human beings and it’s about seeing or partitioning certain parts of the world as sites of extraction. Which only exist to benefit other parts of the world. So that’s why the entire concept of sustainability is a problem. Now if you start taking those sorts of things seriously and in fact they are at the core of the Anthropocene. It’s that lifestyle, that way of thinking about what you do and how you relate to the world and to others that is the problem, then you are forced to take a more radical position.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

â&#x20AC;&#x153;

For Pasquero, in the renaissance our relation with the urban sphere (institutions and apparatus) was much weaker than with the natural biosphere, therefore architecture became an interface between the human being and the milieu. Today, the exact opposite is true. The urban sphere is so remarkably strong that it changes the geology of the planet. Therefore, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;architecture could be something else. It is not morphology, not the geometry; it is morphogenesis: the relation between matter, information and energy, where morphology is not a static element, it is dynamic and changes according to the input of matter and energyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

IV-H / CL AUDIA PASQUERO Professor of Landscape Architecture, Universitat Innsbruck Co-founder & co-director, ecoLogicStudio Lecturer & Director, Urban Morphogenesis, Bartlett School of Architecture Senior Faculty, IAAC Barcelona Head Curator, bioTallinn, Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017

PROFILES.

After graduating from Turin Polytechnic in 2000, Pasquero participated in the EE Master programme at the Architectural Association and then worked with various offices such as Ushida Findlay Partnership and Erick Van Egerat Architects. In 2005 she co-founded ecoLogicStudio, which focuses on the interaction of design, biology, and technology. Her experience ranges from practice to academia and apart from design projects, she has developed prototypes, installations and exhibitions shown at the London and Venice Biennales. In 2012 she co-authored the book “Systemic Architecture” which gathers the work of ecoLogicStudio and in 2017 she was the curator for the Tallinn Biennale, entitled bioTallinn. Pasquero is currently the director of the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at The Bartlett, a senior staff member at IAAC Barcelona working with digital fabrication and professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Innsbruck.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Ecologic knowledge The inspiration for the name of Pasquero’s practice (ecoLogicStudio) comes from anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”, in which he relates language and meta-language to define “ecologic” frameworks. She focuses on the interaction of language (for a rational understanding of life) and made language (such as design, art, technology) to account for the less rational dimensions. Thus, in her practice, she is interested in how aesthetics and design can be a language to understand the socio-political and ecological crises that we are currently facing. Emphasising her engagement with methods of communication, Pasquero introduces her lecture with a picture rather than a title, portraying a corrugated

Image 24. Image of corrugated bioplastic used to introduce the lecture. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO bioplastic (made from organic waste). The texture of the material is a result of several experiments to transform it. These corrugations can be controlled and monitored and are therefore capable of providing information about its age. As a consequence, the texture not only becomes an aesthetic quality of the material, but also an indicator that locally communicates with the population and with those interacting with the material. Pasquero defines her work as a space for reasoning between design, biology, and computation. Since most of the combinations and interactions between design and science are either positivistic or dystopian, she positions herself in a place that accepts the unsolvable character of these conditions. Thus, instead of trying to create solutions, she prefers to recognise that some issues are not meant to be solved. Pollution, for instance, is an irreversible issue. It is more appropriate to understand it as a metabolic change of minerals and chemicals and learn about them materially and locally in order to identify their potential benefits. The pollutants can then be transformed into energy and other resources, instead of ideologically thinking of them as a solvable problem. Under this logic, she questions how design and aesthetics can contribute. Relating architecture to the Anthropocene, she refers to the origin of the word “architecture”. For Pasquero, in the renaissance our relation with the urban sphere (institutions and apparatus) was much weaker than with the natural biosphere, therefore architecture became an interface between the human being and the milieu. Today, the exact opposite is true. The urban sphere is so remarkably strong that it changes the geology of the planet. Therefore, ‘architecture could be something else. It is not morphology, not the geometry; it is morpho-genesis; the relation between matter, information and energy, where morphology is not a static element, it is dynamic and changes according to the input of matter and energy’. In her academic approach with students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she avoids the use of geometric models or drawings, instead preferring other modes of representation such as the “slime model”. Pasquero explains how one slime model can contain millions of cells and is then able to optimise resources, a fundamental requirement for operating our cities nowadays. Furthermore, slime operates in a different way to current models of master planning, constructing a relationship between “nuclei” and “milieu”, rather than simple top-down engineering. Scientists call this collective intelligence.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Biodigital: Algae in spatial practice Pasquero proposes working with the properties of materials, computing and the transference of information to trigger self-organisation in cities. For a Venice Biennale exhibition in 2008, ecoLogicStudio tried to redefine architecture as a machine for interacting and processing, instead of merely living, entitled ecoMachines. ‘ecoMachines provide a material and operational framework to deal with change and transformation, the two main defining qualities of our new understanding of urban ecology; moreover, they support interaction between heterogeneous systems, such as social, infrastructural, architectural and environmental: they allows us to sense, register and manipulate in our daily life the unfolding processes defining our cities, our houses and our artificial environment. ecoMachines turn us all into ecologists in the most operational sense of the term’ Pasquero claims that the operational sense (the interaction between matter, reading of patterns and information) is a key aspect of her practice; ‘from the built world to speculation and installation’. But how can material computing influence society? To answer this, Pasquero explains the design of a wall installation using algae farming (given their role as pollutant), urban oxygenation and material computing. The wall was able to index quantities of oxygenation according to algae growth. The use of organic matter to perform a task becomes a screen, resulting in the creation of a spatial articulation and generating an index of measurable information about oxygenation and radiation. Moreover, it can be physically experienced by its users and its aesthetics and materiality convey information. The feedback between the digital, the physical and the reading of information become a part of a spatial structure.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

Image 25.â&#x20AC;&#x192; STEMv1.0, London Architecture Biennale 2006. ecoLogicStudio, 2006. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

P E R S P EC T I V E S Pasquero also shows a new version of a photobioreactor wall installed in Seville, that promotes more interaction with users in order to capture CO2, enable better monitoring and appropriate connections between the material and the digital. The observation of the relationships between CO2 consumption and algae growth revealed new unexpected types of microalgae, which encouraged the definition of new interactions between designers and marine microbiologists, leading to exploration of the vast potential algae might have. Building on this research, Pasquero and her team were able to further develop experimental bioreactors by using ten types of microalgae, giving each of them a colour gradient and assigning each algae a different purpose. While critics judged the project as an â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;over-aestheticised algae farmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Pasquero defends these experiments as a potential means to make cities more productive. The fact that they have an aesthetic is precisely the point. Frequently, productive infrastructures are isolated outside the city, losing their contact with it and thus having no accessible means to measure or evaluate it. Instead of demanding a halt to consumerism, she calls for a sense of our daily life processes and for a growing sensibility regarding them, even though the current structure of cities and infrastructure are built in a way that prevents us from doing so. In that regard, could aesthetics become a language to create a reconnection with the practices that enable our modern lives? Following the idea of the bioreactor and the effort to make it architectural, she describes the design of a material system that defines spatial articulations and generates a game of aesthetics and production. This outcome was achieved through groups of columns and connecting linear elements that could react to algae in different ways. In this particular example, the interaction relied on a QR code system to monitor the number of people experiencing it and, with every scanning, retrieving information and images about the algae type.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

Image 26.â&#x20AC;&#x192; HORTUS _ Hydro Organism Responsive To Urban Stimuli. Exhibition, London, 2012. ecoLogicStudio, 2012. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Image 27.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Urban Algae Folly, EXPO Milano 2015 Future Food District. ecoLogicStudio, 2015. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

The second set of bioreactors was created to explore the relation between matter, energy and information. ecoLogicStudio created what they call an “urban algae folly” to cultivate spirulina3, combining architecture, digital futures and the farming of microalgae within the urban environment. The folly works on different levels, both as a spatial artefact and as a cooling mechanism for the space it encompasses, a side effect of its chemical reactions. The artefact can produce up to 2kg of oxygen (equivalent to 25 urban trees) and 2kg of protein per day. At the same time, the folly is embedding production within the urban realm, promoting a discourse over “biodigital infrastructure” in the city. Information and biological technologies can create new possibilities for industrial and urban environments. Furthermore, based on the criticism of the folly, which challenged the potentials of algae consumption, ecoLogicStudio worked with Milanesi chefs to engage the population with spirulina, creating a culinary culture aiming to change the negative image towards its production and consumption and thus, developing a sensibility around the proposed process. New follies were created in other cities as examples of chlorella4 and spirulina production in urban areas, each time defining different collaborations within the specific context.

[3] Spirulina: Type of cyanobacteria capable of obtaining energy through photosynthesis and able to produce oxygen. The species Arthrospira is a dietary supplement. [4] Chlorella: Type of single-celled green algae with potential as a source of food and energy.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

Trans-scalar methods: bacteria transforming the territory Following Timothy Morton’s definition of “dark ecology” and his proposal to engage with the “sticky mess”, Pasquero argues that design has to interact with the gap between speculation and real projects. An example of this is an ecoLogicStudio project in Ulcinj, Montenegro on a site (a former saltern) which, according to Pasquero, is a truly anthropogenic environment due to its specific biotypes and bacteria. This area has recently become a destination for birds, for which it was designated a protected area and although an inhumane site and without direct interaction, the local community has a positive opinion of the site. The debate was whether to transform it into housing or protect it as a natural site for birds. The latter argument had an ideological and romanticised approach to the area but neglected the current dynamics of the site. With their intervention, ecoLogicStudio aimed to create the Solana Open Aviary, an open structure that allows birds of different dimensions to nest and enables birdwatchers to interact with them. To do so, they worked in collaboration with the European Space Agency, by using satellite sentinels to scan and read the landscape of the saltern. The sensors captured different wavelengths and with the help of algorithms, the studio computed maps and drawings exposing the character of the landscape. These maps were able to illustrate both the flows between land and water and material flows across scales. By monitoring water and bacteria ratios in the territory, they could then simulate alternative transformations of water-salt-soil medium in order to preserve water circulation processes. Another goal of the project was to rethink existing industrial construction processes and to present innovative in-situ construction mechanisms. These would be small elements, with a long term presence, able to monitor the site area while they transform it. To achieve this they collaborated with Enrico Dini, a pioneer in 3D printing techniques, to develop prototypes using chemical and material binding in order to compose structures and architectures capable of modifying the landscape.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

Image 28.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Solana Open Aviary for the Montenegro Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016. ecoLogicStudio 2016. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

With their approach, the practice recognised the value of aesthetics as a means to address the issues of a particular site and created space for human interaction with the aviary so as to enable human agency and redefine its ownership. Moreover, the Solana was recognised as a site of ecological relevance. This project inspired the format and proposal of Tallinn Biennale, called bioTallinn, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bioTallinn works on the relationship between biology, computation and design, more specifically, the curatorial looks at the city from an anthropocentric point of view, realising that in the Anthropocene age, no ecosystem has been unaffected by human action and is difficult to trace a clear distinction between the natural and artificial, between landscape and city and ultimately between the biosphere and the urban sphere. The curatorial strategy focuses on the Paljassaare Peninsula in Tallinn, a collective project as a case study of the Anthropocene landscape. It aims to mobilise novel intelligence that is part artificial and part biological, to insert a new mode of reasoning and therefore designing in a complex milieu where multiple degrees of stability and diversity coexist. The exhibition proposes new strategies of urban planning which operate in a transcalar manner, from the bacteria to territorial scale. Tallinn wastewater infrastructure becomes a morphogenetic force and evolves into an urban digestive apparatus. Pathogens are re-metabolised, diluted or capture by augmented ecosystems. Infrastructural networks deepen and infilter surface which in turns folds into a convoluted epidermis populated by a large amount of bioreactors, which constitutes the Anthropocene Island of Paljassaare. Different from other contemporary biennales, bioTallinn uses this cultural event not only to present the latest developments in the architecture field, but also as a platform of experimentation and design. The challenge is the current disciplinary boundary between science and design as well as in between research and practice.

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

Image 29.â&#x20AC;&#x192; Anthropocene Island Exhibition for Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017. ecoLogicStudio, 2017. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

P E R S P EC T I V E S

100

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO My dream is for the biennale to be able to discuss a new paradigm for architecture, whereas design and aesthetics acquire a central stage in the current eco-political debate, where problems are not solved but interact through a material reading of reality and ultimately where the figure of the single star architect would disappear to leave space to a more diffuse and distributed design age’. The Paljassaare Peninsula is the site of the territorial scale exhibition developed by ecoLogicStudio for the biennale, entitled “Anthropocene Island”. A site in which a wastewater treatment infrastructure and an ornithological park share the same territory, separated spatially by a fence. For the exhibition, the studio addressed the site through a multi-scale analytical process, illustrating petrol tanks on the sea (the city scale) as well as the presence of microalgae and pollutants. The set of maps allowed the reconfiguration of the terrain and the understanding of the relation between park and plant, integrated at the micro scale. This highlights the ecology of the site, in which water from the treatment plant is being filtered by the park and birds are flocking to the plant due to the warm water temperatures. Their approach is to transform the site using biotechnology to process water rather than constructing large infrastructural interventions, aiming to create a relationship between the two programs: bird watching and water treatment. The spatial proposal, which lies at the intersection between landscape and architecture, envisions photo-bioreactors that are able to transform water from the site so as to define a new habitable space. To conclude, Pasquero emphasises the integration of architecture with other disciplines in order to re-define the practice of the built environment. Not to create more comprehensive spatial solutions, but to interact with complex environmental conditions. To understand them from multiple perspectives and then to respond locally, therefore creating a more diffuse image of the architect.

Image 30. Anthropocene Island Proposal. ecoLogicStudio, 2017. Courtesy of Claudia Pasquero.

101

P E R S P EC T I V E S

I N T E RV I E W Speaker: Claudia Pasquero [CP] Interviewer: Urbanism and Landscape Week Crew [ULW]

ULW

In general the term is helpful in describing the human infrastructure and how it has a geological influence on the planet so somehow geological infrastructure becomes what I call the urban sphere which is in conflict with the natural biosphere. I think some of the articles that come out are not very helpful because I divide them in two categories that are the apocalyptic ones...so we are doomed, nothing we can do, natural disaster and there is no solution. And there are the ones that have a solution, where theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going to solve the problem of the fact that we are polluting the world. Both points of view can be a way of opening a conversation, but for me the best way for looking at a problem is the fact that, okay human infrastructure has an impact so how do we deal with that? How do we read this impact? What is it? Can we go more in detail? Can each single human being have a material reading of this information? Can we shift from a question of can we try to clean all the pollution of London? Which is impossible because I cannot clean all the pollution of London, it is a metabolic change. So I offer design solutions to interact with specific elements that are in the air, that were not in the air before. They are a problem for the breathing of human beings but might be a resource for something else. So can design intervene by not producing technology but producing techniques of interaction with the metabolic changes in what they call the Anthropocene that are being created.

ULW

Perhaps this notion of the Anthropocene is encapsulating all of these separate issues that we face at the moment and global issues with human societies that are effecting geological and geographical change. So you think thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quite a helpful way of bringing everyone together... a single topic that everyone can focus on and then address in a number of different ways and with different techniques?

I think as a scientific definition it is useful, but it is not enough. What comes after should be more specific about material and detail, or more connected with the single human being and not trying to generalise solutions that can be either dystopic or positivistic. I think we have tools to read the reality, and to allow the single human being and social groups to read what surrounds them and decide what they can do with that. Because it is a change but it is not a change that is necessarily bad. It is a change that might hold good possibilities, if we just read

102

C L AU D I A PA S Q U E RO

”

them and we are not obfuscated by the ideology that all is bad. We are changing the planet therefore it is bad. No it is not bad, it is a change. Once the definition is there, and we know there is a change, the step is not saying it is a catastrophe. The step is, let’s understand this change and let’s see what we can do with that. Maybe there is something good and we don’t know about it.

ULW

You’ve spoken in your lecture about removing distinctions between human and natural, good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, and using the Anthropocene in focusing on different techniques to solve different problems. So is this approach, this removal of distinctions, where you think is most helpful and where most solutions might come from?

I think the way of approaching the issue of dialogue between the biosphere and the urban-sphere is a way of creating a re-connection. So as human culture we have been creating segregation in cities through zoning. We have been creating segregation in culture between science, literature, and art. We are in a society which I think is slightly dominated by a positivistic way of reading society. We shouldn’t be mistaken and think that a certain positivistic reading is reality or scientific reading is reality. Reality ontologically is what it is, you can read it through science, you can read it through poetry, you can read it through drawing. But reality remains what it is. It’s something else. It’s not more true what science says and what art says. So, my wish is for this discipline to interact in a more seamless way. We could start and have a more articulated reading of this reality. I’m not against the problem solving solution per se, I did engineering before architecture and I did theatre before engineering. So I try to bridge this boundary a little bit but the problem for me is when the solution is provided mainly by one way of this reality. That’s why I am a bit of the devil’s advocate and say we shouldn’t look for solutions, but we cannot just rely on a positivistic scientific reading of their reality. Because sometimes I feel in the society where we are, these get confused with the realities themselves. No, it is something we have constructed ourselves as human beings. And therefore, in a moment in which today the situation is complex, we should have a more complex reading to bridge.

ULW

So, one thing the Anthropocene might teach us is that the days of a single reading of a problem are over. There are always multiple readings, and multiple impacts?

The way that architects see a city, If you see a city from above or a satellite point of view it is often difficult to distinguish a pattern that is natural and artificial, because they are completely interwoven. So the question is, again, how can we spread the understanding of this pattern and this new knowledge? And try to understand how we can produce inside of the city, we can interact with changes, accept changes, and be much more specific about that. I said in the lecture that pollutants are generic. What is a pollutant? It is just saying that change is completely wrong. No, change is not wrong by default. There is something in this change that is surely problematic. But if we read it, we can understand what is problematic for us, what is good for other beings that are maybe not human and can maybe be not problematic for them and what can we do with this change. If we box it in the pollution category it is inaccessible, we will panic. And I don’t like to panic.

103

V. CO N V E R S AT I O N S The following conversations describe two panels of discussion held as part of the Urban and Landscape Week and moderated by Maurice Harteveld. The first panel, entitled Anthropocene and the built environment: conflict, crisis and change, discusses the planning and design challenges in human and environmental â&#x20AC;&#x153;conflict zonesâ&#x20AC;?. The participants on this panel were Christophe Girot, Jan Willem Petersen and Godofredo Pereira, discussing their own practice and research on the topic. The second panel with Sabine Mueller and Jan Jongert, entitled Anthropocene and practice, sought to investigate how designers and practitioners acknowledge the definition of this new era and the main challenges it poses for their everyday practice.

104

105

C O N V E R S AT I O NS

DAY 1

V-A / PANEL DISCUSSION I

106

Christophe Girot, ETH Zurich (CG), Jan Willem Petersen, Specialist Operations (JWP), and Godofredo Pereira, RCA London (GP) joined as panelists on the first day of the symposium which focused on the theme Anthropocene and the built environment - conflict, crisis, & change: with Maurice Harteveld (MH) from TU Delftâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department of Urbanism as moderator.

107

C O N V E R S AT I O NS MH

Audience

Directed at JWP: Working in Afghanistan, you have witnessed the way that NGOs take action in post-conflict areas. The imposing of different architectural characters and typologies can contradict with the local values and needs of people in countries like this.

Directed at JWP: What do you think is our role as designers in these situations? Maybe the contribution is knowledge, which can help the local people build on their own after the conflict.

Directed at GP: From a theoretical point of view, we see the same occurring in your narrative where you put the emphasis on the groups that are not covered, the minorities, indigenous people, or rather anthropological elimination of differences. How would you respond to each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s views?

It is a challenging question. First it is important to understand the forces which are taking place to have a thorough understanding of the conflict and its impact on the environment. Second is to understand the kind of cultural sensitivity by going in depth with the cultures themselves.

GP I would like to add one point: you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have post-conflict city but you have conflict managed in different means. Instead of assuming there is a situation of postconflict, we have to open up the question. There is always an expectation of the post-conflict in the conversation of the environment and climate change that in some way, we are going to stop or change our ways. However, responding to these questions, we open up a different kind of conflict. JWP I agree with your observation, I think that there is an incredible dynamic in conflict and it is incredibly opportunistic. The problem is that many situations have a very strong spatial component, yet (in the Middle East) they are militarily driven and not for social purposes. It is obvious that these situations are not part of the dialogue of the whole profession. We are not trained to incorporate these conditions into practice and to work with it. This discussion shows that it is a challenge to know how we, as designers, can contribute to post-war conflicted areas.

108

JWP

In practice however, the architecture that is built in these areas is marginal, thus, it has no impact nor value. The involvement of foreign military in an area affects the direction and the sheer scale of the output. So, the big question is, what kind of design tools do you engage with? Are we able to rebuild the nation as a whole? Should we approach from a technical or a cultural point of view? These questions are very difficult to answer. MH Directed at JWP: In your examples you mentioned that outsiders come in and influence the local culture, or rather, miss the cultural sensitivity of the area. Directed at CG: This is also the case of your example where, for instance, foreign tree species are brought into a certain area and become part of the nature. If nature can do this, is it the same as humans? CG I will try to respond by referring back to both Jan Willem and Godofredo. I would go back to the lecture of Godofredo because I really liked when you said that the big mistake of environmental agencies

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 1

is separating nature from humankind and I think that is very fundamental. I am trying to bridge it back to Kabul. Most people think that it is the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and George Bush, but if you think of it in terms of landscape, Kabul is where one of the first Mughal gardens was founded. This was created by Babur, a war tyrant, who used his army to build this garden in the 16th century. It is still there and preserved by local people. When thinking about the Amazon (referring to Godofredoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lecture), it is no pure wilderness since it has always been maintained by local tribes. There is always a cultural dimension behind that and I think the problem that we have is that we create distinctions between the city and the environment, between ourselves and nature, between artificial and natural. How do we bring these things back together? Probably the best project of Kabul, and I am saying that a bit naively, is the elaborate garden with the armies, something that holds people together with some sort of

value. It is being able to identify with oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s environment. I think the problem with Kabul today is this absence of respect. Even the garden is neglected for the last decade. Instead of being confused by this environmental righteousness, it has to be cultural and people have to be able to identify and be proud of the nature that they deal with. JWP Indeed, the Babur garden is a fascinating place. Although, I think it is fundamentally different scale-wise. The scale that we have to engage with is so monumental and primarily military driven, that thinking on the level of a project is already problematic. The intervention has to be pragmatic because there is no other approach to get it done. The USAID built 600 schools in 9 months. It is impossible to work at this pace and include architecture and spatial planning dimensions. Nevertheless, these foreign offices come into the environment and see the devastating situation. There is some

109

C O N V E R S AT I O NS kind of urgency and in terms of spatial planning it is interesting. Therefore, we need to strongly look into the local culture before we step into the environment. CG I think you misunderstood me, the scale doesn’t scare me. I am not saying that we have to reproduce the Babur garden or only work with that scale. It is the money involved in these projects. With this large amount of money, we could reforest the whole of Afghanistan. I think it is more about will and scale is something that we can deal with. GP I think the question needs to be posed in a different way. Let’s look at water, for example. The distribution of water in parts of the world is reason for conflict. So, who is local to water? It is an interesting question and I am saying this to avoid a certain opinion of “local” and “outsider” being predicated on geography and the idea of scale being predicated on geographical proximity. The distribution of water organises different social modes of conduct. So, there is a different sociopolitical proximity diagram associated with water distribution but that’s not the locality of water. Because who is local to measuring contaminants? If the water is distributed from an aquaduct or other means of engineering, then the person who is local is someone who knows how it works. Each problem has different scales of what you can call local and not local. Is it interesting to see who is local to climate change? Is it the scientist who is familiar with a certain term? Or is it the people who live on an island with rising sea level? They are simply local to a different problem. So, I think there is a problem in a way we understand scale. Therefore, the key is to identify what you are local to. Now “the local” does not have to be an expert

110

or authority, but a collaboration between people that are local to different problems seems to be the most adequate way to process things. It means that you have to be very careful not to enter as an expert who explains, but to understand what our contribution can be. JWP To respond to the local versus foreign, sometimes the answer is not to act persuasively. For example, the US decided to build highways in Afghanistan. They just bring in heavy equipment and do it: it is the only appropriate answer because nobody in Afghanistan knows how to do it in terms of expertise, equipment, politics, etc. So, there is kind of an approach to act to what’s right at the moment. At the same time, the same Americans bulldozed things in other locations where they destroyed agricultural land with the same approach. Therefore, when can you insert your expertise because you know how to build and when to say no? Can local stakeholders do it? Different choices are right for different locations. So, it’s a very schizophrenic mindset that you somehow have to act to what is appropriate when it can be very much in contrast with another view. Audience Directed at JWP: Do you maintain your sense of humility as a designer when you deal with this scale, even if you have the means to execute things quickly? With your practice working in Afghanistan, how do you approach these projects and they are saying that you are not there to play politics but to assist. As a designer that comes from western culture, how does your office navigate that?

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 1

111

C O N V E R S AT I O NS JWP Very briefly, I think you cannot avoid playing politics. Especially in Afghanistan where everything is power related. One of the key things in the contribution is to see the intervention differently in terms of legacy: what can you contribute and what is there to last. A mission has a timeframe, 4 years, 8 years, 10 years, therefore, the purpose of the intervention is already quite different. MH Directed at CG: To push it back to the abstract level, if we allow, in certain cases, foreigners to come in and act, and in other cases, to work with the community and then try to understand the locality of the territory. But can we in the end answer the environmental challenges? Is that possible? If we understand human nature as part of the ecology that we are in, can we then challenge the global issues? CG In terms of global environmental issues, who would decide on a mitigating solution or intervention? Is it a national decision? How does it work with international law? This idea that I find is very boastful and very western is the idea that we can control everything. I think we have to be very cautious about these environmental concerns and I tend to believe that very simple methods: planting trees, bringing water and food to the people is probably the best way to solve the problems. So, it contradicts the fundamentalist approach to deep ecology which people basically say let’s save, for example, the Amazon by getting rid of humans. If people think that way, we shouldn’t even discuss it. I think we always manipulate nature and I tend to think that it would be good to think about nature as a human project. It takes time. It is not good for politics because

112

it sometimes takes 30 to 40 years for a project. I did a project in France and asked the authorities that why don’t we plant oak trees anymore? We always plant poplars and birches because within 3 years, the trees grow, and they can take pictures and get re-elected. I’m being very cynical but that’s basically where we are at today in terms of environment and politics. I think that deep down, environmental projects require culture, support, and time. It needs stability. That’s my belief. GP I fully agree. What was predicated in the word sustainability is that it would be sustained for a series of governmental policies, institutions, etc., regardless of who comes after. The point is that we frame problems in which consequences are not ideal. So, what is it that you gain in framing, say a planetary problem? You get a certain type of politics. A tree-hugging problem, you get a different type of politics. We need to be very careful and resist the temptation to try to find answers for all of them. I don’t think there is an answer to addressing the climate change at large. The discussion here is that we always intervene to nature, nature, nature, but what are we doing to humans? Is it because humanity is a thing that we know very clearly? MH Clearly, when you label the Anthropocene, you put the human in the centre and the last lines that you put to the table is that, to an extent, do we understand ourselves? I think this is a moment to close the session and I would like to ask you for a big round of applause for the debaters. Session closed.

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 1

113

C O N V E R S AT I O NS

DAY 2

V-B / PANEL DISCUSSION II

114

The following article summarises the panel of discussion between Sabine Mueller (SM) and Jan Jongert (JJ), moderated by Maurice Harteveld (MH). The focus of the debate was on professional practice and the Anthropocene. After their lecture presentations of projects tackling diverse global challenges, both designers discussed their approaches towards the questions raised by the Anthropocene. The focus was largely on the built environment and particularly the materials adopted by professionals: their origins, lifespan and disposal. Triggered by remarks on societal understandings of product life cycles, the panelists also expressed their perspectives on the importance of the locational context of projects and products as well as recognition of existing social relationships associated with their production.

115

C O N V E R S AT I O NS

MH Welcome. As designers, the question of “if we are accountable” in the Anthropocene, is not really the issue because we are and we can anticipate in the fact that we use our planet in different ways. In the first talk, by Sabine Mueller, the emphasis was on the systems we act on, while in Jan Jongert’s speech we saw some focus on materials and products, and his efforts to reuse them. Audience Directed to both: This question about replicability. We had a discussion concerning the significance of harvesting materials for their reuse in construction. But if it starts to be reproduced and it becomes a large scale model, will it still work the same way? Is there the risk that the whole model would collapse? MH I’ll try to spice it up! Colin Waters presented his research about the last five decades of our planet this morning, trying to argue that the Anthropocene is indeed the new era from multiple different perspectives, among others, the material aspects. So the presence of plastics or aluminum or steel is already a part of the Anthropocene and you, designers, don’t change it. Even further, you stimulate the use of non-natural and alien materials to be applied in our environment. SM Yes, but is that not really the interesting thing? Jan’s lecture gave me this idea that there are so many materials already embedded in our world that it is just a matter of taking one thing and putting it somewhere else. Materials do not disappear, they just go to the wrong places. It is a matter of “keeping the ball in the air”, which is a very interesting concept that we should try to inhabit. 116

Audience Directed to both: As we know, extracting materials from the earth has a really high footprint on the environment. Wouldn’t those circular practices be justifying the rate of consumption that we already have and not having an impact on reducing the footprint on the planet? In the sense of circular economy, you both are talking about added value, but that’s not reducing the amount of material extracted. Furthermore, wouldn’t a profitable model also incentivise the production of even more waste? MH So celebrating the Anthropocene may mean that you add economies and you add ecologies. JJ It’s not that there aren’t enough resources, it is just a matter of what is being done with it. Taking coffee as an example, if you are growing plants to sell a coffee cup that uses only 0.2% of its biomass, you are not using all the resource potential. The same thing happens to every material, with only small percentages actually being used and those, probably only once. It’s not about abolishing these materials but knowing where they are. So, after they have been sourced, being able to turn it into something that can be re-adapted later. Materials can always take another form by people wanting to interact with it. SM Everything we have been talking about is actually an argument against construction. There is already enough material floating around. A similar principle can be applied when we consider a city like Los Angeles that, in order to be green, has to transport water for 1000 km, degrading an ecosystem far away. This is just not necessary. What

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 2

both myself and Jan are arguing is that once you engage in circular mechanisms, extraction is not necessary anymore. We have enough! JJ Adding to this, the reuse of materials is also about creating local value. That is very important. There is the need to add value where the material is extracted. If the extracted material is used on the other side of the earth, there is no care about the implications and impacts, such as pollution, on its origin place. So, when adding local value, those responsible are very keen on respecting the resources, because they depend on it. This is a lesson that systemic design can also teach. Audience Directed to SM: Sabine, you presented some fantastic solutions for the Palm, in Dubai. Was there any kind of economic or socially quantifiable study done to

demonstrate what you say? Do you think that might have helped to persuade the client or would such a thing never happen? SM We are getting to an interesting point by engaging in these kinds of cultural questions. It is a matter of what you want and what you value in life. You could say that implementing a Palm or a linear economy is also an expression of extreme power. If you can do that, if you can build a Palm and maintain it with resources taken from somewhere else, with labour not being paid adequately, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a sign of power. So, the processes we are promoting also have implications on how we see social relationships. If your identity is based on power relationships, like in Dubai, then there is no point in showing that this could be also done in a different way. One really has to suggest this kind of cultural question on how to deal with each other.

117

C O N V E R S AT I O NS Audience Yet, 50 km inland they are building (the sustainable) Masdar, that’s sort of a strange combination. Audience Directed to JJ: I like the topic introduced by Sabine very much, about locality, about dealing with local communities and different cultures. And as designers investigating about possible reuse of materials, we can already find some specific examples worldwide. But when we start imagining a system engaging different stakeholders to make this new process of the blue economy, I start getting curious about how this would be received in different cultures. My question is, and it might be still soon to say, what was the experience you had with the China project and how was it received? JJ To me, it was also a challenge to introduce our idea to a country which I had already visited but didn’t know from a professional point of view. I think if I would go there as an architect and tried to make a building with some specific materials I would not have succeeded very well, but actually by going there and offering a service on how other architects and companies could change their way of dealing with materials it was a completely different approach. So, we visited all kinds of companies and people were enthusiastic. Within three days we had an investor wanting to participate in our online platform and we found all types of companies that wanted to work with us. China was actually very receptive to the project and we see how innovation there is speeding up a lot. We see a lot of companies being very open to this but also being encouraged by governments to turn their company processes much more circular. So, we collaborated with a circular

118

economy organisation in the Guangdong province to look at industrial zones in and around Guangzhou, to also support this way of working. As architects coming with a finished product or building this would not have been possible, but actually providing services to see where in that society links are missing and you can bridge a gap, is a general approach at Superuse Studios. We don’t just design buildings. It is about finding where you can create a bridge to allow this way of working and then we find a lot of positive responses in different countries. Audience Have you ever thought that no matter how much we do, we can’t change the process? Global warming and waste issues point to the fact that there are too many people, and this is the main problem. In fact, what we can do is very little. According to the IPCC, the global warming will continue alongside an increasing global population and, therefore, the need for food will increase. This will then result in reduced biodiversity due to the domestication of animals. So, the main reason, in my opinion, the number of people. Do you agree? Is there a solution? JJ I don’t think there are too many people, there are too many people not connected to the processes that influence their lives. When people and communities are part of the processes of creating the products that they consume, we understand how to deal with the environment. MH Directed to SM: The issue at hand is clear, but I would like to frame the question in another direction, concerning the advocacy to close the circles on a local scale. Is that enough to challenge larger global issues?

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 2

119

C O N V E R S AT I O NS SM I would like to respond to this by making the issue even bigger. It is not so much just about discussing if we do enough for the environment. It is a question of social justice. If we don’t connect to questions of local culture and social justice the environmental issues won’t be solved. Somewhat, they are interlinked. And that’s why I believe thinking in cycles does not necessarily mean the projects are only small and community-related. There are small cycles, bigger cycles, and so on and so on, and if they don’t relate social justice questions the environmental cause will be lost. MH Directed to JJ: Thank you, it also seems to me that the reuse of materials is also a matter of timescale. When I was in school I’ve learned that a building would last 26 years, and every calculation was based on that. But now you are reusing materials and designing a villa where the facade material lasts 45 years. What does that mean in the Anthropocene? JJ There is a choice of which materials you use. Wood is an organic material, so if the whole thing falls off, it will not harmfully enter the environment again. With steel, we need to make it in a way that you can easily take it apart or change it after its initial use. Adaptiveness is something that our practice tries to include in every design. An example is the Espresso Bar here at TU Delft, which is the third or fourth life of the window frames of the former Zwarte Madonna building, in The Hague. They first became an exhibition, then some interior design in Amsterdam, before finally turning into the Espresso Bar, constructed out of the remaining pieces. And we could easily take them apart and use them in the following phase. The thought of what happens

120

afterwards needs to be there but our main focus is on how we act on it now. A lot of designers are trained in the cradle to cradle model, aiming to create new products that have positive impacts on their future lifespan, which is a good thing. However, it is also important to act with all the materials that were not conceived under this idea and to give them a purpose for as long as possible. MH Well, with the last two clarifications we bring the practice back to social responsibilities and understanding the technical process and the detailing of your work within the larger context. I am very curious what statement you (all) could make now. But for tonight I think this is the status quo and let’s see what future brings and what kind of values you put forward and how you engage with the Anthropocene in your profession. Session closed.

PA N E L D IS C US SI O N - DAY 2

121

VI.MANI F E STO

122

The aim of any symposium is of course to create a discussion on the topic at hand. However, in the course of a series of lectures it can be difficult for the participants of an event to engage in serious conversation. For this reason, ULWeek 2017 featured a short, intense competition as an additional means for participants to delve into the topic of the Anthropocene. As with the overall concept of Urban and Landscape Week 2017, the competition aimed to not only discuss the Anthropocene as a challenge for the relationship between humankind and nature, but more generally, as a concept that reflects how we engage with our environment at large.

123

M A N I F E STO

The idea of having a competition in the context of Urban and Landscape Week is relatively new. It was first introduced in 2016 as a sort of counter-proposal to the existing curriculum. Since the courses for urbanism at TU Delft focus mostly on methodology, the ULWeek competition was supposed to allow participants to, within a very limited amount of time, explore a topic at depth. As the entire event unfolded over just three days with only 13 hours set aside for the actual competition, its format was deliberately different from conventional architectural competitions. Rather than producing a site-specific design visualised through a set of drawings, the competition was intended to focus on reflection and ideas. The participants were thus provided with one of five (anonymised) sites around the globe radically transformed through implications of the Anthropocene. While sites showing surface mining, energy production and natural disaster reflected the relation between man and the environment, two sites showing the desolation of civil war and the rapid sprawl of informal settlements looked at the Anthropocene through the relationship with mankind and the man-made environment. As in spatial terms, the Anthropocene will always manifest itself in a change of a site over time, the basis for the interventions was a set of high resolution satellite imagery of the preselected sites. Covering different scales and times, these images showed sites of roughly 2.5 km2 undergoing sometimes rather brutal, transformations over the course of little more than the last decade: surface mining ripping an enormous hole in the ground with no regard for infrastructure or nature, an informal settlement appearing out of nowhere with a visible system of streets and plots, a complete neighbourhood increasingly devastated by the horror of civil war or a landscape flooded after the construction of a dam. All sites reflected the dynamics of the Anthropocene.

124

COMPETITION

As the intention was not to come up with an actual architectural design, the participants were asked to make a reflective statement on the dynamics of the Anthropocene represented on their site by means of a written manifesto. The core of the submission however, was the representation and elaboration of the ideas developed in the manifesto in the form of a vision. While this had to be visual, there was explicitly no restriction on the format whether collage, model or video. In addition to not limiting the participants in their creativity, this was also intended to open up the competition to participants from a non-design, non-architectural background. As a consequence, the submissions were diverse and, unsurprisingly, relatively non-spatial. Thus, it was also a challenge for the jury, consisting of Adrian Lahoud, dean at the Royal College of Art, Dr. Luisa Calabrese and Hamed Khosravi, both researchers at TU Delft, to identify a winner. The level of reflection as well as the creativity presented in the vision of the entry were consequently the main characteristics in the judging process. The following pages will feature the results of the five teams that participated in the event, beginning with the winning team and the runners-up.

125

M A N I F E STO

VI-A / ENERGY PRODUCTION Team 1 / Competition Winners

2006

2009

2011

2017

Team Members: Sebastian Gschanes, Berra Sulenur Kilik, Diego Moya Ortiz, Ahmad Syuhudi Rahmani, Gabriela Waldherr

126

M A N I F E STO

What are the new possibilities for green energy? What are the possible new energy resources? How can we produce green energy cheaper and more efficient? Is it possible to power the entire world with green energy? How much area would we need to supply the entire world with green energy? What are the most efficient geographies for each type of green energy production? IT IS OBVIOUS THAT WE NEED SOME ANSWERS TO SURVIVE. BUT DON’T WE NEED THE RIGHT QUESTIONS FIRST?

Is green energy really green? What’s the price of more green energy? Does “not seeing” mean non-existent? FAR FROM YOU IS CLOSE TO SOMEONE ELSE. IS IT NATURE FOR HUMANS OR NATURE WITH HUMANS?

128

COMPETITION WINNERS

Consumers see nature as a resource, ancient tribes saw it as a mother. WHAT IS NATURE FOR YOU?

The answer depends on your culture. We are living in a material world, so have you ever asked yourself... WHAT DO I REALLY NEED? HOW MUCH DO I REALLY NEED TO CONSUME?

If you ask the right questions you get the answers you need TO SURVIVE THE ANTHROPOCENE.

129

M A N I F E STO

VI-B / CIVIL WAR Team 2 / Runners-Up

2009

2014

2016

Team Members: Shu-Wen Chen, Sindhuja Janakiraman, Gayatri Mujumdar, Asmeeta Das Sharma, Thomas Dillon Peynado

130

Re - joice

Re - Imagine

Re - Live Re - build

– torn landscape to re-instill normalcy. We believe that the power to rebuild societies is with the people. Our job is to assist them in the execution of their ideas and needs. However, we can attempt to provide a space to re – sow HOPE. A FREE ZONE – free of politics, power and war – owned by the people as a collective – protected by the remains of goodwill agencies of the world. A space which embodies equality and promotes sustainability and peace rather than hatred and greed. The idea is to bring everyone together to build metabolic and symbiotic relationships. A space owned, ideated and built by the people. We propose this as a stepping stone to build a secular society and eventually a harmonious city.

M A N I F E STO

RE-LIVE RE-IMAGINE RE-BUILD RE-JOICE

The Anthropocene has pushed us into an age of greed, insecurity and resource scarcity. Temporary greed and egocentricity leading to permanent disasters. In this age of global networks and socio-economic interdependency “crisis” is a very commonly used term. Economic Crisis, Natural Crisis, Political Crisis, Social Crisis – and in times of crisis – the most obvious answer in our capitalist, consumerist world is conflict. Men against men for land to grow, water to drink, air to breathe, energy and economic opportunities. In process, destroying the world as we know it and leaving behind a void with only fear, pain and virtually no resources. This mindless wastage of human life, resources and money pushes the world into a Survival Zone. A zone in which the overarching identity of a community or an individual is to survive. Beyond Ethnicity, territory or religion – to be alive and healthy. However, in this Zone we are one. For generations we have been living in a patriarchal society where the men go to work and now the men go to war. This left behind women and children as the remnants of Civil Conflicts across the world. Germany, USA, Lebanon, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Syria – time after time, history repeated itself. At the edge of the Anthropocene the responsibility of survival lies on the shoulders of these women. To redefine identity and collectively give birth to a new humanity.

132

RU N N E R S - U P

As designers and outsiders, we find it almost impossible to “provide” a solution for a war-torn landscape to re-instill normalcy. We believe that the power to rebuild societies is with the people. Our job is to assist them in the execution of their ideas and needs. However, we can attempt to provide a space to re-sow HOPE. A FREE ZONE – free of politics, power and war – owned by the people as a collective – protected by the remains of goodwill agencies of the world. A space which embodies equality and promotes sustainability and peace rather than hatred and greed. The idea is to bring everyone together to build metabolic and symbiotic relationships. A space owned, ideated and built by the people. We propose this as a stepping stone to build a secular society and eventually a harmonious city.

A CALL FOR COLLECTIVISM. A RE DEFINED SOCIETY. REBIRTH OF HUMANITY.

133

M A N I F E STO

VI-C / [IN]FORMAL SPRAWL Team 3

2003

2007

2010

2017

Team Members: Ranee Leung, Iliyana Miteva, Johanna Pieritz, Zuzanna Sekuła, Carola Vega

134

M A N I F E STO

Welcome Anthropocene. We, the human population are growing. Cities are growing. Nature is growing. All of this is possible, only if we have enough space. Ignorance, greed, the catastrophic cycle of unlimited production and consumption. Endless sprawl. In 2050, 70% of world’s population will live in cities but at what cost? Maybe our world itself? We have reached the point where inhabitable territories have turned “habitable”. Increasing VULNERABILITY. Creating CONTRADICTORY environments. DIVIDING communities. We need to use the Anthropocene as a tool of a new beginning. We need to embrace it and start building bridges, break down barriers. COMPLEXITY COMES WHEN WE BALANCE EXTREMES.

136

TEAM 3

There is a clash between the flow of nature and the built environment. There is a strong duality between the formal: escaping the city, and informal: migrating towards the city. We ACCEPT that we cannot control the informal being born from the formal; the same way we cannot control humans or nature. However, we can find solutions where they can COEXIST and create new possibilities. The more we accept informality, the more we will be able to create a more balanced and sustainable typology. We need to catalyse opportunities where governments, businesses and societies can work together to make change. Societies need to be held accountable to address the root of the problem. WE NEED TO QUESTION THE WAY WE INHABIT AND INTERFERE WITH BOTH THE URBAN AND NATURAL REALM. WHY PRESERVING NATURE SHOULD MEAN ONLY KEEPING IT AWAY FROM PEOPLE? WE CAN INTERVENE. WE CAN PROVIDE PEOPLE WITH NEW SOLUTIONS. WE CAN CREATE INCENTIVES. WE SHOULD MANAGE INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS DIFFERENTLY BUT WE SHOULDNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T PREVENT IT FROM HAPPENING. ACCEPTANCE IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A CHANGE.

137

M A N I F E STO

VI-D / RESOURCE EXTRACTION Team 4

2000

2007

2013

2016

Team Members: Bonaventura Kevin Satria, Pablo Diego Pastor, Vinay Sutisna, Lew Bing Quan

138

MAN NEEDS TO GET RID OF HIS

RESOURCE EXTRACTION

OMINOUS

EGO

OPPORTUNITY? How resource extractions are changing our landscapes

Recent Earth’s Satellite Images Showing

Scars and Barren Landscapes

Acid Water Pollution RiskS

Miner’s Lives By Jessica Winter

Environment Special: The Perils of Resource Extraction

Mapping a World Without Ice 45 Why Explorers Need to Fail 60 Towards the Edge of Anthropocene 125

BRYAN HOLIDAY

By Steven Pressfield

MAY 2030

THE MINER’S MANIFESTO

MINER

WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL MINER IN 2030

DIG

In this great era of advancement, Man Man has successfully disconnected looked ahead and forward more and himself from his actions – by more - and looked around less and less. decentralizing necessary components of life from one another, such as Man has come a long way, but production and consumption, Man has sometimes that means an even longer lost the ability to perceive and react to road back. The consequent scars are the truth. The detachment between starting to show and we need to take action and consequence has blinded Man from truth. action - dont dig holes you cannot fill!

“DONT DIG HOLES YOU CANNOT FILL!”

JACK DORSEY

DONT

HOLES YOU

CANT

A new agreement between the so mining and construccon companies, a the developers of urban plans to crea type of typology that allows the renew old mines and thus to be able to use n This agreement will allow a new use seen before, and a remodeling that w the way in which they

FILL

Our Anthropocene reconnects two essential vertices. Diminish Man’s ego. Experience both sides of consumption. Bring the effects to Man, or Man to the effects. Restore negative feedback loops. Naturalize the economy of man in the rest of nature. Let each Man scale his own well-being. Let every Man have a hold on his own future.

SHAKE HANDS MINERS AND DEVELOPERS TO COOPERATE FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PIT

MAY 2030

BY THOMAS PIERROT

TU Delft University creates first Mars Colony

Circular Economy: what is it?

Engineering remote cotrolled T cells

Regulating genome editing

CELEBRATING 200 YEARS OF EXPLORATION

A Message From the Gypsies NGM.COM

Employment in the Quarry

AUGUST 2050

15$ 8 April 2030

Resource Extraction and Economic Growth

DISCOVER WORLD's LATEST AND TRENDIEST HUMAN SETTLEMENT

th Bobbie G Flower

Researchers find a way to make quarries acid neutral

100

WE DID IT! A New Dawn for Pioneers in Manmade Crevaces

Moving from a linear to circular economy

“I am one with the quarry. It provides me with all that I need and I am eager to show you its ways.” - Bo Bobbie the Flower Gypsie

Land Rehabilitaaon in India 32 Can We Recycle our Buildings? 44 Archaeology by Satellite 140

MOS INFLUENTIA PEOPL O ALL TIM

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

NEGATIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

MINE PIT NEW CITIES

URBAN MODULES OUT OF INDUSTRIAL CAVITIES BY TRIVIC

Did the Trick

DZVRAKO

CORRECTED MECHANISM

Junko Tamura

INPUT

OUTPUT

TAYLOR SWIFT RELEASES HER NEW SINGLE TITLED

“MINE” YOUR OWN

BUSINESS EXTERNALITIES AS A SIGNAL

Erin Marie W.

TayloR releases he Single “Mine you busi

M A N I F E STO

THE MINERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S MANIFESTO

In this great era of advancement, Man looked ahead and forward more and more - and looked around less and less. Man has come a long way, but sometimes that means an even longer road back. The consequent scars are starting to show and we need to take action.

140

TEAM 4

DON’T DIG HOLES YOU CANNOT FILL!

Man needs a little nerve - the nerve to live differently, the nerve to live with some discomfort! A healthy system needs to feel where it has gone wrong, not just when everything is alright. It calls for a definitive future, instead of one that may be better or may not exist at all. Man has successfully disconnected himself from his actions – by decentralising necessary components of life from one another, such as production and consumption, Man has lost the ability to perceive and react to the truth. The detachment between action and consequence has blinded Man from truth. Our Anthropocene reconnects two essential vertices. Diminish Man’s ego. Experience both sides of consumption. Bring the effects to Man, or Man to the effects. Restore negative feedback loops. Naturalise the economy of man in the rest of nature. Let each Man scale his own well-being. Let every Man have a hold on his own future.

141

M A N I F E STO

VI-E / NATURAL DISASTER Team 5

2006

2009

Team Members: Sara Boraei, Boomi Kim, Francisco Monsalve, Pablo Munoz, Mark Slierings

142

M A N I F E STO

ANTHROPO!CENE Is the Anthropocene the era of human impact on the Earth? Isn’t this concept already a way of seeing us isolated from nature? Couldn’t a new concept be explored in which different humans (not just one Anthropos) and nature are seen as related? On the other hand, a concept as natural disaster is usually used to blame nature when things go wrong. Wouldn’t they be considered human disasters? We propose a new era of working together. An era in which economic (human) reasons are not the main priority to make decisions. Together doesn’t mean the same. We embrace difference. We embrace conflict. We need to learn how to deal with it.

TOGETHER! As a new system, in which different peoples take responsibility of any disaster happening elsewhere. A global organisation that give voice to communities and governments. TOGETHER! In small communities we would be able to work and react to a disaster in an organised way, using the resources at hand. TOGETHER! The nature and the people: we’ll build a complex understanding of the former so we can coexist. TOGETHER! Using different knowledge as valuable resources: technical - scientific / traditional / global / local knowledge together.

144

TEAM 5

ANTROPOC?ENE Is the Anthropocene the era of human impact on the Earth? Do we even have an impact on this world? Or was a change in climate irreversible? It’s everyone for themselves in this world. There is no such thing as global agreements as people from other countries are considered different, there’s no way to agree with them. And these agreements cost money which would rather be spent on problems in their own country. Natural disasters would only be seen as a chance to gain political or economic advantage of the situation.

TOGETHER? We will please the needs of everyone in our country. From now on it is our country first! TOGETHER? We believe that a few extra degrees aren’t bad at all. You don’t actually believe that climate change is caused by humanity, do you? Plus: now summertime lasts longer! TOGETHER? We are moving forward; our economy is growing on the sources that this earth gives us. We are all becoming rich! TOGETHER? We are fighting these natural disasters. When our people are struck by one I am going to help them. Supply crates are coming for you, be sure to vote for me on the next elections!

145

V I I.R E F L E CTIONS

146

So what lessons are we to draw from the collection of ideas and approaches gathered together for the Urbanism and Landscape week 2017? There seems little doubt that the Anthropocene is here: both as a catchall term to gather together a range of current social and systemic design issues as well as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit within geological time scales as is being proposed by the Anthropocene Working Group (with Colin Waters). Perhaps in keeping with its anthropogenic origins and planetary implications, confronting the issues raised by the Anthropocene is truly a â&#x20AC;&#x153;wickedâ&#x20AC;? endeavour.

147

The most obvious point of tension or conflict surrounds our relationships with, and impact upon, natural systems and the implications of this for human societies. It is no longer plausible to view ourselves as separate from these systems or suggest that our will can be imposed upon the natural world without our suffering unwanted consequences. The ecological world is fundamentally dynamic and as such, so too are our innumerable inter-relations with natural systems at all scales...from the local to the planetary. While this does negate traditional problem solving approaches that strive for a single solution (the masterplan) or stable state (a static system) in favour of changing behaviours, it also encourages us to engage with this â&#x20AC;&#x153;sticky messâ&#x20AC;? and better understand the processes that both impact, and are impacted by, anthropogenic forces and patterns. A number of themes recur in our guestsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; approaches and may offer us some pointers for future practice. The architect might be required to become a more diffuse figure, a participant in new multi and inter-disciplinary processes that might view systems, materials and resources differently. That might concentrate on empowering individuals and cities to self-organise, to reconfigure their conceptions of resources and waste, to generate information and facilitate user interaction, to think across scales (both temporal and spatial) and become more productive or at least, more connected to the productive infrastructures that maintain their urban lifestyles.

148

To do this, the architectural and design disciplines must step beyond spatial interventions in the built environment to also facilitate connections: between people and urban processes but also between the biological and the human, the virtual and the real. Aesthetics should still play a role however, as Claudia Pasquero insists: our productive urban infrastructures need to be brought back into everyday view, no longer relegated to the periphery but enclosed within the very makeup of our urban landscapes and a part of our everyday urban conversations. The student competition perhaps also revealed how young the discussion around the Anthropocene is, as both the competition brief - left deliberately open in order to start a conversation rather than produce specific results - and the teamsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; outputs were focused on the ethical implications of the Anthropocene rather than on a (currently) nebulous definition of the term. The ways that we approach these newly established (and fundamental) connections between urban and natural landscapes at the local, regional, national and planetary scales are not fixed: the possibilities are as endless as the interactions and the contexts in which these interactions take place...therein lies the opportunity.

149

Polis Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft ulweek@polistudelft.nl +31 (01) 5278 4093 Support

Urban and Landscape Week 2017: [NO] FURTHER - Towards the Edge of the Anthropocene

Articles inside

ULWeek2017- [NO]Further- Towards the Edge of the Anthropocene