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‘When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold designers, artists and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.’ Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement.
What is the agency of the landscape architect when we consider the ‘imagining of possibilities’ for our cities, streets and spaces as we collectively confront the challenge of the climate crisis? Design Studio 2 explores this question and the urban condition through the lens of Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive to read and understand the city of today so we can imagine new possibilities for the Retrofit City of the future.
Dérive, usually translated from French as ‘to drift’, is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’. Our studio pursues speculative scenarios for existing streets, parks, squares, green spaces, fragments and edges that often underperform in the city, particularly in the face of a changing climate where absorptive, living and sequestering landscapes will be increasingly important. Biodiversity and ecology will be a new form of currency; as Richard Weller writes, ‘As they do with culture, cities will soon compete to be the most biodiverse.’
Retrofitting buildings is often discussed as a method to reduce the impact of the construction industry on the climate crisis and aid in our collective progress towards net zero by limiting the number of new buildings, but retrofitting the city is rarely considered. What could our cities look like and how could they perform if retrofitted to privilege live matter, living systems, absorptive surfaces, alternative substrates and optimised conditions for non-humans? What if those forgotten fragments of streets, spaces and cities were retrofitted to create new habitats, social spaces or Miyawaki micro-forests? As we collectively work to counter the effects of the Anthropocene, could we work with ecological systems to move towards the Symbiocene, a new epoch marked by the symbiosis between the systems of the city and the systems of the living world? As urbanist Sarah Ichioka and architect Michael Pawlyn put it, ‘rather than referring to “the environment”, which implies something abstract for which humans are separate, it is more consistent with regenerative thinking to refer to “the living world”’