Search Results (25)

This paper examines the adaptive design potential and post-industrial transformation possibilities of decommissioned mono-functional infrastructures (built to serve a single-use purpose) as fertile grounds for industrial exaptation, rather than as obsolete structures from the 20th century industrial age. It develops a typological framework, organized by industrial process, to interrogate these structures and outlines a blueprint for their possible adaptive transformations. Through select global case studies, it proposes how industrial exaptation should move beyond just cultural spectacle to support multi-performative adaptive uses: from productive economies, new forms of industry, and domestic occupations, to ecological remediation strategies and climate-responsive adaptations. Rather than treating these forms as nostalgic artifacts, the paper argues for a paradigm shift: reclaiming industrial infrastructure under the domain of the design disciplines and reframing industrial exaptation as an urban, environmental, and civic project. Through this framework, these post-industrial forms are recast as evolutionary palimpsests—spatial templates for reimagining more sustainable futures in the age of the Anthropocene. Full article

The research’s main objective is to explore and encourage modes of architectural practice that can foster multispecies co-living to reduce biodiversity loss and increase the quality of life for both human and nonhuman inhabitants of architecture. This is achieved through conceptual discussions, comprehensive architectural case studies and work-based design explorations that support cross-species co-living in the context of Eastern Norway (Østlandet)—a geographical region of south-eastern Norway consisting of the counties Vestfold, Telemark, Viken, Oslo and Innlandet. A pluralistic method builds on analytical, critical and work-based explorative studies consisting of two parts: (a) historical and contemporary case studies in Norway that support modes of cross-species co-living and (b) design explorations by the second author investigating the operational potential of kindness in architecture. The notion of kindness in this research is built upon an understanding of the amalgam of concepts: solidarity, kinship and being kind, explained in the article’s introduction. The potential for designing with and for nonhumans to reinvigorate modes of co-living and support existing habitats is investigated, focusing on the ways three bird species relate to a specific building in Eastern Norway due to their habitat needs in the region: Cyanistes caeruleus, Eurasian blue tit (blåmeis in Norwegian); Passer montanus, Eurasian tree sparrow (pilfink in Norwegian); and Delichon urbicum, northern or common house martin (taksvale in Norwegian). The research contributes to ongoing discussions within architectural discourse regarding multispecies inhabitation and architecture’s role in the current biodiversity crisis and provides insight into both historical and contemporary/ongoing design solutions for multispecies co-living. Full article

By studying Aboriginal maps, this speculative research discusses world heritage concepts about land and merges them into western urban contexts. Assumptions concerning spatial allocation and demarcation such as boundaries, divisions and geometric patterns are being contested by ideas pertaining to Indigenous narratives expressing holistic views about community, and the ecosystem as integrated components of broader organisations. First, this paper introduces principles of the Indigenous culture spurring viable land management by shared, equal and inclusive schemes as ones that also respond to global socio-environmental challenges. Alternative strategies are being considered relating to the soft demarcation of distinct areas understood as malleable aggregates merging with each other and with the landscape’s topological features, with reference to the Aboriginal culture. The techniques being proposed are further compared with original approaches in architecture and urban design developed since late modernism, challenging enduring practices. Seen next to each other, these models of thought are suggestive of a paradigm shift by which architecture reinforces deeper connections with the intellectual, sociocultural, and natural resources of the greater cosmos. Furthermore, as these ideas are propelled by computing, they lead towards the dynamic linking of analysis with the design results producing all-sustainable structures that are widely applicable, as architecture’s contribution to the current socio-scientific discourse on holistic approaches with a more-than-human perspective. Full article

Human actions are ambivalent in nature and this in turn has an impact on all components of socio-ecological systems. Their ambivalence results from the fact that human actions have both positive and negative outcomes and properties, which occur and manifest concurrently in the ontological realm of human existence. In terms of space–time, both micro-geography and macro-geography of human existence are intertwined during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus affecting pre- and post-pandemic space–time continuum. The utilitarian qubit can be used to describe the nature of human existence, i.e., Homo sapiens has always been experiencing a state of existence where pain and pleasure are co-extensive. In this state, it is impossible to establish to what extent pain, and to what extent pleasure, will have a definitive impact on our status as individuals and humanity as a species. In this article, the authors explore how the record of an individual’s life before and after the COVID-19 pandemic has been impacted by the wellbeing and actions of other humans and prior to one’s existence. Drawing on the utilitarian qubit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impacts on the members of Homo sapiens, can be understood as a partial outcome of the cumulative actions of humanity on the biosphere and other elements of the global ecosystem (the Age of the Anthropocene). We argue that this paper is also useful to foster disaster preparedness and resilience in the pandemic and post-pandemic era, at micro- and macro-geographical interfaces of human existence in the 21st century. The existence of individual members of Homo sapiens and humanity as a species is unfolding at the boundary between two levels: fundamental reality and situational reality. The result is the historical accumulation and ontological interconnectedness of humanity’s activities with one’s own actions. Pain and pleasure resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Age of Anthropocene, as well as the right and wrong consequences of humanity’s actions, are posited here to be symptoms of the Anthropocenic (phase of) epidemiological transition. Full article

Human activity is affecting and transforming the natural environment, changing the ecosystem mosaic and natural biogeochemical processes in urban-industrial landscapes. Among the anthropogenic ecosystems, there are many present features of Novel Ecosystems (NE), e.g., the de novo created habitats on post-mineral excavation sites. The biological nature of the functional mechanisms of Novel Ecosystems is mostly unknown. In natural and semi-natural ecosystems, biodiversity is considered as the primary element influencing ecosystem processes and functioning. The preliminary studies conducted on post-mineral excavation sites have shown that, in poor oligotrophic habitats, the species composition of the assembled vascular plants is non-analogous, distinctive, and not found in natural and semi-natural habitats. This paper aims to present the gaps between scientific identification of the biological mechanisms driving ecosystem processes and functioning (including the expanding areas of Novel Ecosystems created de novo). Among the identified gaps, the following issues should be listed. The detailed identification and understanding of the processes and biodiversity-dependent functioning of Novel Ecosystems is crucial for proper environmental management, particularly when facing the challenges of ecological constraints and of global change. The ecology of Novel Ecosystems is a social and economic issue because of the relationships with densely populated urban-industrial areas. Full article

The article explores how the quality of life within a deprived urban environment might be improved through the ‘gamification’ of and interaction with, more-than-human elements within the environment. It argues that such quality may be achieved through the community’s multicentered value from the bottom up. This is shown through the case study of the Co-De|GT urban mobile application that was developed in the Synergetic Landscapes unit through real-life research by design experimental studio teaching. Complimentary experimentation took place during the Relating Systems Thinking and Design 10 symposium in the Co-De|BP workshop, where experts were able to be collocated for interactive real-time data gathering. This application addresses the need for collective action towards more-than-human synergy across an urban ecosystem through gamification, community collaboration and DIY culture. It intends to generate a sustainable, scalable token economy where humans and non-humans play equal roles, earning, trading and being paid for goods and services to test such potentials for future economies underpinned by blockchain. This work diverges from dominant economic models that do not recognise the performance of and the limits to, material extraction from the ecosystem. The current economic model has led to the global financial crisis (GFC). Furthermore, it is based on the unsustainable perpetual consumption of services and goods, which may lead to the untangling and critical failure of the market system globally. Therefore, this work investigates how gamification and tokenization may support a complementary and parallel economic market that sustains and grows urban ecosystems. While the research does not speculate on policy implications, it posits how such markets may ameliorate some of the brittleness apparent in the global economic model. It demonstrates a systemic approach to urban ecosystem performance for the future post-Anthropocene communities and economies. Full article

This paper aims to investigate the state of integrated coastal zone management (ICZM), which is justified as a strategy for managing coastal resources with respect to increasing pressures from tourism, farming, climate change, urbanization, population growth, etc. In the case of island states, the impact of tourism and second-home development is paramount. The use of coastal areas as commons and ICZM as a governance strategy have been established for a long time; however, the implementation of ICZM has remained a challenge due to the forces of global mass tourism and unsustainable resource use in island states. This study focused on views of the coastal communities in North Cyprus, who are in constant interaction with coastal ecosystems for their livelihood. For the analytical purpose of the study, 251 survey questionnaires were administered to eight communities along the coastal areas. Data analysis was conducted using descriptive statistical analysis with a post hoc test. Socio-ecological systems (SES) and Ostrom’s collective action principles guided the study as the main theoretical frameworks. The study revealed that the ICZM strategy has been neglected and coastal communities are not invited to be involved in any form of ICZM. Furthermore, the study revealed the tourism development has been the major activity of the Anthropocene in coastal areas without a proactive coastal development strategy that is supposed to consider the vulnerability of coastal ecosystems. Practical and theoretical implications are also discussed. Full article

The term ‘sustainability’ has become an overused umbrella term that encompasses a range of climate actions and environmental infrastructure investments; however, there is still an urgent need for transformative reform work. Scholars of urban studies have made compelling cases for a more-than-human conceptualisation of urban and environmental planning and also share a common interest in translating theory into practical approaches and implications that recognise (i) our ecological entanglements with planetary systems and (ii) the urgent need for multispecies justice in the reconceptualisation of genuinely sustainable cities. More-than-human sensibility draws on a range of disciplines and encompasses conventional and non-conventional research methods and design approaches. In this article, we offer a horizon scan type of review of key posthuman and more-than-human literature sources at the intersection of urban studies and environmental humanities. The aim of this review is to (i) contribute to the emerging discourse that is starting to operationalise a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development, and; (ii) to articulate a nascent framework for more-than-human spatial planning policy and practice. Full article

Since the Industrial Revolution, a new era has arisen called the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change outside the stable environmental state of the Holocene. During the Holocene, environmental change occurred naturally, and the Earth’s regulatory capacity maintained the conditions that enabled human development. Resource overexploitation of the industrial “Anthropocene”, under the principle of profit maximization, has led to planetary ecological crises, such as overloaded carbon sinks and climate changes, vanishing species, degraded ecosystems, and insufficient natural resources. Agro-based society, in which almost all demands of humans can be supported by agriculture, is characterized by life production. The substitution of Agro-based society for a post-industrial society is an evolutionary result of social movement, it is an internal requirement of a sustainable society for breaking through the resource constraint of economic growth. The core feature of agriculture is to use organisms as production objects and rely on life processes to achieve production goals. The substitution of Agro-based society for a post-industrial society is the precondition for a sustainable carbon cycle, breaking through the resource limits of the industrial “Anthropocene”, alleviating the environmental pressure of economic development, and promoting society from increasing disorderly entropy to orderly decreasing entropy. Meanwhile, technological advancements and growing environmental awareness of society make it feasible for the substitution of an agro-based society for a post-industrial society. Full article

This article seeks the qualitative synthesis of schools of thought from extreme climate regions that could support urban biodiversity and climate change adaptation through architectural design. It proposes that climate comfort and biodiversity are closely related. This article suggests a possible systemic urban metabolism within a built environment that can support a transition to post-Anthropocene, where humans and other species live together in synergy. This article exemplifies and seeks systemic relations and reflections of gathered field studies documentation of case studies of breathing walls, envelopes, and screens generating bioclimatic layers in the cultural landscape, selected for their penetrability and performance. The samples from diverse study journeys that were codesigned through vernacular cultures and the author’s research by design speculations on the responsive screen ‘Ray’ are investigated and speculated upon through gigamapping (visual complexity mapping). This gigamapping is not to present any hard data model but to relate, inform and speculate on the investigated field that is grounded in research by design on cross-species coliving. This is approached through possible architectures and architectural and urban design parasites, transitioning towards synergetic landscapes of our envisioned colived and cocreated futures. Full article

Critiques of ecologically harmful human activity in the Anthropocene extend beyond life and livelihoods to practices of dying, death, and the disposal of bodies. For members of the diffuse ‘New Death Movement’ operating in the post-secular West today, such environmental externalities are symptomatic of a broader failure of modern death care, what we refer to here as the ‘Death Industrial Complex’. According to New Death advocates, in its profit-driven, medicalised, de-ritualized and patriarchal form, modern death care fundamentally distorts humans’ relationship to mortality, and through it, nature. In response, the Movement promotes a (re)new(ed) way of ‘doing death’, one coded as spiritual and feminine, and based on the acceptance of natural cycles of decay and rebirth. In this article, we examine two examples from this Movement that demonstrate how the relationship between death, religion, and gender is re-configured in the Anthropocene: the rise of death doulas as alternates to funeral directors and the invention of new necro-technologies designed to transform the dead into trees. We ask how gender is positioned within the attempt to remake death care, and show how, for adherents of the New Death Movement, gender is fundamental both to a critique of the Death Industrial Complex and to mending our distorted relationship to death. By weaving together women, nature, and spirituality, the caring labours of death doulas and the fertility symbolism of new arboreal necro-technologies build an alternative model of a good death in the Anthropocene, one premised on its (re)feminization. Full article

This article argues that whilst our recent economic models are dependent on the overall ecosystem, they do not reflect this fact. As a result of this, we are facing Anthropocene mass extinction. The paper presents a collaborative regenerative region (COLreg) co-creation and tokenisation, involving multiple human and non-human, living and non-living stakeholders. It unfolds different stages of multicentred, systemic co-design via collaborative gigamapping. In the first steps, certain stakeholders are present and certain are represented, whilst in the final stages of generative development, all stakeholders, even those who were previously just potential stakeholders, take an active role. The ‘COLreg’ project represents a holistic approach that reflects today’s most burning issues, such as biodiversity decrease, unsustainable food production, unsustainable economic models, and social systems. It combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to co-create to achieve regional social and environmental justice for the coming symbiotic post-Anthropocene era. Full article

Ethical food choices have become an important societal theme in post-industrial countries. Many consumers are particularly interested in the animal welfare implications of the various foods they may choose to consume. However, concepts in animal welfare are rapidly evolving towards consideration of all animals (including wildlife) in contemporary approaches such as “One Welfare”. This approach requires recognition that negative impacts (harms) may be intentional and obvious (e.g., slaughter of livestock) but also include the under-appreciated indirect or unintentional harms that often impact wildlife (e.g., land clearing). This is especially true in the Anthropocene, where impacts on non-human life are almost ubiquitous across all human activities. We applied the “harms” model of animal welfare assessment to several common food production systems and provide a framework for assessing the breadth (not intensity) of harms imposed. We considered all harms caused to wild as well as domestic animals, both direct effects and indirect effects. We described 21 forms of harm and considered how they applied to 16 forms of food production. Our analysis suggests that all food production systems harm animals to some degree and that the majority of these harms affect wildlife, not livestock. We conclude that the food production systems likely to impose the greatest overall breadth of harms to animals are intensive animal agriculture industries (e.g., dairy) that rely on a secondary food production system (e.g., cropping), while harvesting of locally available wild plants, mushrooms or seaweed is likely to impose the least harms. We present this conceptual analysis as a resource for those who want to begin considering the complex animal welfare trade-offs involved in their food choices. Full article

Planetary health is a broad multidisciplinary effort that attempts to address what has been described as “Anthropocene Syndrome”—the wicked, interrelated challenges of our time. These include, but are not limited to, grotesque biodiversity losses, climate change, environmental degradation, resource depletion, the global burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), health inequalities, social injustices, erosion of wisdom and civility, together with the many structural underpinnings of these grand challenges. The ultimate aim of planetary health is flourishing along every link in the person, place and planet continuum. The events of “2020” have illuminated the consequences of “mass trauma” and how sub-threshold anxiety and/or depressive symptoms erase the rigid lines between mental “health” and mental “disorders”, and unmasked the systemic forms of injustice, discrimination, and oppression that have too often escaped discourse. Here, we query the ways in which post-traumatic growth research might inform the larger planetary health community, especially in the context of a global pandemic, broadening socioeconomic inequalities, a worsening climate crisis, and the rise of political authoritarianism. The available research would suggest that “2020” fulfills the trauma criteria of having a “seismic impact on the assumptive world”, and as such, provides fertile ground for post-traumatic growth. Among the many potential positive changes that might occur in response to trauma, we focus on the value of new awareness, perspective and greater wisdom. Full article

The term “Anthropocene Syndrome” describes the wicked interrelated challenges of our time. These include, but are not limited to, unacceptable poverty (of both income and opportunity), grotesque biodiversity losses, climate change, environmental degradation, resource depletion, the global burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), health inequalities, social injustices, the spread of ultra-processed foods, consumerism and incivility in tandem with a diminished emphasis on the greater potential of humankind, efforts toward unity, or the value of fulfilment and flourishing of all humankind. Planetary health is a concept that recognizes the interdependent vitality of all natural and anthropogenic ecosystems—social, political and otherwise; it blurs the artificial lines between health at scales of person, place and planet. Promoting planetary health requires addressing the underlying pathology of “Anthropocene Syndrome” and the deeper value systems and power dynamics that promote its various signs and symptoms. Here, we focus on misinformation as a toxin that maintains the syndromic status quo—rapid dissemination of falsehoods and dark conspiracies on social media, fake news, alternative facts and medical misinformation described by the World Health Organization as an “infodemic”. In the context of planetary health, we explore the historical antecedents of this “infodemic” and underscore an urgent need to remediate the misinformation mess. It is our contention that education (especially in early life) emphasizing mindfulness and understanding of the mechanisms by which propaganda is spread (and unhealthy products are marketed) is essential. We expand the discourse on positive social contagion and argue that empowerment through education can help lead to an information transformation with the aim of flourishing along every link in the person, place and planet continuum. Full article