Citizen Spring 2020 Issue

CITIZEN SPRING 2020/£25

ALL SH0OK UP Summer 2019 |Citizen|1

Furniture with a mission.

Osaka

by Teruhiro Yanagihara

Offecct London, Flokk Showroom, 63 Central Street, London, EC1 V 3AF. offecct.com

The battle for a brave new world

I

t all seemed so straightforward.

When we started to plan this issue of Citizen, we made some clear editorial decisions. We would narrow our focus to a single theme – Climate Change – but tackle our field of enquiry through a range of different lenses. Design proposals are our stock-in-trade; the meat of the magazine. But, ultimately, we are interested in change; in stepping outside the self-referential world of architectural critique. We organised a forum for designers and entrepreneurs to present progressive design proposals to investors with the means to get ideas off the ground.

We spoke to investors and funders who believe in the power of capital not only to generate wealth, but to kickstart positive change and transform citizens’ lives.

We looked for case studies and research that help us to understand the scale and the complexities of the challenges we face.

We wanted to get real. But we also wanted to venture into the realm of imagination. To celebrate the power of poetry and fiction to envisage alternative realities or evoke an emotional response.

But most of all to engage and entertain.

We took the view that tough concepts and big ideas are at their most digestible when leavened by a healthy dose of levity and light relief. It didn’t occur to us that it might be tricky to distinguish fact from fiction. The academic Jem Bendell and the curator Lev Bratishenko both anticipate a future ravaged by climate change. One is factual, the other fiction.

One is deadly serious; the other darkly humorous. The serious piece is so unsettling that it’s difficult to process.

The fantasy is all too easy to believe.

It seemed bold – perhaps a little histrionic – to dedicate space in a serious journal to premonitions of apocalypse; societal breakdown; the near-term extinction of the human race. But the coronavirus COVID-19 has made such ruminations commonplace.

Commentators routinely grapple with fundamental issues of survival, ethics, citizenship. Governments curtail privileges that – until a matter of weeks ago – were taken for granted as fundamental tenets of civilised society: freedom of movement, the right to congregate and socialise. Collaboration.

Civic life.

Stranger still, society – by and large – is grateful. We are hungry – desperate – for rules and regulations, directives and decrees. Our infatuation with freedom and frivolity feels like adolescent folly.

Our perception of the state has shifted from inconvenient killjoy to indispensable provider. We look to the public sector not

just to slow the spread of infection but – in many instances – to keep us fed, housed, employed, paid. The state has demonstrated an ability to be both radical and nimble; visionary and bold; to capitalise on its newfound energy and mandate to make transformative decisions. As citizens we have discovered that we can forgo luxuries, curb behaviour, change our habits, learn new skills. We have grasped the fact that personal sacrifices are essential to serve the common good. We have discovered, too, a new respect for experts and expertise, for clear communication, factual information and spokespeople we can trust.

Circumstances have issued a timely call to arms; forced us to acquire the tools – and the will – to regroup and reorganise; to focus our collective energies and expertise on a battle for survival.

To acquire the tools that are essential

Circumstances have issued a timely call to arms; a reminder that our very existence is threatened by forces that can’t be brushed aside or wished away to protect not just the population but the planet: however deadly it proves to be, the long-term impact of COVID-19 will pale in comparison with the havoc wreaked by climate change.

Doomsday is an imminent reality.

Someday soon. Any day now. Yet we fail to grasp – or to acknowledge – the scientific evidence. We decline to capitalise on the technology we have to hand. We struggle to visualise, or to believe, both the crisis that we face and the opportunities it represents. We shy away from a reality that seems stranger and more terrifying than any work of fiction. Paralysed by collective inertia, or despondency or disbelief. But we have run out of excuses.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a warning shot. A reminder that our very existence is threatened by forces that can’t be brushed aside or wished away. Now, more than ever, we need to apply our intellect and imagination. To embrace our gift for telling different stories; visualising the unknown. Most of all, we need to understand that we have the tools to transform vision into reality. To draw on humanity’s extraordinary ability to prioritise and organise and galvanise and – ultimately – to change the course of destiny. To design a different future.

To reject Armageddon in favour of Rebirth.

Isabel Allen, Editor-in-Chief Spring 2020|Citizen|1

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Spring 2020

5 Rethinking education

94 After the flood

Finn Harries challenges architecture schools to teach climate literacy, ecological regeneration and cultural transformation

Richard Mullane presents a proposal to protect San Francisco Bay from flooding

7 Constructing change

Daniela Cocco Beltrame unpicks the faulty logic behind the regeneration of Buenos Aires’ most notorious shanty town

Amanda Baillieu makes predictions about architects’ ability to weather the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 10 Goodbye to all that

Peter Bishop speculates on the way the current pandemic will change society and the city 12 Unite and conquer

Antonio Pisanò explores the role of empathy and collective action in the fight against COVID-19 and climate crisis 18 How to pitch it

CITIZEN SPRING 2020/£25

Summer 2019 |Citizen|1

Cover: Production still from Pacific Sun, a 100-second animated film made by the artist Thomas Demand capturing the impact of a storm on the cruise ship Pacific Sun. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Dacs, London

Editor-in-Chief Isabel Allen isabel@citizen-mag.org Creative Director Simon Esterson Art Editor Holly Catford Assistant Editor Jason Sayer Staff Photographer Freddie Ardley Poet in Residence LionHeart Sub-Editor Julia Dawson Associate Editor James Soane Engagement Manager John Nahar Founders Isabel Allen Will Hunter Citizen Magazine 141a Mare Street E8 3RH 020 7206 2585

102 The medium is the message

Fraser Morrison creates a forum for sharing ideas for sustainable cities 111 Sustainability spotlight

Companies and products that address the challenges posed by climate change 120 Recommended reading

Peter Buchanan suggests essential reading for lockdown and a post-pandemic world

Experts help architects and entrepreneurs make their proposals to improve the city more attractive to investors

122 You wanted this

30 Capital gains

Anthony Vidler and others pay tribute

The ethical investors channelling capital towards ventures with progressive social and environmental goals 44 They shall inherit the Earth

ALL SH0OK UP

98 Prosperity and growth: busting the myths

Short story by Lev Bratishenko 126 Michael Sorkin remembered

128 The wit and wisdom of Michael Sorkin

Julio Salcedo-Fernández selects highlights from Michael Sorkin’s written work

Proposals for London by the generation of architects that will inherit the city in the decades to come

130 Was Michael Sorkin killed by bat-eaters?

82 A map for navigating climate tragedy

132 Credits and thanks

Jem Bendell says we can’t avert environmental catastrophe but must find ways of adapting to a new reality

The London School of Architecture 2019/2020

92 Deep adaptation: a personal response

In conversation with the poet LionHeart

James Soane reports on an emotional journey to recognise and respond to the prospect of societal and ecological collapse Editorial Board Pooja Agrawal is co-founder of Public Practice and a member of the GLA Regeneration Team Peter Buchanan is an architect, urbanist, writer, critic, lecturer and curator.

His many books include five volumes of Renzo Piano Building Workshop: CompleteWorks (Phaidon Press) Matthew Claudel is a designer, researcher and writer. Formerly the strategic advisor to Future Cities Canada, he is currently head of civic innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sherry Dobbin is a cultural strategist and producer, and the managing and cultural director of Futurecity

Denise Hoffman Brandt investigates the systems implicit in the death of her friend

134 The poetics of space

136 One last call, before you end it

An original poem by LionHeart

Finn Harries is an environmental campaigner and co-founded JacksGap, an online blog and video project with over 3.9 million subscribers Arthur Kay is CEO of Skyroom, which partners with landlords to create high-quality, low-cost, ecofriendly homes for key urban workers on disused rooftops in London Crispin Kelly is the CEO of Baylight – an award-winning development company which has been developing commercial and mixed-use property in London for more than three decades Tom Mann is a director at Savills and leads the firm’s residential development consultancy team, focusing on super-prime and large-scale regeneration developments

Professor Dame Henrietta L Moore is the founder and director of the institute for Global Prosperity and the Chair of Culture, Philosophy and Design at UCL Farshid Moussavi is the principal of Farshid Moussavi Architects and a professor in practice at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Soheb Panja co-founded the quarterly publication Courier, a magazine that reports on modern business and start-up culture Professor Richard Sennett is a professor at MIT and a prolific writer on culture and cities. He has served at the United Nations for the last three decades Suzanne Trocmé is a writer and journalist and editor-at-large for Wallpaper* magazine

Spring 2020|Citizen|3

Royal Academy Architecture Awards 2020 Congratulations to Cristina Iglesias, winner of the Royal Academy Architecture Prize 2020.

Her artworks both inspire and act as a reminder of the crucial role of public space provision in our cities.

Announcing the finalists for the Royal Academy Dorfman Award: • AAU Anastas (Palestine) • AOR Architects (Finland) • BCKJ Architects (China) • WHBC Architects (Malaysia) Keep an eye out for the selection of the winner later in the year.

Cristina Iglesias, Tres Aguas, Town Hall Square, Toledo, 2014 (c) Attilio Maranzano

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Opinion

Rethinking education Architecture student and social media campaigner Finn Harries challenges architecture schools to equip students with the skills to mitigate and adapt to climate change

Students are alarmingly ill-prepared to navigate one of the greatest challenges they will face throughout their careers

As increasing numbers of disgruntled students take to the streets (or group video calls) in defiance of a system that threatens their future, the gatekeepers of higher education remain alarmingly quiet. Despite what they may preach, academic institutions tend to be reluctant to embrace systemic change.

As established bodies of knowledge, power and wealth, anything that threatens to destabilise the status quo risks undermining the institution itself. Although many were founded on progressive ideals, the larger and older they grow the more their survival relies on protecting a carefully constructed order of hierarchy and tradition. But there is a balancing act. An institution’s prestige is defined by the public’s perception of its ability to stay culturally, socially and intellectually relevant.

Architectural education has always enjoyed a sense of prestige as an academic and creative pursuit.

Its seven-year period of education puts it in line with the vocational commitments required to train as a doctor or a lawyer. It is understood that the goal of this extended tutelage is to produce architects who can engage in a highly complex dance between multiple disciplines in order to successfully shape the built environment.Yet the institutions who provide this education and those that regulate it, such as the ARB and RIBA, have been caught off guard.

After seven years of dedicated studying, students are emerging alarmingly ill-prepared to navigate one of the greatest challenges they will face throughout their careers as architects. It is no longer a question of whether the global climate will change but how significantly and how fast.

These questions will be answered in part by the action that is or isn’t taken by these new graduates. It cannot be overemphasised how important architectural education is to both mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. The built environment contributes around 40 per cent of the UK’s carbon footprint (UKGBC).

Architectural education must equip students with the tools not only to understand the challenge ahead of them, but to enable them to help cut carbon emissions to the necessary net zero by 2050 (IPCC). This requires an immediate and significant shift in the way we teach architectural design, from addressing the embodied and operational carbon of our buildings, to developing a deeper understanding of ecology and natural ecosystems.

Most importantly, we must embrace a cultural shift in the way we think about design. There is a sense that teaching ‘sustainable’ design means restricting creative freedom.

That advocating certain materials or emphasising environmental sensitivity limits a project’s potential rather than opening up new possibilities. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Designers thrive within reasonable parameters and restrictions. The more specific the brief, the more focused the creative innovation can be.

We have to let go of the idea that contemporary architecture is limited only by the imagination of the designer and the CPU of their computer. There are ecological ceilings and environmental tipping points and our failure to address them has led us right to the precipice.

It is time for reform. The first step to taking action on climate change for any institution is telling the truth about the severity of the situation we’re facing. This requires a critical and self-reflective process.

For architectural education it means putting climate literacy, ecological regeneration and cultural transformation at the heart of a new pedagogy. It means conceding that our current system is failing to provide the most basic requirement of any academic institution, which is simply to best prepare students for the future, no matter how uncertain or challenging it may be.

Finn Harries is a student at the Architectural Association, co-founder of JacksGap and a member of the Architects Climate Action Network.Visit www. architectscan.org to find out more Spring 2020|Citizen|5

Education

Campus Collaboration: Cullinan Studio’s NAIC

Forum Charles Holland, MJ Wells, Katy Lock, Sasha Bhavan Works Lee Boyd, Maccreanor Lavington, Casswell Bank

307

April 2020

Focus Energy & Sustainability: Haworth Tompkins at Kingston University

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Opinion

Constructing change Is this the end of the architectural profession as we know it? Amanda Baillieu sees cause for optimism in how architects could build on lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis

The profession needs to show real leadership rather than being obsessed with the next job opportunity

Architects are used to being told their existence is threatened.

As well as those forces outside their control, namely recessions and the demands of a global economy, the profession has proved slow to adapt and prone to introspection.

Add to this, risk aversion among clients, the profession’s reluctance to collaborate to solve pressing social issues and the stark fact that buildings designed by architects account for no more than two per cent of global construction, the profession’s future is not bright.

But no one factored in a global virus that keeps us contained in our homes, that’s closing down nations and bringing the world economy to a standstill.

Should architects see this as yet another setback? Or the reverse – that a crisis, even one as devastating as this one, presents opportunities?

I am going to come down on the side of optimism having witnessed two recessions (1991 and 2007) and the gradual sidelining of the profession by successive governments.

Of course, practices of all sizes will need to lay off staff and some will inevitably close their doors altogether.

Practices are vulnerable to downturns.

But history also shows architects have a way of pulling through and coming out the other side re-energised.

So, my predictions are that once the health emergency is over, society will demand change that architects can respond to.

We are seeing already that in an emergency, governments are prepared to act fast, spend money to get things done. If we can build an emergency hospital in the space of two weeks, people will rightly demand to know why the government can’t fund the building of decent homes with the same sense of urgency.

Second, our environment will seem even more precious. Allowed out for our daily walk, those with access to parks and open spaces count themselves lucky. But for many, open space is the street with no tree in sight.

It’s too early to say how our newfound acquaintance with silence, cleaner air and time to appreciate nature will translate into city making – but it will.

Third, the profession can be both fractious and fractured – the main reasons why respect for it has diminished. But as we all search for answers, the profession needs to show real leadership in these areas rather than being perpetually obsessed with the next job opportunity as the work starts to trickle back.

Finally, we are being forced to revise our very conception of what makes a successful community. So perhaps a positive outcome of COVID-19 will be to challenge the financially driven, short-term outlook that determines how places are planned, designed and built, and promise to do better.

Amanda Baillieu is the former editor of Building Design and RIBA Journal and founder of architecture platform Archiboo London’s ExCel exhibition centre was repurposed into the 4,000-bed NHS Nightingale by BDP within a matter of weeks. The public will expect the government to demonstrate the same decisiveness and speed in addressing other areas of need

Spring 2020|Citizen|7

Goodbye to all that?

The coronavirus could galvanise us into a salutary rethink of the city’s priorities, argues urbanist Peter Bishop Over the past 30 years we have seen the collapse of communism as an ideological and geopolitical force, progressive shifts of economic and political power to Asia, the development of the internet and mobile communications, and the realisation that climate change is a very real global threat. Constant change and uncertainty now prevail and seem likely to persist. At the time of writing a global pandemic is causing city regions to be put into quarantine with restrictions on travel and major reductions in economic activity. This is likely to last at least a year until an effective vaccine can be found. This may be the most significantly destructive event since the Second World War. When we emerge, and we will, the world will probably never be the same again.

Alternative futures Let us be optimistic and assume that economic and societal collapse will be avoided and that we will be able to pick up the pieces. The big questions are: What will the world look like?

How will our lives change? And – for the readership of Citizen magazine – what does the future hold for our cities and communities?

One important lesson that is likely to emerge from this is a greater awareness that effective states with efficient government and administrative apparatus are likely to fare better than those countries that have dismantled their public sectors.

Perhaps we might relearn the value of public services and community spirit. On a global scale, countries that have failed to respond will be hit the hardest (as will poorer nations).

As the world eventually emerges from the inevitable recession, we are likely to see China becoming the main global power as Europe and the USA struggle with a decade of austerity that could resemble the postwar period. The 1950s was not a particularly good time. There were scarcities and most of what we now take for granted, including eating out and foreign holidays, were luxuries.

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This post-pandemic period will, however, present us with a real choice as to whether we want a socially cohesive society based on shared values or a return to a free marketdriven global free-for-all.

There are some positives that we could choose to build on though.

It is possible that December 2019 was the peak of global carbon emissions.

Will we be prepared to continue with some of our new habits to keep it that way? Work behaviour has changed.

Many people are realising that home working, internet shopping and video conferencing are pretty efficient ways of organising their lives and that much of the travel that they did, whether the daily commute, the weekend city break or international business travel, was unnecessary. If this is sustained then existing airport, rail and road infrastructures will be more than adequate for the foreseeable future.

Britain will certainly not need a third runway at Heathrow, High Speed 2 or Crossrail 2 (which is just as well as we will not be able to afford them anyway). Many small businesses, especially in the food and drink sector, will probably be decimated and in consequence we will also need less commercial and retail floor space in our cities. There will still be a need for high-end and specialist floor space, but many high streets will have to face up to the fact that they must adapt to becoming attractive multifunctional community hubs or die on their feet. Either way there is likely to be a significant restructuring of urban land uses that might, if we get it right, pave the way for more housing, more public spaces and a healthier environment. A positive result could be that the problem of urban air quality will have diminished.

The city renewed This is not the end of the city, far from it. Technology can only go so far.

Successful cities would be those that still create the conditions for face-toface contact. Cities are social places, they are creative places, they are places of chance meetings, exchange

of ideas and political intrigue.

Within the city, location really will be everything. Attractive areas will still be desirable, but others will face decline. Cities like London might hollow out as they expand to cover areas outside their boundaries as some choose to work remotely.

The relationship between the city and countryside will become increasingly blurred. In parallel we are likely to see a greater social divide unless we can manage this process carefully.

Events such as the one that we are experiencing usually herald significant changes in social behaviour and attitudes. Perhaps this

This post-pandemic period will present us with a choice between a society based on shared values and a free market-driven global free-for-all

is the time for the postwar generation – the baby boomers – to step aside and make room for a younger generation. The severity of the crisis might finally raise questions about the distribution of paid work and the need for a minimum equitable income for all. The unprecedented government response amounts to nationalisation of much of the economy and the national/universal wage that many ‘greens’ and others have been arguing for. It might be rational for the government to create new jobs as there will be real labour shortages in social care, agriculture, tree planting and energy efficiency. After all, nearly

half a million people have volunteered in response to the coronavirus.

This might be the best way to restart the economy and make it more sustainable at the same time.

Back to basics Finally, we might get used to living more simply and being more aware of the important things in life. This could herald a more leisured society and a re-gearing of social values.

Maybe, just maybe, if we don’t blow this opportunity, we might have a more efficient and less wasteful world.

Peter Bishop is professor in urban design at The Bartlett School of Architecture Spring 2020|Citizen|11

ANGELA WEISS/GETTY IMAGES

Temporary closure or the end of an era? We might get used to living more simply and being more aware of the important things in life

Unite and conquer 12|Citizen|Spring 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a metaphor for climate change.

Antonio Pisanò argues that both can only be resolved when humanity channels the fear of death into the empathy, collaboration and discipline required for coordinated collective action

Spring 2020|Citizen|13

Culture is key to understanding the spread of coronavirus and how to end the pandemic

COVID-19 has turned the world on its head. The economy at a standstill, society in lockdown. Our basic freedom of movement taken away. COVID-19 has disrupted the normality of our lives without notice. Individuals, governments and societies are in shock. My brain is trying to adapt to the new online lifestyle of WhatsApp breakfasts and Zoom dinners. The re-normalisation process is so fast that I am starting to forget how normal life was. The more I think about it, the more I am left wondering: what is normal?

Normal comes from the Latin adjective normalis, of the norm. The norm in Latin is norma, the carpenter’s square rule. For any given angle, the norma will give you a 90° line. In geometry a 90° line setting off from any given line or plane is called a normal, whose points are equidistant from the original line or plane.

The etymology of the adjective ‘normal’ gives us an interesting insight into the subjectivity of normality.

In geometry there is not a single normality but infinite different ones. In society the matter is somewhat less variable but a degree of multiplicity still exists.

Our normality depends on our habits, beliefs, lifestyles.

But all of these are largely dictated by our culture, which is the narrative that social groups follow to seek order and meaning in life, which, in turn, some people believe, is actually just a mix of chaos and chance. One way or another, we could say that normality is a subset of culture.

Culture holds the secret code of human behaviours.

And culture is key for understanding the spread of coronavirus and how to end the dramatic pandemic.

Like SARS, COVID-19 is a virus that has ‘jumped’ species, moving from animals to humans. Whether from snakes, birds or bats, scientists are working around the clock to trace the virus’s origins in order to unlock essential clues about how to treat it. At its simplest level of analysis, COVID-19 provides additional evidence that human and natural systems are interlinked and that the level of fragility/robustness of natural ecosystems has a direct impact, more or less severe, on humans. Beyond the evidence of humans’ connection to natural ecosystems, the ongoing unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic provides other relevant keys to better understand human behaviour and the path ahead for its evolution.

The story of coronavirus comes from complexity and heads towards more complexity. It has its roots in the anthropocentric exploitation of wild animals to supply a segment of the food market where extra value is identified in the exotic and rare nature of game meat. Such market 14|Citizen|Spring 2020

segments are poorly regulated and poorly assessed in terms of sustainability. In other words, the complex collateral effect of eating wild and rare animals is ignored, both in respect to the natural ecosystem the animals are taken from, and in respect to the human systems into which the product is introduced. Such market segments continue to exist because of certain human narratives.

Large groups of humans are convinced that eating rare and exotic animals is right. The same amount of nutrients that came from the exotic rare game meat responsible for COVID-19 could be extracted sustainably from other sources, yet because of powerful human narratives, we end up eating weird stuff that eventually kills us. This is not to say that avoiding exotic and rare game meat will spare us from pandemic but it is meant to reinforce the importance of being aware of what we don’t know we don’t know.

Our society seems obsessed with bending our perception of reality to match our beliefs. Where humans should maximise their collective awareness of complexity and ecology, the linearity of unfounded narratives takes precedence. From coronavirus to climate change, the importance of reframing human culture in the context of complexity and empathy is crucial. Empathy is the evolutionary tool to handle complexity intuitively.

Complexity and empathy go hand in hand like yin and yang, Apollonian and Dionysian, sense and sensibility, science and art … and so on and so forth. Without empathy, and more specifically mirror neurons, predators cannot ‘feel’ how a potential prey might behave and will be unable to successfully hunt and feed their young.

Without empathy, early humans could not have organised themselves in more and more complex social structures, like clans and tribes, and would not have overcome the risk of much larger and stronger predators. As effectively argued by Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization, and contrary to a simplistic take on Darwinian theories and evolutionary biology, empathy plays a crucial role in the evolution of species.

Yet empathy seems at odds with our main cultural framework, based on anthropocentrism, individualism and neoliberalism. Since the emergence of humanism in the 15th century, human intellect, applied to science and technology, has been the dominant narrative framework for humanity. Behind our humanistic shield we bounced off the evidence of a wider and more complex web, a web perhaps too difficult to explore with the computational power of the human brain alone. While empathy provides

powerful subconscious insight into the behaviour of organisms and systems other than ourselves, it is ultimately dependent on perception and therefore hard to implement in the realm of objective sciences. In the evolution of their cognitive powers, humans possibly needed some extra help to manage complexity beyond the intuitive insight of empathy. In Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick highlights the emergence of chaos theory from Lorenz’s equations and Mandelbrot’s fractals in the ’60s and ’70s. Besides the exquisitely human ingenuity required to imagine the possibility of order in apparently random behaviours, the importance of digital computing should not be underestimated. Hand calculators first and personal computers later provided essential extra brain power for humans’ evolution towards the beginning of a rational and objective understanding of complexity. Humans today have great tools to embrace the interwoven web of life that holds together the biosphere.

On the other hand, the fact that scientists have started to pin down the mechanics of complexity, does not necessarily mean that the weight of linear narratives has been lifted from the entirety of humanity’s consciousness.

And it shouldn’t. Different levels and types of consciousness co-exist at once as much as different kinds of narratives and social constructs live alongside each other more or less peacefully. As effectively pointed out by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens and Homo Deus, narratives are essential for human systems to function as they provide intersubjective truths for individuals to agree upon.

Why can’t people follow the rules?

Logic alone cannot solve the conundrum of why humans can’t get their act together and contain the viral contagion.

So many of us are actively contributing to the viral spread, acting in complete cognitive denial. Are people just stupid (as in lacking in computational power)? Statistically, that is possible. While, on the one hand, the divestment from quality public education has had a direct effect on the average level of critical thinking and capacity to distinguish facts from fiction, stupidity alone cannot be responsible for the irresponsible behaviour that is contributing to the pandemic. Seemingly intelligent people are acting in seemingly stupid ways. Beyond the vague dualism of stupidity and intelligence, I believe that it is our culture standing in the way of logic. So many of us are stuck with our individuality. We all learnt to believe that we are unique, exceptional and amazing. We need to celebrate our uniqueness and individuality with seemingly unique

products and services. Also we are told to plough ahead in life, in a highly competitive environment, leveraging our very own creative, ingenious, entrepreneurial skills.

COVID-19 loves all of that. What COVID-19 doesn’t like is humanity thinking as a coherent, united, coordinated organism. What COVID-19 will struggle to cope with is humanity as a super-organism with true collective intelligence organising defence and counter-attack.

To grasp the idea of humanity as a super-organism, we need abstract, systemic thinking, an appreciation of complexity, and above all, empathy and love.

Unfortunately, those of us stuck in the narrative of individuality get very little of the above and pose a risk to all of us, regardless of the specific level of intelligence, education or income. How is the notion of humanity as a super-organism present in our cultures?

In the last few weeks, scanning through newspapers and social media, it is interesting to notice a recurrent pattern in how different social narratives make humans react to the pandemic. At first there is denial, then fear and more or less selfish action, then comes the embracing of complexity and empathy.

At first, denial Local Chinese health authorities refused to believe that they could not manage the outbreak. Italian partygoers refused to believe that they should change their trendy lifestyle. French Smurf enthusiasts refused to believe that a foreign virus could bring their society to a halt. Some climate-sceptic Americans still refuse to believe that their great nation could be responsible for any environmental wrongdoing and, even if some wrongdoing is being done, refuse to believe that they will be affected and even if affected, refuse to believe that they should do something about it.

Then, fear Chinese citizens fully embraced the use of breathing masks and protective clothing. Italian students enrolled in the northern Italian universities, despite the very clear instruction to stay at home to limit the spread of the virus in the country, jumped on trains to go to their parents’ home elsewhere in Italy (and reach the protective all-encompassing powers of the mamma), in ways not necessarily effective to contain contagion … quite the opposite. British citizens, despite exhortations not to panic buy, cleared the shops of toilet rolls and hand detergents and sanitisers, effectively preventing other citizens from Spring 2020|Citizen|15

In more than thirty years climate change has not triggered a reaction proportionate to the threat

staying clean and washing their hands, thus increasing the risk of viral spread. In light of the poor political response to the Paris Agreement pledges, a growing number of American students are more and more scared for their own future and have taken to the streets with Fridays for Future and other movements.

Finally, embracing complexity, empathy, action In China, the pandemic peaked and the number of new cases diminished dramatically. The management of the viral spread resulted from the combined action of top-down government policies and bottom-up citizens’ responsible collaboration. The fact that China has managed to curb the exponential curve is a key factor in finding a way through this crisis. Italian society, from showbiz to sport, from religion to business, has found new solidarity and, almost overnight, government and an increasing number of citizens have started coordinating actions to reduce the burden on the health service, which has responded with greater efficiency. The positive impact of united action should be emphasised also to counter the dysfunctional impact of fake news and fear mongers.

Similarly, European businesses have mobilised to allow remote working and reduce the probability of contagion.

Emergency budgets have been hastily announced to try to save national economies. Countries and citizens have stepped up, embracing the intricate complexity of the situation.

Not enough, we could say, and in a rather mixed way, as some cultures retain more collective consciousness than others. Capitalist liberal democracies are proving less effective in coordinating social response compared with less liberal or more community-oriented social structures.

The relevance of culture will provide an interesting angle to assess the data, once confirmed, on how Japan and South Korea are managing to contain the viral infection better than Italy or the US. Still, before all of this is over – and our social scientists are able to study the pandemic phenomenon retrospectively – we have a very urgent issue to resolve which involves reinventing our culture and redefining a new normal. If we could zoom into the generic domain of normality we may see that, already within our culture, we have the germinating seeds of a promising new order.

In a few months, COVID-19 has triggered individual reactions at global scale because it affects the ultimate core value of our collective narrative, which is ourselves, our own health and happiness. Humans have reacted 16|Citizen|Spring 2020

accordingly to the scale of the threat. Because the impact of COVID-19 is complex, empathy and cooperation are the most effective policies to manage the emergency.

Unlike the coronavirus pandemic, in more than thirty years, climate change has not triggered a reaction proportionate to the threat, probably because it does not immediately affect the core values of the anthropocentricneoliberal paradigm of our societies. Climate change needs an even higher level of empathy to be understood compared with COVID-19. Only if one is able to empathise with a flooded village thousands of miles away, with the dying last male white rhino of a practically extinct species, or with the future of fellow humans yet to be born, will one suddenly understand the scale of the global threat climate change poses for all life on Earth. And then act accordingly.

The challenge is therefore not to replace human narratives with almighty artificial intelligence but rather to go back to culture, the single most important narrative for humanity, and embed complexity and empathy in our core cultural values.

Selfish and linear narratives have only kicked the can down the road, delayed coordinated and collaborative action and made the emergency harder to tackle.

Although the pandemic is still on the rise in many parts of the world, on the basis of the recent data coming from China, it would seem that humans are well equipped to fight back COVID-19. We most certainly hope so.

Discipline and danger While most people like an easy life and find existential meaning in a reassuring routine, others don’t mind a bit of hardship and risk getting a glimpse of their own version of existential meaning. I happen to belong to the second group. Why the hell am I doing this? Sometimes I can’t help asking myself. Usually it happens when I’m hanging from a 300-metre vertical drop, with only a few spiders and birds staring at me, their answer being: ‘Honestly, I really don’t know what you are doing up here’. Or it happens when a lovely holiday with friends turns into a struggle against Neptune, battling four-metre waves in 40-knot winds with all the sails reefed down, trying to surf the crest of the waves and glide down the other side hoping not to damage the vessel my life depends upon.

Or it happens after an intense ‘learning’ session at my local dojo with a better sparring partner (most of them are), whose fast and precise kicks and punches leave me concussed and confused, pondering the fact that I truly

don’t know what I don’t know. Rock climbing, sailing and martial arts are great fun. They facilitate the release of endorphins and adrenaline. They are unequivocally dangerous. Beware of anyone who says otherwise.

The practice of extreme sports brings risk management from the safe distance of an Excel spreadsheet to the scary reality of survival. Being in close contact with lifethreatening danger triggers repeatedly our fear of death, which is among the most powerful ancestral instincts we possess. Fear, when correctly channelled, triggers our stupendously resourceful survival mode. Unfortunately, extreme sports don’t make you immune from COVID-19 but they help in understanding the vital correspondence of causes and effects, of correct and incorrect action, of life and death. Crucially, they teach us that we aren’t unstoppable, unique and amazing as our mainstream consumerist culture has taught us. We are weak.

We are fragile. We break and bleed very easily. Nature is unthinkably more powerful than us. A single movement in the rock crack and all the quickdraws and ropes are gone … and maybe we die. A drastic change in weather, perhaps made worse by our lack of experience, planning or action, and we fall overboard or our mast breaks, or the engine goes, or we run aground … and maybe we die. Against nature, we are infinitely weaker and we need each other.

We need each other to complete the climb in safety or to sail the boat to harbour as much as we need each other to overcome COVID-19.

In all sport practices, whether extreme or not, discipline is essential. Interestingly, discipline is also essential in complex social structures or social super-organisms like armies and religious orders. But discipline is equally essential to hermits and lone travellers and people confined to isolation. Discipline blends elements of risk management with insights of existential meaning. With a bit of luck, if we follow the rules, we can reach the summit and complete the sail, we can win the spar and overcome the virus. Discipline is all the more effective when we have the cost of not following the rules clearly in mind.

Death and dying The cost of not following the rules can be life. On a rock face, in the sea or in the middle of a pandemic. It is important to acknowledge the possibility of death and to channel the fear into discipline. Denying the possibility of death, ignoring the risk, only increases the chances of a negative outcome and puts the people around us at risk.

It is rather unfortunate that our culture has made our

relationship with death slightly dysfunctional. For most of our lives we simply ignore death. We do anything to avoid its image. We invest time and money in the artificial alteration of the signs of age and decay. We act as if the linear promise of endless economic growth and endless life could be achievable. We ignore the circularity of life and death and, as a result, we are poorly prepared for death’s inevitable occurrence.

It wasn’t always this way. Pre-modern rural agricultural societies faced death in various forms on a daily basis due to lower levels of sanitisation and poor healthcare but also because they were closely connected to nature and its ruthless food chain. Because of the fragility of human life, people had to stick together. Social cohesion was crucial to make it through the winter. Multi-generational living was a no brainer in order to leverage everybody’s resources and maximise the chances of survival. Humbleness and fear of nature were natural instincts to inform a shared discipline of simplicity and hardship. Fail to conform and people might die.

Act, now COVID-19 is forcing individuals to embrace their belonging to the super-organism of humanity. On a daily basis we hear of neighbourhood help groups, online support, WhatsApp dinners, Skype breakfasts and balcony singing. We are instinctively drawn towards checking on one another. All those acts are the unquestionable evidence that when we drop the self-delusional mask of modern supremacism and anthropocentric linear growth, we automatically reconnect to the super-organism of humanity. Alone we are fragile, easily breakable mammals.

Together we give life to a bigger self, a powerful interconnected nebula of social cooperation, empathy and love. We can and must evolve our culture quickly, letting go of the illusion of endless humanist power and bringing back pre-modern values of collective intelligence and natural symbiosis. We must redefine our normality and act together against COVID-19. And when the pandemic is over we will have to hold onto the newly gained value of collective humanity and understand, once and for all, that humans are a part of our biosphere. COVID-19 is a small, hopefully short, and definitively painful reintroduction to the fragility of humankind. Climate change is the full story.

Perhaps Gaia is watching us, giving us a last chance to evolve. Stay at home and keep safe.

Antonio Pisanò is a director of Marcel Mauer Architecture Spring 2020|Citizen|17

FREDDIE ARDLEY

Citizen round table

The Panel Alex Nicholson Endeavour Ventures Endeavour Ventures (www.endven.com) is a venture capital firm focused on identifying scaleable investment opportunities with an environmental or social benefit for sophisticated and high net worth clients.

Arthur Kay Skyroom Skyroom partners with major landlords to create high-quality, low-cost, eco-friendly homes on disused rooftops in London to house key urban workers.

Amy Zamarripa Solis Foundation for Future London Foundation for Future London raises finance, creates programmes and funds projects that strengthen connections between the communities of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.

Digby Summerhill Minotti London Minotti are leaders in contemporary high-end furniture design with 34 showrooms, over 300 dealers around the world and a presence in every continent.

Sahil Sachdev Founders Factory Founders Factory helps early stage companies become viable and sustainable businesses by offering expedited pre-seed funding, agile technology development, lean acceleration and world-class mentors.

Citizen Isabel Allen Editor-in-Chief, Citizen magazine Soheb Panja Co-founder, courier Magazine

How to 18|Citizen|Spring 2020

Suzanne Trocmé Editor-at-Large, Wallpaper* magazine

The most interesting ideas are often the most difficult to finance. Citizen held a round-table discussion at Minotti’s Fitzrovia showroom to explore the potential for entrepreneurial architects, and one former chef, to get investment for self-initiated projects that don’t fit into traditional funding models.

An expert panel helped to hone a good idea into a credible investment pitch

pitch it Spring 2020|Citizen|19

Friday Saturday Sunday Three architects from different faiths – Daniel Leon, Matthew Lloyd and Shahed Saleem – have joined forces to design a shared place of worship that serves as a mosque on Friday, a synagogue on Saturday and a church on Sunday

Daniel Leon When we first met we started to talk about London and the way that mosques or churches or synagogues are very much underused.

As a group of architects we never really understood each other’s spaces of worship, yet there are huge similarities. Brick Lane Mosque, for example, was a church, then a synagogue and now it’s a mosque.

You can still see the plaque from when it was a Jewish Sunday School.

Brick Lane is a mini Jerusalem.

We started to look at shared spaces.

We looked at the prayer rooms you get in hospitals. These tend to be very boring spaces. We started to doodle on tracing paper; to think about what a shared space of worship could be.

We learnt that there are a lot of similarities between our religions’ places of worship, the way their ceremonies use light, water and fire.

The main differences were to do with orientation. Muslims pray towards Mecca. Synagogues and churches face Jerusalem.

We came up with this idea about a space that is a mosque on a Friday, synagogue on a Saturday and a church on a Sunday. Iconography is a challenge. It would be problematic for non-Christian services and ceremonies to be taking place with church crosses. Hence curtains and clever lighting hide this iconography when necessary. We are looking at a programme of activities for Monday to Thursday. Weekdays may be inter-faith rather than single faith.

Rosie Parker I came across this project

when I was organising a festival for the Three Faiths Forum. I had never come across anything that addressed the issue of architecture. There is the House of One, an architectural proposition for an inter-faith space Aerial view showing internal organisation with prayer lines facing south-east for the mosque, in-the-round seating for the synagogue and rows of benches for the church

20|Citizen|Spring 2020

which is being built in Berlin.

The idea is for a shared space in the middle and then partitioned areas for each of the three faiths – a church, a mosque and a synagogue.

Friday Saturday Sunday is different in that it proposes a collective space that is actively shared in a positive way.

Alex Nicholson Could multi-faith weddings be a market?

Daniel Leon Yes. Education – for faith and non-faith schools – could also be an opportunity.

Alex Nicholson Could you be a registry office? Weddings and funerals would give you footfall.

Isabel Allen I would have thought that all sorts of people who generally wouldn’t ordinarily choose a religious building for a wedding or funeral would feel more comfortable with the idea of a multi-faith space that isn’t attached to any one specific religion. The key thing is that this is a community building, but one which caters to spiritual as well as functional needs. I could imagine it working as a ‘seed’ project for major new developments. It could start life essentially as a sales office; a place to generate interest in an emerging community, but it could also help to establish that community – to glue it together – from early on.

Daniel Leon Food is also a massive thing; bringing people together.

People from different traditions arguing about who has got the best hummus.

Alex Nicholson Food might muddy the waters.You won’t get a developer to

1. Worship space to be constructed in parkland 2. Raised plinth with entrance space for ritual ablutions 3. Seating and furniture for Islamic, Jewish and Christian worship 4. Surrounding screening and substructure to shelter and enclose the worship space 5. Sheltering central ‘tree’ with three branches and skylights to allow light to penetrate 6. Orientation lines for the pavilion tailored to each faith’s requirements

hedge their bets on the food aspect.

You want to focus on one aspect.

6

5

F riday S aturday S unday

1 FSS Worship Space to be constructed in parkland 2 Raised plinth with entrance space for ritual ablutions 3 Seating and furniture for Islamic, Jewish and Christian worship 4 Surrounding screening and substructure to shelter and enclose the worship space 5 Sheltering central ‘tree’ with three branches and skylights to allow light to penetrate 6 Orientation lines for the FSS pavilion tailored to each faith’s requirements

Amy Zamarripa Solis What about the arts

4

4

3

3 Isabel

2

Top: the interior focuses on elements that are important to all three faiths such as the use of natural light.

Above: exploded diagram showing how the design responds to the different axes associated with the three forms of worship

Soheb Panja We are all asking how this thing is going to make money. But it 6 feels like an amazing societal necessity at a time when people are increasingly polarised. Muslims and Jews are going to learn about each other in a way that never normally happens. The parts of London where faith is very strong are often the most segregated. This feels like a real social good. It might be 5 hard to make it work in a commercial sense but do you want this to be a charitable thing? Could it appeal to a rich donor who might want to do something good?

1

and cultural heritage angle? I would pitch it to festivals with the idea that you could use the spaces to host exhibitions that represent these different faiths.

Allen How much does it cost to install your prototype to showcase the idea?

Daniel Leon We have a portable structure that opens up like an umbrella, which we can build and 2 install for around £36,000. The intention is that this is funded equally by the three faiths. With a few phone calls we can get these people together quite quickly.

Summerhill A multi-faith wedding is a great way to celebrate a coming together of cultures.You could take this to festivals and advertise that aspect. This is a quick proof of concept – a flagship rollout.

1 Digby

Spring 2020|Citizen|21

WasteData WasteData is a proposed network of waste disposal hubs where rubbish is scanned and identified before being recycled.

Designed by Aleksandar Stojaković and Alexander Frehse, founders of Studio 8FOLD

Alexander Frehse Every bag of trash has a story to tell. Look at the way archaeologists study civilisations – what did they own? What did they need? If we find a way to log and analyse what people are throwing away we can start to understand their lifestyle. At a neighbourhood scale, data about trash provides an unfiltered reflection of people’s way of life. If you scale it up, and overlay this knowledge with demographic data, you can start to get really valuable intelligence. Mapping data gives us different ways to understand and improve the city. In the 19th century, John Snow linked cholera to water pumps polluted by sewage by mapping cholera outbreaks across the city. Smart phone GPS allows more informed decisions about where to locate bus stops. An analysis of trash gives us another means of understanding the city. When you start to overlay one set of data with another you start to see relationships and patterns that never occurred to you before. Other industries are using data to make informed decisions.

The waste industry is throwing it in the dump.

Aleksandar Stojaković Most people have no idea how much trash they discard over a year. We think there is an opportunity to communicate data

Parking-bay sized units combining small-scale recycling with facilities for compressing waste could be located across the city reducing the burden on waste services and harvesting data about consumer behaviour

22|Citizen|Spring 2020

back to people so that there is an awareness about what they are throwing away. When you are aware of your own behaviour you are in a position to change it. Small changes, such as getting milk delivered in glass bottles, can result in a substantial reduction in waste. The decision to charge five pence for plastic bags had an enormous impact. Maybe you can use the information to influence policy on packaging and pollution.

Our proposal is for a network of reverse vending machines, where people dispose of – and log – the things they want to throw away.

We worked on the assumption that automated cars and developments in technology will lead to reduced demand for parking bays. We designed parking-bay sized units to inhabit these newly redundant spaces, creating a networked data collection system at places with a critical mass of people. A machine would weigh and image-scan each object to create a data bank that would be both a saleable commodity and a subject of local interest. We can imagine a future where different neighbourhoods or streets compete to produce the least waste. We see the data itself as a valuable asset, but we need guidance and expert advice on what we can do with this data. Practically, how would we do this?

Entry pod shell has an urban interface: landscaping, a place to read, micro-farming and solar panels

A pneumatic roof reacts to the type of waste it is detecting: how much is recyclable, amount wasted etc. The better the neighbourhood’s efforts at being waste-conscious, the more inflated and colourful the structure

The waste-pod compresses analysed data. The back-end interfaces with existing infrastructures, with the potential to upgrade into self-driving waste pods

Geo-specific data allows for real-time analysis of lifestyles and habits in various boroughs

Quantitative data is fed live to a central station

Data collection

Exterior edges act as new public furniture/amenities

Entry pod tears open bags and checks contents

Waste bags are colour coded as recyclable, biological or other

Arthur Kay Who is this big data

valuable to?

Alexander Frehse We would view it

as something you could sell to the government to inform city plans or larger developments. Or to other companies who want to get a better understanding of what people are consuming. It could provide information on issues such as which marketing campaigns are successful; how different packaging is being run through the system.

Sahil Sachdev A lot of investment decisions take into account the carbon impact of a supply chain.

It could be interesting to start at the end of the supply chain and work backwards. Environmentally and socially conscious governments are interested in this sort of data.

Soheb Panja Do you need to specify who will find value in this data at this stage? The biggest companies in the world are very conscious of the need to track and quantify waste.

It’s reasonable to take a bet that there will be value in the data somewhere.

An array of sensors, from infrared, ultrasonic, water and bacteria are used alongside cameras to detect and measure weight, shape, size, humidity, pH levels of discarded products and use video connected to Google Imaging and text recognition to identify specific materials and products

Trash is checked and sorted.

Credits are allocated according to weight, type and how well it has been separated. Credits can be used for Transport for London travel, movie vouchers, mobile credit etc

Amy Zamarripa Solis Many funders

are looking into mapping and data, and the value that arises from overlaying different types of data.

Aleksandar Stojaković The issue is the methodology. Who do we pitch to first? How can we present the data to them? How do we navigate a path between city officials, private companies and residents? We know that the information in itself is valuable. For example, if you look at which newspapers are being thrown away you start to understand political affiliation.

Isabel Allen We already know what newspapers have a hold in different parts of town because we know the sales figures. The data only gets really interesting when the trash tells us information you couldn’t get from data on sales. As an example, if a company invests in recyclable packaging, but it’s not ending up in the recycling bin, we know that the investment isn’t getting the desired results. Maybe the company needs to work harder on its messaging.

Suzanne Trocmé What you need to develop is the timeline. The gap between when things are bought and when they get thrown away.

For example, people are talking about fast fashion at the moment but nobody is collecting data on how long it takes before clothes end up in bin bags.

Arthur Kay Winnow Solutions do this

at a micro scale. They do computer imaging for food waste inside restaurants. Their technology photographs and identifies food as it’s thrown away and puts a value on it. This allows restaurants to make informed decisions and cut down on the amount of food they throw away.

Isabel Allen Even if you can’t find a way of realising the commercial value of the data immediately, there’s an environmental benefit which would appeal to the public sector.

As I understand it you’re offering incentives in return for responsible recycling. In a way it’s like the mother of all Nectar cards. Except in reverse. In that it encourages people to recycle rather than consume.

Spring 2020|Citizen|23

21st-century village hall Tom Badger, a recent graduate from the London School of Architecture, and George Entwistle are developing proposals for a village hall that serves the community, boosts the local economy, champions the production and consumption of local, sustainable food and anticipates the demands of a growing population

Tom Badger I was approached by

trustees of my local village hall in Kempsey in Worcestershire, who have planning permission to replace the building they have. They had hit a wall. They needed to find £750k.

My challenge was just to renew the planning permission but I felt there was vast potential in the site. The village has a population of 3,000 but is rapidly growing. In the next five years there will be 500 new homes.

There is a lack of foresight about the social infrastructure needed to accommodate this increase in population. I wanted to assess who the village was working for, to look at the existing network of amenities and to look at the potential to develop the site to complement the assets the village already has.

I found out that the parish owns a patch of land on the edge of the site.

At the moment the parish gets £200 a year from renting out the field as grazing for sheep. They could make the same money by renting it to local people as allotments. People could grow food for themselves and to supply local pubs. The village hall could include a café and a shop selling fresh produce. I started to look at the

24|Citizen|Spring 2020

potential for a building that hosts village hall functions but also boosts the local economy and offers training and education for local people.

There are opportunities to create a new social centre and to teach people about farming and food. I looked at case studies like the Incredible Edible project in Todmorden in West Yorkshire, which uses unused patches of land to plant food for the community, and The Food Commons in California, which looks at poor areas of the state and uses redundant buildings and land to produce and grow food. The building can be pretty straightforward. By designing a simple, flexible, barn-like building I have reduced costs by £250,000 to £500,000. We still need funding for the building and for the operating costs. How do I go about that?

Amy Zamarripa Solis I would look for

funding for training. Without knowing the demographics of your village, I can’t say exactly what. But you could get funding to train those in need.You could also look at creating a community pub. Selling shares is a good way of getting community buy-in.

Digby Summerhill Do the 500 homes

being built have partial planning permission? If not, the developer will be able to latch onto your scheme via Section 106. They will want to convince the council and the locals that their project will have a positive impact on the community and providing funds for this sort of project is a great way to do it.

Opposite: a central entrance leads to a coffee shop and hall space. The greenhouse provides fresh produce

Top: isometric showing how the building relates to its context Above: view from the main hall space

Isabel Allen The housebuilders will have a marketing budget.You could look at things that will make it easier for them to justify funding your project on the basis that they add to the sales story. Find out about their target market and think about what might appeal to them. A decent café is going to be a big pull.You could also think about things like opportunities for hot desking and shared workspace to make it more attractive for people planning to work from home.

Digby Summerhill It’s like you’re

creating a WeWork that’s a farm in a village. WeWork meets Soho House but without the expensive membership. Something you didn’t know you needed.

Amy Zamarripa Solis Your project

could provide an opportunity to train people working in the construction industry.You could approach the housebuilders about working with them on apprenticeship schemes.

Digby Summerhill A more powerful

pitch to the developer is if you go to them offering some sort of buy-in.

Developers aren’t overly concerned with the social aspect. If you make it simple for them they are more likely to buy in.You just need to write to them saying: ‘If you do X,Y,Z then we will give you X’.You need to talk to the council and get them on side so that they demand that the Section 106 money from the new housing goes towards your project.

It’s worth chatting to planning consultants and planning PR people, who are good at doing this sort of thing. If you can get developers witnessing council and local buy-in to your project they’re much more likely to get behind it too – both to save face and to increase the chances of getting their own project through the planning process.

Spring 2020|Citizen|25

Former chef Pascal Gerrard has launched StreetCube, a start-up that converts upcycled shipping containers into professional semi-permanent solarpowered kitchens.

The aim is to give independent chefs a platform to operate small-scale businesses serving sustainable organic food at the heart of local communities

Digby Summerhill What do you actually

need? If I could write you a cheque now, would you be after enough cash to get more cubes in more locations?

Pascal Gerrard What I need now is more sites. For that I need exposure.

And I need connections. So I’m looking for any help with press coverage and with links into government.

Isabel Allen But is access to sites enough? If you had space to put in 10 more cubes would you have the capital to do that?

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Above: the first two StreetCubes are up and running in Wandsworth.

The aim is for clusters of cubes across the city, the UK and potentially the world

Below: StreetCube offers an opportunity for chefs to own and operate their own business serving seasonal, organic, locally sourced food

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANCIS PAYNE

StreetCube

Pascal Gerrard My project is focused on food and sustainability and reducing CO2 and improving public health.

I wanted to tackle that by empowering chefs to champion a more sustainable food future. Our city centres are our public spaces where the majority of people shop and mingle. As a chef, I’m horrified by the way these centres are populated with unsustainable food chains that prioritise profit rather than nutrition, taste or sustainability. The only place I see chefs being empowered is in streetfood markets where good, affordable food is cooked with passion and pride, but often with a lack of awareness around sustainability and nutrition.

Pop-up culture has produced some great results. But by its very nature it’s here today, gone tomorrow.

There’s no opportunity for the chef to establish a lasting relationship with their audience. I wanted to find a way to help young chefs set up business at the heart of their communities and to challenge them to offer more nutritious food.

Using disused shipping containers I’ve designed a semi-permanent professional kitchen. We look for locations in busy public places and young chefs who want to operate their own kitchen. The chef has to agree to commit to using local, seasonal, organic produce.

I spent two years in Bournemouth trying to sell my idea to the council and get hold of a site, but didn’t get anywhere. Things only started to come together when I picked up the phone to Land Securities and asked them for space. We now have two kitchens on site in Wandsworth.

We launched the first cube in May. Raymond Blanc came to the opening.

We are reducing CO2 by a kilo every day. There is no plastic and no food waste – nothing goes to landfill.

We are looking for places to install more cubes.

Pascal Gerrard I’d need financial help to install more than five cubes.

Isabel Allen Then it needs to be framed as a business model. At the moment you’re presenting it as a social, philanthropic model, but it feels as though you have the makings of a scaleable business model which could be framed as a pretty straightforward investment pitch.

In simple terms, what are the costs and what are the profits?

Pascal Gerrard It costs £25,000

to build and install each cube.

I negotiate a reduced rent with the landowner on the basis of the benefits it brings – reduced CO2, improvements to the neighbourhood.

The chef rents the cube from me.

In Wandsworth the chef pays £75 a day.

Isabel Allen Would you consider marketing and selling the cube as a product for an upfront one-off cost?

Pascal Gerrard No. Because then you lose control over the ethos.You wouldn’t be able to be prescriptive about things like sustainability.

Digby Summerhill Could you cover that

with contracts? The sustainability label becomes part of the overall brand. When a consumer goes there they know what they are buying.

The chef can buy a cube as a franchise. That jumps out to me as a workable model that you can easily scale up.

Pascal Gerrard I can see the cube as a mobile solution: a kitchen on wheels.

A chef could buy it on a lease and maybe use it for festivals or events.

Soheb Panja A good way to mitigate

risk and grow at scale would be to look at platforms like Deliveroo.

By tapping into that model you open up to a much bigger market.

You have a niche.You can give people what no one else is offering.

Amy Zamarripa Solis Could this be a

place for people to learn new skills?

You could look at, say, a six-month programme for people to learn about food. A lot of councils are looking at micro-sites for new businesses.

A big focus for us, and for a lot of community funding, is job creation and giving people opportunities to learn skills and routes to employment.

The National Lottery-funded programmes also fit this bill.

Alex Nicholson What is your average revenue per day?

Pascal Gerrard At the moment the chefs take around £500-£600 day.

Alex Nicholson That’s a workable business model.You offer chefs a service contract.You could get the chefs to search out sites for you and scale up pretty quickly.You just need to package it.You just need the cash model.You need to work out future revenues. We can help you with that.

Spring 2020|Citizen|27

Following the How to Pitch It event, Alex Nicholson invited Pascal Gerrard to meet his colleagues for further discussions about developing and funding his business.

We asked Magnus Macintyre, Chairman of Endeavour Ventures, to give his verdict

There is no reason to fear healthy competition. First they mock, then they diss, then they copy

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not face any other business trying to grow – execution risk.

There is a lot of financial modelling and interrogation of costs to be done. The search for suitable sites is probably the biggest challenge, and Pascal will need to find a team of people to help him to do this and all the other aspects of the business that he has been doing largely on his own.

Building teams quickly also has risks and stresses. But Endeavour has seen and done it many times, and can advise along the way. Pascal also needs a board that can challenge him as well as help him.

We like that, unlike most efforts to create sustainable environments in the city, this does not require vast amounts of capital. We like its social and environmental benefits.

But perhaps the most exciting element for a venture capital firm is that there are no limits to the business. If it works in London, there is no reason why it cannot work in other cities and towns – and for events and festivals anywhere. And if it works in the UK, there is no reason why it cannot work in other countries.

Of course, other people could copy StreetCube. Indeed, they surely will if it is a success – and it is unlikely that it could be protected by patent.

But there is no reason to fear healthy competition. First they mock, then they diss, then they copy.

Pascal has the one characteristic essential for an entrepreneur that you can’t manufacture. It’s the thing that’s going to make people want to work for him, to persuade people to give him and sell him things, and to buy from him. And it’s the characteristic that’s going to sustain him and the people around him during the occasional bleak periods in any business when things don’t seem to be going according to plan. That characteristic is passion.

FRANCIS PAYNE

StreetCube – what happened next?

When Alex Nicholson brought Pascal Gerrard to our offices in Devonshire Street my colleague Bill Cunningham and I wanted to know three things.

Did he have a plan to scale StreetCube? What was his ultimate goal? Was he prepared for us to help him achieve his goal?

The answer to the first question doesn’t have to be yes, but the answer to the last most certainly does.

Not every entrepreneur has to have figured out every step of their plan.

To a degree, that’s our job – and anyway, no one can predict the future with absolute certainty. But if the entrepreneur is suspicious of the financiers, or resents them getting involved, the relationship is not going to be a happy one. The entrepreneur must have realistic expectations of what can be accomplished, and a clear view of the chances of success and what that success might look like.

Equally, the financiers must be both helpful and honest.

As far as we can tell from an initial examination, there are two ways to finance StreetCube. The first option is to raise all the finance as equity.

This has the benefit of stability, but it is hard work to raise money and Pascal may have to give away more of the business than he is completely comfortable with. The other way of doing it would be to use debt. If each cube costs, say, £20,000 to make, the business could borrow probably £15,000 on each cube and pay back that debt out of the first year’s rent.

It may be that a hybrid of debt and equity is the optimum.

Pascal’s idea clearly works. The concept has been proven. It is popular with customers, rewards Pascal and the chefs, and is also good for the landowner and for the people who live and work in the areas he has chosen.

There is no reason why it cannot work at scale. At least, no reason that does

Final entry deadline: 14 August worldarchitecturefestival.com

Lisbon Lisbon 2020 2020 2-4 December

2-4 December

Award entries and delegate enquires +44 (0)20 3953 2045 info@worldarchitecturefestival.com

Sponsorship opportunities Damien St George +44 (0)20 3953 2789 damien.stgeorge@emap.com Award entries and delegate enquires +44 (0)20 3953 2045 info@worldarchitecturefestival.com Sponsorship opportunities Damien St George +44 (0)20 3953 2789 damien.stgeorge@emap.com

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Founder Partner

Founder Partner

Headline partners

Headline partners

MAATBY MUSEUM IN LISBON BYBY AL_A. PHOTOGRAPH BY+FERNANDO GUERRA + SÉR MAAT MUSEUM IN LISBON AL_A. PHOTOGRAPH FERNANDO GUERRA SÉRGIO GUERRA

worldarchitecturefestival.com

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Interviews by Jason Sayer Photographs by Freddie Ardley

Capital gains A new generation of ethical investors are kickstarting ventures with social and environmental benefits and transforming citizens’ lives Spring 2020|Citizen|31

‘We show investors how investments align to a lowcarbon climateresilient future’

Christa Clapp Christa Clapp is co-founder of CICERO Shades of Green, an organisation that provides independent advice on the extent to which investment opportunities align with sustainability goals

What do you do?

I am research director of climate finance at CICERO and co-founder of CICERO Shades of Green.

We provide independent green ratings of financial instruments, like green bonds, and show investors how well the investments align to a low-carbon and climate-resilient future, using a simple system of light, medium and dark green. The methodology is based on climate research that shows we need a green transition in all sectors to achieve the climate targets in the Paris Agreement. We give a clear signal to investors about how their investments align with climate goals in order to facilitate green financial decisions.

Governments and corporations can issue green bonds to finance many things, from renewable energy to transport solutions. For cities, we have seen green bonds used to finance, for example, public transport and cycling lanes, green hospital buildings, improved recycling practices and adaptive measures to address the increased flooding associated with climate change.

Why do you do it?

Climate change is the biggest threat our society faces. While policymakers have started to address the challenge, they need to do much more. The financial sector can play an important role in shifting capital to climatesmart investments. If investors have transparent information on climate risk, they can make informed choices.

How did you get where you are today?

I started my career in finance, then returned to grad school looking for more meaning in what I do.

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The complexity of the climate challenge motivated me to move into climate policy and economic analysis. Eventually I completed the circle, channelling climate change research back into a solution for the finance sector.

When investors began to ask for more clearly identifiable green products, they needed to know that they could trust the green label. A research-based approach, simply communicated to investors, is one answer.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

As a climate researcher, I am surrounded by depressing climate news: political setbacks, increasing costs of extreme weather events associated with climate change such as flooding and forest fires. Keeping positive is sometimes tough. But that’s why it’s motivating to work with investors that are asking for more green bonds and sustainable financial products. This has been one of the most positive trends related to climate change.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

Seeing green bonds supporting financial incentives to promote greener choices, such as preferential rates for green mortgages or better loan terms for cities strong on climate change adaptation planning.

We have even seen some Swedish municipalities competing with each other to be the ‘greenest’ in their bond issuances. cicero.oslo.no

Spring 2020|Citizen|33

Anya Navidski

Anya Navidski is the Founding Partner at Voulez Capital, a venture capital fund that provides capital for scaleable, high-growth businesses with at least one female founder on the team

What made you launch Voulez Capital?

We live in a world designed and built by men for men. In venture capital (VC) in the UK, less than one per cent of cash from VCs goes to femalerun businesses. As a result, we end up with products and services that are not taking the female perspective and needs into account. Drugs are not tested on women. Cars are less safe for women. Transport systems are built without taking into account how women – who still carry the higher burden of childcare and elderly care and other errands – move around.

Even some of the latest technologies, like voice recognition software, are 70 per cent less accurate for female voices. By backing women-run businesses we are helping companies of the future to gradually change the world we live in. Not only do women see opportunities to create value that others miss, but they also build companies that are more inclusive and more flexible for all.

I am an entrepreneur and I find it hard to resist an opportunity.

While I was between my own ventures, I was pregnant and looking for a breast pump, but I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t designed in the 1950s, except one – a US company which created a version as elegant as an iPhone. I came across the story of the founder and the horrendous issues she faced from VCs while trying to raise capital. They found her product disgusting and failed to see the opportunity right in front of them.

Having done some research, I found out that in the US there were a number of funds focused on women and doing very well. In Europe, however, there was nothing. That’s how Voulez Capital was born.

What is your business model?

We find promising, early-stage companies, and provide them with equity capital to help them grow.

We also work very closely with them at an operational and strategic level, as well as opening up certain doors and opportunities for them.

What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?

My biggest barrier was when my family first came to this country, almost 30 years ago. My parents had no idea how things worked here. I was lucky enough to earn a bursary to do my A Levels at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls in Elstree, which gave me opportunities which would not otherwise have been available. This made me a big believer in providing people with equal opportunities –

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it makes all the difference. Giving female entrepreneurs an opportunity to access financing is a key part of this philosophy.

What is the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

There are two key challenges. The first is coming into this sector without previous experience of working for a large VC fund. However, this has enabled me to do things with a fresh perspective. The launch of our Fair Venture Principles has been a key outcome of this and one of the reasons why founders who would otherwise not trust the venture capital route, nevertheless go down this road, with us at their side.

Second has been the impact of the Me Too movement. On the one hand, it raised a lot of awareness around issues facing women. On the other, it created a lot of hype and defensiveness. According to some numbers, investment in female-run businesses has actually declined since 2016. It also gave rise to things like women-only business clubs and co-working spaces, which, I believe, only set us back.

What do you look for in an investment pitch?

We look for ideas that create true value by solving a real, tangible problem. We then assess whether the venture is sufficiently scaleable to justify VC funding. We then try to assess whether the team has what it takes to execute the idea and if there is a real cultural match between them and us. Investment is like a long-term relationship; it needs to work on a personal level as well a practical one.

What investment decision are you most proud of?

This is like asking me to choose a favourite child. The hardest investment is always the first one, which in my case was made harder by the fact that I was about to go into labour. We were doing due diligence on Evrelab before Voulez Capital was even incorporated. I ended up with an emergency C-section. The founder, an amazing entrepreneur called Jo Osborne, had to come to my house and put up with me covered in baby puke and trying to figure out breastfeeding while negotiating final points on the transaction documents.

It was certainly not your average investment process!

But it does show what women are capable of and is one of the reasons why female founders trust us so much. My daughter sat on my lap

‘Women see opportunities to create value that others miss’

when I signed our incorporation documents. She sat on top of the boardroom table at our lawyer’s offices when I signed our Fund 2 documents, and she had to play on the floor at a number of board meetings, when my childcare arrangements suddenly fell through.

We know what women are capable of and we live and breathe our values.

What lessons have you learnt?

To listen well to those around me, but also to trust my gut. When I had the idea to launch Voulez Capital, many of my friends, who are partners at other VC firms, told me not to do it.

My gut told me otherwise. And now, many of them are actively looking at us for co-investment opportunities because we see deal flow they will never get otherwise.

What lessons would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

Do your homework: on your idea, on your market, on everything.

Be prepared. Know your stuff. Have a clear plan. Know what culture of the firm you wish to create and build it from day one. Be inclusive and hire outside your comfort zone – your team will be stronger as a result.

Be prepared to listen. Learn how to communicate your ideas effectively.

Maybe practise on a whole bunch of people before talking to investors.

Do due diligence on your investors.

If it doesn’t feel right, walk away.

There are plenty of other investors.

Talk to their portfolio CEOs. Nobody knows better than them what it’s like to work with that particular investor.

Above all, know that great traction beats any stereotype that might work against you. Anne Boden took five years of ‘nos’ from investors before raising her first Starling Bank investment round. And then she raised £35 million as a seed round.

Her traction was so great that they simply could not ignore her any more.

What is the biggest challenge for society today?

There is a lack of truly critical thinking. We stopped teaching kids how to think for themselves; how to analyse information, assess its accuracy and make informed decisions; how to respect knowledge and reason. Journalism used to be an honourable profession, focused on the search for the truth. Now, much of the media is focused on click rates and sensationalism. One-liner headlines, not backed by evidence, have the power to sway big elements of society.

That’s a scary position to be in.

Because if reason and science fail, our society fails with it. Mass media has a tremendous power to change the world. But, like any tool, it is only as good as its application. voulez.capital Spring 2020|Citizen|35

David Uzsoki

David Uzsoki is a senior advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development where he uses his financial industry experience to demonstrate that sustainability can be a benefit rather than a cost

What do you do?

I work at a think tank focusing on sustainable finance and I provide investors and governments with the knowledge, data and solutions to shift capital towards more sustainable investments. As part of my role, I also provide evidence, using our in-house methodology, that sustainability is not a cost, but a benefit.

How is the market changing?

I am convinced that the integration of sustainability considerations is one of the megatrends that will shape the financial industry. Sustainable investing – also called ESG (environmental, social and governance) or responsible investing – has come a long way from being a niche, and often misunderstood, investment approach, to becoming a 36|Citizen|Spring 2020

widely accepted phenomenon. Also, the reallocation of institutional capital from ‘brown’ to ‘green’ will create a reinforcing loop, where the resulting changes in valuation will encourage an even larger number of market players to jump on the bandwagon of sustainable investing.

All major financial players are setting up their own dedicated ESG impact advisory desks and offering a plethora of financial products in various shades of green. Currently there are $30 trillion assets managed according to ESG principles. Experts estimate that it will reach $170 trillion by 2036. This means that sustainable investing is indeed on its way to becoming mainstream. How will this impact stock market valuations? Will financial organisations indeed drive the climate agenda? It would be an

excellent opportunity to address the image problem the financial sector has struggled to overcome since the 2008 financial crisis.

Why do investors care?

The millennial generation will be a significant driving force behind mainstreaming sustainable investing.

According to recent studies, they are twice as likely as other generations to make investment decisions based on their values. This is especially important as the spending power of millennials is expected to exceed that of previous generations by around 2025 due to the ongoing intergenerational wealth transfer.

Sustainable investing can also be an attractive investment approach from a pure financial performance perspective. The myth of a trade-off

‘The millennial generation is twice as likely to make investment decisions based on values’

between impact and financial return has been proven wrong by a long list of studies on the subject. Indeed, companies with a high ESG score even tend to outperform in the long term. The energy transition; climate change; new environmental regulations and policies; the recognition of the real cost of externalities can all have an impact on the valuations of companies.

Some of the largest institutional investors have already started to divest from certain high-polluting or socially questionable sectors as a result.

What’s the biggest challenge?

It’s important that sustainable investing does not stop at superficial, light-green investment overlays, but achieves meaningful environmental

and social impact. Currently $20 trillion of the $30 trillion of ESGcompliant assets follow a negative screening ESG strategy. This means that a portfolio with a simple exclusion of tobacco and weapon manufacturers, while investing in fossil fuels, could be considered ESG investing based on some of the widely used definitions. This is clearly insufficient and raises questions about greenwashing. While there are ongoing initiatives to better define ‘green’, such as the EU’s upcoming taxonomy on sustainable finance, there is currently a lack of regulation and internationally accepted guidelines on when an investment product can be labelled green or ESG compliant. iisd.org Spring 2020|Citizen|37

Malte Susen, Jalal Koubaiti and Leopold OettingenWallerstein Malte Susen (centre), Jalal Koubaiti (left) and Leopold OettingenWallerstein (right) co-founded Impact X Partners, an investment platform that focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

What do you do?

Impact X Partners drives capital to businesses and projects that address some of the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges.

We are developing a discovery platform to source, structure and place fixed-income products for companies supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We allow qualified and institutional investors to invest confidently in fixed-income products covering measurable Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) impact as well as offering attractive riskadjusted returns.

How did you get where you are today?

Most established financial players had a rather passive approach to sustainability and focused on avoiding negative PR rather than taking a proactive approach. Start-ups and impact initiatives are mostly focusing on equities, while ignoring fixed income, which is a huge pool of funding that the general public doesn’t necessarily know about.

Impact X bridges both gaps.

What’s your business model?

We help businesses become sustainable. This requires significant changes to their operations, and a need for capital to do that. We outline a business plan with key milestones for their sustainability goals. Then we partner with an investor that buys into this vision and wants to finance it.

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What do you look for in an investment pitch?

The situations we cover can be as diverse as the profound challenges our planet is facing. We look at the usual financial fundamentals to ensure companies are able to repay the money investors lend them while benefiting from it. But most importantly, we look for people that share the same vision as us.

How would you describe your attitude to risk?

We believe the best-performing companies in the medium to long term are also those aiming at the highest ESG standards. But finding investment opportunities with that balance requires a lot of work and expertise. We use a proprietary taxonomy combined with rigorous, in-depth financial analysis. We are risk managers with a deep understanding of SDG impact frameworks.

What lessons have you learnt?

Being an early player in a new field is exciting, but comes at a price: you have limited resources and the market is not always ready to embrace change. Stay focused when you face a setback, be patient as it takes time to unsettle old habits, in business as in other fields in life.Use your dynamic resilience to carry on your mission as intended while adapting to an ever-changing context. impactxpartners.com

‘We drive capital to projects that address the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges’

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIAN DODD

‘Ask someone to open the door for you – you’ll be surprised that most people will hold it wide open’ 40|Citizen|Spring 2020

June Angelides

June Angelides set up Mums in Technology before becoming an early stage investor at Samos Investments

What do you do?

I’m a venture capital investor at Samos Investments. I have the joy of spending a lot of my time with people a lot smarter and braver than myself, bringing their ideas to life.

Why do you do it?

I love people, I love tech and I have this intrinsic hunger to keep learning.

Working in venture capital allows me to do this. It’s also a unique opportunity to be in a position to help people make real change. Although we can’t fund every start-up we meet, I always try to be helpful.

How did you get where you are today?

I was working in venture debt at Silicon Valley Bank, then, after my second child was born, I started a social enterprise called Mums in Technology, teaching mums to code.

It was after this experience of being a founder myself and realising how hard it was to raise money that I started to think about how I could be a part of the solution and influence decision-making.

What barriers have you had to overcome to get where you are today?

The VC network may seem hard to access from the outside looking in, but I learnt very quickly that all you need to do is ask someone to open the door for you.You’ll be surprised that most people will hold it wide open.

What do you look for in an investment pitch?

I spend a lot of time thinking about how big the problem is and why the team are the best people to solve it.

I also think about whether venture capital is actually the best source of

financing for the business. Very often the founders may not have explored other options that may be a better fit.

How do you measure success?

Success to me is adding value in every interaction I have. As we can’t fund every business we meet, if I’m able to give constructive feedback or make an introduction, that to me feels like success.

What advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur?

Anyone starting a business today has an incredible advantage. There is so much information online in the form of blogs, podcasts and tweets. Read as much as you can. Attend events and meet other founders at the same stage and ahead of you. Don’t be afraid to talk about your ideas.

Most importantly, don’t be afraid to be scrappy and get your product into the hands of customers and start collecting real feedback.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

I am excited about the investment scene changing for under-represented founders. Investors are making more conscious decisions and the right conversations are happening.

What’s the biggest challenge for society today?

Information overload. I personally function best when I have had time to be still and just think. Tech makes it possible to work any time anywhere.

It would make all the difference if we were able to find some form of balance and space to disconnect. samos.vc

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Keji Mustapha Keji Mustapha is head of network and brand at Connect Ventures, a venture capital firm specialising in investments in seed, start-up and early-stage companies

What do you do?

I head up the network at Connect Ventures. This means I have the awesome job of thinking about how we add value to the companies in our portfolio following investment.

Why do you do it?

I got the job because the partners at Connect recognised that they needed a resource on the team whose sole focus was to think about how best to plug the founders’ knowledge gaps, how to consolidate all the best practices and know-how within the portfolio and, finally, how best to connect the founders with each other to allow them to build meaningful relationships with one another.

The mission of the network is to accelerate the learning of the founders and ultimately help them to make better decisions, and everything I do goes towards achieving this.

How did you get where you are today?

I originally planned on a legal career and after qualifying as a barrister I decided to see what else was out there before committing to the profession.

Along the way I met a wonderful woman who became my mentor.

She later went on to found a tech start-up and asked me to come and be her first non-technical hire. As the company continued to scale, I realised that I had a real passion for the earlier stage of the business and so I decided to leave and consult with other early stage businesses. While I was doing this, I saw the role at Connect Ventures advertised on AngelList, which seemed like a great way to continue working with early stage start-ups, as Connect is a seed-stage fund.

What barriers have you had to overcome?

I’m of African descent, so culturally the expectation is that you’ll go into a career in law, medicine or finance.

Deciding not to pursue my career as a barrister was something my parents struggled with for a while (and still do sometimes). Luckily, however, because my father is an entrepreneur he can see that I get my love of business from him and he has now accepted that there’s no keeping me away from a non-traditional career path.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

Thinking about how best to solve problems for tomorrow and helping founders know what they don’t know.

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How do you measure success?

On the work front, success to me is the ability to undertake work that has an impact – work that stimulates, challenges and stretches me. I think Maya Angelou summed it up well when she said, ‘Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it’.

How would you describe your attitude to risk?

I have quite a high-risk appetite – switching careers and jumping into the unknown is something I’ve done a few times now. So long as I’m not taking a risk I can never bounce back from, then any mis-steps are opportunities for growth.

change; developing resilience as a skill is the best way to be prepared for this.

What are you most excited about at the moment?

I’m excited about the conversations that are happening around (workplace) wellbeing, specifically founder wellbeing. It’s great to see that there’s been a positive shift in the conversation, and resources such as leadership coaching and therapy are now becoming commonplace in the industry. Additionally, it’s fantastic to see a concerted effort being made to actively fund under-represented founders be it female founders or founders from ethnic minorities.

There’s still so much more to be done but at least the tide is starting to turn.

What are your key themes for the next five to 10 years?

One is the future of work – specifically around remote working and the increased need for leaders to develop strong relational intelligence.

The second, which is a related issue, is wellbeing. In the next 10 years we’ll need to focus on fostering offline connections if we are to address the loneliness epidemic for Millennials, Gen Z and the elderly.

How do you see advances in technology impacting on the decisions you make?

Technology makes it easier to collect information. If decision-making is a multi-staged process, then advances in technology/business intelligence tools mean we can collect, analyse and manipulate the data in the optimal way at the right stage of the decisionmaking process. The impact of this has, arguably, increased the speed and improved the quality of decisions.

‘We need to focus on offline connections to address the loneliness epidemic’

What lessons have you learned?

There are no mistakes, merely experiences. And if in doubt, follow the 5Ps: preparation prevents piss poor performance (as we were taught in law school).

What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

Be clear on the problem you’re solving not the features of your product. For customers to be excited with your offering, it has to speak to solving their problem, so focus on clearly articulating the pain you’re addressing. In addition to this, I’d advise entrepreneurs to cultivate and nurture a growth mindset.

The only constant in a start-up is

Is capitalism working?

No, I don’t believe so. They say that you can judge the success of a society by the way in which the poorest fare.

In most capitalist societies, the wealth disparity is so large that one could argue that it isn’t working, or at least not working as it was intended to.

What is the biggest challenge for society today?

An increasing lack of empathy for others. Everything seems to be focused on the ‘I’ and it’s increasingly accepted that it’s OK to do what’s best for you at the expense of everything and everyone else.

The more we do this the more we fail to function cohesively as a society, which ultimately brings about cracks. connectventures.co Spring 2020|Citizen|43

They shall inherit the Earth 46 Purpose & Pleasure Design Think Tank

54 Eradicating Homelessness Design Think Tank

58 Rewilding Architecture Design Think Tank

62 Intense City Design Think Tank

Leaders:Yasir Azami and Andrew McEwan (Orms), Theo Games Petrohilos (Unknown Works) Students: Alisha Gould, Kiril Georgiev, Thomas Ka Ming Tse, George Johnson, Kurtis Gentry, Felix Chu UN Sustainable Development Goals 10 Reduced Inequalities

Leaders: Heather Macey (John McAslan + Partners), Steven Smith (Urban Narrative) Students: Stephanie Moore, Onwudinjo Chukwunweike Toby, George Sunderland, Calum Snape, Piotr Kruk, Hannah Cruickshank UN Sustainable Development Goals 1 No Poverty 2 Zero Hunger 10 Reduced Inequalities

Leaders: Maria-Chiara Piccinelli and Maurizio Mucciola (PiM.studio) Students: Ben Griffiths, Lucia Sanchez-Toribio, Luke Upton, Kathryn Goligher, Ross Langtree, Theodore Shack, Vincent Chan UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities 13 Climate Action 15 Life on Land

Leaders: Benjamin Graham, Harbinder Birdi, Iain Cochran and Andrew Barkley (Hawkins\Brown), Blazej Czuba (Public Practice) Students: Sean Keogh, Shelley Heanue, Anastasia Zabarsky,Yavor Ivanov, Christian Kennedy, Carlos Tolosa Tejedor UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

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Generations Y and Z are aware of the global challenges they face. But by the time they succeed to positions of power, it could be too late to make the changes we need now.

What would today’s London be like if reshaped by the generation that will inherit the city in decades to come? We asked fourth-year students at the London School of Architecture to share their proposals for transforming the lives of Londoners in the borough of Hackney.Within eight design think tanks, students and practices collaborated to reimagine everyday activities, from waste and wilderness to playfulness and pleasure

66 Regenerative Design Design Think Tank

70 Arrival City Design Think Tank

72 Generational Shift Design Think Tank

78 Playful City Design Think Tank

Leaders: Javier Quintana de UnĚƒa (IDOM), Jessie Turnbull (MICA) Students: Jack Bowen, Simona Uzunova, Julie-Anne Czyz, Maryam Saleemi, Carlos Nayagam, Aleksandra Stosio UN Sustainable Development Goals 12 Responsible Consumption and Production

Leaders: Rafael Marks (Penoyre & Prasad), Xenia Adjoubei (Adjoubei ScottWhitbyStudio) Students: Jonathan Craven, Luke Cameron, David Janosi, Alexandra Martin, Stefania Barbera, Iulia Cistelecan UN Sustainable Development Goals 10 Reduced Inequalities

Leaders: Angie Jim Osman and Nick Keen (Allies and Morrison), Petra Marko (Solidspace / Marko & Placemakers) Students: Gannaty Rahman, Cora McLean, Matthew Knivett, Conor Moses, Callum Rowland, Calum Norman, Jack Banting UN Sustainable Development Goals 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

Leaders: Christophe Egret and Joshua Thomas (Studio Egret West), Esther Escribano (Studio Weave & Architecture 00) Students: Paige James, Aanisah Chowdhury, Elliot Bennett, Sophie Adsett, Quincy Haynes, Rita Tornallyay, Kieran Chan UN Sustainable Development Goals 5 Gender Equality 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

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Purpose and Pleasure A pleasure gardens that enriches the night-time economy with 24-hour opportunities to study, work and relax

Challenge Investment in the night-time economy tends to focus on people relaxing after a day at work. But for many city-dwellers, the night-time is the working ‘day’. The challenge is to create an architecture that allows people to experience the city by night in a range of different ways – to walk, read, work, socialise, or simply reflect and enjoy the cover of night.

Proposal Circadian Commons is a new metropolitan building type, a reimagining of the area around St John’s Church and Gardens in Hackney into a contemporary pleasure gardens offering opportunities for education, Above: Circadian Commons sits moulded into the landscape with the lido on an axis with St John’s Church

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Below: section through night walking channel leading from the arrival wall to the lido at the northern end of the site

work and leisure 24 hours a day.

The arrival is marked by a new wall constructed of bricks from the bus station that currently occupies the site, the assumption being that, as we move towards a 24/7 economy, bus journeys will be more evenly distributed around the clock, reducing the demand for bus storage.

The proposal consists of six key components: a lido and observatory offering opportunities for night-time swimming and star-gazing; a new, more efficient 21st-century bus depot; skill-sharing workshops; pleasure gardens; routes for night walking; and Purpose and Pleasure pavilions, flexible structures that can be used for work or relaxation by day or by night.

1: lido and observatory 2: 21st-century bus depot 3: skill-sharing workshops 4: pleasure garden 5: night walking 6: Purpose and Pleasure pavilions 7: canteen 8: space with chairs 9: public toilets

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6 2 5

9

7 8

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Impact Circadian Commons is conceived as part of a wider strategy to enrich London’s night-time offering, destigmatise night-time working, and move towards a 24-hour economy. This is a key component for a more efficient, sustainable city, decreasing the impact of ‘peak’ demand for public transport and key services. More consistent energy

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demand will facilitate more efficient power generation and increasing use of renewable energy sources.

The hope is that the success of this project, and others like it, would encourage wider policy and legislation to enshrine the human right to access daylight and darkness in safety. A positive outcome would be the introduction of a 1.5 per cent tax – to be applied to companies with

more than 100 employees – to support Sadiq Khan’s vision of a 24-hour Trailblazing City, by investing in relevant research and development and in areas of 24-hour activity around the UK. Companies would be able to claim a tax rebate for offering their buildings and resources for community use outside working hours.

Opposite page: the same landscape shown in summer and winter

Above: the walking channel leads through the retained structural frame of the bus garage Below: the bus garage frame is covered with mesh allowing for projections of the night sky

Right: the blank facade of the bus garage is replaced by workshops that enliven the street

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Above: the pavilions are a deliberate departure from flexible workspace generally on offer Below: by night the pavilions offer an opportunity for study and relaxation

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Right: walking channel with pavilions either side

Above: the lido offers night-time swimming with views of the sky Below: the threshold to the commons is marked by an arrival wall constructed from reclaimed bricks from the bus station that previously occupied the site

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Above: diagram highlighting possible locations for new facilities and interventions and exploring the potential for social interaction between new and existing services

Eradicating Homelessness Integrating the homeless into the city with a dispersed network of facilities, services and support

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Challenge Homelessness is a national problem, with an estimated 280,000 people homeless across the UK. It is most prevalent in our cities, where housing shortages are most acute: 25 of the 32 London boroughs are in the 30 local authorities with the highest number of homeless constituents.

From the hidden homeless to the most vulnerable rough sleepers, the urban experience of a homeless person is exclusionary and dehumanising. Social interaction plays a key role in enabling people who have lost their homes to reintegrate into society. How can the city be adapted to create a more supportive environment for the homeless without creating barriers between the homeless and the city as a whole?

Proposal Eradicating Homelessness proposes a strategy that provides support for the homeless in a dispersed network of facilities throughout the city.

Taking the area around Old Street roundabout as a pilot project, the starting point was to research a day in the life of a homeless person and to identify the full range of goods, services and support that help to ease existence and, potentially, reintegration into society. The team carried out a detailed audit of the city to identify sites and buildings that could be appropriated or adapted to house a wide range of amenities including accommodation, showers, storage lockers, and training and advice, as well as facilities that bring the homeless into contact with the wider community such as launderettes, food banks, charity shops and space for yoga, exercise,

Night stop

Hotel

Extension

Gap site

Crisis has set out five ‘ingredients’ for ending homelessness

1: No one sleeping rough

2: No transient accommodation

3: No one staying in emergency accommodation without a plan to secure stable housing

4: No one homeless from leaving institutional care

5: Everyone at risk of immediate homelessness receives immediate assistance

art and other creative pursuits.

A central core building on Old Street roundabout – an area with high footfall and already a magnet for rough sleepers who take shelter in the network of Underground subways below – acts as a central information point. This core building houses a range of functions and spaces with varying degrees of privacy.

Lower levels house a café, resource library and exhibition space open to the general public and designed to encourage interaction and combat the stigma around homelessness.

Upper levels include accommodation and a range of shared spaces and communal facilities. A private entrance and carefully thought-out circulation afford privacy to the building’s more vulnerable residents.

Accommodation is dispersed throughout the area in a variety of forms including empty rooms in houses, unfilled hotel rooms, new builds on gap sites and extensions to existing buildings

Impact Eradicating Homelessness establishes a framework for a programme that can be implemented at a variety of scales and adapted to reflect the spaces and amenities available in any given neighbourhood.

This offers the prospect of a ‘network of networks’ across the city reflecting an understanding that facilities that support the homeless can enliven and enrich the city as a whole and blurring the boundaries between those with homes and those without.

The ultimate aim is to move from a city where the homeless are turned away and sent elsewhere, to one where they are welcomed in, treated with dignity, and offered the help that individual requirements dictate.

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Right: diagrams showing the range of services supplied in the core building

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centralised information point, provision of support services and integration with public amenities

Left: aerial view showing the massing of the central core building on its site above Old Street Underground station The site was selected for its heavy footfall and because homeless people already make use of the Underground space

Above: section through the core building.

The subway level includes a 24-hour cafĂŠ for all users plus lockers and washing facilities for those still living on the streets Below: the core building is surrounded by a network of new and existing satellite facilities

Old Street station acts as central information point A supporting network abides by a rule of proximity – up to two miles in any given direction

Plug-in services to facilitate the needs which are not currently provided in the area Existing support service

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Rewilding Architecture A centre to promote engagement with the natural world and act as a catalyst for the rewilding of the city as a whole

Below: an amphitheatre – constructed from gabion walls made from concrete salvaged from the site – acts as a gathering and performance space

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Challenge Humanity is an integral part of the world’s ecosystem. We depend on the plants, insects, animals, microbes and fungi that surround us, and need to assume responsibility for their habitats and the environment as a whole. The challenge is to create an environment that improves our knowledge of – and engagement with – the natural world and ultimately to restore a degree of balance to our relationship with the planet.

Proposal Our proposal is for London Wilds, a place to see examples of ‘rewilded’ architecture: new and retrofitted buildings designed to support diverse habitats and plants and to learn the principles of – and experience – what wilding can be. The centre is conceived as a catalyst for the rewilding of London as a whole.

The site, a former Thames Water depot just to the north of Hackney Marshes, occupies a hinterland between the city and Lea Valley, a green corridor connecting London to the open countryside. As a crossroads, it is the perfect location to explore how we can integrate both wildlife and human functions to create a symbiotic piece of urbanism.

Much of the site is currently covered with concrete. Former filter beds have been infilled with rubble.

Hard-edged and fenced off, it is

Beavers help to shape the landscape to be more resilient to drought and flood

impermeable to people and wildlife alike. The proposal is to salvage the material on site to create a new architecture of dry-stone gabion walls alongside rammed earth and timber.

The existing concrete will be removed gradually, allowing trees and plants to grow in the gaps, providing conditions for a greater variety of soil depths and substrates, nutrient levels, and improved water tables, hence improving biodiversity by increasing the range of habitats on site.

This process, combined with a new water channel through the site, will create the necessary habitat to introduce beavers who engineer it to suit their needs, cutting down branches to dam small streams to make the pools they need to build their dens. These slow-moving pools create the perfect habitat for fish to spawn, and insects to breed.

This process will gradually re-saturate the ground, restoring the water table and increasing the capacity of the area to store water, improving its drought resilience and ability to withstand floods.

The beavers will attract visitors and researchers, giving momentum to an educational and research programme housed in a series of laboratories, offices, and indoor and outdoor workshops and classrooms.

The centre also includes residential accommodation for visitors and staff, a ‘wild chapel’ for contemplation, and an amphitheatre hosting lectures, performances, concerts and open-air cinema screenings dedicated to wilding and related themes.

A ‘wild kitchen’, kitchen garden, growing spaces and foraging opportunities foster an appreciation of healthy eating habits that relate to the patterns and seasons of the natural world.

River Lea

Haringey

Site

Waltham Forest

Impact Over time, the site will establish itself as a wet woodland, one of the most biodiverse types of UK habitat.

Studies of beaver reintroductions have found fourfold increases in biodiversity with more fish, bees, frogs and the return of endangered species.

As the site establishes itself and the need for active management declines, the Wilds will focus its energies outwards, with an outreach programme encompassing a fleet of ‘sheds-on-wheels’ bringing plants, tools, education and expertise to communities in Hackney and across London in a bid to kick-start rewilding projects across the city.

Hackney

Newham

Tower Hamlets

25

Above: the site lies within the Lea Valley, an important wildlife corridor that connects habitats in London with the open countryside

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Above: the shed on wheels is a mobile teaching and transport unit containing two main spaces: kitchen and potting shed Based on an electric milk float, the shed on wheels is zero emissions and uses renewable energy

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Below: the shed comes equipped with exterior furniture, an all-weather awning and removable side panels that offer protection from moderate wind and rain. The inside of the panels allows for storage and display

The shed on wheels allows tools, materials, resources, knowledge and ideas to be shared with audiences throughout the borough and potentially beyond

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Intense City Tackling London’s housing shortage and protecting architectural heritage by increasing the density of councilowned estates

Challenge In England alone, 8.4m people are estimated to live in ‘unaffordable, insecure or unsuitable homes’.

Within Hackney, 13,000 people are currently on the waiting list for social housing. London is expected to see a six per cent rise in population by 2026, exacerbating housing need.

The practice of demolishing housing blocks to make way for new development is environmentally and culturally questionable, leading to displaced communities and obliterating the social, cultural and historic value of existing estates. The challenge is to address the need for housing in a way that preserves and strengthens existing communities, social networks and heritage.

Proposal Hackney’s De Beauvoir Estate, a Modernist development designed with generous open space, is used as an exemplar for an approach that increases the number of homes on existing estates without compromising the quality of the architecture or residents’ quality of life. Existing housing blocks are extended vertically and horizontally, doubling the density while retaining the generous outdoor space. New decks provide outdoor circulation and increase the usable space of existing dwellings. The existing circulation cores are reconfigured, extended and refurbished to act as co-living rooms for each floor. The use of off-site manufacturing will reduce construction time by up to 30 per cent, keeping disruption to residents to a minimum.

The existing courtyards are retained with enhanced amenities including different types of play

Opposite page Top: view of the redeveloped towers from Bridport Place Bridge Middle: ground plane appraisal identifying areas for densification and new connections through the site Bottom: massing model showing additional storey and new blocks

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Right: chart showing changing attitudes to the provision of public housing. The aim of this new approach is to retain council management and control of the estate in the long term and ensure an annual return to secure its future

provision across the estate. Ground floor retail and café spaces will enrich estate life and activate the public realm. Traffic is re-routed turning De Beauvoir Road into a central pedestrian route to encourage residents and non-residents to walk and cycle through the estate.

A new skate park activates the northern edge of the site while existing garages are turned into workspaces and low-cost business spaces designed to encourage artists, creatives and small businesses who have been priced out of central Hackney to return to the area and help to create a mixed and vibrant community. The existing parkland to the southern edge of the site will be kept as natural rewilded landscape fulfilling the Modernist vision of towers within a park.

Impact This project is envisaged as a demonstration project for councils looking to take advantage of the recent abolition of borrowing caps on councils for housing development. Hackney can now borrow money against its assets to redevelop the estate. The private homes are then rented out by the council at market rates, bringing in an annualised yield that allows Hackney to gradually repay the loan, reinvest in maintenance and upkeep and, crucially, crosssubsidise regeneration projects on other estates. The proposed regeneration of the De Beauvoir Estate would provide 1,129 new homes, 731 refurbished homes and 7 hectares of revitalised public space. Its wider impact would be to reinvigorate an ongoing programme of redevelopment and an exponential increase in councils’ capacity to maintain, upgrade and replenish their existing housing stock.

Post-war

Urban renaissance

Our model

What?

Decanting Demolishing Rebuilding

Decanting Demolishing Rebuilding

No decanting No demolishing No rebuilding

How?

Council as wealth distributor

Council as risk offloader

Council as ethical business

For whom?

Council housing for working class

Council housing for the poor

Council housing for all

How long for?

A decade of construction-site living

Decades of construction-site living

Decades of gradual improvements

How often?

Every 50 years

Every 50 years

Eternal stewardship

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Above: internal view of a deck access flat retrofitted with a new winter garden to provide additional space and light and a protective thermal envelope.

Below: View along Downham Road

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Opposite page Top: new deck access provides entrance alcoves, seating and communal space Middle: non-residential uses at ground floor level provide passive surveillance of public space Bottom: courtyards have been designed to encourage pedestrians and public life

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Regenerative Design A strategy to turn Hackney into London’s first zerowaste borough

Right: private dwellings are fitted with single-flat anaerobic digesters

Challenge Landfill produces harmful gases such as methane and CO2. Exporting waste subcontracts, rather than solves, the problem and brings the additional environmental cost of transport.

It is also putting the UK’s relationship with other countries under increasing pressure. The challenge is to tackle the problem at source by instigating a waste-free economy, starting with a pilot project to turn Hackney into London’s first zero-waste borough.

Proposal The first step is to abolish door-todoor waste collection. Unwanted items will have to be taken to commodity stops, maintained by Hackney Council, where they will be barcoded and tracked before being recycled, reused or, as a last resort, sent to incineration stations used to power Hackney’s commercial and industrial grid. Commodity stops will be built from recycled and repurposed materials and will include workshop

space where people can repurpose or learn to fix unwanted or broken possessions, and space for sharing food that is surplus to requirements or nearing its sell-by date.

The second step is to retrofit the borough’s housing stock with anaerobic digesters. The De Beauvoir Estate has been selected as a pilot scheme for the retrofitting of residential blocks. Each flat is fitted with a disposal pipe that runs through the kitchen window to a shared Current system The aim is to eliminate landfill and invert the ‘pyramid of waste’

Five key principles underpin the proposal

1% Anaerobic digestion 7% Other 7% Recycling 15% Incineration

15% Transfer 3: Products to be reused and repurposed

55% Landfill Proposed system 30% Reuse 1: No waste leaves Hackney

4: Mandatory composting

30% Anaerobic digestion

25% Recycling

2: No private bin collection

5: No single-use plastic

10% Composting 7% Incineration

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Commodity stops

Anaerobic digester

Incinerator

anaerobic digester in what is currently the car park. The typical Victorian house is retrofitted with an anaerobic digester that breaks down organic matter and produces biogas for the home. Gardens incorporate shared composting and wormeries.

As a final phase, Millfields Depot, an existing transfer site that takes responsibility for all fly-tipping within the borough, is used as a testbed for an environmentally friendly incinerator and anaerobic digester

that contributes to powering Hackney’s grid. The project incorporates a public piazza as a symbol of Hackney’s progressive attitude to waste. Over time, there will be a network of incinerators and anaerobic digesters across the borough.

Impact Hackney will become the first borough not to allow any waste to leave its boundaries. By 2025,

the elimination of kerbside recycling and waste collection will have had a significant impact on behaviour and consumer choice with shops such as Pret a Manger facing a choice between closing down or adopting a zero-waste policy. The introduction of anaerobic digesters for residential buildings and the transformation of Millfields Depot will be complete by 2040. By 2050 Hackney’s zero-waste strategy will have been copied across the UK and, hopefully, the world.

Above: proposal for a zero-waste borough Right: section showing biogas-powered kitchen

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Left: communal anaerobic digester at the De Beauvoir Estate. Previously a car park, the courtyard combines infrastructure with shared allotments

Above: anaerobic digester, workshop and public realm at the reinvented Millfields Depot Below: commodity stop workshops at Millfields Depot

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Arrival City Reinventing an underused part of the city as a commercial, cultural and social gathering place for migrant populations

Challenge Migration is one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century. We live in a world in which 232 million people are international migrants, with Europe as the largest migrant region of over 72 million. Cities are, and always have been, fundamentally places of opportunity and hope for a better future.Yet government immigration policies have created a hostile environment, making it increasingly difficult for new arrivals to gain a foothold in the city. The challenge is to develop a welcoming, supportive environment that allows the city to benefit from the richness and diversity of its immigrant population and allows arrivals to play a part in the city’s political, economic and social life.

Proposal Arrival City sets out to reinvent Dalston Square in London’s Hackney as a commercial, cultural and social gathering place for migrant populations. A recent redevelopment project lost much of the area’s historic and cultural resonance. Local institutions such as the Four Aces Club, one of the UK’s few venues for black musicians, and many

small-scale local businesses disappeared. The scale of the site is challenging and lacks intimacy. Four of the five retail units that border the square are currently vacant, adding up to a total of 1,000 sqm of empty retail space. The square, a static, linear space, is disconnected from local activity by heavy traffic on Dalston Lane, and is largely devoid of life.

This proposal aims to revitalise both buildings and square as a vibrant multi-cultural civic centre. The aim is not to produce deterministic architecture but to ‘design the blanket not the picnic’ – to create a flexible canvas that can be reconfigured and appropriated in infinite ways. Vacant retail spaces have been repurposed to meet the needs of migrant populations: a ‘living room’ offering a warm welcome, unlimited tea, space for informal meetings and a ‘non-citizens advice bureau’ dispensing formal advice; a ‘dining room’ with space for communal cooking and eating; an educational institution providing courses, skills enhancement, childcare and facilities for children’s play. Thresholds have been designed to allow activities to spill outside helping to reinvigorate

Ramadan Iftar Evening 1: lighting installation 2: planting structure with seating 3: tables with seating 4: lighting installation 5: ramadan dinner area 6: amphitheatre 7: play installations 8: screening 9: food stalls

Left and opposite: portable furniture and structures allow the space to be configured in a variety of ways for different events throughout the year

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Below: diagram showing the range of countries represented by businesses within a three-minute walk

Dalston Square as an active, animated public space. A variety of lightweight portable furniture and installations – food stalls, tables, seating, lighting, play equipment, screens, canopies, stages and plinths – allows the space to be used in different ways for different events throughout the year.

Impact Arrival City could be applied to different sites across the city.

While each locality would demand a bespoke response, the brief could be defined by a six-step approach: 1. Understand the audience and their practical and psychological needs 2. Analyse the existing support network for migrants, newcomers and local residents 3. Identify missing links and establish the appropriate networks and people to help to define a suitable programme 4. Identify places that can accommodate the programme and offer potential to reanimate the public realm 5. Map existing support networks, spaces and organisations to understand the spatial configurations and requirements for a diverse and inclusive cityscape 6. Design the blanket not the picnic

Afro-Caribbean Festival Day 1: food stalls 2: barbecue 3: seating 4: stage 5: planting structure with seating 6: tables with seating 7: canopy structure 8: amphitheatre 9: canopy structure 10: play installations 11: main stage 12: food stalls

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Above: diagram showing the history of community spaces

Generational Shift Repurposing councilowned community buildings and disused spaces to provide improved facilities for young people

Below: bridge overlooking the double-height atrium space

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Challenge Since 2011, 46 per cent of funding for London council youth services has been cut.Youth provision, especially for those of secondary school/college age, has been drastically reduced.

These cuts have been felt particularly strongly in the London Borough of Hackney where the population is diverse, multicultural and comparatively young. The challenge is to develop a framework with and for Hackney Council to support the lives of young people, intensify and repurpose existing council-owned community infrastructure, and recognise the value of the existing user groups reliant on these spaces.

Proposal The refurbishment of Hoxton’s existing Fellows Court Community Centre is the first step in a policy of repurposing council-owned assets to improve the provision of youth facilities throughout the estate.

The refurbishment works with Fellows Court’s concrete frame structure, and preserves and celebrates its assets – mosaics above the entrance hall, the community hall, the incumbent Suzuki music school and its strong ties with the community. Key changes include moving the dining room to a more prominent position, a more welcoming entrance lobby, improved circulation and wayfinding, and replacing hostile security bars with passive surveillance, lighting and improved activity in the adjacent square.

Satellite projects include appropriating vacant shop units for start-up businesses, repurposing vacant garages to provide facilities for 12-19 year olds, revitalising disused undercrofts by using new materials to create a more inviting environment, landscaping to establish a better relationship with adjacent public space, and installing low-cost structures to encourage play.

These disparate elements are linked by a programme of public realm improvements including the provision of a greater variety of gathering spaces and cycle/pedestrian routes.

A new app – the Shift – streamlines and modernises listings and booking processes, offering information on programmes in local community centres and the availability of all nearby spaces and events.

Impact 2021: the influence of Hackney’s community infrastructure begins to spread out across the estate, inhabiting local garages, undercroft spaces and vacant shop fronts 2-5 years: legitimised by the success of Fellows Court Estate, Hackney Council receives backing to develop further community hall sites across the borough 5-10 years: Hackney’s community infrastructure extends beyond a now reduced community hall stock, inhabiting underused assets across the borough and connecting to form a resilient and sustainable network of spaces and programmes

Above: section showing double-height entrance foyer with Suzuki music school to the left and community kitchen and dining space to the right Below: the entrance has been opened up to be more welcoming and give a sense of arrival.

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Opposite top: proposed first floor plan showing community hall to the right and bridge leading to rooftop garden with pop-up recording studios and pirate radio stations Opposite bottom: proposed ground floor plan showing entrance atrium with community rooms to the right and music school to the left

Above: youth theatre group in the community hall Right: senior citizens’ yoga class in the community hall Below: in the community kitchen

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Below: undercrofts are repurposed with low-cost installations for climbing and play Bottom left: disused garages are transformed into gathering spaces Bottom right: vacant shop units are revitalised with new functions such as a bike storage and workshop facility

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Opposite top: the Shift App centralises the council’s online presence streamlining and modernising information and booking for spaces and events Opposite bottom: transformed garage spaces can be booked free of charge though the Shift App

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Playful City Combatting loneliness and boredom by fostering chance encounters between different generations and putting play at the heart of city life

Challenge City life can be alienating, isolating and exhausting with limited opportunities for spontaneity, exploration and chance encounters.

Play is the antidote. The challenge is to create a physical architecture that invites interaction, breaks up the monotony of city life and encourages exploratory play.

elderly is combined with a nursery and skate park to foster interaction between different generations.

A performance space – the Curtain Call – encourages audience participation, impromptu performances and a cooperative approach to set design and stagecraft.

The site is designed to be as permeable as possible to encourage people to meander through the site – and join in the fun – as part of their daily commute to work.

A residential development – the Move-In Move-Out building – champions communal living as a means of maximising interaction and cooperative play with shared cooking, living and dining located in the central communal core and a gathering space on the roof.

Proposal At Morning Lane, Hackney, Playful City incorporates play into every aspect of daily life – living, eating, working, shopping and learning.

Different functions are combined to create unorthodox typologies and promote social interaction between groups of people who wouldn’t normally meet. Housing for the

Below: unorthodox typologies are created by blending uses to encourage contact between groups of people who wouldn’t normally interact

Opposite: the massing encourages movement through the site and crafts pockets of space for public realm

Left: members of the Think Tank as the self-styled first cohort of a new network of ‘radical assassins’ charged with responsibility for transforming attitudes to play

HOME 2nd hand Clothes

TRADE

ZERO WASTE

LIVE CINEMA PERFORMING ARTS

COMMUNITY FLEXIBLE SPACES

Work

PARTICIPATION Gym

Pop-up stages

Yoga

Nursery Studio ZERO WASTE

Healthy Fast food

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EAT

SHARED RECIPIES

EXCHANGE

KNOWLEDGE

COMMUAL DINING

Live INTERGENERATIONAL

Day care

Residents can adjust the position of individual sleeping pods, allowing for different relationships between enclosure and deck space, and creating an ever-changing facade.

White goods are communal and supersized making mundane housework a social event.

The public realm is conceived as a playscape with a variety of spaces from wide boulevards to narrow lanes and multi-level alley spaces offering varied opportunities for both structured and unstructured play.

A team of ‘playful assassins’ stage pop-up events and installations so that there is always an element of surprise.

The project endorses sustainable lifestyles with: the Eco-Est, a zerowaste store championing local sourcing and re-use; the Maze,

a rooftop slow-food restaurant and ‘roving allotments’ – a conveyor belt that supplies residents with fresh produce growing in shopping baskets.

Fruit trees and hedgerows are dotted throughout the public realm.

Impact Playful City aims to highlight the value and importance of play, leading to an amendment to the draft New London Plan Policy S4 (Play and Informal Recreation) stating that the 10m2 of play space is a requirement not just for children, as currently stipulated, but for citizens of any age.

In addition, the project is envisaged as a catalyst for the introduction of new planning-use classes: A1(P) shops that provide a clear zero-waste solution to everyday food

and wellbeing products A3(P) restaurants and cafés with a focus on making diners aware of the source of their food C2(P) residential care homes that increase awareness, understanding and knowledge sharing between generational groups in the city C3(P) dwelling houses that allow for groups of people to cohabit housing units with shared facilities to centralise interaction between residents and reduce energy consumption D1(P) non-residential institutions that focus on crafting new material for the dissemination of new ideas D2(P) assembly and leisure buildings that encourage community participation in the creation and function of the event

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It’s too late to avert the catastrophic impact of climate change. Jem Bendell calls for ‘deep adaptation’ in preparation for inevitable – and imminent – societal and ecological collapse

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Can professionals in sustainability management, policy and research – myself included – continue to work with the assumption or hope that we can slow down climate change, or respond to it sufficiently to sustain our civilisation? As disturbing information on climate change passed across my screen, this was the question I could no longer ignore, and therefore decided to take a couple of months to analyse the latest climate science. As I began to conclude that we can no longer work with that assumption or hope, I asked a second question. Have professionals in the sustainability field discussed the possibility that it is too late to avert an environmental catastrophe and the implications for their work? A quick literature review revealed that my fellow professionals have not been publishing work that explores, or starts from, that perspective. That led to a third question, on why sustainability professionals are not exploring this issue which is fundamentally important to our whole field as well as our personal lives. To explore that, I drew on psychological analyses, conversations with colleagues, reviews of debates among environmentalists in social media and self-reflection on my own reticence.

Concluding that there is a need to promote discussion about the implications of a social collapse triggered by an environmental catastrophe, I asked my fourth question on what are the ways that people are talking about collapse on social media. I identified a variety of conceptualisations and from that asked myself what could provide a map for people to navigate this extremely difficult issue. For that, I drew on a range of reading and experiences over my 25 years in the sustainability field to outline an agenda for what I have termed ‘deep adaptation’ to climate change.

The result of these five questions is an article that does not contribute to one specific set of literature or practice in the broad field of sustainability management and policy.

Rather, it questions the basis for all the work in this field.

It does not seek to add to the existing research, policy and practice on climate adaptation, as I found that to be framed by the view that we can manage the impacts of a changing climate on our physical, economic, social, political and psychological situations. Instead, this article may contribute to future work on sustainable management and policy as much by subtraction as by addition. By that I mean the implication is for you to take time to step back, to consider ‘what if’ the analysis in these pages is true, to allow yourself to grieve, and to overcome enough of the typical fears we all have, to find meaning in new ways of being and acting. That may be in the fields of academia or management – or could be in some other field that this realisation leads you to.

As researchers and reflective practitioners, we have an opportunity and obligation to not just do what is expected by our employers and the norms of our profession, but also to reflect on the relevance of our work within wider society.

I am aware that some people consider statements from academics that we now face inevitable near-term social collapse to be irresponsible due to the potential impact that may have on the motivation or mental health of people reading such statements. My research and engagement in dialogue on this topic leads me to conclude the exact opposite. It is a responsible act to communicate this analysis now and invite people to support each other in exploring the implications.

The most surprising warming is in the Arctic, where the 2016 land surface temperature was 2.0°C above the 1981-2010 average, breaking the previous records of 2007, 2011 and 2015 by 0.8°C, representing a 3.5°C increase since the record began in 1900.

This data is fairly easy to collate and not widely challenged, so swiftly finds its way into academic publications. However, to obtain a sense of the implications of this warming on environment and society, one needs real-time data on the current situation and the trends it may entail. This review draws on a range of sources with a focus on data since 2014.

That is because, unfortunately, data collected since then is often consistent with non-linear changes to our environment. Non-linear changes are of central importance to understanding climate change, as they suggest that impacts will be far more rapid and severe than predictions based on linear projections.

The warming of the Arctic reached wider public awareness as it began destabilising winds in the higher atmosphere, specifically the jet stream and the northern polar vortex, leading to extreme movements of warmer air north into the Arctic and cold air to the south.

At one point in early 2018, temperature recordings from the Arctic were 20°C above the average for that date.

The warming Arctic has led to dramatic loss in sea ice, the average September extent of which has been decreasing at a rate of 13.2 per cent per decade since 1980, so that over two-thirds of the ice cover has now gone. One of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, Peter Wadhams, believes an ice-free Arctic will occur one summer in the next few years and that it will likely increase by 50 per cent the warming caused by the CO2 produced by human activity.

Already we see impacts on storm, drought and flood frequency and strength due to increased volatility from more energy in the atmosphere. We are witnessing negative impacts on agriculture. Climate change has reduced growth in crop yields by 1-2 per cent per decade over the past century. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that weather abnormalities related to climate change are costing billions of dollars a year and growing exponentially.

For now, the impact is calculated in money, but the nutritional implications are key. We are also seeing impacts on marine ecosystems. About half of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years, due to a mixture of reasons including higher water temperatures and acidification due to higher CO2 concentrations in ocean water. In the 10 years prior to 2016, the Atlantic Ocean soaked up 50 per cent more carbon dioxide than it did the previous decade, measurably speeding up the acidification of the ocean. This is indicative of oceans worldwide, and the consequent acidification degrades the base of the marine food web, thereby reducing the ability of fish populations to reproduce themselves across the globe. Meanwhile, warming oceans are already reducing the population size of some fish species. Compounding these threats to human nutrition, in some regions we are witnessing an exponential rise in the spread of mosquito and tickborne viruses as temperatures become more conducive to them.

Our non-linear world The simple evidence of global ambient temperature rise is indisputable. Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001, and global temperatures have increased by 0.9°C since 1880.

Looking ahead It is difficult to predict future impacts on our ecosystems, soils, seas and societies. But current models suggest an increase in storm number and strength and a decline of normal agriculture, including the

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Half of all plants and animal species in the world’s most biodiverse places are at risk of extinction due to climate change

compromising of mass production of grains in the northern hemisphere and intermittent disruption to rice production in the tropics. That includes predicted declines in the yields of rice, wheat, and corn in China by 36.25, 18.26 and 45.10 per cent, respectively, by the end of this century and a 6-23 and 15-25 per cent reduction in the wheat yield in India during the 2050s and 2080s respectively. The loss of coral and the acidification of the seas is predicted to reduce fisheries productivity by over half. The rates of sea level rise suggest they may soon become exponential, which will pose significant problems for billions of people living in coastal zones. About half of all plants and animal species in the world’s most biodiverse places are at risk of extinction due to climate change.

Environmental scientists are now describing our current era as the sixth mass extinction event in the history of planet Earth, with this one caused by us. The World Bank reported in 2018 that countries needed to prepare for over 100 million internally displaced people due to the effects of climate change, in addition to millions of international refugees.

It is useful to recap simply to invite a sober acceptance of our current predicament. It has led some commentators to describe our time as a new geological era shaped by humans – the Anthropocene. It has led others to conclude that we should be exploring how to live in an unstable post-sustainability situation.

The politically permissible scientific consensus is that we need to stay beneath 2°C warming of global ambient temperatures, to avoid dangerous and uncontrollable levels of climate change, with impacts such as mass starvation, disease, flooding, storm destruction, forced migration and war. That figure was agreed on by governments that were dealing with many domestic and international pressures from vested interests, particularly corporations. It is therefore not a figure that many scientists would advise, given that many ecosystems will be lost and many risks created if we approach 2°C global ambient warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agreed in 2013 that if the world does not keep further anthropogenic emissions below a total of 800 billion tonnes of carbon, we are not likely to keep average temperatures below 2°C of global average warming.

That left about 270 billion tonnes of carbon to burn.

Total global emissions remain at around 11 billion tonnes of carbon per year (which is 37 billion tonnes of CO2).

Those calculations appear worrying but give the impression we have at least a decade to change. It takes significant time to change economic systems, so if we are not already on the path to dramatic reductions it is unlikely we will keep within the carbon limit. With an increase of carbon emissions of 2 per cent in 2017, the decoupling of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions. So, we are not on the path to prevent going over 2°C warming through emissions reductions. In any case the IPCC estimate of a carbon budget was controversial with many scientists who estimated that existing CO2 in the atmosphere should already produce global ambient temperature rises over 5°C. So there is no carbon budget – it has already been overspent.

That situation is why some experts have argued for more work on removing carbon from the atmosphere with machines. Unfortunately, the current technology needs to be scaled by a factor of two million within two years, all powered by renewables, alongside massive emission cuts, to reduce the amount of heating already locked into the system. Biological approaches to carbon capture appear Spring 2020|Citizen|85

far more promising. These include planting trees, restoring soils used in agriculture, and growing seagrass and kelp. They also offer wider beneficial environmental and social side effects. Studies on seagrass and seaweed indicate we could be taking millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere immediately and continually if we had a massive effort to restore seagrass meadows and to farm seaweed.

Research into ‘management-intensive rotational grazing’ (MIRG) practices, also known as holistic grazing, shows how a healthy grassland can store carbon. A 2014 study measured annual per-hectare increases in soil carbon at 8 tonnes per year on farms converted to these practices. The world uses about 3.5 billion hectares of land for pasture and fodder crops. Using the 8 tonnes figure above, converting a 10th of that land to MIRG practices would sequester a quarter of present emissions.

In addition, no-till methods of horticulture can sequester as much as two tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, so could also make significant contributions. It is clear, therefore, that our assessment of carbon budgets must focus as much on these agricultural systems as we do on emissions reductions.

Clearly a massive campaign and policy agenda to transform agriculture and restore ecosystems globally is needed right now. It will be a huge undertaking, undoing 60 years of developments in world agriculture. In addition, it means the conservation of our existing wetlands and forests must suddenly become successful, after decades of failure across lands outside geographically limited nature reserves. Even if such will emerges immediately, the heating and instability already locked into the climate will cause damage to ecosystems, so it will be difficult for such approaches to curb the global atmospheric carbon level. The reality that we have progressed too far already to avert disruptions to ecosystems is highlighted by the finding that if CO2 removal from the atmosphere could work at scale, it would not prevent massive damage to marine life, which is locked in for many years due to acidification from the dissolving of CO2 in the oceans.

Despite the limitations of what humans can do to work with nature to encourage its carbon sequestration processes, the planet has been helping us out. A global ‘greening’ of the planet has significantly slowed the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of the century. Plants have been growing faster and larger due to higher CO2 levels in the air and warming temperatures that reduce the CO2 emitted by plants via respiration.

The effects led the proportion of annual carbon emissions remaining in the air to fall from about 50 per cent to 40 per cent in the last decade. However, this process only offers a limited effect, as the absolute level of CO2 in the atmosphere is continuing to rise, breaking the milestone of 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2015. Given that changes in seasons, temperature extremes, flood and drought are beginning to negatively affect ecosystems, the risk exists that this global greening effect may be reduced in time.

These potential reductions in atmospheric carbon from natural and assisted biological processes is a flickering ray of hope in our dark situation. However, the uncertainty about their impact needs to be contrasted with the uncertain yet significant impact of increasing methane release in the atmosphere. It is a gas that enables far more trapping of heat from the sun’s rays than CO2, but was ignored in most of the climate models over the past decades. The authors of the 2016 Global Methane Budget report found that in the early years of this century, concentrations of methane rose by only about 0.5ppb each year, compared with 10ppb in 2014 and 2015.

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Various sources were identified, from fossil fuels to agriculture to melting permafrost.

In 2017 scientists working on the Eastern Siberian Sea shelf, reported that the permafrost layer has thinned enough to risk destabilising hydrates. That, along with unprecedented temperatures in the Arctic and the data in non-linear rises in high-atmosphere methane levels, combine to make it feel like we are about to play Russian roulette with the entire human race, with already two bullets loaded. Nothing is certain. But it is sobering that humanity has arrived at a situation of our own making where we now debate the strength of analyses of our near-term extinction.

Apocalypse uncertain We do not know if the power of human ingenuity will help sufficiently to change the environmental trajectory we are on. Unfortunately, the recent years of innovation, investment and patenting indicate how human ingenuity has increasingly been channelled into consumerism and financial engineering. We might pray for time. But the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war.

We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where we will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways. But the evidence is mounting that the impacts will be catastrophic to our livelihoods and the societies that we live within.

Our norms of behaviour, that we call our ‘civilisation’, may also degrade. When we contemplate this possibility, it can seem abstract. But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap.You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth.You will become malnourished.You won’t know whether to stay or go.You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.

These descriptions may seem overly dramatic.

I chose the words above as an attempt to cut through the sense that this topic is purely theoretical. We are considering here a situation where the publishers of this journal would no longer exist, the electricity to read its outputs won’t exist, and a profession to educate won’t exist.

Some of us may take pride in upholding the norms of the current society, even amid collapse. Others will consider that the probability of collapse means that effort at reforming our current system is no longer the pragmatic choice. My conclusion has been that we need to expand our work on ‘sustainability’ to consider how communities, countries and humanity can adapt to the coming troubles. I have dubbed this the ‘deep adaptation agenda’, to contrast it with the limited scope of current climate adaptation activities. My experience is that a lot of people are resistant to the conclusions I have just shared. So before explaining the implications, let us consider some of the emotional and psychological responses to the information I have just summarised.

Systems of denial It would not be unusual to feel a bit affronted, disturbed or saddened by the information and arguments I have just shared. In the past few years, many people have said to me that, ‘It can’t be too late to stop climate change, because if it were, how would we find the energy to keep

We are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war

on striving for change?’ With such views, a possible reality is denied because people want to continue their striving.

What does that tell us? The ‘striving’ is based on a rationale of maintaining self-identities related to espoused values.

It is understandable why that happens. If one has always thought of oneself as having self-worth through promoting the public good, then information that initially appears to take away that self-image is difficult to assimilate.

That process of strategic denial to maintain striving and identity is easily seen in online debates about the latest climate science. One particular case is illustrative. In 2017 the NewYork Magazine published an article that drew together the latest data and analysis of what the implications of rapid climatic warming would be on ecosystems and humanity. Unlike the many dry academic articles on these subjects, this popular article sought to describe these processes in visceral ways. The reaction of some environmentalists to this article did not focus on the accuracy of the descriptions or what might be done to reduce some of the worst effects identified in the article.

Instead, they focused on whether such ideas should be communicated to the general public. Climate scientist Michael Mann warned against presenting ‘the problem as unsolvable, and feed[ing] a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness’. In a blog post, Daniel Aldana Cohen (2017) an assistant sociology professor working on climate politics, called the piece ‘climate disaster porn’.

There are three main factors that could be encouraging professional environmentalists in their denial that our societies will collapse in the near-term. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates. Eminent climate scientist James Hansen has always been ahead of the conservative consensus in his analyses and predictions.

Using the case study of sea level rise, he threw light on processes that lead to ‘scientific reticence’ to conclude and communicate scenarios that would be disturbing to employers, funders, governments and the public.

Combined with the norms of scientific analysis and reporting to be cautious and avoid bombast, and the time it takes to fund, research, produce and publish peerreviewed scientific studies, this means that the information available to environmental professionals about the state of the climate is not as frightening as it could be.

A second set of factors influencing denial may be personal. George Marshall summarised the insights from psychology on climate denial, including the interpretative and implicative denial of those who are aware but have not prioritised it. In particular, we are social beings and our assessment of what to do about information is influenced by our culture. Therefore, people often avoid voicing certain thoughts when they go against the social norm around them and/or their social identity. Especially in situations of shared powerlessness, it can be perceived as safer to hide one’s views and do nothing if it goes against the status quo. Marshall also explains how our typical fear of death means that we do not give our full attention to information that reminds us of that. According to anthropologist Ernest Becker: ‘A fear of death lies at the centre of all human belief’. Marshall explains: ‘The denial of death is a “vital lie” that leads us to invest our efforts into our cultures and social groups to obtain a sense of permanence and survival beyond our death. Thus, [Becker] argued, when we receive reminders of our death – what he calls death salience – we respond by defending those values and cultures’.

Research has revealed that people who have a higher level of formal education are more supportive of the existing social and economic systems than those that have less education. The argument is that people who have Spring 2020|Citizen|87

invested time and money in progressing to a higher status within existing social structures are more naturally inclined to imagine reform of those systems than their upending. This situation is accentuated if we assume our livelihood, identity and self-worth is dependent on the perspective that progress on sustainability is possible and that we are part of that progressive process.

The third factor influencing denial is institutional.

I have worked for over 20 years within or with organisations working on the sustainability agenda, in non-profit, private and governmental sectors. In none of these sectors is there an obvious institutional selfinterest in articulating the probability or inevitability of social collapse. Not to members of your charity, not to consumers of your product, not to voters for your party.

The internal culture of environmental groups remains strongly in favour of appearing effective, even when decades of investment and campaigning have not produced a net positive outcome on climate, ecosystems or many specific species.

Let us look at the largest environmental charity, WWF, as an example. I worked for them when we were striving towards all UK wood product imports being from sustainable forests by 1995. Then it became ‘well-managed’ forests by 2000. Then targets were quietly forgotten while the potensiphonic language of solving deforestation through innovative partnerships remained.

If the employees of the world’s leading environmental groups were on performance-related pay, they would probably owe their members and donors money by now.

The fact that some readers may find such a comment to be rude and unhelpful highlights how our interests in civility, praise and belonging within a professional community can censor those of us who seek to communicate uncomfortable truths in memorable ways (like that journalist in the NewYork Magazine).

These personal and institutional factors mean that environmental professionals may be some of the slowest to process the implications of the latest climate information. The idea we ‘experts’ need to be careful about what to tell ‘them’, the ‘unsupported public’, may be a narcissistic delusion in need of immediate remedy.

Emotional difficulties with realising the tragedy that is coming, and that is in many ways upon us already, are understandable.Yet these difficulties need to be overcome so we can explore what the implications may be for our work, lives and communities.

Framing after denial If we allow ourselves to accept that a climate-induced form of economic and social collapse is now likely, then we can begin to explore the nature and likelihood of that collapse. That is when we discover a range of different views. Some frame the future as involving a collapse of this economic and social system, which does not necessarily mean a complete collapse of law, order, identity and values. Some regard that kind of collapse as offering a potential upside in bringing humanity to a post-consumerist way of life that would be more conscious of relationships between people and nature.

Some even argue that this reconnection with nature will generate hitherto unimaginable solutions to our predicament. Sometimes that view comes with a belief in the power of spiritual practices to influence the material world according to human intent. The perspective that natural or spiritual reconnection might save us from catastrophe is, however, a psychological response one could analyse as a form of denial.

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catastrophic nature of this collapse, so that it will not be possible to plan a way to transition at either collective or small-scale levels to a new way of life that we might imagine as tolerable, let alone beautiful. Others go further still and argue that the data can be interpreted as indicating climate change is now in a runaway pattern, with inevitable methane release from the seafloor leading to a rapid collapse of societies that will trigger multiple meltdowns of some of the world’s 400 nuclear power stations, leading to the extinction of the human race.

With each of these framings – collapse, catastrophe, extinction – people describe different degrees of certainty. Different people speak of a scenario being possible, probable or inevitable. In my conversations with both professionals in sustainability or climate, and others not directly involved, I have found that people choose a scenario and a probability depending not on what the data and its analysis might suggest, but what they are choosing to live with as a story about this topic. That parallels findings in psychology that none of us are purely logic machines but relate information into stories about how things relate and why. None of us are immune to that process. Currently, I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction.

There is a growing community of people who conclude we face inevitable human extinction and treat that view as a prerequisite for meaningful discussions about the implications for our lives right now. For instance, there are thousands of people on Facebook groups who believe human extinction is near. In such groups I have witnessed how people who doubt extinction is either inevitable or coming soon are disparaged by some participants for being weak and deluded. This could reflect how some of us may find it easier to believe in a certain than an uncertain story, especially when the uncertain future would be so different to today that it is difficult to comprehend. Reflection on the end of times, or eschatology, is a major dimension of the human experience, and the total sense of loss of everything one could ever contribute to is an extremely powerful experience for many people. How they emerge from that experience depends on many factors, with loving kindness, creativity, transcendence, anger, depression, nihilism and apathy all being potential responses. Given the potential spiritual experience triggered by sensing the imminent extinction of the human race, we can appreciate why a belief in the inevitability of extinction could be a basis for some people to come together.

In my work with mature students, I have found that inviting them to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression. Instead, in a supportive environment, where we have enjoyed community with each other, celebrating ancestors and enjoying nature before then looking at this information and possible framings for it, something positive happens. I have witnessed a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward. Despite that, a certain discombobulation occurs and remains over time as one tries to find a way forward in a society where such perspectives are uncommon. Continued sharing about the implications as we transition our work and lives is valuable.

One further factor in the framing of our situation concerns timing. Which also concerns geography.

Where and when will the collapse or catastrophe begin?

When will it affect my livelihood and society? Has it

Loving kindness, creativity, transcendence, anger, depression, nihilism and apathy are potential responses for people reflecting on the end of time

already begun? Although it is difficult to forecast and impossible to predict with certainty, that does not mean we should not try. The current data on temperature rise at the poles and impacts on weather patterns around the world suggests we are already in the midst of dramatic changes that will impact massively and negatively on agriculture within the next 20 years. Impacts have already begun. That sense of near-term disruption to our ability to feed ourselves and our families, and the implications for crime and conflict, adds another level to the discombobulation I mentioned. Should you drop everything now and move somewhere more suitable for self-sufficiency? Should you be spending time reading the rest of this article? Should I even finish writing it?

I have seen how the idea of Inevitable Near-Term Human Extinction (INTHE) can lead me to focus on truth, love and joy in the now, which is wonderful, but how it can also make me lose interest in planning for the future. And yet I always come around to the same conclusion – we do not know. Ignoring the future because it is unlikely to matter might backfire. ‘Running for the hills’ – to create our own eco-community – might backfire. But we definitely know that continuing to work in the ways we have done until now is not just backfiring – it is holding the gun to our own heads. With this in mind, we can choose to explore how to evolve what we do, without any simple answers. In my post-denial state, shared by increasing numbers of my students and colleagues, I realised that we would benefit from conceptual maps for how to address these questions.

I therefore set about synthesising the main things people talked about doing differently in light of a view of inevitable collapse and probable catastrophe. That is what I offer now as the ‘deep adaptation agenda’.

The deep adaptation agenda For many years, discussions and initiatives on adaptation to climate change were seen by environmental activists and policymakers as unhelpful to the necessary focus on carbon emissions reductions.

That view finally changed in 2010 when the IPCC gave more attention to how societies and economies could be helped to adapt to climate change, and the United Nations Global Adaptation Network was founded to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Five years later the Paris Accord between member states produced a ‘Global Goal on Adaptation’ with the aim of ‘enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, with a view to contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of the global temperature goal’. Countries committed to develop National Adaptation Plans and report on their creation to the UN. Since then the funding being made available to climate adaptation has grown, with all the international development institutions active on adaptation finance.

In 2018 the International Fund for Agricultural Development, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and the World Bank each agreed major financing for governments to increase resilience of their communities. Some of their projects include the Green Climate Fund, which was created to provide lower income countries with assistance.

Typical projects include improving the ability of small-scale farmers to cope with weather variability through the introduction of irrigation and the ability of urban planners to respond to rising sea levels and Spring 2020|Citizen|89

extreme rainfall events through re-engineering drainage systems (Climate Action Programme, 2018). These initiatives are falling short of the commitments made by governments over the past eight years, and so more is being done to promote private bonds to finance adaptation as well as stimulate private philanthropy on this agenda.

These efforts are paralleled by an increased range of activities under the umbrella of ‘Disaster Risk Reduction’, which has its own international agency – the United Nations Office for Disaster Reduction. The aim of its work is to reduce the damage caused by natural hazards like earthquakes, floods, droughts and cyclones, through reducing sensitivity to these hazards as well as increasing the capacity to respond when disasters hit. That focus means significant engagement with urban planners and local governments. In the business sector, this disaster risk reduction agenda meets the private sector through the well-established fields of risk management and business continuity management. Companies ask themselves what the points of failure might be in their value chains and seek to reduce those vulnerabilities or the significance of something failing.

Given the climate science we discussed earlier, some people may think this action is too little too late.Yet, if such action reduces some harm temporarily, that will help people, just like you and me, and therefore such action should not be disregarded. Nevertheless, we can look more critically at how people and organisations are framing the situation and the limitations that such a framing may impose. The initiatives are typically described as promoting ‘resilience’, rather than sustainability. Some definitions of resilience within the environmental sector are surprisingly upbeat. For instance, the Stockholm Resilience Centre explains that ‘resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking’.

Two issues require attention at this point. First, the upbeat allegiance to ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in certain discourses about resilience may not be helpful as we enter a period when material ‘progress’ may not be possible and so aiming for it might become counterproductive. Second, apart from some limited soft skills development, the initiatives under the resilience banner are nearly all focused on physical adaptation to climate change, rather than considering a wider perspective on psychological resilience. In psychology, ‘resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress – such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back from difficult experiences’. How a person ‘bounces back’ after difficulties or loss, may be through a creative reinterpretation of identity and priorities. The concept of resilience in psychology does not, therefore, assume that people return to how they were before. Given the climate reality we now face, this less progressivist framing of resilience is more useful for a deeper adaptation agenda.

In pursuit of a conceptual map of ‘deep adaptation’, we can conceive of resilience of human societies as the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviours. Given that analysts are concluding that a social collapse is inevitable, the question becomes: what are the valued norms and behaviours that human societies will wish to maintain as they seek to survive? That highlights how deep adaptation 90|Citizen|Spring 2020

will involve more than ‘resilience’. It brings us to a second area of this agenda, which I have named ‘relinquishment’.

It involves people and communities letting go of certain assets, behaviours and beliefs where retaining them could make matters worse. Examples include withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facilities, or giving up expectations for certain types of consumption. The third area can be called ‘restoration’.

It involves people and communities rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life and organisation that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded. Examples include rewilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support.

It is not my intention in this paper to map out more specific implications of a deep adaptation agenda.

Indeed, it is impossible to do so, and to attempt it would assume we are in a situation for calculated attempts at management, when what we face is a complex predicament beyond our control. Rather, I hope the deep adaptation agenda of resilience, relinquishment and restoration can be a useful framework for community dialogue in the face of climate change. Resilience asks us ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’

Relinquishment asks us ‘what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?’ Restoration asks us ‘what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?’

Research futures in the face of climate tragedy If all the data and analysis turn out to be misleading, and this society continues nicely for the coming decades, then this article will not have helped my career. If the predicted collapse comes within the next decade, then I won’t have a career. It is the perfect lose-lose.

The West’s response to environmental issues has been restricted by the dominance of neoliberal economics since the 1970s. That led to hyper-individualist, marketfundamentalist, incremental and atomistic approaches.

By hyper-individualist, I mean a focus on individual action as consumers, switching light bulbs or buying sustainable furniture, rather than promoting political action as engaged citizens. By market fundamentalist, I mean a focus on market mechanisms like the complex, costly and largely useless carbon cap and trade systems, rather than exploring what more government intervention could achieve. By incremental, I mean a focus on celebrating small steps forward such as a company publishing a sustainability report, rather than strategies designed for a speed and scale of change suggested by the science. By atomistic, I mean a focus on seeing climate action as a separate issue from the governance of markets, finance and banking, rather than exploring what kind of economic system could permit or enable sustainability.

In my own work, I stopped researching corporate sustainability. I learned about leadership and communications and began to research, teach and advise on these matters in the political arena. I began to work on systems to enable re-localisation of economies and support for community development, particularly those systems using local currencies. I sought to share that knowledge more widely, and therefore launched a free online course (The Money and Society Mass Open Online Course). I began to spend more time reading and talking about the climate tragedy and what I might do, or stop doing, with that in mind. This rethinking and

In ‘deep adaptation’ resilience of human societies is the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances so as to survive with valued norms and behaviours

This is a precis of a much longer paper originally published online. The full article, with references, can be read at www.jembendell.com

repositioning is ongoing, but I can no longer work on subjects that do not have some relevance to deep adaptation. Looking ahead, I see the need and opportunity for more work at multiple levels. People will need more support to access information and networks for how to attempt a shift in their livelihoods and lifestyles. Existing approaches to living off-grid in intentional communities are useful to learn from, but this agenda needs to go further in asking questions like how small-scale production of drugs like aspirin is possible. Free online and in-person courses as well as support networks on self-sufficiency need to be scaled up. Local governments will need similar support on how to develop the capabilities today that will help their communities to collaborate, not fracture, during a collapse. For instance, they will need to roll out systems for productive cooperation between neighbours, such as product and service exchange platforms enabled by locally issued currency. At the international level, there is the need to work on how to responsibly address the wider fallout from collapsing societies including the challenges of refugee support and the securing of dangerous industrial and nuclear sites at the moment of a societal collapse.

Other intellectual disciplines and traditions may be of interest going forward. Human extinction and the topic of eschatology, or the end of the world, is something that has been discussed in various academic disciplines, as you might expect. In theology it has been widely discussed, while it also appears in literary theory as an interesting element to creative writing, and in psychology during the 1980s as a phenomenon related to the threat of nuclear war. The field of psychology seems to be particularly relevant going forward: whatever we choose to work on in future will be shaped by the emotional or psychological implications of this new awareness of a societal collapse being likely in our own lifetimes.

Conclusions Important steps on climate mitigation and adaptation have been taken over the past decade. However, these steps could now be regarded as equivalent to walking up a landslide. If the landslide had not already begun, then quicker and bigger steps would get us to the top of where we want to be. Sadly, the latest data on climate, emissions and the spread of carbon-intensive lifestyles show that the landslide has already begun. As the point of no return can’t be fully known until after the event, ambitious work on reducing carbon emissions and extracting more from the air (naturally and synthetically) is more critical than ever.

That must involve a new front of action on methane.

Disruptive impacts from climate change are now inevitable. Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or counterproductive. Therefore, the mainstream climate policy community now recognises the need to work much more on adaptation to the effects of climate change. That must now rapidly permeate the broader field of people engaged in sustainable development as practitioners, researchers and educators. In assessing how our approaches could evolve, we need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible. Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than 10 years due to climate stress.

Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations. This situation makes redundant the reformist approach to sustainable development and related fields of corporate sustainability that has underpinned the approach of many professionals. Instead, it is important to develop a deep adaptation agenda that explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse.

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Deep adaptation: a personal response James Soane, director of Project Orange, shares his experience of ‘Kissing the Void’, a retreat focusing on Jem Bendell’s predictions of impending societal collapse Climate change is not simply a pollution issue; it is a sign of how humanity and culture have disconnected from our natural habitat. This can also be understood as the end point in the project of Modernism, as defined by the mastery of man over the planet.

Deep adaptation (see previous pages) is about how we prepare for societal and ecological collapse.

Timothy Morton, in his book Being Ecological, talks about the paradox of knowing we have to do something, but failing to act. He suggests this is because the scale and nature of climate change is a ‘hyperobject’; something so large it is impossible to comprehend. In trying to figure out how to approach this in practice and within my teaching at the London School of Architecture, where I am director of research, I further investigated the deep adaptation network, discovering an event that planned to, ‘differentiate between Top: extract from sketchbook/diary kept during the retreat Right: shared projects and creative play

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doing more, better and faster sustainability work in order to turn around the troubles and stop collapse versus fundamentally shifting our orientations to life, death, the future and the present moment’. It was a retreat held in October 2019 entitled ‘Kissing the Void’ and asking how we might approach these times well.

I applied and what happened next was a revelation.

Nineteen people gathered at a farmhouse in Devon for six days of meditation, creative play, writing, drawing, sharing and despairing.

We acted out the four stages of deep adaptation: resilience, relinquishment, restoration and reconciliation. We stared into the void.

We were invited to say what our heart feels. We encountered suffering, grief and uncertainty. We sat around a fire and sang. If you listen very closely, you can hear the sounds of roots spreading deep below. In these times we paused before speaking up.

The following thoughts were generated during short silent writing workshops where we were asked to react to the prompts (in bold) in a direct, visceral and emotional way.

We were asked to connect to the Earth.

The Void Is A gap, a space, a loss Frightening and frightful Lost and found I am lost I am love A second, a minute, a year, a century, a millennium – a time Time to say, to think, to process, to rename, to learn to

relearn to unlearn, to leave behind This void is not your void It is everyone’s void The id of void The mind, to lose your mind, to hunt it down, to miss it To find it, in pieces and in fragments, blasted by the void Infinity and forever, ending in darkness This black hole, almost invisible now, is a force sucking us in Not knowing what is on the other side But there just might be – another side We hope A kiss away To bear witness in these times is A mistake, an error, a blip, a catastrophe An un-making of all that has been made It is a breaking A huge tear A tear An ending of a story We are being asked to leave now The lights are going out and it is very dark outside Where to go?

Where to shelter?

Who shall I talk to?

When my love and I were separated it should have

been the end And yet I am still here Alone with others I am paused When the body leads A stretch, a move turning into moves An ache, a new pain, an old heart, a dance Tentatively thought A sense of longing hoping to be more free To move away, in the dance More fluid and more powerful and more

delicate than ever before The flow of your life is here in every tiny moment But did you ever know that?

Did you not see that your body faithfully records Every single thing you have ever done Ever thought and ever will do?

Until Until it has done enough More than enough, and Is called by time

And now ...

Resting and realising I find new dimensions unknown Strange spaces With a different taste Running is not possible I dance with myself, not seeing the ground on

which my feet stand Here the light is dimmer Cantilevered off the abyss Seeking out crevices, holes and voids No stars, just sparks from the beginning Now embers, glowing Throwing their ancient warmth Slowly, almost imperceptibly so, turning ashen Dimming into darkness Becoming dimensionless Out of the ashes Maybe my ashes Somewhere to place A ceremony To make an order from the chaos To have a final act of creativity with and for myself Out of the ashes a temporary home A place Look into the dust and the grey blackness There is still a pattern, a memory of beauty A piece of something next to something The remains have not entirely vanished They remain in this For a moment more As temperatures rise The warmth that so nourished Is punishing One day at a time Life evaporates, wilting at first Lilting, tilting, collapsing Everywhere dust, ash, smoke Dark stains where once the tangled substance thrived Only now I see The fragile Earth The Going I leave my sword outside, with the others in the dark,

and step inside Here, alongside, a learning, a leaning, an altogether: Facing up, facing in, face to face, faceless In meditation and makings I am undone, redone, remade: Woven into a bright golden precious stitch Visible as the stars in the tapestry of time Never again can this moment be caught To be remembered with care, with love I step outside into hot sun and pick up my shield

Your movements will stop, like everybody’s always will To make way for stillness No movement Another is just waking Spring 2020|Citizen|93

After the flood

Richard Mullane, principal at Hassell, draws on the ‘Collect & Connect’ strategy for San Francisco Bay to champion a new approach to making waterside communities resilient to the ravages of climate change

How do you make waterfront locations resilient to the problems caused by climate change? How can you support communities to manage – and come to terms with – flood risk? As governments and developers reverse their thinking around the land value adjacent to our global rivers and harbours, these challenges are shifting urban design in new and exciting ways.

The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored recent resilience-focused work in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area that typifies the challenges faced by many cities and communities around the world, with lowlying shoreline around the Bay isolated by misplaced freeway infrastructure, and communities economically depressed due to decommissioned industries and the loss of jobs.

These communities face the dual threats of sea-level rise at the shore-edge and increased stormwater flooding from the uplands, with the additional environmental risk of earthquakes and the liquefaction of historical landfill.

The Resilient by Design project asked a team of local, national and international design experts to search for replicable solutions to make communities more resilient to these dynamic threats, all of which are expected to intensify dramatically, in both the immediate and long-term future.

The project involved extensive data analysis of climate change vulnerability, 94|Citizen|Spring 2020

Above right: streets and creeks are tranformed into a resilient network of waterways and creek-side parks Right: public open space planted with native species improves biodiversity and helps to create slow streets

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as well as multidisciplinary prototyping of solutions for adapting vulnerable sites and communities, significantly pushing creative thinking in this burgeoning area of landscape architecture and urban design.

One of the unanimous observations to come from the project was that traditional engineering protections and hard-edged solutions are not practical in solving these complex challenges – as many Bay Area shoreline communities have already witnessed. As an example, embankments designed to offer protection from rising sea levels have resulted in trapping stormwater from the land-side of the Bay, in itself causing flooding, and posing the complex challenge of pumping stormwater out to sea.

The main flaw, identified by designers and communities alike, that comes from focusing on hard solutions, is that, by nature, they are fearful and defensive, and designed to function at their best in a worst-case scenario – in the case of the South Bay area this equates to a current probability of once every 200 years.

Instead, the Resilient by Design team concluded that the challenges called for the combined creativity, knowledge and experience of residents and public officials, along with collaborative working between landscape architects and urban designers.

This in itself pushed a new wave of thinking into an area of the built environment where engineering has traditionally led the design process, bringing to the fore a social dimension to problem-solving.

Before it had become known as the Bay Area’s​‘industrial city’, South San Francisco was the kind of place where people could walk the length of the creek to swim in the bay; a connection to the water that has been lost over the last half-century. A key focus for the project was on re-establishing this connection; making the South Bay waterfront an attractive and accessible part of daily life.

Through extensive community engagement, research and an inclusive design process that involved transforming a disused bank into a community design hub and establishing social media channels to share images and ideas, the design team for the project, Hassell+, mapped out a range of ways to make South City stronger. These included making it easier to reach and enjoy the local creek and bay; reducing the impact of flooding; building resilience to sea-level rise; returning native flora and fauna to the area; and making a healthy, active life near the water easier to imagine and achieve.

The team drew on international precedents for waterfront adaptation and urban expansion. In smaller Chinese cities on the Yangtze River, communities construct riverbank pavilions for the dry season, then carefully deconstruct for the wet season each year. In Indonesia there are villages where residents have learnt to accept – and adapt to – the fact that floods turn the streets into the canals for part of the year. In my hometown 96|Citizen|Spring 2020

of Newcastle, Australia, our suburban rugby parks are designed as additional capacity for stormwater within the low-lying areas, with big rains bringing stormwater onto the fields from the surrounding streets and cancelling the weekend games every few weeks.

There’s immense potential for designing for climate change in these examples of nature and culture sharing space, and it was this last example that led the Hassell+ collective to its multi-benefit proposition for waterfront communities around San Francisco Bay. The resulting overarching South City strategy – named Collect & Connect – proposes a resilient, responsive network where creeks and streets could be redesigned as green linear corridors for water management and community gathering, transforming the regional structure from a vulnerable loop into a connected resilient network, enabling better disaster response and water management, but also contributing to greater liveability and connectedness across the community-at-large.

Open green inundation areas double up as an early flood warning strategy, giving visible signs to the community that floodwaters are rising. Public open space is planted with local species to support the biodiversity needed to create native landscapes that are more resilient to extreme weather. Spaces for events such as markets and sports support communities to live social, healthy lifestyles.

Finally, the project highlights the importance of public open space in allowing communities to gather, organise and rebuild in times of disaster, becoming centres of shelter, or even temporary hospitals and schools.

Other highlights of the Resilient South City proposal include: l A wider, greener creek, to manage flooding and create the right conditions for a sequence of new parks l A South City Circle Bridge, serving as a walking and cycling gateway to all transport modes l An ‘eco waterpark’ at a revamped water plant, to become a teaching tool and natural shoreline swimming pool l A native plant nursery, to help control flooding and treat run-off from the nearby highway l A ‘living levee’, to form a wetland for restoring habitat and hold stormwater in extreme high tides l Schools located on higher ground, to become hubs for water treatment and community recreation Ultimately, the Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge has served as a call-to-action for the region to continue to work together and move the cause forward. It is hoped that as a project exemplar it will aid and inspire others working on practical masterplans to support people and environments in waterside communities through a flexible and dynamic network of public spaces – that recognise the impacts of climate as one of the key ‘users’ of public space.

Above right: South San Francisco is the bay’s self-proclaimed ‘industrial city’.

The area suffers from flooding and access to the shoreline is blocked by industry Right: the project is informed by extensive research and analysis of the Bay Area’s social and environmental conditions

sea-level rise impacts

transit coverage

city scale and cultural diversity

freeway and transit

unemployment

public open space/community of concern

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Prosperity and growth: busting the myths Daniela Cocco Beltrame unpicks the faulty logic behind the transformation of Buenos Aires’ most notorious shanty town and suggests a framework for a more progressive approach Since time immemorial, humankind has been searching for prosperity.

Yet the very definition of the term is still elusive, as is an agreement on the paths towards it. In 1970 the Club of Rome commissioned an international research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop a computer simulation of exponential growth with a finite supply of resources. In 1972 their report, The Limits to Growth, included this 1969 quote by U Thant, United Nations third secretary general: ‘The members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts.

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within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control.’

Fifty years ago, we could already assert a fact that is somehow still contested; that, even with advanced technology, the Earth’s resources cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much longer. In other words, while growth may be, at times, a necessary condition for prosperity, it may just as well be the factor that hinders its very possibility.

Since Limits to Growth was published, there has been growing consensus in the international development field that economic growth as we know it – the one that skyrocketed globally, yet unequally, around 200 years ago and is based on fossil fuel-based energy – must stop

and fundamentally change. This has been backed by a growing pool of scholars, as well as environmental advocates and even political leaders.

Economists who still advocate growth are misguided by a theoretical macroeconomic concept. Growth is not prosperity. They are not identical.

Growth without distribution is just a (small) bunch of rich people getting richer. Prosperity is collective or it cannot be called prosperity at all.

Throughout my career in public service, I had the opportunity to observe the way strategies based on misconceptions about prosperity and development led to forms of public policy that, while well-intentioned, were often counterproductive.

Take the Barrio 31 Social and Urban Integration Plan implemented

by Buenos Aires city government (GCBA) in Argentina. It’s possible to identify four policy actions which

DEPOSIT PHOTOS

One of the oldest informal settlements in Latin America, Barrio 31 is home to more than 40,000 people who live in its 10,000 buildings and borders some of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city

have been informed by misconceptions of prosperity: 1. Land and housing tenure security through individual property rights; 2. Financial inclusion through the formal banking system; 3. Employment through entrepreneurship and precarious private sector jobs; and 4. Environmental sustainability through recycling and other limited strategies.

1. Land and housing tenure The GCBA has chosen to give barrio residents individual property titles, an initiative based on a fallacy of prosperity. Even when mortgage terms are well below average market conditions, residents still feel they will struggle to pay them, especially in the current context of economic crisis.

There are no restrictions to real estate transactions, setting the stage

for what residents have identified as forms of economic eviction. Even if restrictions were applied, exclusion from the formal economic system has pushed barrio residents to engage in norms and pacts that differ from the legal environment of the formal city.

What makes us think they will not persist in informal rent/purchase of newly constructed houses? What mechanisms have been set in place to prevent rampant gentrification?

What’s to stop displacement of residents to cheaper locations?

A more appropriate way forward might be to explore cooperative forms of secure tenure. Community land trusts or other systems of cooperative stewardship may be more aligned with self-organised, self-built communities’ ways of creating and recreating their environment – something we in Latin America call construcción popular del hábitat.

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2. Financial inclusion In this case, the fallacy lies in the belief that financial inclusion through the formal banking system will provide economic development opportunities for residents. Granting individual property rights has been presented as a strategy to make barrio households creditworthy, but banks are still reluctant to take these properties as collateral for productive business loans. The establishment of a local Santander bank branch in Barrio 31 was celebrated by government officials, media and residents, but to a large percentage of the world’s slum/ shack/barrio popular dwellers, the formal banking system remains foreign and unfriendly.

For hundreds of years cooperative and trust-based credit systems have thrived within informal environments.

Barrio 31 would have been (maybe still is) an appropriate context to explore and create space for alternative endogenous forms of financing and loans. An interesting precedent could be Pasanaco or Pasanaku, a mutual trust savings system believed to have originated in the pre-Hispanic territory of current Bolivia whereby members make periodic contributions that are then allocated to members in turn either by lottery or according to needs.

3. Employment This fallacy is about the promise of formal employment and the benefits it brings.

Take, for example, the recent opening of a McDonald’s on the edge of Barrio 31, right next to the Santander bank. It has been presented as part of a strategy of integration between the barrio and the formal city. It comes with the promise of 80 jobs for local people, a fact that is taken as evidence of its role as a driver of economic development for the barrio. This narrative is backed up by the fact that the manager and franchise owner is a life-long Barrio 31 resident who used to work in another McDonald’s a couple of kilometres away. To reinforce the point, the company behind McDonald’s (Arcos Dorados) allowed the franchise owner to repay the set-up costs through a higher royalty percentage rather than the initial upfront payment that is usually required.

While this may have given a boost to an individual’s career, there are questions about its impact on the neighbourhood as a whole. How does this opening affect the hundreds 100|Citizen|Spring 2020

Right: residents use graffiti to protest against plans to move them from their current homes below the Arturo Illia Highway to new housing adjacent to the barrio Opposite page: view from Playón Barrio 31, one of the largest, most central, public open spaces in Barrio 31, looking towards Manzana G1, the first block of existing housing to be included in the Housing Upgrading Programme

of street vendors and local eateries already doing business nearby?

Even if you were to argue that the trade-off is worthwhile, that the creation of 80 jobs offsets the threat to local trade, there are more questions to be asked. What kind of jobs does this company offer for locals? Where does the real profit go? Who owns the brand? What about equity? Perhaps more importantly, who is the real central character here? Where does power lie? Who decided to sell a plot of highly valued and scarce land to this brand? Certainly not the barrio residents, who have been demanding land for social housing for decades, probably ever since the settlement’s creation in the 1930s.

One of the barrio’s delegadas, told me how, when she noticed her next-door neighbour was struggling economically: ‘I offered to keep an eye on her four kids from 4 to 8am so that she could go sell chipa at rush hour at the neighbouring train station’. Solidarity networks are the basis of life in the barrio. Where is the symbolic space and tangible resource allocation to identify and develop these networks in the city’s comprehensive plan? Perhaps it would be fitting to explore forms of Economía Social y Solidaria (Social and Solidarity Economy) as a more appropriate socio-economic and environmental alternative.

4. Sustainability Over 10 years ago, as a very young United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Argentina employee, I was asked to assist in the Green Office initiative. I wrote emails encouraging staff to ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, the three Rs, as per UN guidelines. Like a lot of kids from my generation, I had experienced the mid ’90s wave of recycling (embedded in my brain in the form of can-crushing devices). So, years later at UNDP, the ‘recycle’ part of it all was not foreign to me. What caught my attention were the two words carefully placed before it. A little research taught me the placement was not random. I learned that, if we fail to change our patterns of consumption, recycling can only do so much.

Evidence was showing – and the UN acknowledged – that we had to implement a fundamental reduction in our global use of plastic and fossil fuels. My research was also showing that this fundamental change in consumption and production patterns would be no small feat, since it was not convenient for a global economic system based on unlimited growth.

We are facing the same issues 12 years later. In the case of Barrio 31, while there are sustainability initiatives – such as solar panels on new housing, or bicycle stations –

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIELA COCCO BELTRAME

Growth is not prosperity.

Growth without distribution is a small bunch of people getting richer. Prosperity is collective or it’s not prosperity

environmental focus is mainly placed on the third R through the ATR programme (A Todo Reciclaje).

This includes engagement initiatives to inform residents about trash separation, as well as actual treatment of recyclable material by the barrio’s existing cooperatives. While this is important work, there is a patent absence of more comprehensive policies at the city level aimed at systemic change of production and consumption trends.

Moving forward To move forward, we need to address four overarching issues. The first is about theory. While there have been massive efforts to tackle poverty and define wellbeing, there has not been enough discussion about wealth and growth.Yet, there seems to be growing momentum to finally include this essential part of the prosperity debate in the public agenda. The push for a Green New Deal in the US and beyond, and the protests sparking across Latin America, are examples of people organising (organización popular) around the basic notion that our current economic system and patterns of production, trade and consumption are fundamentally flawed.

The second challenge lies at the intersection of theory and practice.

Once we have developed an

appropriate raft of rights and regulations, we have the challenge of getting consensus and backing across the globe. This calls for a fundamental reform of international governance institutions, at least as a first step.

The third issue is eminently practical. What are the mechanisms to effect change on the ground at the local, national and global scale? Ideas like the Tobin tax (a tax penalising short-term currency conversion), universal basic income, even the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), offer clues that might prove useful for an alternative approach.

Finally, we need to be able to measure progress. Global prosperity indicators, while helpful at times, tend to oversimplify complex issues.

Take inequality, for instance.

The Gini coefficient has been considered insufficient leading to the development of more complex measurements such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) or the Palma ratio. We have to accept effective measurement is an ongoing process, and create mechanisms for inclusive and iterative development of the way we keep track of results.

Daniela Cocco Beltrame was Social Innovation and Participatory Planning Director at Buenos Aires City Government before joining MIT as Master of City Planning student Spring 2020|Citizen|101

Fraser Morrison charts his quest to combine Instagram’s power and reach with a physical forum to share ideas for sustainable cities from around the world

The medium is the message

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I’m sitting in Tate Modern swallowed up by the other-worldly dark fields of Mark Rothko. I could sit here peacefully for hours. But all of a sudden there is the click, click, click of a phone camera and the illusion of solitude shatters. Ugh. Our devices are replacing our ability to see, to pause, to interrogate, to understand.

I’m well aware of my own addiction to imagery. A few years ago, in my early 20s, I would take hundreds of photos in an evening, feeling if I didn’t capture every fleeting moment, they would be lost forever.Yet I never look back at these images. This need to over-record has been growing at an alarming rate. In 2012, we took 380 billion photographs; in 2014, we took one trillion.

Technology allows us to consume imagery at a previously unimaginable pace. My point? We need to move beyond almost subconscious scrolling into a more conscious way of being.

Why? The world as we know it is dying, and the meaningful use of technology could save it.

It may sound naïve but I think my generation sits at a tipping point of the potential collapse of neoliberal capitalist life. At a recent lecture, Naomi Klein told the audience of Guardian subscribers that she looked to the younger readers in the room to instigate change. She saw social media as key to spreading the message of the millions of students who have united to strike against climate change.

The photo-sharing site Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion just 18 months after it was founded in 2010. With over a billion monthly users, it is the primary vehicle for sharing ideas among a younger generation – my generation.

But is Instagram equipped to engender the dialogue, creativity, collaboration and debate that are needed to tackle the challenges we face? Is it possible to move from transient and superficial consumption to more meaningful engagement?

Ultimately, can Instagram act as a catalyst to progress real-world issues and bring about positive change?

Like most people, I have scrolled through Instagram aimlessly for years.

A single swipe transports you through endless lives and brands. But what makes us pause? From analysing traffic and interaction on my own Instagram account, I’ve found that the simplest images are the most successful. Maybe people like images that require less effort. This can be clearly seen in the proliferation of Instagram accounts that compile

From living room to gallery: the opening – and only – night of ‘We Aren’t a Gallery’, a pop-up exhibition of proposals for sustainable cities from as far afield as Australia and Brazil

architecture students’ work.

With audiences in the hundreds of thousands, these are increasingly drivers of tastes. But is this beneficial to students looking to find their own aesthetic? The danger is that the most interaction the user has with the work is a quick ‘like’ or a short comment.

Nothing is given much thought.

Frustrated with the lack of conversation around digital works I instigated the ‘We Aren’t a Gallery’ project. It evolved from a belief that, if Instagram is the visual language for architectural ideas and trends, there should be a way of using it to spark deeper engagement with bigger issues.

My (reluctant) flatmate and I took an existing physical space – our own living room, which opens onto a quiet street in Hackney – and paired it with Instagram to create an exhibition in a physical space where anyone could come and interrogate the ideas.

Through Instagram we promoted an open call for work around the tagline ‘We Aren’t Sustainable’. The brief asked contributors to respond

through any medium in any way they saw fit. Within two weeks we had more than 50 submissions from as far afield as Brazil and Australia. The projects spoke of social infrastructures for minority ethnic groups, of new systems of living, of futures in which we find a way out of climate crisis, of hope.

While curating these pieces, I delved deeper into the ideas of my peers, and picked up on the nuances that I would have otherwise missed while swiping.

On the opening (and only) night, our empty unfurnished living room came alive as people critiqued, and debated the chosen works. Once the exhibition was dismantled we posted the submissions on Instagram again.

For the first time in a while we experienced meaningful interactions: people messaging questions about the work, commenting, and in turn proposing topics for the next ‘We Aren’t …’ exhibition.

It proved there are real people on the other side of the emojis and heart buttons, and that meaningful social engagement need not only happen offline. I found an optimism and inquisitiveness I was yet to experience on the Instagram super-highways of other architecture-sharing pages.

Through critique of architectural imagery that favours substance over style, we watched as the ideas found a life of their own through multiple mediums. The physical medium was finite: our living room once again houses a TV and a cheese plant.

The digital medium archives and disseminates far beyond our little neighbourhood in Hackney.

The fetishisation of half-baked architecture visuals on Instagram has to stop before every architecture student’s degree project is composed of arches, scallops, and postPostmodern pop colour palettes.

We need to encourage students as consumers to scratch the surface to discover what lies beneath; and as producers, to create imagery that expresses the core architectural intention, rather than simplistic crowd-pleasers to garner the most likes.

‘We Aren’t a Gallery’ was motivated by my worry that we aren’t caring, we aren’t progressing, we aren’t sustainable. But the young, aspiring architects who submitted their pieces and thoughts reassured me that we are. At a time when it is difficult to physically visit any galleries it is promising that Instagram can potentially be used in lieu.

Fraser Morrison is a recent graduate of the LSA and now works for Architecture 00 Spring 2020|Citizen|103

West Bank Hamza Shaikh

Temporal Permanence For the last 70 years, generations of Palestinians have established a new life in refugee camps in the West Bank in the hope that they will one day return to their homes. This proposal suggests a kit of parts that combine to allow affordable, self-build insertions and extensions that respond and cater to the refugees’ socioeconomic needs and offer a degree of independence and control.

Belfast Chris Millar

Terra Novus

A proposed ‘new ground’ for the city of Belfast, leading up to and throughout the floods that threaten to engulf the coastline and city in the centuries ahead. The structure is made from Biorock, a material three times stronger than concrete, formed through mineral accretion on metal in seawater. It will provide a means of protection from nature’s will and humanity’s folly, not by the usual means of ‘mitigation and hope’, but by a proactive shaping of a new ground above Belfast.

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Korea Guillermo Fernandez Villar and Frixos Petron

Garden of Conciliation

Garden of ConCiliation

Vast quantities of material and resources have been spent maintaining the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea since the war.

This monument for reunification is conceived as a symbol and focus for mediation, open to appropriation and use by citizens from both sides of the border.

Its cost pales in comparison to the ongoing drain of maintaining the militarised border; a reconciliation strategy should be the cornerstone of a more sustainable approach.

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digital collage

India Pui Mun Lee

Parametric Penrose Rising sea levels have led to frequent flooding in India’s coastal regions, causing loss of livelihoods and homes.

This project, inspired by Penrose tiling and the rhombic triacontahedron, uses woodplastic composite rhombusshaped panels made from wood from local mangrove trees and readily available plastic waste.

Structures are mass produced in local factories. The factories are built first, with the structure gradually expanding outwards to provide community housing as required.

The Oceans G. Fernandez

‘Parametric Penrose’

Polimeria

Petroleum – and its derivatives – is a finite resource. Our society will struggle to adapt to a polymerless world.

As the cost of producing plastic skyrockets, it will become profitable to filter, collect, refine and sell the plastic scattered around the globe.

Thus, Polimeria is born, a nomadic community of scavengers that connect and refine the plastic floating in our oceans, carried by currents to so-called ‘plastic islands’.

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Greece Emilio Sullivan

London Duncan Graham and Samuel Davies

With the focus on its financial crisis, Greece has put the issue of waste on the backburner. But the problem has reached crisis point. The landfill serving Athens has reached capacity with fissures causing complete shutdown. This proposal imagines the conversion of vacant corner-units in Athens’ polykatoikia – concrete-frame housing blocks – into hubs for micro-industry and recycling; a visible manifestation of local government’s investment in residents’ lives.

This strategic infrastructure proposal imagines an uninterrupted cycle route across central London and beyond.

Simple urban interventions, such as a car-free link between the Olympic Park and Victoria Park, highlight how improvements can bring huge benefits to cyclists and pedestrians.

In London, 8.17 million trips a day could be bike rides, with an estimated economic benefit to the tune of 91p for every 4km travelled.

Hyperlocal The Green Infrastructure Line

Syria Tom Gardner

Remnants of a Separation This project envisages a post-war Aleppo and imagines the needs of Syrians returning home to a city once rich with heritage and culture but ravaged by corruption, bombing and chaos. It proposes a caravanserai, a place that references the city’s history and architectural traditions while providing the facilities required to kickstart the rebuilding of communities and help Syrians to make the transition to a permanent home. The project incorporates traditional markets, leisure activities and public gardens made from the ruins.

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Citizen

Sustainability spotlight On the following pages we showcase a selection of products and innovations designed to make greener cities and buildings and help citizens live more sustainable lives.

If you have a product or service that you would like to be considered for the Sustainability spotlight in the next issue of Citizen please email Engagement Manager John Nahar on john.n@the-lsa.org

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Sustainability spotlight

PriestmanGoode PriestmanGoode has designed sustainable products to reduce waste in the transport industry Over the last 20 years, PriestmanGoode has built a reputation as one of the world’s leading transport design studios, dating from the first lie-flat seat for Virgin Atlantic in the 1990s to designing interiors for transport providers and services across the globe.

Perhaps even more than our client work, we have become known for our self-initiated projects that raise awareness of important issues such as accessibility in air travel or personal mobility for older demographics. Our most recent such project ended up becoming an exhibition at the Design Museum in London. Titled Get Onboard: Reduce. Reuse. Rethink, the exhibition addressed the vast problem of waste in travel and explored ways in which we can use design to change the products and services that make up our journeys, as well as affect consumer behaviour to make a positive impact.

While the focus of the exhibition was on air travel, the principles apply across every transport mode.

The statistics we came across during our research were staggering. According to the International Air Transport Association 5.7 million tonnes of aircraft cabin waste is generated on passenger flights each year. And if current behaviour patterns continue, that number will reach 10 million tonnes by 2030. That’s the same weight as 5 million black cabs. (For the record, there are about 21,000 black cabs in London.)

We also came across a report commissioned by the EU, which found that people who exhibited sustainable behaviours in their day-to-day life often did not apply these when they travel.

One of the reasons for this was the view that ‘it’s just for one day, it won’t make a difference’. But with over 4 billion airline passengers a year (the long-term impact of the current pandemic not withstanding), such actions do indeed matter.

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On a fundamental level, we need to rethink and challenge existing processes, exploring all elements of the journey.

The experience of travelling does not just consist of your seat environment onboard a plane or a train, it starts the moment you book your ticket, and includes how you get to the airport or station; it includes public transport systems, and that all important first and last mile of the journey.

To make travel more sustainable, we need to rethink the products we use along the journey. What are they made of?

How are they disposed of? While we worked on Get Onboard, we found that 500 grams of single-use plastic waste is produced per person, on average, for every long-haul flight.

Circular design principles will be crucial if we want lasting positive change in response to problems like this. We need to look at different industries and see what ideas we can carry over to our transport systems. For instance, exciting developments in biodesign and material technology and innovation mean we’re seeing designers and material scientists develop more and more materials made from waste by-products or renewables.

While these might not yet be ready for use in heavily regulated transport industries, we should work together with suppliers to see how we can certify these for transport use.

For Get Onboard we attempted to reduce weight and eliminate plastic waste by using edible and commercially compostable materials to make a meal tray and its accessories. The tray was composed of coffee grounds and husks mixed with a lignin binder while wheat bran was used for base containers that slot into the tray.

In terms of accessories, a cup was made from rice husk blended with polylactic acid binder, with its liner — which saves the cup from being thrown away — being made of algae. Coconut wood was used to make a ‘spork’ (a single utensil combining a knife, spoon and fork), while soluble seaweed formed capsules that could contain sauces and milk.

Finally, banana leaf was used as a lid to cover salads, with wafer doing the same for desserts.

Further to showcasing design possibilities such as these, we need to raise awareness of consumer behaviour, so that travellers are aware of the small changes they can make that will have a positive impact, but also so that they encourage the industry to change. If we want to have sustainable transport systems in the long term, we will need to change both supply and demand. Case in point: if passengers at Heathrow refilled existing bottles instead of purchasing new ones, the airport would use 35 million fewer bottles per year.

The response we have had to Get Onboard has surpassed what we could have imagined. Whether from the industry supply chain, the press or the public, our work has resonated with people. At a time when the Oxford English Dictionary chose ‘climate emergency’ as its word of the year, we have shown that there are alternatives that will make travel more sustainable. What we need now is a joined-up effort to make lasting positive change.

Designers often laud the value of design to make things better. We need to go further: collaboration between designers, architects, masterplanners and local governments is what we need if we want to make our cities and our transport systems more sustainable.

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Sustainability spotlight

Minotti London Minotti London uses sustainable principles to design furniture that is an investment in the future ‘The single most important step people can take to reduce their environmental impact is to consume fewer goods’, says Digby Summerhill, managing director of Minotti London, leaders in contemporary furniture design. This may seem counterintuitive as a sales pitch, but it reflects his confidence that a Minotti sofa — or any other Minotti product — is a lifetime investment, not a casual acquisition to be jettisoned and replaced.

This is, in part, a reflection of the quality and durability which is the company’s trademark. High-quality materials and a marriage between traditional craftsmanship and modern technology result in a finished product that is not only beautifully detailed and designed, but produced with a precision and skill that will stand the test of time. But it is also very much to do with aesthetics. While clearly contemporary, Minotti furniture is classic-modern rather than faddish, with a timeless elegance that has made the company a firm favourite with high-end residential and hospitality clients across the world.

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That said, there is a clear commitment to making sure that each piece of Minotti furniture is manufactured with sustainability in mind. Founded in Italy in 1948, Minotti is — and has always been — 100 per cent ‘Made in Italy’. The company has now grown to a global brand with a presence in 63 countries, 34 flagship stores and over 300 qualified dealers around the world. But, unlike other furniture companies, who have parts manufactured all over the world before being shipped to the factory for assembly, all of its manufacturing is carried out in Italy, with materials — with the exception of cowhides, which come from Germany and are tanned in Venice — sourced from within a 20-mile radius of the factory.

All wood used in Minotti products comes from sustainable sources — from 2020 every tree felled to produce a product sold

by Minotti London will be replaced with two new trees.

The company’s commitment to the environment is reflected in the way it runs its business. The London showroom, which has established itself as the heart of the architectural and design community with an ongoing programme of events — including the How to Pitch It event featured on pages 18-28 of this issue of Citizen — has a policy of using small, local businesses for catering with a stipulation that no more than 20 per cent of food served can contain meat. The goal is to reduce this to zero this year. Coffee consumed on the premises is delivered in recycled packaging that can be recycled again; grinds are collected

by First Mile Recycling and turned into biofuel by Bio-bean. All paper is recycled.

All electricity comes from renewable sources. And all lights are LED. Energy consumption is measured using 24/7 smart meters to identify and address unnecessary use.

The company is committed to reviewing and improving the environmental impact and resource efficiency of its activities year on year.

‘We’re determined to ensure that sustainability is at the heart of everything we do’, says Digby Summerhill. ‘Our clients are highly sophisticated and very much aware of the environmental agenda.

We want them to know that we share their values and are prepared to practise what we preach.’

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Sustainability spotlight

Kingspan Insulation Kingspan’s high-performance insulation reduces household emissions, delivering energy-efficiency and sustainability without compromising architectural vision Putting fabric first The scale of the challenge facing architects today is encapsulated in the Committee on Climate Change’s estimate that, to meet net-zero commitments by 2050, average UK household emissions will need to fall from 2,745 kgCO2e to just 138 kgCO2e.1 To deliver this, the basic building fabric must be right. Buildings that are well insulated, accurately detailed and properly ventilated can support occupant wellbeing, protect against fuel poverty, and ultimately lead the response to the climate emergency.

Insulation choice When it comes to insulation specification, thermal conductivity is key. The lower the value, the more resistant the material is to heat loss through conduction, meaning a slimmer thickness can be used to meet a given U-value. Kingspan Kooltherm products offer excellent performance with thermal conductivities as low as 0.018 W/mK. In practical terms, this allows the creation of buildings with leading thermal performance without having to compromise on internal space or architectural vision. For example, research has shown that by using Kooltherm wall insulation products over lower performing alternatives, it is possible to recover several square metres of usable space from the walls of some buildings.2 Slimmer walls mean window reveal depths can also be reduced, allowing more natural light to flow into a room throughout the day.3

1: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/living-carbonfree-energy-systems-catapult/ 2: https://www.kingspan.com/gb/en-gb/products/ insulation/kingspan-insight/real-value-of-space 3: https://www.kingspan.com/gb/en-gb/products/ insulation/kingspan-insight/daylighting

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Kingspan are also actively working to help architects raise the performance when available space is at a premium with our specialist OPTIM-R range of vacuum insulation panels (VIPs). Through intelligent use of vacuum technology, the panels provide a thermal conductivity of just 0.007 W/mK — up to five times better than commonly used insulation materials.

This means it is possible to address some of the most challenging applications, such as solid floor refurbishments, with an absolute minimum construction depth.

Kingspan Kooltherm and OPTIM-R products can be specified for a wide range of applications and are supported by our specialist technical services team who can assist in all areas of product specification, from U-value calculation and condensation risk analysis to specific detailing advice.

Planet Passionate However, to truly accelerate the move to a more energy-efficient sustainably built environment, we believe we have to do more than supply the products to create it.

We have to live it. Kingspan Insulation are committed to playing our part in tackling the climate emergency. Many of the products produced at our UK sites are certified ‘Very Good’ or ‘Excellent’ under the rigorous responsible sourcing standard — BES 6001 — and the facilities themselves are net-zero energy (NZE).

This means that 100 per cent of our operational energy is met through renewable sources. By the close of the year, all Kingspan sites across the globe will be NZE and this is just the first step in our ambitious Planet Passionate sustainability programme.

Planet Passionate sets out a number of key targets which we will be working to achieve across the globe by 2030 including becoming a zero waste-to-landfill company, increasing onsite renewable generation by 20 per cent and raising product circularity by upcycling 1 billion PET bottles into insulation. Through these, and a variety of other commitments, we will look not only to maintain our NZE performance but also become an entirely net-zero carbon manufacturer.

A sustainable vision The path towards a net-zero carbon built environment is by no means simple. However, by recognising fabric performance as a fundamental building block of net-zero carbon buildings, it is one that we can meet. Kingspan are here to support architects at every step, relentlessly working to develop products which push new boundaries and are manufactured to the highest standards of environmental practice.

For further information and technical support, please contact: Tel: +44 (0) 1544 387 384 Fax: +44 (0) 1544 387 484 e.mail: info@kingspaninsulation.co.uk website: www.kingspaninsulation.co.uk www.twitter.com/KingspanIns_UK www.linkedin.com/company/kingspaninsulation-uk

Kingspan OPTIM-R VIPs offer an insulating performance up to five times better than conventional insulation materials. This makes them ideal for refurbishment applications on projects such as Here East — the conversion of the former Press and Broadcast Centre on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into commercial space by Hawkins\Brown

Kingspan Kooltherm products are available for a wide range of applications, achieving thermal conductivities as low as 0.018 W/ mK making them ideal for projects such as the Windermere Jetty Museum by Carmody Groarke.

Photographs by Christian Richter

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Sustainability spotlight

USM USM’s modular furniture is environmentally friendly and gives workspaces and homes the flexibility to withstand change Since USM’s very beginning, sustainable development has been a cornerstone of the business. The longevity in the design of the iconic furniture system USM Haller speaks for itself in terms of sustainability, and as a modular system the furniture can be reconfigured if the requirements of the purchaser change. USM does everything it can to provide its customers with furnishings that allow them to live in a sustainable manner.

The more quickly a product has to be replaced, the worse it is for the environment: materials and processes are then required to build a replacement, and the old product has to be recycled or thrown away. Damage to the environment resulting from frequent replacement is avoided by building products that last.

That principle is essential to USM’s business philosophy. We build products that endure: wear-resistant materials, fine craftsmanship, durable designs and timeless style all ensure that USM furniture lasts a lifetime. Nothing needs to be thrown away, as thanks to the retrospective compatibility of USM products, previously purchased parts can easily be combined with newly purchased parts.

USM was recently Cradle to Cradle Certified™ for both USM Haller and USM Kitos M. Cradle to Cradle® design defines and develops recyclable products.

It differentiates itself from conventional recycling by maintaining the quality of the raw materials over multiple product life cycles and by only using chemicals designated as safe.

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Instead of undermining economic growth and ecology, Cradle to Cradle® is an industrial model that mimics the balance of natural ecosystems and starts from the premise that humankind can have a positive and restorative beneficial impact on the environment. At the heart of the concept is the development of upcycling products. To avoid continually wasting resources, we need to transform end-of-life products to give them value so they can go back to a new production cycle rather than end up in the trash. Thus, we eliminate the concept of waste and there are only resources that can be reused to infinity.

USM builds and frequently redevelops its factories and workshops to meet a high standard of environmentalism.

It is proud to have been recognised for its commitment to reducing emissions.

In 2007, it became the first European company to be certified by the Greenguard Environmental Institute for the low particle and chemical emissions of its products.

Low emissions make home and work environments healthier by reducing indoor air pollution.

Sustainability is not only ensured in the production of USM products but also in every aspect of the company. The design and management of the site of the USM headquarters and production facilities has always incorporated and embraced the natural environment, resulting in a recent Stiftung Natur & Wirtschaft award.

Going forward, USM continues to lay new foundations for sustainable production with the introduction of a new heating plant and compressed-air generating system.

The amenities, which will ensure the renewable energy output, include two woodchip heating systems, an oil-fired boiler and a new compressed-air system. The new systems save approximately 250,000 litres of heating oil every year, which corresponds to about 644 tons of CO2 per year.

Modularity is not a simple quirk of USM furniture, it’s a belief system.

Change is the only constant in life. The core of our philosophy is that our work and home environments should be adaptable to whatever changes come our way. The USM modular system makes that idea a reality.

Built from standardised components that make addition and reconfiguration easy, USM furniture is unmatched in its ability to be continuously remoulded to changing environments and needs, and remains relevant even after 50 years of production.

The LSA is delighted to welcome USM as a new member of the LSA Design Partner Network, a network of product designers that support the school’s vision of encouraging a diverse talent pool of future architects

Case Study: WD-40 office, Milton Keynes

With sustainability, employee wellbeing and a desire for a cohesive workspace at the heart of the Burtt-Jones & Brewer design for the new WD-40 office in Milton Keynes, USM Haller was the perfect choice of storage solution to help bring the design to life.

Burtt-Jones & Brewer and the WD-40 team carefully selected materials, methods of construction, finishes and products to last a projected 25 years. For example, lighting is energy efficient and all white goods are A-rated. The fact that USM Haller furniture is Cradle to Cradle Certified assists with the anticipated BREEAM Very Good rating.

Using the bold colour choices of gentian blue and sunshine yellow, USM Haller pays homage to the iconic WD-40 can-design and gives the workplace an instant symmetry with the WD-40 brand.

Spanning 24,000 sqft, the three-storey building, in the urban centre of Milton Keynes, serves as the new European headquarters for one of the most recognisable brands in the world. Burtt-Jones & Brewer were tasked with creating a space for WD-40 that answered three key objectives for the WD-40 staff. The first was

to create positive lasting memories. The second was to ensure the business collaborated naturally by removing barriers. The third was to create a workspace that would actively retain employees and be so inspirational it would encourage growth and attract new talent from within Milton Keynes and beyond.

The resulting design celebrates collaboration and provides a comfortable, positive workspace to support a healthy work-life balance, giving employees a choice of environments to work and relax in. The ground floor houses the staff canteen among other amenities, as well as ample breakout space, which feeds into the reception and atrium.

A central spiral staircase leads to the upper two floors which house the principal office workspace, with desks, meeting rooms and a variety of open and cellular work settings.

The choice of blue and yellow USM storage units offers a bold pop of colour and takes centre stage in an otherwise muted colour palette. Located across the three floors, the modular units support the flexible design of the space creating room division as well as providing ample storage space for the

workforce. The versatile modular nature of USM means that it can be reconfigured whenever the needs of the company change.

‘WD-40 had a rare brief.

With freehold occupation of their new EMEA HQ in Milton Keynes, they were looking for signature furniture that fitted their long-term vision, products that could adapt to suit flexible and differing needs, which they couldn’t yet predict. A solution that reflected the iconic status of the WD-40 can and brand, imagined by engineers. USM is a similarly unique product, engineered with a form over function philosophy, with a similar integrity and commitment to WD-40 with long-term, sustainable goals. Every so often, you find the perfect fit.

USM fits seamlessly into the WD-40 workspace, perhaps the greatest possible compliment’, says Adam Burtt-Jones of Burtt-Jones & Brewer.

The project is awaiting Final BREEAM Certification and is due to achieve a BREEAM Very Good rating with an anticipated score of 71 per cent.

The design scheme and fit-out has received industry praise and was recently shortlisted for a Regional BCO Award in the ‘Fit Out of Workplace’ category.

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Books

Recommended reading Sequestered with his extensive library, Peter Buchanan selects his most edifying books to help pass time in lockdown and to prepare for the post-pandemic world

Despite the dire situation necessitating it, even this lockdown has upsides. For some it is a chance to catch up with reading, for architects always a challenge. Ours is the discipline that most others impinge on and these have exploded in complexity. So many new techniques and materials, so much new scholarship bringing significant new books demanding to be read.

Not so long ago, reading 10 books a year sufficed to keep up; now 10 a month seems not enough.

Reading acquires a new urgency and orientation because the pandemic will likely terminate modernity that, along with countless benefits, is the root of so much that is amiss.

We should have transcended long ago: its reductionist thinking; silo-ed knowledge; dismissal of the problematic as irrelevant ‘externalities’; and the hubristic complacency technological prowess has engendered. We have forgotten our dependency on and interdependency with the natural world, other people and cultures. As with the climate emergency, dealing with future pandemics must entail embracing new, more integrative and comprehensive modes of thinking.

Seldom yet applied to architecture, to which they are especially apt, these have been emerging for some while.

Some are covered in the last group of recommended readings.

The following suggested readings are a personal, partial and somewhat arbitrary choice. Those chosen are mainly geared to understanding the major problems we confront, to adopting novel approaches to the necessary changes and elaborating on the architecture that might result.

Mostly they are overviews that don’t go into detail or deal with technical matters. Not much is about form, although some favourites cover that, nor specific buildings and criticism, although the latter is vital in aiding readers to experience and contemplate architecture.

Facing huge changes, the perspective of a historic overview is required. Many sense this, hence the runaway success of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. But for our purposes I prefer Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self (2013). It charts how human

culture has progressively separated itself from nature with now disastrous consequences, its ‘Story of Separation’ now widely influential.

All Eisenstein’s recent books are important and inspiring and elaborate a new way of relating to the larger

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world, as too his latest, Climate: A New Story (2018) linking the water cycle with that of carbon emissions.

Another immensely relevant ‘big picture’ overview is Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (2010)

that looks at our development and future in terms of the evolution of empathy. Rifkin is a wide-ranging thinker and author of several landmark books, including The Third

Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World (2011) that is particularly

germane to the design of a sustainable built environment.

The climate emergency and environmental destruction – factors in unleashing the COVID-19 virus – are major ongoing challenges of our times. They have elicited a plethora of good books. Among the best known, influential and prolific writers are Naomi Klein and George Monbiot.

Selecting only a book from each as starters, they should probably be Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate (2014) and Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature (2016). Very different,

even ‘bigger picture’ and inspiringly contemplative are Thomas Berry, an ordained Catholic scholar of world religions and ecology, and Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, both authors of great books. Read Berry’s The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (2000) and their jointly authored The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era; A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos

(1994). Another very important writer about the environment who presents people pursuing solutions as well as problems is Kenny Ausubel, cofounder of the Bioneers, famous for its conferences. His latest book is Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature (2013). Lastly, an old

landmark still vital for environmental designers, Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature (1969), that shows designers how to chart, analyse and synthesise environmental and ecological factors.

Modernity has also ravaged the physical, social and cultural fabric of the city. Again, many fine books on the city have appeared in recent years.

Arbitrarily and invidiously selecting only one, it is Charles Montgomery’s Happy City: Transforming our Lives through Urban Design (2013), a book full of

good sense and fresh ideas. Hugely important over several decades now are the wide-ranging books of Richard Sennett whose most recent is Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (2016).

Influenced by many of his books,

ST JEROME IN HIS STUDY/NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON

from rather than disrupt.

It is urgent we transcend the limits of modern thinking that entrap us and to do so entails embracing a whole new level of thinking, which in its most useful form is Integral metatheory. Many thinkers and writers now elaborate Integral theory, which itself draws on precedents and other scholarship. But the most important, who initiated this way of thinking, is Ken Wilber, a prolific author whose tomes intimidate some.

Start with a small introduction and explore further once you grasp its explanatory and synthesising power.

Those to start with might be A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (2000) or The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe and Everything (2007).

that which first and most profoundly reoriented my thinking about urban interactions and the benefits of conflict is the 50-year-old The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life

(1970). A major failure of modern architecture and urban design is its inability to create a sense of place.

A book that baffles many architects, Jonathan Hale’s The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost its Magic and How to Get it Back (1994), argues it is partly

a problem of facade composition, an inability to appreciate and create patterns that form an irreducible gestalt and so invest buildings with a presence that ‘holds’ the space before it. Read it and postpone immediate judgement while you look around with fresh eyes. Another often misunderstood book linking architecture and urbanity, now old as well as wise and perfect for dipping into over months of lockdown, is Christopher Alexander et al’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

(1978). It has faults, particularly the patterns relating to construction, but it presents a vision of a very richly articulated environment to sponsor an equally rich social and psychic life that is a usefully educative contrast to the oversimplifications of modernity.

Today as modernity wanes, a great collective challenge for architects is to participate in shaping a more sane, supportive, satisfying and sustainable culture. Among books that leap to mind to provide guidance are: Dr John J Ratey and Richard Manning’s Go Wild: Free your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization (2014); John Thackera’s How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today (2017); Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life (2017); Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions (2018); as well as Michael

Moore’s provocative documentary Where to Invade Next (2016) that looks at countries America could learn

Integral theory is now applied to many disciplines, including architecture and urbanism, although these have been slow to embrace it widely. A hugely informative book, but not particularly user-friendly in layout and cryptic diagrams, is Mark DeKay’s Integral Sustainable Design: Transformative Perspectives (2011).

If the coronavirus proves the catalyst to embracing more contemporary modes of thought it might become a central text for architects. Also applying Integral thinking to architecture and urbanism is my series of essays, The Big Rethink, published in The Architectural Review between January 2012 and November 2014, which can be downloaded from the AR website. A set of regular publications exploring urban issues from the Integral perspective with the aid of enticing graphics is Paul van Schaik’s Urban Hub series, which can be bought printed and bound or downloaded. Two useful websites exploring Integral perspectives are the Daily Evolver and Actualized.Org. If asked to select only three books, today’s choice might be: Go Wild – very readable, enjoyable and wise; The Empathic Civilization, a large tome that along with Integral theory will set a framework for much of your future thinking; and either of the small books

by Wilber, expecting it to draw you further into a way of navigating with clarity and rigour, while bringing into useful relationship, all the vast world of knowledge now readily available.

Oh, and one last, an excellent handbook of bite-sized advice for every student to absorb over the lockdown: Huw Heywood’s 101 Rules of Thumb for Sustainable Buildings and Cities (2015).

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Fiction Lev Bratishenko, curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, plays out the beginnings of a self-inflicted global apocalypse in a United Nations basement hall

Timor the traffic engineer, third class, wakes up coughing.

The smoke in the room is so thick he can barely see the cigarette cart nudging its way through the next row of seats.

It has left samples between his fingers, a different brand wedged between each one. He picks a Zhong Nanhai and lights it. In front of him sleeping delegates are silhouetted against the lit podium. The rest of the room is a black sauna, only cigarette tips burning like fireflies. Hundreds of people are crammed into United Nations basement hall B-18, their sweating faces appearing in circles whenever somebody checks their phone. To his right, a Swedish toxicologist naps sweetly in a gas mask. It’s like Lascaux when the last handprint was painted.

Junior undersecretary for human resources, Cheekbones Argyle, is speaking. His tie is Hermès, his smile is enormous; ‘... incredible opportunity, the historic choice of humanity’s great gift to the Earth. We are at a crossroads of awareness and ability!’

Electric fans sob in the darkness. The undersecretary is undeterred. ‘Whose plan will go to the Assembly as the best of the worst?’ He winks in the direction of the Russians, then leans forward and grabs the podium with both hands.

‘Let nothing influence your objective scientific opinions.

You are here to give unbiased technical input. Now before we welcome the professor back, I want to say again how sorry I am that we couldn’t get the big room. The Optimists were more numerous.

‘And let’s not forget to thank our hospitality sponsors

for the smokes and the aloe tissues. Okay, professor.

Come on up.’

The front row of grad students frantically applauds as Dr Trosbag Windpucker, wildlife management consultant, walks onstage. His huge hands hang by his sides as he stares into the darkness and speaks, measuring every word.

‘Dear colleagues, we already live in the most genocidal society in history, and this is our last chance to rationalise it.

Our collective project began 12,000 years ago, when grain domesticated us, and today, we are in a unique position in the history of life on Earth as the first species that can both predict apocalypse and avoid it. The Human Impact Rapid Reduction project is already under way, but without our help, its disorderly deaths can only continue to reflect the injustices of life. Suffering will be distributed as equally as profits have been.

‘Consider that we have had all the tools needed to eliminate epidemic disease, hunger, and poverty for over a hundred years. We preferred not to. The issue was never capability, it was organisation. It is in our power now to create a world without pain, without want, drudgery and disease, by creating a world without people. As I wrote in The 200,000Year Itch, if there’s one thing we have been striving for with true shared purpose as a species, if a bit unconsciously at times, it is the radical redistribution of suffering.

‘Our progress has been, frankly, astonishing: we went from flinging plague carcasses over city walls to the Right: Production still from Pacific Sun, a 100-second animated film made by the artist Thomas Demand capturing the impact of a storm on the cruise ship Pacific Sun

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© THOMAS DEMAND, VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/DACS, LONDON

You wanted this

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hydrogen bomb in only a few hundred years. We should see this unprecedented acceleration in organised destructive power as a source of comfort, not fear. We have the tools we need to achieve a permanent egalitarianism.

‘You are here as representatives of the international planning community, and you have heard from the world’s leading experts on strategic reductions of human populations. It is very easy to die, but some nations have more relevant experience than others, and we thank them for accepting our invitations.’

The room shuffles in its seats. Most delegates are here because their supervisors declined to attend a conference they would not put on a CV. And most delegates feel uneasy about the really enthusiastic speakers, but if talk in the basement is pessimistic, at least it is sober. Upstairs they have detailed and glossy schemes for colonising Mars, pumping the ground full of CO2, and building microclimatic megastructures, but here in the darkness they are thinking without pleasure or profit. Somebody has to design a way to avoid all that pain. Just in case.

Windpucker motions for the climate modelling specialist, Kiszombora Krai.

‘Thanks, Trosbag. Colleagues, hey! This will be quick, since you’ve all seen the research binder. The first thing to understand is that this crisis doesn’t have a before and an after, like a car crash. It’s more like choking a little bit more every day. We have to leave the problem of determining when it began to future archaeologists, if there are any.

Our challenge is to make accurate predictions now.

So here are some numbers: 85 per cent of our carbon emissions, as a species, have been made since World War Two. Half since 1992. The thawing Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 billion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as in the atmosphere today. Then, the ice caps: because white ice reflects light, just the melting of the ice caps will have the same heating effect as the last 25 years of emissions.

So, even if the targets of the Paris Accords are met, we still expect 4 degrees of warming, which is a green Sahara and an 80 metre sea level rise.’

She clicks through slides, graphs that all show the same curve launching off to the right.

‘At 3 degrees we enter a global food deficit. That’s total calories, but the protein, calcium, and iron content of food crops has already declined by a third since 1950. Four degrees of warming will produce double the economic impact of the Great Depression, which led to a world war, and remember, these new resource reductions will be permanent. We know that air pollution and heat correlate to violent crime, so every half degree of warming is predicted to increase the risk of armed conflict by 15 per cent. By 2030, global water demand will exceed supply by 40 per cent.

At 7 degrees, daily life will include temperatures that we are not evolved for, at which we literally cook ourselves to death sitting in the shade. At 8 degrees a third of the planet becomes uninhabitable from heat. We estimate a billion additional migrants by 2050, which will be like everyone in North and South America looking for another country to live in. Our latest models predict a tipping point for

Social modelling indicates a 78 per cent chance of cultural and religious exuberance.

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condensation: clouds could disappear. If that happens, we predict warming of 12 degrees.

‘Avoiding all this is possible and I guess that’s what they’re talking about upstairs. We would have to reduce emissions by half in 12 years and completely decarbonise in 30. Implementing negative emissions technology at the necessary scale would use a third of all arable land, and it would be the greatest transformation in human history because it would be cumulative: we have to remake the agricultural, urban, industrial and computer revolutions, all their infrastructures and supply chains. We have three decades to do it. At the current pace we will finish in 400 years.’

Windpucker takes back the microphone.

‘Thank you, Dr Krai, for putting our project in perspective. Even scientists can forget to think of ourselves as subject to the natural laws we discover. And yet, here we are, part of the history of nature again. Now let us run into her indifferent embrace.

‘Climate change is total, as total as our environment, as total as modernity was. We all learn about the evil camps that were built to exterminate millions, but their guards went home at night. Today we are all inside a camp and we are still, at this very moment, building it together. We are its guards and its prisoners. The barbed wire does not run along the walls, it runs through our guts like roots.’

Windpucker’s voice trembles with emotion, though Timor can’t identify which emotion.

‘We are not the first civilisation to see this coming, but we are the first ones to be right. History is littered with apocalyptic binaries that implied people would come to their senses and in enough time: architecture or revolution; socialism or barbarism; anarchism or extinction. What if we don’t? Nobody deserves an accidental apocalypse, and no species has ever faced such a menu of ends. But without careful intervention the human impact reduction of climate change will fall on those who have contributed the least to its cause. This is wrong. Shouldn’t the most guilty die first? Shouldn’t the least guilty at least die pleasantly?

The dinosaurs had no say when the asteroid arrived.

Cyanobacteria’s own life processes produced the waste oxygen that suffocated most of them. The Neanderthals could not calculate the beginning of the Little Ice Age – they just froze to death, ignorant and afraid. We alone have both the foresight to anticipate unacceptable suffering and the organisational and technical capacity to avoid it.’

The undersecretary emerges from the smoke, smooths his hair and recites the competition design brief.

‘Before the teams come up and give their summary pitches, I want to remind everyone of the criteria developed by the UN Wellness Institute. A really good death is physically pleasant – that means as painless and as instantaneous as possible – and globally 100 per cent effective. However, since the alternative is a century-long descent into suffering from malnutrition and preventable diseases, with escalating violence, our minimum solution has to outperform this baseline: four generations of radical material simplification. Of course, the best solution will also

be fun and briefly create a tremendous sense of community.’

‘The most basic solidarity is the solidarity of pain,’ calls Windpucker, from outside the spotlight.

The French go first. Dark circles under the major’s eyes can’t diminish an impression of barely controlled vitality.

Here is somebody who gets things done. He presents a biochemical castration agent. Total elimination: six months after introduction to the water supply. ‘Our completely ethical testing shows that the necessary exposure is very low, so an aerosol vector is possible.’ The major stresses the strategic advantage to this, given the recent droughts.

He adds that exposed individuals get depressed, but this should not be the case if all individuals on Earth were equally exposed. ‘Social modelling indicates a 78 per cent chance of cultural and religious exuberance. Like Woodstock, with 100 per cent mortality.’

A tailored Swiss executive steps up: ‘Excuse me, our time began three minutes ago.’ The major nods and smiles into the gloom. ‘Thank you. The Schwarzes Loch meets all the brief’s criteria for an efficient and total conclusion to humanity. Our Large Hadron Collider has produced only tiny and unstable black holes due to self-imposed limits, since we were afraid of what might happen. But the Collider is theoretically capable of generating a singularity big enough to turn a planet inside-out after blinking into existence outside Geneva. Since tests are impossible, we can only speculate what it would feel like, but it would be the quickest of extinctions: much faster than pain signals could reach the brain.’ The room stirs at the elegance of the proposal.

‘Humanity has never invented a weapon we did not use,’ declaims the Russian senior engineer Ahuyakovich, smoking two cigarettes at the same time, and staring, Timor is certain, directly at him. ‘Coordinated global thermonuclear explosions have been in development since the mid-20th century and it is time they got their chance. Contemporary weapons are robust and precise, and produced with sustainable manufacturing processes. Charges can be shaped in orbit to produce radiation blasts in specific frequencies and create microwave conditions. The colours will be spectacular’, she says. Nuclear holocaust is available immediately, globally dispersed, and highly economical.

The Japanese assemble quickly but their video-heavy presentation crashes and has to restart several times.

It is a complicated plan and Timor struggles to follow the details, which are explained through an interpreter.

Many diagrams describe a civilian-led proposal to infect and take control of online domestic appliances, the Internet of Things. ‘A majority of these devices were not designed to cause harm, only frustration. But a careful tuning of Wi-Fi frequencies and power outputs has shown weaponisable potential.’

Bodies shift in discomfort at the oversight. The uneven global distribution of connected devices means an elevated risk of survival in low-tech regions.

The German representative, Morgling Von Conway, begins with a protest. ‘We are deeply uncomfortable with this entire project and I ask that this be noted.’ After it is

noted in the minutes, he gives an enthusiastic presentation on German gamma ray technology. The system replicates natural phenomena caused by star deaths, quasar pulses, or what happens when matter enters black holes. ‘Our sun does occasionally emit gamma rays but we do not have time to wait for a burst of the necessary intensity and size to correctly align to the Earth. A single sufficiently powerful terrestrial device would instantly wipe out all cellular life.’

Grunts of approval sound in the room.

Team USA rolls a white plastic drum on stage, leaving a smear of glitter. ‘We’d like to thank the Sackler family for their generous support.’ Announces Dr Fomo Coumo III, as four young men in lab coats and short shorts chuck handfuls of pills from the barrel into the darkness. They clatter off sleeping heads. The fit young doctor explains how a similar compound could be delivered into the atmosphere by rocket and cover the planet in two weeks. The drug cocktail meets all design criteria, with multiple euphoric, relaxed or contemplative exits possible. ‘There are some risks in relying on distribution by wind currents,’ he adds, ‘but we have solved this problem by making the drug addictive.’

The room listens to Dr Xin Ma in impressed silence.

‘Our work is based on the mega-death incident of 2015, when 200,000 saiga antelope died in two days.

We discovered that the bacteria responsible lived peacefully on the saiga’s tonsils until, for some reason, they had suddenly multiplied, moved to the liver and become fatal.

So we looked for false friends already present in the human body.’ The Chinese team identified thousands of suitable bacteria and genetically modified a virus to trigger one of them. ‘Sorry about the bird flu while we figured it out.’

Activated bacteria produce designer toxins that induce a multi-day orgasm followed by a sudden and painless death.

Results are so consistent that their research has shifted to increasing post-mortem decomposition rates to leave the planet ‘with a high nutrient compost layer’. Individual customisation is built-in, since the viral DNA contains multiple payloads that are selected by consuming one of three internationally available beverages: coffee, tea, water.

‘This is the friendliest option for a world of people used to selecting between competing products’, says Dr Ma. ‘They won’t have to choose between the end of the world and the end of capitalism.’

A sheaf of white voting slips falls into Timor’s lap.

The undersecretary waves the green briefcase he has handcuffed to his wrist. ‘Don’t forget, the winning team gets the Last Avocado – and can do whatever they like with it.’

Windpucker takes the microphone for the last time.

‘Has anyone seen Team UK? Visa issues? Too bad.

Colleagues, the window for action is closing on our plans, just as it did for plans to stabilise the climate. Panic will make coordinated action impossible and the longer we wait, the more likely we will have to consider options that today seem insane. When you vote, leave problems of politics and implementation to the Assembly and consider the situation purely as scientists and engineers. The statistics are clear: people prefer to kill themselves rather than to kill others.

That is enough. Our project offers courage not hope.’

This story is taken from Gross Ideas: Tales of Tomorrow’s Architecture, a compilation of short science fiction stories exploring the economies and cities of the near future published by the Architecture Foundation and the Oslo Architecture Triennale

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Legacy

Colleagues from the City College of New York and the design studio Terreform celebrate Michael Sorkin’s contribution to the college, the discourse of sustainable urbanism and the built fabric of cities across the world Trained as an architect, but extending the field to embrace critical thought and practice in urbanism, the politics of development, and the exploitation of the whole Earth, Michael was a weathervane of truth-telling on the entire human environment. Architectural critic of the Village Voice, founder of Michael Sorkin Studio and Terreform, and teacher of generations of architecture and urban students throughout the world, he was the voice of reason, and a spirit of compassion.

For over forty years he personified the role of guide, mentor and ironic observer of environmental follies, writing and designing with acerbic wit, empathy and deep understanding of the social and economic, aesthetic and professional implications of planning and design. Taken from us by COVID-19, we have lost the very voice that might have guided us through this new terror; his example will sustain us.

Anthony Vidler

Michael Sorkin, brilliant and prolific writer on urbanism, architect, distinguished professor, and founding director of the City College Urban Design Program, will be greatly missed by legions of current and former students and colleagues.

Michael, quite literally, put City College ‘all over the map’ of global urban design pedagogy. As tributes to his career stream out, we leave the recounting of his achievements to be googled or instagrammed.

Michael’s legacy within the school of architecture is deeply personal.

His incisive observations were animated by a profound idealism and he found and gave joy in exhorting students to imagine alternatives to unjust, environmentally degraded cities. Every faculty member, student and alumnus will recall his wit, intellect and extreme generosity of spirit.

As much as we at City College feel the loss of our mentor and friend, we want to celebrate the scope of Michael Sorkin’s contribution to the discourse of urbanism and to the built fabric of cities around the world.

Through his writings as architecture critic, first at the Village Voice and later

The Nation, his many books, edited essay collections, and the publications presented by his non-profit research and design office, Terreform, Michael’s thinking has transformed global design and planning culture.

Cities are now widely understood to be enmeshed in larger ecological and social systems, and advocates for equity in accessing the pleasures of urban life are heard loud amid the babble of efficiency experts and cost estimators. His influence on other writers, designers and planners created a wave that will continue to wash away normative assumptions and allegiance to banal ‘best’ practices.

At City College, our mission is not only to ride the wave that Michael Sorkin generated, but to fuel it and funnel it into continuously emerging channels opened by climate change, escalating inequities of privilege, the rise of surveillance regimes, and social authorisation of violence. And with Michael in mind, we will do so with ideals that push us to look beyond solving problems to create material culture – and a culture of material – that values wit and builds his sense of joy into everyday life.

Celebrating Michael Sorkin (1948-2020)

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The wit and wisdom of the late Michael Sorkin Julio Salcedo-Fernández and his colleagues at Terreform, the not-for-profit research and design studio founded by Michael Sorkin in 2005, select extracts from Sorkin’s writing on architecture, cities and Donald Trump

250 things an architect should know 136. The history of big machines, including those that can fly.

137. How to calculate ecological footprints.

138. Three good lunch spots within walking distance.

139. The value of human life.

140. Who pays.

141. Who profits.

Extract from ‘250 Things an Architect Should Know’, published in What Goes Up, 2018 City planning ‘The very idea of city planning had been made disreputable by postwar experience and its two spectacularly failed models: urban renewal and the suburbs. Physical planning is still flinching from the disrepute of this love-enslavement to social engineering, and had been almost entirely abandoned as a municipal function in the United States; the public realm reduced to reacting to the shoves and slaps of the invisible hand.’

Exquisite Corpse:Writing on Buildings, 1991

Philip Johnson’s AT&T building ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, the building sucks.

The so-called “post-modern” styling in which AT&T has been tarted up is simply a graceless attempt to disguise what is really just the same old building by cloaking it in this week’s drag.’

‘Philip Johnson: The Master Builder as a Self-Made Man’, The Village Voice, 30 October 1978, reprinted in Exquisite Corpse, 1991

CHENXING ZHAO

On Philip Johnson’s skyscrapers ‘As with so much of Johnson’s work, one sees only the outline of architecture, building more described than designed. The problem – skins, clusters of towers – gets stated but remains unsolved. Philip’s tragedy is that the polish and politesse that has permitted his free movement among the older monied has deflected the delicious Robertson Boulevard sensibility that might otherwise have emerged.’

Exquisite Corpse:Writing on Buildings, 1991

The relationship between architecture and capital ‘All architecture distributes: mass, space, materials, privilege, access, meaning, shelter, rights. The inevitable nexus of architecture and capital is one of its core fascinations, one of the reasons it can be so efficiently and abundantly read. That the legibility of the ostentation all around Zuccotti Park – and the deployment of every conceivable police technology to assure Wall Street’s perquisites remained unassailed – is only the zillionth instance of architecture’s insistence on making its role perfectly clear. In the main, architecture only abets the transparency of capital’s inequities. Even the most robust architectural revolutionaries seldom do more than currency conversion, exchanging the material for the symbolic.’

‘Afterword: Architecture Without Capitalism’, in Peggy Deamer (ed), Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, 2014

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Criticism ‘I see criticism – and there is some utility in separating it from theory – as a service profession. Not that I think of myself as an architectural barista brewing up steaming cups of truth, but that my perspective is increasingly both quantum and moral and that here criticism truly must be practical. The main issues confronting the planet are distributive – the apportionment of resources and equity – and architecture fascinates not just for its capacity to map, but to serve. It isn’t that its power to charm – to move – is negligible, uninteresting, even less than central, but criticism must situate the nature of its own urgency.

Many registers – from the urban to the micro-tectonic – demand many criticisms and the search for a unified field, even as a metaphor, seems unproductive, particularly given the rapid shifts of taste among both theoretically minded architects and those with other operational reflexes.’

‘Critical Measure:Why Architectural Criticism Matters’, The Architectural Review, June 2014

Donald Trump ‘Trump’s well-documented history of racial discrimination, tenant harassment, stiffing creditors (including architects), evasive bankruptcies, predilection for projects of low social value – such as casinos – and his calculated evasion of the taxes that might support our common realm are of a piece with his larger nativist, sexist and racist political project. We do not welcome Donald Trump to the White House and will revile and oppose him until he can conclusively demonstrate that the hideous pronouncements and proposals of his campaign have demonstrably been set aside and in favour of positions and actions that genuinely seek to serve our national cause and purpose – to build a better America rooted in the principles of justice, equity, and human dignity.’

Special letter to the World Architecture Community issued November 2016 in response to the American Institute of Architects’ statement announcing its intention to ‘work closely with Donald Trump to strengthen the nation’s ageing infrastructure’

The Manhattan skyline ‘The Empire State was for decades the tallest bar in the graph of real estate values that is the Manhattan skyline.

But it was more than a monument to quantity. Along with other buildings of the great Deco efflorescence – most notably its dance partner the Chrysler Building – it signified both the high-water mark of a style immensely indigenous to New York, but also its collapse in the great depression, after which buildings were very different.

It was the emblem of a capitalism that demanded buildings in which many different firms of many different sizes were housed together. And it was the preeminent symbol of what the Manhattan economy does so uniquely: turn the sky into land.’

‘NewYork Triptych’, in What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City, 2018

Neighbourhoods ‘Not every block is created equal, and although the time constraint can be treated as a constant, fluctuations in density are enormous. The city has blocks that are filled by high-rise apartments and others that are essentially suburban, thousands of dwelling units versus tens.

If an individual dwelling is understood as the centre of a walking radius, each neighbourhood resident will find a greater or lesser degree of her quotidian circle in adjacent neighbourhoods, suggesting that the idea of neighbourhood itself must be treated elastically.’

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, 2009

New Urbanism ‘They’ve been preparing the battleground for years, insisting that they alone have found the one true condition of equipoise. New Urbanists defend their superior wisdom in three areas: the preferability of the “traditional” city of streets and squares to the universally discredited Corbusian model, a claim to special access to knowledge of sustainability, and a faux-populist derision of practices that are “avant-garde”. None of these arguments is interesting or particularly controversial. No designer of conscience (or consciousness) resists the idea of cities with streets built for people on foot or fails to pay at least lip service to a sustainable – even equitable – environment.

Insisting otherwise is just disingenuous.

‘But there is something interesting going on in thinking about the design of cities, informed by questions of sea-level rise and climate change, massive pollution of air, earth and water, and a broad realignment of public consciousness about the limited bearing capacity of the Earth. Like virtually everyone in the disciplines, both Landscape Urbanists and New Urbanists recognise this and have produced projects that address it. It’s the war over formulae that’s a waste. The New Urbanists continue to dine out on the enervated notion of a regulating “transect”, a gradated wash of conditions from rural to urban, derived from Patrick Geddes, which they serve up with all the nuance of Creationism.’

‘Rumble in the Urban Jungle’, Architectural Record, August 2013

On technology and the city ‘With the precise prescience of a true Master of the Universe, Walter Wriston recently declared that “the 800 telephone number and the piece of plastic have made time and space obsolete”. Wriston ought to know. As former CEO of the suggestively named Citicorp, he’s a true Baron Haussmann for the electronic age, ploughing the boulevards of capital through the pliant matrix of the global economy.

‘The comparison isn’t meant to be flip: Wriston’s remark begs fundamental questions about urbanity.

Computers, credit cards, phones, faxes and other instruments of artificial adjacency are rapidly eviscerating historic politics of propinquity, the very cement of the city.

Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of a wholly new kind of city, a city without a place attached to it.

‘This ageographical city is particularly advanced in the United States. It’s visible in clumps of skyscrapers rising from well-wired fields next to the Interstate; in huge shopping malls, anchored by their national-chain department stores, and surrounded by swarms of cars; in hermetically sealed atrium hotels cloned from coast to coast; in uniform “historic” gentrifications and festive markets; in the disaggregated sprawl of endless new suburbs without cities; and in the antenna bristle of a hundred million rooftops from Secaucus to Simi Valley, in the clouds of satellite dishes pointed at the asynchronous blip, all sucking Arsenio and the A-Team out of the ether.’

Variations on a Theme Park, 1992

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Was Michael Sorkin killed by bat-eaters?

Or was he overtaken by the same vicious cycles of late capitalism that he contested his entire life?

Denise Hoffman Brandt offers a personal tribute to her colleague and friend Nothing in the urban environment exists autonomously — the city is a web of fascinating contingencies Michael Sorkin, 2009 I have drawn this as a tribute looking forward, emphatically not in memoriam. As if we could consign Michael Sorkin to the past. His call to designers and planners and, as he would say ‘comrades’, to think, write and draw to orchestrate the complex sustaining and destructive relationships that enmesh us, is worth answering now as much as at any time before. So here I have tried to parse the remote systems complicit in the death of my brilliant friend. It is a personal attempt to situate the sense of loss in the context of urbanity itself – to connect the absence of Michael Sorkin’s voice among us to the tragic and fascinating contingencies that consumed him metaphorically, and ultimately, physically.

And anyway, a map is just a drawing, and Michael loved drawings.

Michael Sorkin usually took an interest in the depressing design research projects I tend to pick up: ziggurats of nuclear waste, backyards in Detroit contaminated by windborne particulates from riverfront coal dust stockpiles, and degrading urban climate-change impacts more subtle than sea-level rise. We shared indignation, yet I always admired Michael’s generosity towards people’s wayward joys.

When I imagine talking to him about what I found while tracking how the reservoirs of virus in bats jumped to an infectious host, and from that to humans, to Michael himself, I know it would have left us both queasy. And outraged at the senseless loss. Just as I am outraged that we have all lost him.

I hope never again to have to look at photos of bushels of pangolin scales next to piles of their coiled little bodies. Or at grinning men, even Thai prostitutes hired to impersonate hunters, gleefully posing on top of flattened tigers and rhinos or yanking back the head of a dead lion.

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(I thought it was alive until I read the caption and noticed the blood on red earth next to the guy’s boot.)

No more views of row after row of boxed shark fins fitted-in cut-side up.

No more candid shots of diners taking photos of Vietnamese waiters cutting the still-beating heart out of a cobra because they think it will make them virile. Our acquiescence to personal proclivities for such meaningless death mirrors our tacit acceptance of the technically legitimate and even outright illegal networks for wildlife trafficking. That cavalier attitude towards non-human species has now made a significant impact on cities all over the world. No more Michael Sorkin.

Aggrandising trophy hunting and ‘gun play’ as fun events for Western tourists legitimises the massive, extinction-scale animal trafficking industry that supplies China’s new capitalist class with live animals to be eaten for status or traditionalmedicinal purposes. Disposable income now buys disposable species.

The soon to be extinguished pangolin is the most trafficked animal on earth.

Live animals imported for food, medicine and items for home decor are sold in wet markets throughout Asia where they are kept in close proximity to bats. The coronavirus that causes SARS is thought to have jumped from a horseshoe bat to a palm civet before it spilled over to humans. MERS, another coronaviral disease, started with a fruit bat.

And it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 (the organism behind COVID-19) started in a bat and then mutated in a pangolin before being ‘caught’ by a human. Those evolutions were not ‘natural’ in the common sense; they could never have happened without the physical structures and practices of the global wild animal market.

Despite the vivid image presented by the Daily Mail, my friend’s death was not a piece of some gone-wrong butterfly effect when a young woman in China ate a bat. He was caught in a web of aggressions and vulnerabilities

immediate and remote. His body was susceptible because of ‘underlying conditions’, an ominous term that seems to throw disease causation back onto those with imperfect health.

His city, state and federal government delayed supportive action while weighing a false binary argument that we must choose economic stability or valuing human lives. In China, ill-considered urban expansion has compressed bat habitat areas and the effects of climate change are further limiting bat ecosystem resources.

This increases intraspecific competition and opportunities for virus transfer and mutation.

All the while, the global apparatus for marketing wild animals as commodities sustains a perfect environment for virus spillover from bat to infectious host to human.

As I write this, in New York and other cities around the world, the fortunate are those who are safely trapped in their homes without fear of losing their livelihoods. From that vantage point cities look the same as ever, only more peaceful. Selfisolation cushions the blow of knowing others are facing tragedy: loss of life, loss of jobs, loss of any sense that there are others out there who care for them. Michael Sorkin would have had much to say about that injustice. Without him, we must ask what does it mean to comply with ‘self-distancing’? To what extent are we complicit in this web of the many’s destruction? What can we do about it?

I have a son I would not want to infect with any pathogen, and asthma from allergies that have me uncontrollably coughing even without a viral provocation. Rebelling against the machinations that killed my friend could kill me and more of those I love.

Is this an apex of control when we cannot band together to protest against the chaos thrust upon us by the apparatus of inequitable wealth?

We need new mechanisms of resistance. We need to build them in honour of our lost friends.

BIOTIC CORONAVIRAL AGENTS Habitat range of suspected SARS-CoV reservoir species Big-eared horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus macrotis Trefoil horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus trifoliatus Lesser brown horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus stheno Least horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pusillus Greater horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum

Vixay Keosavang’s compound Keosavang, called the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking, is a global wild animal farmer, smuggler and ‘launderer’. He is kingpin of Xaysavang Network, an enterprise providing the booming middle class of China with products like pangolin scales for use in traditional medicine. Keosavang is protected by the Lao government which receives millions of dollars in tax revenue from his animal trafficking transactions

Habitat range of suspected MERS-CoV reservoir species Black-bearded tomb bat, Taphozous melanopogon

Pangolin hunting grounds Illegal hunters are, knowingly, making pangolins extinct in Southeast Asia. Consumed in Vietnam and China, pangolin is bought from independent operators for $60 per pound and then sold as an expensive menu item in restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City and in wet markets throughout China

Habitat range of specific bat species known to be eaten in China as delicacies and as traditional medicine Cave nectar bat, Eonycteris spelaea Pomona roundleaf bat, Hipposideros pomona Indian flying fox, Pteropus giganteus Leschenault’s rousette, Rousettus leschenaultii Greater short-nosed fruit bat, Cynopterus sphinx Habitat range of Asian pangolin Indian pangolin, Manis crassicaudata; Philippine pangolin, Manis culionensis; Sunda pangolin, Manis javanica; and the Chinese pangolin, Manis pentadactyla ANIMAL TRAFFICKING CORONAVIRAL AGENTS Area of interspecific competition in bat populations Air traffic routes, heavy lines = routes of import from Africa Exemplar Pangolin hunting cluster sites Wet markets with evidence of disease/without evidence Key wholesale wildlife markets and transfer points Golden triangle (largest), open market illicit enterprise zone Singapore, seized 196 metric tons pangolin scales 2016-19 Hong Kong, home of trafficking syndicates/major transit point

Laotian side of a key smuggling gateway into China The Bachs, ‘Asia’s top wildlife crime family’, manage logistics for the flow of wildlife from Africa and Southeast Asia, from Thailand into Laos and from there to Vietnam and China. In a 2018 picture, taken when Bach Mai Limh (aka Boonchai) was arrested on conspiracy to traffic charges in Bangkok. Bach Mai wears a surgical mask to conceal his face from the press. Exactly like the masks everyone is rushing to buy to protect themselves from COVID-19 Vietnamese side of the Bach family’s wild animal gateway Managed by Mai’s brother, Bach Van Limh, was implicated in bribing an African official in an attempt to release a partner of Vixay Keosavang arrested for trafficking in rhino horns Foshan municipality Origin point of SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) disease in 2002. Early case patients were found to have lived near or worked as food handlers in a wet market. Research indicates that the coronavirus reservoir is a horseshoe bat. The infectious mammalian host, possibly a palm civet, led to spillover into the human population. The virus is relatively limited in its rate of transmission but it killed one in 10 infected people Huanan market in Wuhan, Hubei Province Origin point of SARS-CoV-2, aka COVID-19. Early case patients were associated with the Huanan market, a wet market known for selling wild animals imported from other regions of China and international sources. Current research speculates that the virus originated in a bat that entered a mammalian host, possibly a pangolin

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The London School of Architecture Charity number 1159927 Established 2015 the-lsa.org Twitter/Instagram: @LSofArch Founder / Chief Executive Will Hunter Board of Trustees Crispin Kelly (Chair), Davina Mallinckrodt, Deborah Saunt, John Oliver, Nick Bliss, Robert Mull, Roland Oakshett, Simon Allford Faculty Alan Powers (History Leader), Alicia Pivaro (Curator), Clive Sall (Design Director), George Shaheen (Programme Coordinator), James Soane (Research Director), Jason Sayer (Network Coordinator), John Nahar (Engagement Manager), Lara Kinneir (Cities Leader), Lewis Kinneir (Tectonic Leader), Marilyn Dyer (Registrar), Peter Buchanan (Reader in Architecture and Urbanism), Stephanie Rice (Operations Director) Tutors Akari Takebayashi (Heatherwick Studio), Annarita Papeschi (FLOW Architecture), Blazej Czuba (Public Practice, Maccreanor Lavington, St Albans District Council), Esther Escribano (Studio Weave), Giulia Furlan (Furlan Beeli et al.), Jesper Henriksson (Hesselbrand), Jessie Turnbull (MICA Architects), Kirti Durelle (Ben Adams Architects), Maria-Chiara Piccinelli (PiM.Studio), Matthew Whittaker (Whittaker Parsons), Paolo Vimercati (Grimshaw), Petra Marko (Marko&Placemakers, Solid Space), Philip Turner (AHMM), Rae Whittow-Williams (Greater London Authority), Rebecca Muirhead (Facture Architects), Steve Smith (Urban Narrative), Tara Clinton (Arup), Theo Games Petrohilos (Unknown Works), William Whitby (Arup), Xenia Adjoubei (AdjoubeiScottWhitby Studio) Design Think Tank Leaders Eradicating homelessness: Heather Macey (McAslan) Generational Shift: Angie Jim Osman and Nick Keen (Allies & Morrison) Intense City: Benjamin Graham, Harbinder Birdi and Fiona Stewart (Hawkins\Brown) Migration & Identity: Rafael Marks (Penoyre & Prasad) Nature & Re-wilding: Maurizio Mucciola (PiM Studio) Playful City: Christophe Egret and Josh Thomas (Studio Egret West) Purpose and Pleasure: Andrew McEwen and Yasir Azami (Orms) Regenerative Design: Javier Quintana De Una (IDOM) Academic Court Nigel Coates (Chair), Farshid Moussavi, Lesley Lokko Academic Partner London Metropolitan University External Examiners Jamie Fobert, Kester Rattenbury Technical Partner Arup

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Part 1 Development Panel Alan Powers, Deborah Saunt, Fenella Collingridge, James Soane, Jane Tankard, Joseph Zeal-Henry, Lara Kinneir, Peter Buchanan, Raphael Arthur, Susannah Hagan Part 1 Alumni Working Group Abigail Portus, Alaric CampbellGarrett, Alice Hardy, Annecy Attlee, Charlotte Hurley, Chiara Barrett , Cristina Gaidos, Dawa Pratten, Fraser Morrison, Ian Campbell, James Cornish Hignett, Joe Walker, Katie Oliver, Lisa McDanell, Maelys Garreau, Maxim Sas, Milly Salisbury, Pierre Longhini, Phoebe Nickols, Robin Chatwin, Sara Lambridis, Simon Banfield, Vojtěch Němec Visiting Critics Alice Fung (Architecture 00), Frances Holliss (London Metropolitan University), Kat Scott (dRMM), Katy Marks (Citizens Design Bureau), Angie Pascoe (London Metropolitan University), Carlos Villanueva Brandt (Architectural Association), Crispin Kelly (Baylight), Deborah Saunt (DSDHA), Alicia Pivaro (LSA), Paul Finch (World Architecture Foundation), Stephanie Edwards (Urban Symbiotics), Jane Tankard (University of Westminster) Design Reviews 2019/20 Jan Kattein (Jan Kattein Architects), Peter Buchanan (LSA), Andy Groarke, Lukas Barry (Carmody Groarke), Richard Lavington (Maccreanor Lavington), Lionel Real de Azúa (Red Deer), Roddy Langmuir (Cullinan), Anthony Engi-Meacock (Assemble), Alex Scott-Whitby (Scott-Whitby Studio), Alan Higgs (Alan Higgs Architecture), Collin Burry (Gensler), Valeria Segovia (Gensler), Michael Squire (Squire & Partners), Holly Lewis (We Made That), Takero Shimazaki (Takero Shimazaki Architects), Joseph Henry (Greater London Authority), Michal Cohen (Walters & Cohen Architects), Darren Comber (Scott Brownrigg), Angela Brady (Brady Mallalieu Architects), Andrew Waugh (Waugh Thistleton Architects), Max Rengifo and Sean Weston (WR-AP), Susanne Tutsch (erect architecture) Trim Murati (Ryder Architecture) Drawing Matter talks Matthew Teague, Niall Hobhouse Wednesday Nighters Chris Allen (Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio), Stuart Maclure (ING Media), James Turner (Mikhail Riches), Frances Hollis (London Metropolitan University), Jack Minchella and Carlotta Conte (Dark Matter Laboratories)

Supporters A very special thank you to the practices, partners and patrons who have supported the school and made our work possible: Founding Patrons Niall Hobhouse, Crispin Kelly, Sir Terry Leahy, Nadja Swarovski Founding Practices Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Allies and Morrison, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, IDOM, Orms, PDP London, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Scott Brownrigg Founding Partners Kingspan Insulation, Stanhope, Savills, Tata Steel, Minotti Founding Benefactors Richard Collins, Martin Halusa, Sir Peter Mason, Davina Mallinckrodt Foundations The Garfield Weston Foundation, The Schroder Foundation, Sto Foundation Strategic Partners Caro Communications, Cultural-Agenda, Drawing Matter Ambassadors Carolyn Larkin (Chair), Charlotte Skene Catling, Daniel Gava, Eleanor Hill, Joseph Zeal-Henry, Kate Stirling, Matthew Claudel, Nicola Read, Rohan Silva, Suzanne Trocmé, Theresa Simon, Tom Leahy Alumni Ambassadors Aleksandar Stojakovic, Alexander Frehse, Andrea Nolan, Chiara Barrett, Daniel Lee, Dawa Pratten, Fearghal Moran, Fiona Stewart, Maeve Dolan, Milly Salisbury, Phelan Heinsohn, Raphael Arthur Mega Crit 2020 With the Architectural Association, the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, Central St Martins, Ravensbourne University London, Royal College of Art and University of Westminster. Special thanks to guest critics: Annarita Papeschi (FLOW Architecture), David Knight (DK-CM), Irénée Scalbert (University of Limerick), Kat Scott (dRMM), Kit Jones (Dow Jones Architects), Lauren Shevills (Mæ), Lily Jencks (Lily Jencks Studio), Lou Elena-Bouey (5th Studio), Maria-Chiara Piccinelli (PiM.Studio), Matteo Sarno (Hopkins Architects), Nick Newman (Studio Bark), Phineas Harper (Open City), Siân Moxon (London Metropolitan University), Stefan Laxness (Forensic Architecture)

Practice Network 51% Studio, 5th Studio, AckroydLowrie, ACME, Aedas, AHMM, Alan Baxter, Alan Higgs Architects, aLL Design, Allies and Morrison, alma-nac, AOC, Apt, Ash Sakula, Assemble, Astudio, Aukett Swanke, BAT Studio, BDP, Beasley Dickson, Ben Adams, Benedetti, Brady Mallalieu, Buckley Gray Yeoman, Burrell Foley Fischer, Carl Turner Architects, Carmody Groarke, CF Möller, Chris Dyson, Citizens Design Bureau, Clive Sall Architecture, Coffey Architects, Coppin Dockray, Cullinan Studio, DAAB Design, Dallas Pierce Quintero, David Chipperfield Architects, David Kohn Architects, Daykin Marshall, Delve, DeMatosRyan, Dow Jones, DSDHA, Erect Architecture, Eric Parry Architects, EVA Studio, Farrells, Formation Architects, Foster + Partners, FreeHaus Design, Gensler, Grimshaw, HAT Projects, Hawkins\ Brown, Haworth Tompkins, Henley Halebrown, Henning Stummel Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, Hesselbrand, HOK, Hopkins Architects, HUT, IDOM, IF_DO, Interrobang, Jamie Fobert, Jan Kattein Architects, Jestico + Whiles, John McAslan + Partners, Jonathan Tuckey Design, Karakusevic Carson Architects, Liddicoat & Goldhill, Lipton Plant Architects, Maccreanor Lavington, Make, Marcus Beale Architects, Marko&Placemakers, MICA, Mikhail Riches, Mills Power, Morris + Company, NBBJ, NG Architects, One Works, Orms, PARTI, PDP London, Penoyre & Prasad, Piercy & Company, Populous, Prewett Bizley, Project Orange, RCKa, Red Deer, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Scott Brownrigg, Scott Tallon Walker Architects, ScottWhitby Studio, Simpson Studio, Skene Catling de la Pena, SODA, Solid Space, Something & Son, Square Feet Architects, Squire & Partners, Stanton Williams, Studio Egret West, Studio Octopi, Studio Weave, Surman Weston, SUSD, Takero Shimazaki Architects, Tate Harmer, The Klassnik Corporation, Tonkin Liu, UnderCover Architecture, vPPR, Walters and Cohen, Waugh Thistleton, We Made That, WestonWilliamson+Partners, What Architecture, WilkinsonEyre, William Smalley Architect, Wimshurst Pelleriti, Wright & Wright With a special thanks to our space providers AKT II, Alan Baxter, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Allies & Morrison, alma-nac, Brady Mallalieu Architects, Carmody Groarke, Chris Dyson Architects, Cullinan, Studio Large, Erect Architecture, Farrells, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, HOK, HÛT, INTBAU, Jan Kattein Architects, Karakusevic Carson Architects, MICA, Modern House, NBBJ, Penoyre & Prasad Architects, Pilbrow & Partners, Apt, Sheppard Robson, SODA, Squire and Partners, Studio Egret West

ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ARCHITECTS !CAN CLIMATE ACTION ARCHITECTS !CAN NETWORK! ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ARCHITECTS ! C A N ACAN is a network of individuals within architecture and related built environment professions taking action to address the twin crises of climate and ecological breakdown.

As an open, supportive and inclusive organisation ACAN empowers its members to proactively create change. We are a member-led organisation with working groups tackling a number of issues.

We are in a state of emergency. If you want to help bring about the systemic change of our profession and the construction industry as a whole. Join ACAN, come to our next meeting, start a campaign.

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Spring 2020|Citizen|133

134|Citizen|Spring 2020

Citizen’s Poet in Residence, LionHeart, talks to Isabel Allen about the connection between the built environment and mental health, shirking responsibility for climate change, and the power of the spoken word

explored in his debut poetry collection The Mute’s Rebellion - he credits the Brutalist architecture of the Barbican as having inspired him to find his voice through poetry. The first Poet in Residence at the Saatchi Gallery, Squire & Partners, Grimshaw Architects and now Citizen magazine, his first poem for Citizen is published overleaf.

I’ve talked to over a hundred architects about how they first became interested in architecture and I’ve only heard ‘Lego’ once. Sometimes they say their parents were architects.

Light is important. Often, it’s about the light. But problem-solving is their superpower. The architect’s mindset is ‘let me understand how it works’.

Then there’s the emotional connection, which is my superpower.

Poetry can be very educating this way, particularly when it’s not elitist.

we make it work?’ It’s a very bespoke way of working. It has to be. If I’m in a work environment the conditions have to be there for me to be creative.

If I was more assimilated into the office I wouldn’t have such an impact.

It’s surprising what people speak to me about. Not just technical jargon or design: poetry; meaning; mental health; love.

My English literature teachers at secondary school taught me to see the beauty of William Blake. That’s what sparked my interest in poetry; my interest but not my enthusiasm. I’m a big fan of hip hop. Hip hop poets retain an element of purity. They put their authentic souls into their words.

Imagine if a borough of London were designed by a poet, a hip hop artist, a product designer. Imagine what it would be like. Imagine stepping out into that space. Something completely different. That’s what the Barbican represents. A reaction against the status quo.

The poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib talks about

gentrification as the erosion of memories of a place. When you walk through certain parts of the city you’re walking through the ghosts of our built environment. If the Barbican ever changed … it’s so much part of who I am. Sometimes I think we should preserve the monuments that promised change.

I’m challenging the ways things are done.

Exposing people to different ways of existing. That’s the reason I went to Japan – to see how their culture has allowed spirituality to permeate the built environment and how I can cross-pollinate that with other cultures. There’s one space I lived in for two days in São Paulo that had this view. I feel like I’ve been searching for it my whole life. It was a view that said ‘Thank you for looking at me’.

It’s a huge honour to work with Grimshaw. They have been very supportive about letting my culture influence their culture. They said ‘OK, we want to do this. But how will

I want my poetry to have an emotional

impact, but I want it to be relevant too. It’s not about shouting or going on a demonstration. That’s not my path towards change. My path is to change those cog wheels one at a time.

When we’re walking though the built environment we’re walking through people’s decisions, the result of people saying ‘This is what we need’.

If I make one change in the way people think about things, and that makes one change in the way they design one building and the way that people influence wellbeing and mental health …

I’m hoping to change policy at some point but incremental change is incredible change.

With climate change what we require isn’t incremental. It’s human instinct not to take responsibility when something feels overwhelming. There are so many unfathomable things happening. It’s easier not to see world problems as our problems. They’re for the experts to sort out. Or the scientists. We run away from the problems even when they’re staring us in the face. They call it analysis paralysis. Most of us are running towards something and we don’t know what it is.

We need help from the kids who haven’t

been conditioned to the way of thinking of the ’80s and ’90s. People like Greta Thunberg. That’s why we need … what’s a better word than diversity? That’s what I’m talking about but I’m so tired of that word.

I’ve made up a new word. Amoratory.

It’s not the same as sapiosexual, which people confuse it with.

Sapiosexual describes people who find intelligence sexually exciting.

Amoratory is love of the creative use of words.

Spring 2020|Citizen|135

PHOTOGRAPH BY FREDDIE ARDLEY

The poetics of space

LionHeart is a TEDx Speaker, BBC Radio London Presenter, award-winning poet and international spoken word performer with a particular interest in architecture and poetry and their relationship to emotions, memory and mental health. Having struggled with anxiety and selective mutism as a child – experiences

One Last Call, Before You End It LionHeart

Are we taking into account what nature wants?

Or is this some grand plan where nature tolerates us for as long as it can?

One last plea of neglect.That’s the story.

The sad excuse for our irresponsibility: guilt’s evasion deciding which choice to attach our humility, we say we’re sorry.

One last plea.That’s our story, we’re sticking to it. Even apologies can be a last line of defence: A commitment to irresponsibility’s psychosis, we say I’m sorry.

But the Earth’s sea is becoming carnivorous, no building will stand in the way its appetite, out of hand, out of mind, imagine Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower stuck — a toothpick — in the jaws of sea levels rising as high as temperatures and temperaments because our responsibility required too much drastic change, just too much of us.

Are we taking into account what nature wants?

I’m asking for the Earth’s wellbeing, for ours, before our very own insidious inability forces its hand further making it the architect of our coup de grâce.

We’re all so sorry when an apology’s deadline was yesterday, and its line of defence: a wall: comes crashing down like a tsunami, for this abusive relationship, of apologizing without action, and all the advice in the world.

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Summer 2019 |Citizen|3

A journey to a peaceful mind Introducing Voyage designed for VitrA by Arik Levy.

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