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Designing in a State of Climate Emergency

Positionality exercise.

Designing in a state of climate emergency was a very insightful seminar. I had the opportunity to describe myself to others in a more holistic way, instead of the usual way of describing us as workers, where what we do for a living describes our hole being. Using the wheel of power and privilege made me reflect on how society works and what is my position in it. For sure it makes me think of how privileged I am in comparison with other humans in today’s world, but also on how some other areas may hold me back from certain opportunities.

1st day takeaways:

  • On the concept of polycrisis: This was a new concept to me, despite having the awareness of many conflicts happening around the world, one can get lost in the midst of it all and quickly shift attention from one crisis to another losing the ability to understand that these multiple regional crisis contribute to a larger effect on geodynamics. It makes me reflect on trying to connect certain events that are happening to root conflicts that took place either relatively recently.

    My personal feeling of this overlapping of multiple crisis made me feel vulnerable and scared. It is easy to live in your own bubble and not question why things are happening the way they are, but I also felt that it is important to do this exercise of connecting dots and analyze the situation in order to give strong meaning to our words and be able to formulate an informed opinion about it. Our voice has power, it is important to use it in a careful way.

  • Disconnection by abstraction: Humans get lost in abstractions. Abstractions that we have created to stay together, whereas for good or for worse. Abstractions like money, religion, work, nation, the list goes on. At the end its strange to think about how these abstractions that holds some of us together also excludes and create division.

  • The Economy is linked with ecology: It is not possible to think of economical development, and the capitalist machine without linking it directly to the ecology. We live in a material world and every action that we do affects the material, in this case planet earth and everything that it means.

On the second session we met Gustavo who talked to us about temporality. At first this concept was hard to grasp, as there was so much depth in it.

2nd day takeaways:

  • Time does not behave in a linear mode, but instead is much more like a spiral. We can find ourselves in very similar situations than repeat throughout time, like a cycle, and we can observe how different we encounter these situations on different points of our life and reflect on our change of perception and response.

  • It was eye opened for me the idea that we humans in this modern society are victims of time in a different way, some of us live more in the past it could be with an attitude of gratitude or guilt, some others move with a more present oriented mindset and others are more future oriented. I also believe that we are complex beings and our experience of time changes from day to day. For me, there are some days where I can find myself very reflective about the past, present or future on different sides of their spectrum, but for sure I can tell that one way of experiencing time is more frequent.

  • The best way of moving through time is with gratitude, as it makes one reflect on the things that one had to go through in order to accomplish something that you are experiencing or you want to experience. It is being conscious of all the thing that had to happen and the people that where part of the journey and made those things possible.

3rd day takeaways. Giorgios Kallis.

  • I learned that in order to have less ecological impact the idea of degrowth is necessary. There where some examples where developed countries claimed their GDP was increasing when at the same time their material economy was decreasing due to economy shifting to services and digitalization. But there is a problem with this, they were getting their material resources from other countries and digitalization also affects the material world. In this globalized world, where planetary resources are being transported from one side of the world to the other, we cannot think anymore of the idea that a nations actions do not affect others.

  • The economy is slowing down by disaster instead of slowing down by design. We saw that with the Covid-19 pandemic, which is one of the feeders of the actual polycrisis.

How can we design in a state of climate emergency?

My approach to this would be slowing down, not throw to the window all the developments that we have achieved technologically, but taking advantage of those that allow us to be autonomous and serve us for freedom. Freedom of energy, freedom for food and freedom for shelter. I think this is possible through community and caring for each other, including other species. How? Thinking it with an architectural-urbanistic approach (I am a trained architect) The idea of living in community with shared spaces for encounter, for food production and leisure, and also exploring the idea of giving other species spaces to live in our cities and rewild our surroundings.

The honorable harvest:

-Ask for permission

-Listen for the answer

-Take only what you need and no more

-Minimize harm

-Use everything that you take

-Be grateful

-Reciprocate the gift