Urban Ambience:
Since the 1980s the focus of architecture has titled toward the urban and more recently the territorial scale. This shift has provoked new problems for design. At its most extreme, it has required us to think about urbanization as a planetary process, which includes not only dense centres of agglomeration, but also the resource peripheries, which fuel our cities. However, it is not only the scale of urbanization that has shifted, so too have the actants which need to be included in our understanding of the urban. Architects have begun to focus on urban conditions that they rarely considered in earlier projections of urban form, such as urban ecology and urban metabolism, including the cycles of non-human forms of life and energy.
Moderator: Val Rynnimeri – University of Waterloo
Kian Goh – Northeastern University
Bio:
Kian Goh, RA, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Urban Landscape at Northeastern University School of Architecture. She researches urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization. She is Associate Director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative at MIT, and a Research Affiliate with the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard GSD. A licensed architect, she cofounded design practice SUPER-INTERESTING!, and previously worked with Weiss/Manfredi and MVRDV. Kian has taught at MIT, UPenn, New School, and WUSTL. Kian received a PhD in Urban and Environmental Planning from MIT, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.
Abstract:
New Spaces of Flows? Global-Urban Networks in Climate Change Adaptation
Urban climate change adaptation research has tended to reinforce static conceptualizations of the city, neglecting interconnections across networks and broader processes of globalization, urbanization, and geopolitics. I explore the emerging sites and strategies of urban adaptation, often globally conceived, capital-intensive, and privatized urban megaprojects. I focus on global/urban networks – connections through which concepts travel, transform, and embed – and shifting political terrains of urban adaptation. I find that urban environmental projects are increasingly intertwine d within multiscalar networks of globalized urban and economic development. They constitute sites of struggle, through which dominant development models are produced and consolidated, and new modes of resistance emerge.
Janette Kim – Syracuse University
Bio:
Janette Kim is a designer, researcher, and educator based in New York City. Her work focuses on design and ecology in relationship to public representation, interest, and debate. Janette Kim is an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University, principal of the design and research practice All of the Above, and editor and founder of ARPA Journal, a digital publication on applied research practices in architecture. Janette is co-author, with Erik Carver, of The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform and former co-director of the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia University, where she taught as adjunct assistant professor from 2005-2015 .
Abstract:
The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform is an architect’s guide to the politics of energy. It maps conflicts and affiliations among various approaches to energy management and examines their implications for public life. It asks how architecture can realign collective priorities in today’s built environment. Underdome addresses these ongoing agendas and, more than prescribing solutions, discusses the implications of politics on the way we design and build, ranging from the microelectronic to the macroregional. The book’s series of dry, axonometric drawings tease out the operations, territories, symbols and scales of 48 case studies. This talk will examine the relationship
Sarah Gunawan – University of Waterloo
Bio:
Sarah Gunawan received her Masters of Architecture and Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo. Her thesis, entitled Synanthropic Suburbia, examined the interface between humans and animals within prototypical, North American suburbs and proposed a series of prosthetics to the single-family house which created opportunities for cohabitation. Sarah is currently working as an Intern Architect at Lateral Office, an experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape and urbanism.
Abstract: Drawing the Post-human
Cities, like any biome, are dynamic ecosystems teeming with non-human life. Even though diverse populations of birds and mammals occupy the urban environment, they remain at the periphery of human consciousness. Drawing the Post-human explores representations of non-human environments to identify how these adaptive species occupy and perceive our shared habitat. Filtering the city through the perceptual lens of different animals reveals multiple alternative readings of urban space. What would the city look like if it was designed considering the biological interactions, spatial parameters and ecosystem requirements of not only humans but also our non-human co-habitants?
Respondent: Mona El Khafif – University of Waterloo