The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

As climate change impacts in cities around the world have revealed under-recognized socio-ecological vulnerabilities and the need for adaptive and radical responses, a growing number of architects, designers, and architectural historians have begun to revisit the relation between the built environment and the natural environment, and the role their disciplines have played in shaping and responding to current conditions. Critical scholars in these and related fields have drawn on radical, feminist, and decolonial thought to examine the role of architecture in the history of environmental thought and tensions between environmental design and environmental politics (Hutton 2019; Haffner 2021; Nolan 2021; Hochhausl et al 2018), but also experimented with alternative practices of design oriented to the creation of socially and environmentally just futures (Boehnert 2018; Escobar 2018; Costanza-Chock 2020).

However, geographic engagement with these developments remains limited, which inhibits cross-disciplinary dialogue and reinforces a division between disciplines that study and reflect on evolving human-environment relations, and disciplines that experiment with and create new human-environment relations in the Anthropocene. What are the potentials and challenges for extending design thinking in geography? As research funders and practitioners alike increasingly call for interdisciplinarity and experimentation beyond academia, the lack of geographic engagement with design risks increased disciplinary marginalization, precisely at a moment of socio-ecological indeterminacy in which geographic thought – and its penchant for inventive scholarly bricolage (Larsen and Harrington, Jr. 2021) and positive syncretism (Castree 2016) – can play a decisive role in opening up new issues and responses for interdisciplinary research. What can geographers learn from the environmental turn in architectural history? How is this turn influenced by geographical ideas? An emphasis on environmental in/justice that political ecologists share with a new generation of architectural historians (Chang 2016; Cupers 2016; Ruiz 2021) and design practitioners (Goh 2021) suggests an alternative form of interdisciplinary dialogue that doesn’t align with systems-based and other technocratic forms of interdisciplinarity.

In this session, we seek to bring together geographers and scholars in related fields working on broadly-construed topics of environment and design in the Anthropocene. Our goal is to explore how geographers, and geography more generally, might engage with emerging cross-disciplinary interest on the relation between the built environment and natural environment, particularly (but not exclusively) within urban and urbanizing contexts. We are particularly interested in papers that engage with and explore emerging trends and dynamics in disciplines such as architecture, design, architectural history and design history, and seek to build bridges across disciplinary divisions to reimagine what interdisciplinary urban environmental research might become in the Anthropocene.

Non-Presenting Participants