New Understandings
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, School of Architecture
Ecology of an Egalitarian City
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ngaka Mosiane
Although the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to prompt new urban thinking around ordinary people’s living conditions generally, that thinking will include the proposals of the last twenty years or so, which are seeking to harness the informal housing, urban planning and livelihood innovations. This study draws from the interview and secondary research materials collected from the Gauteng, North-West, and Western Cape Provinces of South Africa to reflect on the architectural and spatial planning initiatives by the state, urban practitioners, and ordinary people. The paper shows that the responses by local managers and urban practitioners to ordinary people’s housing, planning, and livelihood initiatives are diverse, ranging from repressing such resourcefulness to buttressing them, depending on the kinds of local and external forces being mediated. Those responses that back ordinary people’s activities, including various forms of state support, contribute to the creation of an egalitarian city – a city that enhances ordinary people’s socio-economic gains and their adaptability to health, environmental, economic, and political crises.
How Vulnerability Shapes Climate Policy Attitudes: The Case of Rising Sea Levels View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Reeves, Dino Christenson
The earth's warming climate poses many risks to human beings and other forms of life on earth. Yet solving this building crisis involves a temporal tradeoff: make costly policy changes now to avert the worst future disasters. Existing research suggests that this will be difficult -environmental policy attitudes are stable, polarized, predominantly acquired through partisan elite messaging, and only moderately responsive in the short-term to large shocks like exposure to catastrophic environmental events. But what about susceptibility to climate extremes like rising sea levels that can render entire communities uninhabitable within our lifetimes? Is living in a coastal community that is susceptible to such existential risk associated with stronger support for climate mitigation policies? Using a variety of original and publicly available surveys from 2010 to present, we establish a clear link between susceptibility to sea-level rise and support for climate mitigation policy, offer evidence for several potential mechanisms, and show that the results are robust to a variety of methodological and substantive choices.
Wildfires - Constructed Risks and Inadequate Vulnerability Assessments View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicole Lambrou, Erica Anjum
Increasing wildfire disasters globally have highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and overlooked the aspects of social vulnerability that determine individual and community resilience to wildfire, particularly sensitivity. Here, we synthesize the socioeconomic, demographic, and intersectional identity factors that contribute to how sensitive populations are to wildfire, and identify how those factors subsequently affect the adaptive capacity of said populations through cultural/social cohesions, perception of risk, and agency to enact change. Further, we look at how populations and communities address the social sensitivities and inequities that position them at greater risk for wildfires, and investigate how they mitigate those risks and rebuild from wildfire disasters. We suggest that approaching wildfire resilience through a climate justice framework can center solutions that address root causes of inequity in differential sensitivity rather than landscape outcomes.
On Fully Recognizing the Social Complexity of Constructed Environments : Seeking Engagement, not Reconciliation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Walkover
Design engages and is engaged by the complex dynamics of the social and natural worlds. This complexity is generated through networks of interdependent relationships among social and natural entities. My study offers a critique and complement to assumptions about “wicked problems” emerging from this conference’s presentations on Human/Nature interdependences. Complex design, in my view, does not seek reconciliation. Instead, complex design instantiates how we fully engage the juggernaut of human/nature interdependencies with ‘eyes wide open.’ I propose a framework for understanding how human/nature interdependencies generate social complexity. This framework is based on observations about the dimensions and dynamics of biotic and abiotic entities from the fields of sociology, physics, chemistry, and biology. I offer vocabulary useful for discussing the ontological ‘nature’ of entities and processes across the following conceptual map: entities as unbounded and multi-dimensional; how interactions between entities shape and are shaped by the flow of energy, matter and information; how interactions emerge along matrices of relational networks. Projects generated through local design engage not only material processes but also discursive dynamics that travel across global networks. When mechanical assumptions about social and natural dynamics slip into design processes, the project’s adaptative and innovative capacities are truncated. But more importantly rigid mechanical design elements, working in complex and dynamic environments engages the emergence of wicked problems. Complex design, then, is presented as a process constituted by the social complexity of networked, relational Human/Nature alignments that engage the capacity to reproduce statis and generate innovation across time and space.
