RNPG Archives

Houses of Flood, Silt and Shadow

Houses of Flood, Silt and Shadow explores how architecture can engage with the performative and poetic to challenge dominant discourses that prioritize technological and scientific responses to the climate crisis. The book showcases how architecture that manifest conditions of the performative and poetic can foster embodied and emotional awareness of the environment – highlighting its fragility and unpredictability – to deepen our understanding of climate change.

The book operates as a critical and propositional enquiry, moving fluidly between architectural design practice, art practice, and historical and theoretical research. Structured around three main chapters, it focuses on four of Matthew Butcher’s speculative architectural design projects: Flood House (2016), Silt House (2015), Bang Bang House (2017) and Measure House (2017). These works exist as drawings, models and 1:1 built structures, and are presented in dialogue with the practices of environmental architects and artists who influenced them, such as architects Raimund Abraham and Gianni Pettena, artists Alan Kaprow and Robert Morris, and performance artist Joan Jonas. Butcher argues that these historical figures offer vital inspiration for alternative forms of architectural design today. Their work viscerally emphasizes – through physical and emotional experience – natural processes such as growth and decay, entropy, weather patterns and celestial forces.

Universities and Climate Action

Universities have a pivotal role to play in addressing the climate crisis, not only educating an increasingly large proportion of the global population, but also through scientific breakthroughs, technological innovation and raising public awareness. Higher education is particularly important given the roots of ecological and social breakdown in our models of civilisation, culture and knowledge. Yet its potential has not always been realised, and universities have historically been implicated in the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment and human communities. A transformation is thus needed in higher education, with institutions reorienting their activities towards positive engagement with climate.

Universities and Climate Action presents an original framework for understanding the impact of universities on climate change. It explores the interactions of education, research, services, public debate and campus operations on society and the ecosphere, and the complex interplay of influences on local, national and global levels. It provides in-depth discussions of ways of engaging with climate in teaching and learning and the curriculum, in research agendas, in governance and management of estates, and in engaging with external communities. The theoretical models are contextualised with examples of climate action in universities around the world. This book provides vital tools for analysis and action for researchers and practitioners working with and within the higher education sector.

Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique

Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique is a practitioners’ handbook that builds upon the experience of a pilot project that was awarded the United Nations ‘Lighthouse Activity’ Award.

Building upon a long scholarly tradition of participatory planning, this dual-language (English/Portuguese) book addresses crucial questions about the relevance of citizen participation in planning for climate compatible development and argues that citizens have knowledge and access to resources that enable them to develop a sustainable vision for their community. In order to do so, the author proposes a Participatory Action Planning methodology to organise communities, and also advances mechanisms for institutional development through partnerships.

Haste

What does it mean politically to construct climate change as a matter of urgency? We are certainly running out of time to stop climate change. But perhaps this particular understanding of urgency could be at the heart of the problem. When in haste, we make more mistakes, we overlook things, we get tunnel vision. Here we make the case for a ‘slow politics of urgency’. Rather than rushing and speeding up, the sustainable future is arguably better served by us challenging the dominant framings through which we understand time and change in society. Transformation to meet the climate challenge requires multiple temporalities of change, speeding up certain types of change processes but also slowing things down.
While recognizing the need for certain types of urgency in climate politics, Haste directs attention to the different and alternative temporalities at play in climate and sustainability politics. It addresses several key issues on climate urgency: How do we accommodate concerns that are undermined by the politics of urgency, such as participation and justice? How do we act upon the urgency of the climate challenge without reproducing the problems that speeding up of social processes has brought? What do the slow politics of urgency look like in practice? Divided into 23 short and accessible chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars from different disciplines, Haste tackles a major problem in contemporary climate change research and offers creative perspectives on pathways out of the climate emergency.

Climate, God and Uncertainty

Climate, God and Uncertainty moves beyond Bruno Latour’s thought to understand what climate change means for philosophical anthropology and wider culture. What are, for example, the philosophical implications of climate change and its associated uncertainties?

Referring mainly to works by Latour, William James and Heinrich Rickert, Petersen develops ‘transcendental naturalism’ to reinterpret the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change. He highlights, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. In developing its argument, the book makes a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the academic field called ‘science and religion’.