“What’s design got to do with it?”
Cities, communities, climate change: exploring my golden threads through a decade of projects
This post has sat in my drafts for a good couple of years now, but the start of a new decade has been a good excuse to take a step back and ask the scary question — what does it all add up to?
In doing this as an exercise in both reflection and pattern spotting, I noticed that over the past decade I’ve been on a journey from physical applications of design (such as architectural, urban or product-service design) to the more abstract and conceptual implications of design (such as the design of change interventions and processes). In other words, I’ve been journeying from designing things, to shaping processes that help challenge and reimagine how we do things. Below I’ve picked out a few vignettes to help weave the three golden threads of the past decade — cities, communities and climate change.
I started the decade by graduating in architecture at the University of Sheffield, the place I still credit with gifting me two very important lenses for my practice — equity and participation. I was lucky to be inspired by educators such as Jeremy Till, Doina Petrescu, Bryan Lawson and the late Peter Blundell Jones, as well as by the company of a ridiculously talented and purpose-driven peers many of whom are still my closes friends. Years later, I also came to appreciate the asset-based pedagogy we were exposed to at Sheffield — little did I know what a rare culture that was among the competitive philosophy that pervaded architecture schools at the time.
I went on to work with the participatory architecture practice die Baupiloten in Berlin, and in 2013 I founded a Bucharest-based NGO to serve as a knowledge exchange platform between my home country and the UK following the post-2012 Olympic Games and the flurry of temporary interventions in collaborative city-making that went with it. During the 2013 Bucharest Architecture Biennale we took over two public spaces for a week and curated a series of events — participatory mapping, visioning, talks and games.
Our installations led a collaboration with two other NGOs to refurbish a van into a mobile office for urbanism (Urboteca) and to curate a programme of talks, events and training workshops to help build awareness and literacy about why urbanism matters. Years after I’ve dialled down my involvement it’s still one of my dearest ventures and I’m ever so proud to see its latest adventures (such as a podcast about cities).
Another project started from research I did for my masters dissertation, Cinema Favorit — the Aleph and the Civil Void, where I head back to my childhood neighbourhood in Bucharest to revisit the legacy of my local 1960s cinema, then in disuse.
I argued in favour of tactical urbanism as a low-cost alternative regeneration model to serve as example for other disused civic buildings from the Communist period and ran experiments with my old community on how we might activate the space at no cost. It was also a harsh encounter with the tension between the role of the expert in a participatory process and what happens when the objectives of the two don’t align. A few years after the attempt to activate and salvage a disused public space that meant so much to me, the cinema was demolished with the backing of the local community.
Replacing it, a bland, “cultural shopping mall” is currently being built. What really struck me in this process was the strong association people had between the architectural style and the refuted ideology of socialism, which to this day is one of the biggest lessons I learnt about the power of social imaginaries — the common values, beliefs and symbols that enable us to imagine a social whole.
This chapter made me more aware of the complexity of problem setting and problem solving, while only looking at the built environment as the site for intervention. To paraphrase Cedric Price:
Spatial tactics were the answer, but what was the question?
I became increasingly frustrated with the agency I didn’t have and the conversations I couldn’t influence nor inform as part of the traditional structure of an ‘architecture practice’. I knew I had a different way of seeing and doing to offer, yet a seat at the table seemed to only come as the result of decades of plodding along the traditional hierarchical ladder.
Consequently, I spent the past 5 years exploring alternatives on a spectrum from critical to strategic to systemic design. My final thesis at the Royal College of Art was an exploration of institutional responses in the Anthropocene, through speculating about the future of a seemingly uneventful seaside town called Skegness.
At Forum for the Future, I experimented with bringing to life the roles of citizen innovation in accelerating sustainable lifestyles as part of a set of 2050 European scenarios. More recently, I was part of the Civil Society Futures Inquiry, exploring the renewed roles English civil society can play in the coming decade through a large scale participatory listening and imagining exercise. Another exploration close to my heart has been the #OneLess campaign — seeking to rid London of single-use plastic water bottles through a series of systemic interventions that ultimately connect residents and visitors alike with the value of the ocean. I shared examples and reflections about the role design futures has played in the #OneLess campaign here.
A pattern I noticed over the years is that I’ve been constantly dancing between three centres of gravity — cities, communities and climate change. They’ve sometimes overlapped in pairs, but rarely as a triad and as the years passed, I felt a stronger urge to try to weave these threads together. I started my PhD in 2018 as a vessel to experiment with the overlaps between the three — through designing processes and learning experiences for communities of practice (practitioners, researchers and policy makers) in urban resilience. I’m still very much “looking for patterns in the rug”, but this has given me the opportunity of an integrative (and challenging) sandbox.
Although this has predominantly been a review of my “work” over the past decade, theres’s also been many grey areas, side projects, personal inquiries and evening hustles. Some of them made it out of these liminal spaces to become something bigger (such as a loose co-inquiry space called Living Change), while others became the compost from which perhaps new ideas will seed. I shared some musings here about the difficulties I sometimes have in defining what “work” is in a world still driven by titles, status and rankings.
As I start looking towards the intentions I want to bring to this coming decade, I’ll end with a quote that’s helped me stay buoyant in those moments when the uncertainty surrounding us felt like a cloak too heavy to wear:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
