I am writing this text from my hotel room in Bombay, the penultimate stop on a four-week research visit through India—with intermittent stations in large cities such as Chennai, Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi, as well as smaller places such as Calicut and rural areas—supported by the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (IGCS). As an extension of the research project 'Architecture is Climate', which explored architecture and the discipline's inextricable (yet often ignored) entanglement with climate, I am visiting and talking to people (in private practice and public office, NGOs, educational institutions, activists) who are addressing climate breakdown by situating spatial concerns in a broad field beyond the technocratic, solutionist approaches that dominate current architectural and engineering approaches to climate; integrating sustainability principles into formal planning frameworks; building bottom-up networks; and understanding architectural practice as a means of bridging policy, community action and climate concerns through alternative forms of organisation and collaboration. What I am finding are approaches that push through the barriers of the purportedly impossible in order to find what is possible, incredible practices of resourcefulness, ways of doing that think through soil, see expertise everywhere, challenge relations of property and rights to air, water and land. I am looking forward to the continuation of these conversations over the next year(s).
Season's Greetings
Tatjana
