Super Wicked

PG11 continue to explore the philosophical and practical overlaps between land use and its associated architectures, technologies, infrastructures, and ecologies in both spatial and conceptual dimensions.

These complexities and relationships are exemplified by the term ‘Wicked Problems’ which describes issues that lack clarity in both their aims and solutions, and which are inherently complex, multifaceted and entangled. The ‘Super-Wicked’ dilemmas of climate change present problems nested within problems as well as interactions between natural, designed and social systems. Acting on climate change consequences, characterized by high stakes, limited time frames, and moving targets, means continually adapting to their changing nature.

Flows of materials and energy intricately link architecture with both the causes of climate change and its potential remedies. This relationship generates some startling statistics—buildings consume 36% of the world’s energy and cement production alone is responsible for 8% of global emissions. Both the design of buildings and the planning of cities needs to be reimagined, however, rethinking what and why we build, is a more revolutionary task.

To examine the complex relationships between human lives and natural environments our studies are based on the Thames Gateway. This area has never managed to achieve the regeneration ambitions harboured by successive governments. Students were challenged to propose new urban and landscape environments that are a dynamic outcome of the interplay of cultural systems and this complex territory, which is made even more so by the state of environmental change and an uncertain future.

We asked: “How can the estuarian exurbs connect the past and present with the most pressing issues of tomorrow?” and “How can the interaction of social, ecological and commercial forces respond to the needs of the environment?”

We travelled to Barcelona where climate stress is having obvious impacts. Practice visits to Flores i Prats and their Sala Beckett restoration project, and Ricardo Bofill’s office educated and motivated students to make design choices that extend beyond ‘drawing board radicalism’ and relate their work to a global context of super-wicked circularities, uncertainties and conflicts which are never solved, but “at best they are only re-solved—over and over again.”

4th Year Students: Xintong Chen, William Hodges, Jane Li, Freya Parkinson, Cyrus Shek, Sarah Nolan
5th Year Students: Henry Aldridge, Bianca Andreea Blanari, Rio Burrage, Jiawei Fan, Maddie Rutherford-Browne, Jennifer Oguguo, Sharon Tam, Lorena Ziyue Yan, Jacqueline Zhi Qian Yu