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Where the term ‘global warming’ focuses on the symptoms of a planetary ecological crisis, ‘climate emergency’ frames the crisis temporally, underlining the imminence of devastation. Between the speed of collapsing ecosystems, the paralysing ‘flow state’ of capitalist societies and the impasse that citizens experience on an individual level, the global and local perceptions of temporality have never been so contradictory or fraught.
Around the world, apparently idle land and leftover spaces have become places of resistance as occupiers self-organise through gardening, permaculture, foraging and other rituals of collective cultivation. Such activities create and reinforce interdependencies between ecological cycles and local communities. In their most radical manifestations these cultivate regenerative practices that prioritise legacy over progress and intergenerational consciousness over self-fulfilment.
With the reflection that ‘the gardener digs in another time’, filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman, who produced art on the margins of a society facing the fast disappearance of commons, refers to the deeper timescales with which a constant gardener engages: those that might go beyond immediate needs and serve those who would eventually inherit the earth. This year Studio 2C investigated how such practices can locally generate communal solidarity and speculated on how collectively they posit an alternative model of ‘co-agency in which the human and the environment are fostered through a fundamental interdependence in life.’
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) give space and form to domestic collectivism within a city whose housing market is mostly ruled and shaped by financial interest. In doing so, these places pose alternatives to the status quo of real estate speculation. Our studio invites students to speculate alternative design frameworks and modes of collaboration between architects and local associations based on the principles set out by CLTs.
These frameworks would moreover be reconsidered as projects far beyond ‘housing’ in the conventional sense, as they address precarious living conditions within Greater London and inspire architects to rethink their practice. In this sense, the studio focused on schemes that include playgrounds, allotments, parks, forests, libraries, workshops and day care centres, among others.