Architecture and Resilience ― Interdisciplinary Dialogues

Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation, we know that our current ways of living are not resilient. Our urban infrastructures, our buildings, our economies, our ways of managing and governing are still too tightly bound to models of unrestrained free-market growth, individualism and consumerism. Research has shown that the crises arising from climate change will become increasingly frequent and increasingly severe. It is also known that the effects of climate change are not evenly distributed across places and people, and neither are the resources needed to meet these challenges. We will need specific responses in place that engage with, and emerge from, citizens ourselves.

This volume takes resilience as a transformative concept to ask where and what architecture might contribute. Bringing together cross-disciplinary perspectives from architecture, urban design, art, geography, building science and psychoanalysis, it aims to open up multiple perspectives of research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges, defining the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse.

Kim Trogal is a lecturer at the Canterbury School of Architecture, University of the Creative Arts. She completed her architectural studies at the University of Sheffield, including a PhD in Architecture (2012) for which she was awarded the RIBA LKE Ozolins Studentship. Kim was research assistant at the Sheffield School of Architecture (2012–2015), exploring issues of local social and ecological resilience, and Postdoctoral Researcher at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2014–2016). She is co-editor with Doina Petrescu of The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (2017) and co-editor with Valeria Graziano of a special issue of the journal Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organisation, called ‘Repair Matters’ (2019).

Irena Bauman is a practising architect and a founding director of Bauman Lyons Architects. She is an emeritus Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at Sheffield University School of Architecture and Director of MassBespoke R@D. Her practice and research are concerned with how architecture and architectural thinking can facilitate local communities to mitigate, adapt and become more resilient to the uncertainties that lie ahead. Her practice experiments with behaviour change needed to achieve greater social justice and a more sustainable society. She is the author of ‘How to be a Happy Architect’ in which she challenges the architectural establishment and of ‘Retrofitting Neighborhoods - Designing for Resilience’ a study of international case studies of neighborhood scale project that are paving the way towards transformative change.

Ranald Lawrence is a lecturer in environmental design at Sheffield School of Architecture. His background in architectural practice informs his teaching and research, focusing on environmental performance, energy consumption and user behaviour in the context of climate change. He has worked for several award-winning architectural practices, and taught and published on the history of environmental design, adaptive comfort theory and the implications of the use of technology in buildings. Prior to joining the University of Sheffield, Ranald lectured in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge while completing his PhD on environmental design strategies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings. His current research investigates how architects contribute to sustainable adaptation in different cultures and climates, including the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Doina Petrescu is Professor of Architecture and Design Activism at the University of Sheffield and co-founder of atelier d’architecture autogeree (aaa). Her cross-disciplinary research addresses outstanding questions in architecture and urban planning, focusing on issues of civic participation and gender and the relations between coproduction, urban commons and resilience. Her main publications include The Social (Re)Production of Architecture (2017), Learn to Act (2017), Altering Practices (2007) and Architecture and Participation (2005). She is currently working on an authored book: Architecture Otherhow: Questioning Contemporary Practice (forthcoming 2019).