Environments by Design

Abstract

As the complexity and problems of the world proliferate so does the making of things that matter. As architects, designers and urbanists have become more sought after than ever and the decisions related to creation and making need to be increasingly explicit in order to produce meaningful and healthy products, experiences, urban spaces, places, and buildings. For the best way to invent the future is to make it. And the best way to predict the future is to create it. Post-disciplinary is becoming more and more the norm in today’s marketplace. Post-disciplinary means our voices are disparate and unique incorporating multiples and futures, speculations and actualities, accounting for the varied people, places, and settings we have come from and will become.

What is the future of practice that makes disciplinary boundaries archaic? A post-disciplinary approach envisions the future of cities: urban environments, spaces, and the public realm by probing cities and how they evolve and function. Can we shape the future of the city by thinking and making things in more critical ways? What does your future look like, the city you move in, the environments you interact with? What is a citizen centered public realm that brings you outside onto the street, into a community? 

Besides the health of the city one also has to consider the health of the planet, the connection between the development of urban spaces, the distributed proximities and networks that link major urban cities with their surrounding suburbs and rural locales. All development must become healthier and safer because of the fragility of the planet, and the delicate nature of man’s relationship to it; a relationship that has been further exposed to be precarious and fraught with tension by the current COVID-19 epidemic. How can we learn from the past and present in order to envision the future, to speculate and develop a post-disciplinary situation that accentuates and activates possible futures. 

In order for real change to occur, what will be the processes and procedures that need to be acted upon and initiated by designers, architects, and urbanists? How will we begin to reshape the current world, it’s ecology and the environments connected to it, so that there will be an actualization of the potential for meaningful and healthy products, experiences, urban spaces, places, and buildings to truly initiate and promote novel approaches and procedures for the betterment and welfare of the planet and the people who inhabit it. What will the new sustainability look like, the post-disciplinary approach that pushes on the borders and boundaries of preconceived notions of what can be accomplished through the various guises of the built environment.