5.1.10 An Architecture for all Ages: Evolution meets Cyclic Theories

“Fire x climate change x landcover change can flip the Earth system into something very difficult for us to adapt to: fire accelerates changes via non- linearities and feedbacks creating chaotic conditions that we can’t track” Bowman, 2018, personal communication.

Upon triangulating past, present, and possible future cases studies, the systemic nature of not merely cities, but of the wider socio-ecological circumstances in which they reside becomes evident. When we compare and contrast events which, be it spatially, temporally, and/or disciplinary, are commonly perceived as ‘separate’, we find, as above, that, at the level of the Earth Sciences, be it in regard of their biochemistry and/or behaviour, many bare similarities. Thus, when thinking to ‘the future’ we need also think to the past, and to the patterns and the cycles as may be inherent therein.

On the surface, floral and faunal evolution may appear to involve the exponential expansion of physiological and behavioural traits: a one-way evolutionary street. However, as discussed earlier, as the life sciences have themselves ‘evolved’, the number of system agents under examination have expanded: one became two, two became three, and so on. Whereas once organisms were studied in isolation, thereon in symbiotic pairs, today they are studied as [eco]systems, Within the ecological sciences the cyclic nature of change is broadly, though not universally acknowledged, be that in regard of local disturbance (Wright and Heinselman, 1973; Holling, 1973), or planetary-scale regime shifts. Migrating the relevance thereof to the events under interrogation, starting with the Great Fire, the city-scale conflagration impacted not solely on London’s Hominin residents. A clue to the plague’s causation resides in its seasonality: outbreaks peaked in autumn (Cummins et al, 2016). However, the pandemic’s cyclicality extended beyond the annual. While the popular media tends focus on the Black Death [1348] and the Great Plague [1665 – 1666], in the interim period pandemic engulfed London on no less than forty occasions, and with a frequency of approx. every 20-30 years (Museum of London, 2017). During the latter period, plague recurring intermittently from 1560 to 1665, mortality elevated to between 5-6x its usual rate, the exception thereto in the more affluent parishes, where infection declined over time (Cummins et al, 2016). However, the passing of the Great Fire coincides with the apparent purging of the plague. But, the debate remains open as to whether the causation can be attributed to the fire, and if so, exclusively or in concert with other factors. Manifold data suggests there a need to unravel the interplay between the abiotic and biotic agents as were to hand.

Plague outbreaks, and those of pandemics more generally, couple with local and/or global environmental shifts. For example, land-use change has been identified as “a driver of emerging infectious disease... most frequently where natural landscapes have been removed or replaced with agriculture, plantations, livestock or urban development” (McFarlane et al, 2013, p.2699), variants thereof including vector- borne and zoonotic, amongst others. In the case of zoonoses [121] [i.e. plague] shifts in the density and/or populous of host species, vectors and pathogens play a significant role. In and of itself, both within and beyond the case study regions, this coupling is significant both with respect to the scale and the type of land-use change. In changing the materiality of the built environment, and the relationship therewith of floral and faunal species and assemblages thereof, humanity will shift disease vectors, such as the proximity of disease carrying species.

However, regardless of whatsoever actions architects, planners, and other built environment professionals may take, the historical record speaks to there being pandemic drivers as are far beyond human control. In the instance of the bubonic plague, we find references as allude thereto in ancient texts of which the origin is hypothesized as dating to pre-history. The most well-known example is found in Exodus, “Egyptians and even their animals developed painful boils all over their bodies” (British Library, 2017, online), the latter a symptom of infection by the Yersinia pestis, which is a bacterium indigenous to the rodent populations of Africa and Asia. Hypothesised to have impacted on Hominin species from H. erectus onwards (Karlen, 1995), the first human host may have been an early hunter that consumed infected prey. The first recorded outbreak [Justinian Plague, 542-750AD] has been posited a consequence of the following chain of environmental events: The anomalous weather event of 535-536AD, which bore the signature of a volcanic winter, resulted in a drought, which in turn led to a reduction in the size of the predator populous, of which the consequence was an increase in their fast-breeding prey species, including African gerbils, thus their displacement from wildland to port cities in search of food, therein contact with urban rodent species, as lack resilience to Yersinia pestis, but to which the bacterium was transmitted through vector-borne infection [fleas], as in turn migrated the bacterium from the rodent to human populous (Bilich, 2007). Within this scenario the abating of the first pandemic is attributed to the arrival of the Medieval Warm Period [950-1250] during which the predator-prey balance resumed, to then falter upon the onset of the Little Ice Age, hence the advent of the second pandemic (Ibidem). The hypothesis that plague reservoirs are “sensitive to climate fluctuations” is supported by a subsequent study (Schmid et al, 2015) that examined how both upward and downward temperature shifts have capacity to propagate pandemic through displacement of species.

Not merely within Athenian myth, but across myriad ancient and living belief systems and their affiliated rituals and practices, fire and smoke are associated with purification and the “purging of evil and sickness” (Pyne, 1997, p.301). Indigenous land-management practices of the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, both within MTC climate regions and beyond, utilize fire to increase biodiversity while simultaneously reducing populations of disease transmitting species, vectors and pathogens. As in 17th Century London, indigenous insight is imparted through a combination of pedagogy, praxis, and spoken narrative within holistic transdisciplinary constructs (Jackson, 2010). Upon the advent of European colonisation, in consequence of vested political interests in combination with environmental determinism (McFarlane et al, 2013), cultures as aspire not to controlling, but to coexisting with the biological hand that feeds, were themselves all but purged from wildlands (Pyne, 1997). But, in “trying to control nature through fire suppression” humanity has created greater “unpredictability” (Kimmerer and Lake, 2001, p.39), and not merely is respect of wildfire. As in the Pleistocene, Yersinia pestis persists, as do innumerable other pathogens which, given the confluence of events as described above, will likely sooner not later, once again come in to contact with human populations, now, and before through trade routes, and given the reliance of the Global North on food imports from the Global South, quite possibly via transportation of that favoured foodstuff of rodents, grain. Speculation yes, impossible, no.

>Continue to Chapter 5.1.11 here.

Footnotes

[121] Zoonoses are infectious diseases that spread from animals to humans.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.