6.1.9.2 Chickens and Cosmological Eggs: Critique vs. Cliché

“his [P’an-ku] body became the animistic source of the world itself”. Leeming, 2005.

A subset of human beliefs, values, and cultures, that the predominant architectural and urban design paradigm of present is being burnt to its foundations at its interface with wildlands makes physically manifest the fragility of the ideas upon which the Global North, and many of its creations are built. Although, as architects, planners, and others within the built environment community have become aware that planetary- scale changes as impact upon their professions, and on society at large are afoot, and ever more have proposed responses thereto, as highlighted by Rachel Armstrong (2013) few have authored more than superficial augmentations of the architectural schools of the relative late. As relates to interstitial spaces and to the natural hazards as are indigenous thereto, many architectural researchers and practitioners have proposed concepts in absence of understanding of the sciences, Earth Systems and otherwise, thus have understood not how, whereupon built, their proposals would fare over near, let alone medium to long time. Furthermore, they within the architecture and urban design community commonly cite ecological theories as are not merely out-dated, but by decades, the matter thereof suggesting their research looked not to the state-of-the-art ecological sciences themselves, but to historic literature as was authored at a time when Clementian ecological equilibrium was hot off the academic press.

No matter how plentiful the press and propaganda as proposes the future to be the exponential expansion of the present, empires and their architectural legacies rise, and over time, quite literally fall. If taking the Fall of Rome as one’s guide, it would be not an exaggeration to state that the closer that fall the greater the propaganda effort on the part of they as wished keep the status quo. From awards to certificates to press, and more, endorsements and honours for architectures as are devoid of the capacity to coexist within all but the most hospitable of environments abound. Yet, as illustrated above, rising insurance and other property-related losses make evident that no amount of physical and theoretical armour-plating or camouflage could make modern-era architecture fit for an Earth Systems battle. Architectural precepts birthed of ideologies as perceive of the world as a series of closed systems upon which control can be exerted and containment enforced are being confronted with both physical, and economic reality.

As architecture’s naked emperors confidently march amidst admiring crowds, all too scant is such critique as exposes the often times scientifically-obvious shortcomings of many works thereof, and all too frequent are the conceptual clichés as wipe not Platonian canvases clean. Wildfire, and fire more generally, can remain not conspicuous by its absence from architectural proposals, for fire’s presence will be increasingly felt both at the WUI and beyond, including in those places where though known not in ‘living memory’, as asserted by the charcoal record, it is native to the land, such for example as the peatlands and moorlands of Britain, they being regions that, in close proximity to many towns and cities, will witness shortened fire-return - cycles whereupon regional mean average temperatures rise. As they as authored the Vedic and Orphic Hymns realised, fire, ultimately, is a manifestation not of Earthly, but ‘heavenly’ powers, more specifically the G-type main-sequence star known as ‘The Sun’. Thus, when fighting fire one is fighting that which is powered by a solar body of decidedly deitic proportions, that being 333,000 times the mass of the Earth.

In the words Moritz et al, “Remarkably, a coupled wildfire socio-ecological system framework has yet to be adopted for the more densely developed wildland urban interface where most of the human fatalities, home losses and fire suppression expenditure occur” (2014, p.58). However, as illustrated by the contents of this thesis, attaining an understanding the phenomena of wildfire, of its behaviour within the landscape, and of the near, medium, and long-term legacy thereof necessitates knowledge of wide-ranging scientific fields, and of their relations to one another. Extending that understanding to incorporate the built environment, and to the policies and the codes as relate thereto, requires familiarity with societal-power relations at the level of communities, of regions, and of nations, and no less so than at present, it being a time when, in some instances, heads of state no less, are denying the viability of matters of scientific consensus. Put succinctly, one can understand not the “trade- offs and sacrifices” (Ibid, p.64) as need be made to balance “short and long-term risks and benefits of different development patterns” (Mann et al, 2013, p.447) whereupon one understands not the complex systems as form those patterns. The geese that lay the wildland urban interface’s golden paradigmatic eggs will have roosted in not one, but several disciplinary sheds.

>Continue to Chapter 6.1.9.3 here.

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.