Panarchistic Architecture :: Chapter #6 [6.3]

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.

The Ascent from Pyriphlegethon:

Living with Fire

We are, we are praying,

We are, we are,

Bowie, 1993.

6.3.1 Overview

Having explored how planetary events of the past and present inform the adjacent Earth Systems possible, in this section H.sapiens sapiens are folded into the foresight mix. More specifically, how the human record suggests that our sub-species may respond to the level of environmental change that both theoretical and computer modelling suggest imminent, and how this may compound the pressures exerted upon the WUI in the near and medium-term future, and thus need be accommodated for within the new paradigm proposed therefor.

6.3.2 Panta Rhei: Wildland Urban Interface Forecasts to 2100 and beyond

“The big name contractors all fell out with one another, the lawyers presumably got very rich, and the nations, Genesis tell us, scattered unto the ends of the Earth... so much for the world’s first bid at technofix”. McIntosh, 2008.

It’s a tale, or rather a power struggle narrative, [at least] as old as [anthropogenically- recorded] time: prophet warns humanity to curtail its environmentally and socially wayward conduct; humanity ignores said prophet, thus elicits the wrath of all- powerful forces that unleash a series of punishments, of which the spatiotemporal dimensions are eschatological: marking the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Scribed in Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets circa. 5tya, the oldest recorded incarnations thereof, including The Flood, Gilgamesh, and the myth to which the origin of ‘Pandora’ is attributed [129], the Epic of Creation (Dalley, 2008), emerged from an “inherently unpredictable natural world” (Leick, 2002, p.xviii). But, not merely in myth has global environmental change catalysed the destruction and the creation of civilisations, and of that which has emerged therefrom. The archaeological record evidences that, from the moment of their conception in the mythically- augmented [130] southern Mesopotamian city of Eridu, which founded in prehistory led the Ur-ban Revolution of the Uruk Period [circa. 6tya] cities have risen and fallen with tides and temperatures. Civilisation having developed during “a fortuitous lull following the end of a post-glacial storm” (McGuire, 2013, p.11), once again finds itself facing an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. Urbanisation proceeding apace from the 1700s, by 2000, more than 50% of the terrestrial biosphere constituted not biome, but “anthrome” [agricultural and urbanised land] (Bistinas et al, 2013, p.2), and if the projections of some are correct, that figure will rise as the century unfolds.

Currently, just under 2m Californian households are at “high or extreme risk” from wildfires (Gardner, 2014). A study by Mann et al (2013) predicts that by 2050 this sum will have risen by 50%, as a further 12m wildland acres join the exurban land classes. However, in the still inherently unpredictable world that humanity inhabits, the figure could be yet greater than 3m.

Climate change may make manifest the largest diaspora in all human history, as not millions, but hundreds of millions of people migrate en masse [131] in response to rising seas, desertification and land-degradation more generally, and as resultant conflicts ensue (Rigaud et al, 2018; Adger et al, 2014; Confine, 2014; Kimura, 2010; Brown, 2008; Stern et al, 2006). Worldwide, one person per second was displaced by conflict, violence or disasters during 2016, of which 24.2 million fled floods, storms, wildfires, and severe weather events (IDMC, 2018). While, of the sum thereof, just 1.1m were U.S. residents (Ibid), given the bandwidth of climate trajectories and environmental impacts as may result therefrom, here through 2100, both internal and inward migration, legal and otherwise, may rise sharply. Bringing perspective thereto, analysis by Geisler and Currens (2017), estimate that 1/5 people will be climate refugees by 2100. The direction of travel inland as coastal regions become submerged by rising seas and storm surges, the scale of movement may be so great as for military strategists to consider U.S. national and international security at threat (Carrington, 2016). Amongst others, the World Bank considers humanity so “badly prepared” to deal with the scale and speed of the changes as may occur as to place the global economy at risk (Elliot, 2016), the conclusion thereof echoing that which peers have privately expressed since the early 2000s.

Nationally, should humanity exceed the expectations of some, and limit climate change to a mean surface temperature [MST] increase of <2°C, swathes of the U.S. mainland would, nonetheless, become submerged by the resultant sea level rise. Hauer et al (2016) estimate that 13.1>m will be forced inland by 2100, the magnitude thereof mirrored in several independent studies. For example, real estate group Zillow predict by 2100 36 U.S cities will have lost their entire housing stock to rising seas, and a further 300 will have lost “at least” 50% (Rao, 2016). Zillow estimated the combined [current] value thereof at $882b, of which California’s share is $49.2b, which translates to approaching 42.5t properties. The state’s topography makes evident that Los Angeles and San Francisco, both of which were largely built on wetlands, could be all but lost to the sea, and not least whereupon the climate transitions beyond the parameters of the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period and to they of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum [+5-6°C on present-day MST], which Bill Mcguire posits “perfectly possible” towards the latter half of the century (2013, p. 47). However, not merely may homes and businesses be wiped off the map, but also beaches and other interstitial landscape features that provide protection against coastal erosion. Not raining, but ‘pouring’, as coastlines become more vulnerable to storm surges, warmer atmospheric temperatures could result in storms producing 70%> precipitation (Prein et al, 2017). In California, the event thereof would result in more flash floods, landslides, and debris flows. As discussed earlier, calcium carbonate sand supplies now fast dwindling, here-out not merely will the economics, but logistics of land reclamation be ‘challenging’, to say the least.

But, the above constitutes not the worst of all possible scenarios. Environmental terrorism is at least as old as civilisation, with accounts strewn throughout the history books, such for example as when, led by William of Orange, Low Countries rebels used flooding in their fight against the Spanish during the Eighty Years War. While, within recorded history, water has been the primary weapon of environmental warfare [i.e. redirection of rivers and destruction of dams by means of cutting off urban water supplies], fire not merely comes a close second, but is hypothesised to be the foremost ancient means by which humans have weaponised the landscape. Today, vast tracts of South Asia are burning at the behest of both legal and illegal organisations by means of removing indigenous peoples of the region. However, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that, within decades, such ancient, unprincipled, yet effective measures reoccur in the Global North.

Several fire ecologists have advocated against urban sprawl (Pyne, 2008; Moritz et al, 2014; Scott et al, 2014), but, while the ecological and wider environmental case therefor is robust, whereupon caught between lands subjected to incineration at one end, and inundation the other, one can assume not that migratory peoples will settle where policy, let alone scientific studies advocate: logistics not laws guide the footsteps of peoples fleeing from immediate danger. Bowman (2017, online), amongst others, has expressed there an urgent need to fireproof “vulnerable cities”. But, as discussed earlier, the mineral materials that facilitate the act thereof [i.e. stone and cement] present not insignificant problems in and of themselves [i.e. supply shortages, high C02 emissions upon extraction, processing, distribution, and building, together with landscape erosion at point of source]. All the while, headlines of the ilk of “The National Forests of the Future Need to Be in Cities” (Wilkinson, 2018) keep rolling on in.

Torrent, storm, and flood [132] forecast to once again ‘come on’ as the metaphorical Ea speaks, humanity is yet again, noisily, debating how many storehouses will be depleted and households left upon a catastrophe’s passing, as it envisages another urban revolution [Fig. 68].

Fragment from ‘Highline to the Hills’ [133]: speculative fiction

The city had looked every bit as apocalyptical as in the scenes of the Hollywood blockbusters of old. But, that was just the beginning. Next came the several storm surges, “perfect storm” surges. Millions had moved inland and upward, to the high ground. Yet, for others the prospect of cohabiting with the now frequent infernos that engulfed California’s chaparral and woodlands was just too daunting. In a world of elemental extremes, while some lived with fire, others lived a life semiaquatic.

6.3.3 Psychological [Wildland Urban Interface] Types

“The Promethean defiance of the accepted gods is personified in the figure of the medieval magician. The magician has preserved in himself a trace of primitive paganism; he possesses a nature that is still unaffected by the Christian dichotomy”. Jung, 2017.

Worldviews, therein perceptions of the causations and remedies to societal and environmental problems vary greatly from one psychological type to another (Jung, 2017). Stripping Jungian theory to its foremost tenants, persons align to one of four primary psychological dispositions, or hybrids thereof, predominantly perceiving of their environment and its workings through either sensing or feeling, thinking or intuition, their lens either largely inward [introverted] or outward [extroverted] facing (Ibid). The matter thereof has profound influence on human decision-making, and especially as relates to matters as are remote in space and/or time, thus require abstract thinking. Notable authors that have explored the consequences to societal development include Alvin Toffler who, as had Jung before him, concluded there to be four primary psychological variants: Denier, Specialist, Reversionist, and Super-simplifier, which at the societal-level manifest a perpetual pushmi-pullyu effect in which Specialist and Super-simplifier embrace change, and Denier and Reversionist reject it (Toffler, 1970). Upon examining behavioral dynamics and their relation to societal development, including but not limited to the implications thereof to the environment, Virginia Postrel (1998) drew similar conclusions to Jung and Toffler, postulating persons align to a culture of dynamism or stasis, which in turn divided into subsets. However, recognizing that a book can be judged not always by its cover, Postrel observed that one of the two variants of the stasis personality-type, the Technocrat, perceives of the self as building ‘the future’, but in the pursuit thereof perceives it possible to exert such control over the environment as to mitigate unwanted environmental and other scenarios. One finds this narrative repeated time and again in the propositions of innumerable technologists, architects, planners, policymakers, and others of whom the opinions influence both the legal and financial frameworks that underpin regional, national, and global development.

Within the domain of WUI planning and policymaking, psychology and its influence on citizen behaviour prior, during, and post-fire, is a field of growing influence. While the authors applied not the theoretical lens of Jung, Toffler, or Postrel to their research, several recent papers make evident that, both within and beyond the WUI, citizenry perceptions of the risks that are presented by wildfires vary greatly. Theories that relate psychology to risk perception and response thereto include Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Aizen, 1991). The former asserts that perception of risk in combination with a sense of capacity to mitigate that risk are “necessary for action to take place” (Brenkert-Smith et al, 2012). Whereas, while the latter likewise links risk-response with perception, the response is tied to subjective norms, therein governed by a sense of what is perceived to be appropriate behaviour. Within the WUI, studies suggest psychology to have a greater bearing on wildfire risk perception and response than personal and situational circumstances (Toman et al 2012). Concurring, Champ, Donovan, and Barth found that WUI “residents understood and responded differently to the same information, making risk perception as much a function of social and cultural factors as biophysical vulnerabilities” (2013, p833). Their research also found that, regardless of their psychological and demographic profile, residents usually under-estimate to risk wildfire presents to their homes (Ibid, p.835).

Echoing Toffler and Postrel’s 20th century postulations, a study by Pavelgio et al found a correlation between a higher capacity “to perceive of change or risk [within the WUI], evaluate potential impacts or opportunities” as may reside therein, and “adapt their functioning” by means of minimizing “adverse outcomes” (2015b, p.301) with “higher adaptive capacity” more generally. Further factors that have been found to influence WUI citizen behaviour prior, during, and post-fire include age and gender (Brenkert-Smith et al, 2012); place-based knowledge [i.e. awareness of fire-ecology] (Paveglio et al, 2015b; T oman et al, 2012; Jakes et al, 2007); income-level [>$100,000 positively correlated with increased risk-mitigation measures] (Champ, Donovan, and Barth, 2013); and, in respect of fire risk mitigation, the extent to which they value “privacy, perceived naturalness, shading, providing wildlife habitat, and potential aesthetic impacts” (Toman et al, 2012, p.10).

Thus, when exploring the architectural, landscaping, planning, and policy potentialities for the WUI, imperative is the need to recognize its heterogeneity extends beyond ecologies, topographies, geologies, and weather, and to the psychologies, and in turn personalities of the people to whom it is home.

**6.3.4 Three Little Pigs and a Big Bad Wolf: Purging Pyrophobia**

“Sometimes “catastrophe” still seems to live up to its original meaning as a dramatic plot device in a Greek tragedy, as though this world is magical realist fiction”. Muir-Wood, 2016.

While once upon a not long-ago time, as discussed earlier, Western citizenry celebrated Promethean potentialities, of decades late, within some press circles, fire within its native wildland has been a source of nigh persistent condemnation and critique. A legacy born of those that, in the land-policy sense, leapt before looking, thus sought to eradicate phenomenon about which they were ecologically illiterate, no matter the enormity of recent advancements in scientific understanding of fire and its ecology, the popular media still largely lags in its grasp thereof, thus perpetuates scientifically unsound and inappropriate approaches to addressing fire’s presence in ever-more residentially populated wild and semi-wild lands. Although persisting in print since the late 1800s, with arrival of the television age, thereon the Internet, and all as rests thereupon, the problem has propagated to become a veritable inferno of public misinformation.

The foremost example as illustrates the issues as can arise from the above is that of the media coverage that surrounded the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fire complex, which Jensen and McPherson described as, “emotional, hyperbolic, and unrelenting”, using inappropriately alarming rhetoric, and littered with “outright disinformation” (2008, p.12), theirs being a position that aligns to that of several other authors (National Park Service, 2016; Henry, 2015; Smith, n.d, 1992; Kilgore, 2007). But, regardless of the inaccuracies as occurred, there remain they with lessons yet to learn. Hence, now, as then, not uncommon is press and media advocacy of fire suppression measures which, given the broader environmental context of wildland fires, would have limited capacity to make any difference to the outcome of fire crews’ operations, beyond putting more lives at risk, and raising already fast rising costs.

Put succinctly, a “media deluge” (Jensen and McPherson, 2008, p.3) of poorly researched press and media coverage of wildfires “can [adversely] colour social perception of fire outcomes” (Spies et al, 2014, p.2), and particularly whereupon the public are presented with gross-over simplifications of fire’s behaviour; climatological and ecological context; and humanity’s interface therewith. As in communications more generally, language reinforces ideas, which in mainstream press and media coverage of wildfires tends be that of their presence bringing forth ‘catastrophe’ in the absence of ‘opportunity’ (Kilgore, 2007). In contrast to the saying, ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping’, communications have consequences, which within the domain of wildfire becomes manifest in policy and budgetary decisions of the foremost profound implications to environment and society.

However, the press and media alone carry not the [public misinformation] can. For example, in 2016 Ogilvy and Mather’s Madrid office announced a 3G-connected ‘birdhouse’ that, embedded with solar-powered sensors, was ‘designed’ to act as “a smoke alarm” which could alert firefighters to “remote” wildfires that “might not be noticed immediately”, thus spread “more quickly” (Peters, 2016, online). Although promoted as in ‘co-existence’ with “its environment in a natural way” the prototype product was the antithesis thereof, and to the extent that, an archetypal technocratic proposition, it embraced not biological technology, let alone thinking, but one in the same kind as has sparked several fires [134]. Upon reading that its creators hoped to “bring the birdhouse to other parts of the world” (Ibid), the impression is that their intent is not nested in enhancing the integrity of ecological systems near and far, but of making a profit of a problem born of the unintended consequences of, amongst things, technology.

6.3.5 Book Burning: Arming Against the Arsonists of Alexandria

“In 2004 I learned that NASA press releases related to global warming were sent to the White House, where they were edited to appear less serious or discarded entirely” Hansen, 2011.

The acquisition of knowledge, scientific and otherwise, is a stochastic process, which operating as an open, not closed system, is greatly influenced by politics, and by vested interests more generally. Knowledge, as the cliché goes, is power, more specifically, the power to undermine all as has been built on false premise. Historically, be they libraries, temples, or palaces, book burning involved the incineration of buildings and their contents. However, in this, the digital age, not physical, but virtual documents and elements thereof, such for example as scientific terminology as relates to phenomena including, but not limited to anthropogenic climate change, are being torched.

As relates to the scientific disciplines that underpin the fundamental tenants of this thesis, former NASA chief scientist Dr. James Hansen was one of the first individuals to fire-up a warning flare as altered others to the systemic censoring of scientific publications and communications as relate thereto (2011). However, in subsequent years, be it the banning of use of scientific terminology, such as ‘science-based’ (Tsipursky, 2017), or the removal of numerous Earth Systems studies from the public domain (Greenfield, 2018; Diep, 2018; UCS, 2017), scientific censorship has scaled to heights that go far and beyond that of a decade ago.

Compounding the issue, censorship is but one of several significant challenges to U.S. federal science agencies, which, be it at the behest of Trump’s administration or Congress “act in ways that sideline science, favour private over public interests, or threaten the role that facts, evidence, and science play in our democracy” (Rest and Rosenberg, 2018, p.18). An example of how political agency has undermined efforts to disseminate new scientific knowledge at the interface of climate and wildfire, and the possible implications thereof to future generations, resides in several federal scientists, including a fire ecologist, being denied travel to the Fire Congress (Patterson, 2017), therein the ability to subject their research to both the formal, and informal peer review as occurs at meetings of its ilk.

However, now, as in centuries past, they at the helm of scientific research and innovation are resourceful in their efforts to advance expertise within and beyond their fields. Hence, metaphorical fire is meeting with fire, of which examples include the 20,000 and rising membership of the Union of Concerned Scientists; flagship universities, including University of California, Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, converging their intellectual and equipment recourses in an effect to create the California Climate Science and Solutions Institute; and researchers self-organising worldwide to save federally-funded climate and other Earth Systems publications to private servers and hard drives (Harmon, 2017).

Aside from a sense of urgency to interrogate the federally funded publications from which data has been extrapolated during this research endeavour, the events as referenced above have made evident that the premise of scientific credibility alone will decide not Wildland Urban Interface policymaking outcomes. Furthermore, they illustrate that, as in fire regimes, any ‘pyric transition’ (Pyne, 2001), as occurs at the level of policy, therein of buildings, will be a process of starts, stops, and not infrequent politically motivated u-turns.

6.3.6 Pot Plants on Plinths and Other Acts of Ecological Reductionism

“Our reasons for valuing nature in cities needs to move beyond the “selfie” view that puts a bit of greenery in the frame of urban portraiture.” Downton, 2018.

No matter the quantity thereof, ecologically, plants that reside in pots atop balconies on the exterior of glass, steel, and/or concrete tower blocks amount not to ‘forests’, ‘urban’ or otherwise, for forests constitute not mere collections of individual plant specimens, but highly connected networks of specimen populations. Nonetheless, glorified pot plant assemblages, as exemplified by Boeri Studio’s Bosco Verticale [Fig. 69] (Stefano Boeri Achitetti, 2018a) are awash in the industry press and media.

Acts of “overly simplistic” ecological reductionism (Davies and Doick, 2017), though promoted as “biological” habitats (Frearson, 2014), in not one, but several ways, the ilk of Bosco Verticale reduce biota to baubles. Within forests of all variants, different ecological functions typically operate at different strata [ground, surface, or canopy], wherein, species are both physiologically and behaviourally adapted to particular spatial relations both between their populous, and other variables, both biotic and abiotic. Shift a specimen’s relation to those variables and its capacity to maintain processes such as reproduction, dispersal, and symbiosis, will likewise shift. As relates to natural hazards, such as drought, heatwaves, disease, and storms, the exchange of information and nutrients across root and mycorrhizal networks that extend across the forest floor is fundamental to resilience, therein in removing species from the horizontal to the vertical plane one increases their exposure to these, and other environmental hazards. However, absence of ecological integrity is, arguably, the lesser of the failings inherent in proposals which, like Bosco Verticale, suggest not notion that, carbon-based, in and of the right conditions [i.e. a dry storm] their baubles are both conductive and flammable.

What evidence is there to suggest that Bosco Verticale and its vertical forest-kind may present a fire risk? In 2017 a casually discarded cigarette ignited a potted plant, which then ignited the balcony where it was placed, from which fire spread inwards and upwards, incinerating three floors, and the apartments therein in the process (Giordano, 2017). As evident from earlier chapters, that carbon-based materials are combustible is indisputable. Likewise, that ignition sources come in many and varied sources is not a matter of dispute, but of fact. Consequently, whereupon flora is being placed in abundance on building exteriors, reasonable is the speculation that, somewhere, sometime, be the ignition source an act of arson, accidental, an electrical discharge that heats the atmosphere to c. 20,000°C [lightning], or other, that fire will be no stranger to vertical forests is not so much a matter of speculation as probability.

Of course, fire is by no means the only threat posed by vertical urban forests. Indeed, some risks, such as that of a tree, or number thereof, toppling during a storm is yet more accentuated whereupon those trees are upon tower blocks than within forests of the none-anthropogenic variant. But, in the former instance [i.e. a tree falling from several floors high] the risk of injury to both people and property is many times greater than the latter, the extent thereof calculable using Newton’s Second and Third Laws. Yet, as architecture critic Mark Minkjan has pointed out, even the ilk of MVRDV have produced vertical forest proposals as are so absent of attention to the very particular risks posed thereby as to be devoid of balustrades upon balconies containing trees, shrubs, and assorted other foliage (Minkjan, 2016). “Is architecture today anything more than make-up for real estate projects” Minkjan asked, adding, “Renderings hide the ugly sides of architecture and urban development, and the media buy it”. However, the media aren’t alone.

Awards to so-called ‘urban forests’ proliferate (Stathaki, 2017). Indeed, Bosco Verticale was celebrated by the RIBA no less. Beyond the architectural and into the wider built environment realm, oblivion to the fact that, as dendrologists from Evelyn onwards (1659) have recognised (Berg, 2016; Pyne, 2012), whether live or dead, in forests wild or cultivated, wood is flammable, is, again, rife. So wide-spread is use of imagery of vertical forests in social and other media as suggests some think them the poster-child of urban sustainability. Some claims go yet further still. Umpteen are they that be it in the print or pixels are hailing the scaling of Boeri’s tree-clad balconies from tower block to city as a means of mitigating climate change. According to the studio, whereupon their proposal for “the first Chinese Forest City” becomes a reality, some “10,000 tons of CO2” will be “absorbed” (Stefano Boeri Achitetti, 2018b). As discussed earlier, until the migration to mineral-based building fabrication, from the cities of the Zhou dynasty to the “Flowers [fires] of Edo” [Tokyo] and beyond, fires were as, if not more frequent in the cities of the East as West. Thus, in conjunction with climatological and hydrological trajectories [i.e. longer fire-seasons, less water availability], history suggests that if Boeri and his treescaper-hugging peers have their professional way, fires of the scale of they of Stuart London will ensue.

However, not merely are practitioners of architecture and the built environment proliferating concepts that evidence scant understanding of fire and its dangers. For example, whereupon a student project proposed to turn the “world’s largest trees” [they being fire-adapted sequoias] into “skyscrapers”, their aim to facilitate humanity’s “coexistence” with “nature” by ‘enabling’ said flora to “continue standing” [i.e. attempt to inflict permanency on a species of which the survival is dependent on temporality] (McKnight, 2017), it occurred not to the student, let alone the editorial team of Dezeen that the project, which was suggested for a Sierra Nevadan site, might pose a fire risk, let alone there need to address that risk within the proposal. Where some see ‘biomorphism’ another sees ‘bio-illiteracy’. Or, as Minkjan suggested, “green-wash” (2016). Arguably, architects, planners, and policymakers need recognise the fire risk inherent in vertical forests, and do so before, not after the advent of a case study, and having done so, reconsider the risks and opportunities of urban forests on the horizontal plane, like that depicted by Michael Sorkin [Fig. 70].

6.3.7 Summary

“few tackle the difficult land-use issue of where and how humans choose to build their communities in the first place. The prospect of widely increasing fire activity with climate change intensifies the need of a new path forward”. Moritz et al, 2014.

In theory, the future could be ‘engineered’. In practice, both Earth and human systems align not to linear trajectories as can be determined, let alone ‘managed’ down to the last detail. Not merely in mythological and other literary works has the viability of the ‘technofix’ been challenged, but in innumerable natural hazard scenarios of past and present. Nonetheless, Earth and human systems are creatures of relative habit, thus in looking to the past we find indications of possible futures. Whether in relation to wildfire, or any other genre of event as recurs within predictable spatial, temporal, and in the instance of Earth systems, biochemical and temperature ranges, cyclicality is a consequence of fundamental cause and effect mechanisms, thus whereupon we understand those mechanisms, though we may know not the specifics of that which may occur in consequence, we know, and with reasonable assurance, of the range of possibilities as relate thereto [Fig. 71].

Although the origins of the belief systems of Mesopotamian peoples predate ‘history’, their cities – the first cities – were built upon the emergence of a climate hospitable to farming, therein to permanence of place: to settlement. As a planetary-scale regime shift triggered an urban revolution then, whereupon theoretical and climate models are correct, even in such instance as MST is limited to <+2°C the predominant architectural and urban design paradigm of present would be not fit for future purpose. However, should MST exceed the sum thereof and fall into the range of the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum not merely would that which humanity builds need be re-evaluated, but attachment to place, as wildfires and the wider folio of natural hazards, including but not limited to extremes of heat, cold, wind, and water, and the secondary impacts thereof [i.e. vector and water borne diseases] displace people, their possessions, pets, and livestock.

All the while, humans’ psychological make-up suggests that debates will continue to rage as to whether our collective actions are propagating planetary pandemonium, and even in such instance as parties agree thereon there will be not sustained consensus on any remedy thereto, which, particularly in an age when there are they with all the biologically-modifying gear, but scant ecological idea could yet further perpetuate the problems we face. But, history illuminates not problems alone. In the words of a recent UNEP report, “Living cultural heritage is a vital resource for climate adaption” (2016, p.24).

Sourced remotely not locally, built ‘to last’ not ‘evolve’, and largely at odds with abiotic and biotic systems, the predominant architectural and urban design paradigm of both the WUI and wider world present is the antithesis of its antecedents. However, going forward, humanity’s choices are restricted to neither the modus of present nor past, for we have both the scientific and technical capacity to craft another architectural ‘way’.

>Continue to Chapter 6 [part IV] here.

Footnotes

[129] In the Epic of Creation the mother goddess ‘Mami’ and god of water, wisdom, and creation, ‘Enki’ [Ea in Akkadian], craft a mortals from clay and blood, their purpose to undertake hard labour for the gods.

[130] In reference to the fact that in Mesopotamian myth the archetypal city, Eridu, was born of sacred origin.

[131] Both recent and historic reports by organisations including the World Bank, IPCC, Stern Review, and Christian Aid anticipate in the region of 140m – 250m migrants by 2050, the figure thereof rising towards the latter end of the century.

[132] In reference to v, Tablet II of the Mesopotamian myth Atrahasis III.

[133] A climate fiction novella set late 21st century, from author’s work-in-progress ‘Storms Anthology’, which received an Honourable mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards.

[134] In reference to several instances of fire having been ignited by solar panels.