Summary: Panthology

[Panarchistic Anthology]

“Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

Waldo Emerson, 2008

Seeding near-future potentialities in wildland urban interface resilience to wildfire, the contents of this chapter have drawn on recent and real-time developments in information acquisition and processing at multiple spatial scales, and in bio- fabrication and materials science more generally, to explore how the Panarchistic architectural concept may migrate to reality. The speed of innovation in bio-sensing, actuating, analysis, networking, and storage moving several times faster than that of policymaking, and of codification of building, and other civic codes, not merely in the physical environment, but in law resides an urgent need for reconciliation.

The disjunct between past, present and possible near-future wildland-urban-interface, and indeed urban fire realities is such as necessitates the use of wide-ranging aids to help both architecture and planning researchers and practitioners, and those with the most direct interest of all, residents of fire-prone regions, recognise both the risks and opportunities as may lay ahead. Though, historically, academic publications have relied largely, if not exclusively, on statistics, diagrams, tables, and other quantitative methods of visualising potentialities both within and beyond the wildland urban interface, as evidenced in the speculative triptych and flash fiction trilogy, when conveying how and why scenarios may impact upon the lives of individuals, and in turn of families, friends, colleagues, and peers, the arts, in this instance the writing arts, can help convey that which the sciences cannot.

Having so far drawn on several forecasting, foresight, fictional futures, and post normal science methods, in the next chapter speculative design and design fiction will be simultaneously engaged to produce the ‘Panarchic Codex’: it being a prototype of which the intent is to propagate architectural and urban realities which are qualitatively closer to fire-adapted ecological systems than the wildland urban interface, intermix, and occluded anthropogenic present.

>Continue to Chapter 8 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.