Search

This paper uses ‘deep time’, as an alternative ontology to crisis management to argue for the application of a broad decolonial approach in lieu of contemporary green design practices. Methodologically, this paper substantiates it claims by utilising conventional academic ‘knowledge’ production, as represented in literature, references, and case studies, but also supports the expansion of knowledge through a deeper exploration of place, pattern, and time demonstrated by intermingling deep time principles with Indigenous spatial practices. Fearing that urban life will descend into obsolescence and irrelevance if no such knowledge systems are taken up, this paper proposes an alternative trajectory as a preventive measure, which has all been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. By exploring alternative Indigenous design ontologies, specifically in Oceania, alongside deep adaptation and deep time, this paper’s authors intend to provide an important basis for research and teaching that reinvigorates connections to Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge systems. This paper proposes that by taking up notions of deep adaptation and Indigenous epistemologies as critiques of Western notions of time, property, etc. architecture, design and planning might re-situate ideas, ranging from stewardship to maintenance, within time and placebased technologies outside of the discourse of crisis.

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in presentday urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-thanhuman beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

The question of how to show processes that are by definition time-based has been one of the more intriguing ones in the field of landscape representation. With ever-greater importance being given to values of space that can be measured, we ask if new approaches to the drawing of space are needed to unveil these measured, sometimes hidden landscapes. With this in mind, students in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Ljubljana undertaking the Visual Communication course were tasked with developing new techniques of data visualization focusing on (1) the spatial dynamics of landscapes and (2) on the multiscalarity of the representations. The paper comprises a general description and discussion of the topic, accompanied by seven sets of drawings where the two above-mentioned aspects are briefly discussed in the drawings’ captions. The drawings presented here push and question the boundaries of drawing conventions and consequently elicit uncertainty and encourage further enquiry. Exploring new drawing approaches is an important part of revealing contemporary landscapes.

Since industrialization, modern architecture has appropriated the notion of adaptation. Defined as the adjustment of a building to the environment and its users, architectural adaptation has been mainly carried out via a narrow technological approach. Thus, digitalization has emerged as the latest ‘smart’ update. The limits of technological adaptation become especially evident with architecture in aiming to solve an ecological and social crisis on both a global and local level. In this paper, we argue for reconceptualizing adaptivity in architecture to (re)integrate processual, social, and aesthetic dimensions. We propose a new architectural understanding of adaptivity that includes currently excluded agents and involves them in communication and adaptation processes. As we focus on the intertwining of technical developments and cultural practices, that is, the interactions of human and non-human agents in architecture, we seek to describe architectural adaptation as an inclusive spatial praxis. This may aid in inventing new ways of life built upon sustainable nature-culture-technology relationships within society.