Architects design community solutions for combatting climate disaster

By Jessica Rawnsley, Financial Times

As another year punctuated by climate catastrophe draws to a close, densely-packed urban communities – from favelas in Brazil to slums on the outskirts of Mexico City – have again found themselves on the sharp end of extreme weather. So-called informal communities are often situated in undesirable, disaster-prone areas – such as low-lying flood plains that lack the infrastructure to drain off excess water. Despite this, more often than not, they are excluded from government-instigated adaptation plans and overlooked in climate funds.

But a number of pioneering architecture firms are now attempting to grapple with these interlinked challenges within vulnerable communities across the Global South.

Their work cannot come too soon. According to UN estimates, one in four city dwellers – more than a billion people – live in precarious conditions without access to basic services or adequate housing. On top of that, the IPCC’s latest Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report has found that economically and socially marginalised residents living in urban ‘informal settlements’ bear the brunt of climate change. For many of these communities, the ravages of global warming are not a distance away on the horizon but in the here and now — and the task is how best to prepare them to withstand it.

Decades of research have already established that social infrastructure — such as public swimming pools, sport centres and libraries — can be critical in fostering community cohesion and resilience, which can directly impact how people fare in a disaster. For example, sociologist Eric Klinenberg highlights the value of this infrastructure to community wellbeing in his 2018 book Palaces for the People, and illustrates how the absence of it causes excess deaths during natural disasters, such as heat waves.

Several architects have begun to explore community-led solutions to these localised problems — signifying a novel way of approaching architecture in a rapidly warming world.

Their structures are disparate, rooted in specific contexts and communities, but all share a unifying thread: buildings that boost both social and ecological resilience, tackling the intertwined issues of inequality, urban poverty, and climate adaptation.

“We need to shift to architecture as a practice of listening,” argues Catalina Mejia Moreno, a senior lecturer in climate studies at Central Saint Martins. She has developed an open curriculum that explores the interconnectedness of social justice and climate justice, and the way architects can engage with the worst-affected communities.

“We think architecture is a solutions-based discipline that can arrive anywhere and offer a blanket solution,” she says. What is needed, according to Meija Moreno, are designs that address the root causes and consequences of climate breakdown, and nurture the rebuilding of social and ecological systems.

Stefano Romagnoli, co-founder of Argentina-based Region Austral, takes a similar view.

“We can be part of the solution to climate change but we need to rethink the way we use the discipline, not in traditional top-down, client-architect relationships, but a more horizontal way of thinking and designing alongside people,” he says.

That idea forms the spine of a project underway in a vulnerable settlement in Buenos Aires “that empowers local residents to drive the creation of resilient public spaces within the neighbourhood”. Four community spaces – designed through participatory workshops – will simultaneously improve climate resilience and create communal areas.

A sports centre, for example, built in a disused space that had become a place for selling drugs, utilises green infrastructure to act also as a rain garden to mitigate flooding.

^{Palpa Sports Court - Credit-Region Austral}

“As in many other informal settlements in Latin America, there is a huge problem with a scarcity of public spaces, trees and rain filtration areas that make the neighbourhood highly vulnerable to climate change,” explains Region Austral co-founder Soledad Patino. “We tackled both public space and green infrastructure to improve the neighbourhood and make it more adapted to climate effects in the future.”

Urban design studio Taller Capital addresses flooding in neglected urban communities in Mexico with designs created in tandem with communities — and unique to each location.

Founder Loreta Castro Reguera stresses the importance of addressing climate change and community issues simultaneously – otherwise governments will opt to funnel money toward immediate economic concerns that seem more pressing than future-proofing.

“For vulnerable communities that are being impacted by climate change and a host of other issues, you need to think about architecture that is effective, but that also improves life quality,” Reguera explains. “Now, everyone is teaching that architecture needs to be climate sensitive, but it needs to be socially accurate too.”

For a community in Mexico City blighted by flooding, that meant building a water management structure to funnel rain into a natural public pool, before cascading it down tiered gardens and into aquaculture ponds. Alongside a flood defence, the structure acts as a community center replete with changing rooms, toilets, a kitchen space and a car park.

^{Containing the flood - Colosio embankment; Credit: Taller Capital}

Non-profit design studio Arquitetura na Periferia addresses the need for sustainable housing and gender inequality among impoverished communities in Brazil by teaching groups of women how to build and improve their own homes. The predominantly single mothers develop a sense of autonomy and a louder voice within their communities. They go on to renovate other houses, too. And, as each year brings more violent rains, the women find themselves better equipped to fortify their homes.

But the ramifications run wider and deeper, says founder Carina Guedes. “They create this network of support between them,” she explains. “And they start projects within the community – one woman started a project to support women that have experienced violence, another started a community garden. And they start to stand up for their rights.”

Guedes adds: “When you’re doing architecture with people that live within the communities, it’s a transformation that really, really goes way beyond that space. It changes the whole chain of social relations. Once we strengthen this sense of community, we strengthen care for the home, for public spaces, for the environment. We don’t see ourselves as owners of the project, we’re doing it together. The community is the owner of the space.”

^{Before house improvement; Credit: IA}

^{After house improvement; Credit: IA}

It is a significant shift away from conventional, top-down design – where an architect zooms into an area to implement their idea and then departs – and moves beyond the often siloed ways of approaching sustainability. Projects begin with listening to a community’s specific needs; designs address interconnected social and environmental issues; community engagement defines conception through to long-term management.

There are inherent challenges to the approach, such as needing approval from hundreds of members of a community. And, as projects like these are excluded from most global climate adaptation funds and government initiatives, they must rely on grants from organisations such as re:arc — a philanthropic institute with a focus on innovative, holistic community-led solutions at the intersection of climate and architecture.

Mitigation projects tend to receive the lion’s share of climate funding – a mere 1.2 per cent of climate finance for cities is spent on adaptation. But, as extreme weather intensifies, adaptation will become increasingly important. In the built world, architecture that forges strong, resilient communities will play a pivotal role.