South Designs: Planetary Futures

Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel announces South Designs: Planetary Futures. This eight-month series of discussions reflects on how design, thought and practiced from the South, forges planetary futures.

What do design responses to ecological crisis look like when they are grounded in the aspirations and struggles of those most affected, predominantly residing in the Global South? How does design grapple with radical interdependence in conditions of enduring injustice and rapid urban and environmental change?

In 2022, we launched a global call for projects to answer these questions. Over 150 multidisciplinary teams from across the world responded. In dialogue with emerging thought and design leaders, the six winning project teams will reflect on their collaborative and speculative work with communities, sites, and materials and discuss how current social and ecological theory confronts the pragmatics and urgencies of making things together.

Rationale
The climate crisis is only the latest manifestation of a longstanding history of planetary injustice. While the global North has historically produced and, together with China, continues to produce the bulk of emissions that have caused climate change, its consequences are felt disproportionality by vulnerable subjects and ecologies in the Global South. Current sustainability agendas are shaped by the interests of wealthy and polluting countries, rather than the world’s human and other-than-human majority. Addressing global ecological crisis requires overcoming planetary modes of colonial extraction and asymmetric industrialisation, and the resulting global inequities.

Fuelled by climate crisis, design solutions have increasingly gathered around a call to build and strengthen sustainable and resilient systems. Politicians, planners, designers, development agencies, and community organizations invest hope in design as they aim to foster environments and subjects that can effectively respond to new levels of risk and uncertainty. Critics, however, have noted that adopting resilience as an end goal may entrench rather than undo political-economic systems of violence and marginalization.

The Global South designs, obviously. It does so relentlessly and often with urgency. These worlding projects and practices, however, are routinely overshadowed, co-opted, or suppressed by institutions that govern in the name of resilience, sustainability, or development.

South Designs starts from the premise that to carry through the promise of design against catastrophe, the South remains indispensable—not as a geographical location, but as an ethos of engagement. The project asks what resilience means when it is mobilized from the South, and how design can work for living landscapes and autonomous communities to foster global justice. Considering the colonial relations to which both “design” and the “global South” are tied, this prompt invites a fundamental questioning of design and points to a world beyond inherited spatial and epistemic divides.

Opening roundtable discussion with Jennifer Gabrys, Paulo Tavares, and Michael Uwemedimo
Tuesday, September 28, 4–6pm CET
Moderated by Kenny Cupers
Register here.

Planetary Occupations x Nana Yaa Biamah Ofosu
Tuesday, October 24, 4–6pm CET
Register here.

Re-Imagi(nations) x Françoise Vergès
Tuesday, November 14, 4–6pm CET
Register here.

Rural Futurisms x Germane Barnes
Tuesday, November 28, 4-6pm CET
Register here.

You can read up on the South Designs initiative and selected projects here. Stay tuned, four more events in this series will follow in spring 2024.

All events are online and open to the public. Please register for the conversations you would like to attend by following the respective link above (please register for each event individually, i.e. if you’d like to attend all four events, please register for each). Events will also be live-streamed with closed captioning via the Critical Urbanisms YouTube channel.

Organized by Kenny Cupers (Critical Urbanisms, University of Basel) and Laura Nkula-Wenz (African Centre for Cities, Cape Town) as part of the SNSF-funded Sinergia project Governing Through Design.

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