The Project Toolkit

 

The Project Toolkit

The purpose of the projects

To encourage the participants to create something as an output from the seminar. There is going to be a lot of information coming their way, and the projects can be a way of consolidating it into something substantial. The projects are also a great opportunity to actually do interdisciplinary work, to encourage crosstalk and see if people will come together in teams to create something together, which is probably the only way we have to get to unknown unknowns.

 

The exercise

Build a community space. The only two criteria that it must meet are that 1. It must be scientifically possible, and 2. There must be a path to go from where we are today to where we are in the scenario. You can write about it or sketch out the basic details of it. Or you could sing a song about it. Any way you can imagine of communicating about this space will work.

One way is to start with 5km² and 50 households, say a population of about 250 people. This could be a city block, a gated community, or a village. You’d have to think about food, water, shelter, sewage, waste management, energy and transport. You might also find yourself thinking about its economy, aesthetics, education, governance, judiciary and other processes that might come to define it.

But if this feels like jumping into the deep end, start with what you know. The end goal is a viable multispecies space, but to begin with, you can start with how you’d like to change your world. I asked a fashion designer friend how she’d like to change the world around her, and she said she’d like to see clothes with their seams showing on the outside.

 

Ryan Gosling, with the seams showing

She finds seams against the skin annoying and thanks that clothes would be much more comfortable if the seams – where the cloth is stitched together – were to be on the outside. This is as good a place to start as any. For one, we know that people in such a world would pay more attention to comfort than to appearances; that their aesthetics would be informed by functionality. You can think forward from there to wonder how that aesthetic would affect their architecture, their transport, or their waste management. That would lead you to the design of your community space.

Or you could think back and wonder how they came to have such an aesthetic in the first place. What factors affect the formation of our aesthetic sensibilities, and how can they be altered? This will show you the path to get from where we are today to the world of your scenario.

If you hate road-kills, to take another example, you could start with transport. Would you change the design of the roads, or the vehicles? Or is there a way to alter the way we think about transportation per se? And what world would that lead us to?

You can think of your community space as a game design, or the setting of a sci-fi novel, or a cartoon, just as long as it meets the aforementioned criteria. The movie, Avatar, did a wonderful job of world-building, as did the cartoon, The Jetsons, from a few decades ago. 

A still from Avatar

The Jetsons

but coming to examples more grounded in reality, here are some examples of community spaces. Which of these do you relate to, and which ones stir your heart with longing? Where would you want to live, and why?

 Soviet housing blocks

 Large, fortified, earth buildings from Fujian, China 

A gated community, Bangalore

A village in Himachal Pradesh

Each of these spaces have their own ways of managing the basics of housing: shelter, water, food, sewage. Which do you think is most efficient in each aspect? Which of these are viable? Scalable? And which of these is the most 'multispecies'?

Finally, here is an image of a shepherd family in a pasture. There is no discernable shelter, though they seem very much at home. There is food being cooked and served in what is very much a multi-species space. A nomadic lifestyle questions all the assumptions we have about settlements, forcing us to reconsider everything that we take for granted.