Design Diplomacy
Singapore Spain Korea Japan Australia Oman Hawaii
Design Diplomacy:
The Transmission of Autochthonous Practices & Customs
INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR SERIES
Design Diplomacy is constituted by a series of international embedded on-site workshops, investigates design practices and customs that exist outside of international environmental conventions in order to report on and disseminate off-the-shelf and non-speculative practices. Emphasising and brokering an expanded interdisciplinary and collaborative dialogue between experts, governmental institutions, indigenous knowledges and practitioners, and diverse communities, this research project seeks to empower civil society and especially aims to offer to the new emerging generations of practitioners in the built environment, a richer knowledge of the opportunities offered by the expanded landscape economy – a demonstration of ways of doing things differently.
Pursued through a series of workshops taking place in regions sharing global concerns through local issues, this research project is envisioned to unfold in two phases. The first taking place across the Asia Pacific (e.g. Seoul (South Korea), Coranderrk (Australia), Fukuyama (Japan), Singapore, Cameron Highland (Malaysia), Oahu (Hawaii)), and the second focusing on Europe and the Middle East (e.g. Nizwa, Muscat (Oman), Seville (Spain)). These workshops enable us to meet people in their own environment and context, as well as the various types of stakeholders disregarded by globalisation and speculation of current environmental markets. Internationally expanding the knowledge of these environmental resilience movements is both a logical continuation and an opportunity to define a multi-sectoral and transnational critical tool for the built environment community.
Seminar Series Program
Each seminar takes place in a specific site and will enable various stakeholders to expose their approach and debate with participants.
1 or 2 days Seminar (Talk + Site Visit + Dinner)
SINGAPORE / MALAYSIA_Cameron Highland
Specific Issues: Food Production / Environmental Justice
Date: 08-14 July 2019
SPAIN_Seville
Specific Issues: Cohesive Urbanisties & Societies / Cultural Landscape of Sustainable Touristic Region
Date: 27-31 January 2020
KOREA_Seoul
Specific Issues: Pedagogy of Citizen Participation
Date: 20 June – 03 July 2020 (Canceled_New Dates TBC)
OMAN, Nizwa, Muscat
Specific Issues: Resilient Autochthonous Practice of Arid Region Date:TBC
JAPAN_ Sendai
Specific Issues: Community Care / Mental Health & Landscape Design
Date: TBC
AUSTRALIA, Coranderrk
Specific Issues: Indigenous Practice & customs / Post-Colonial Landscape
Date:TBC
HAWAII, Oahu
Specific Issues: Resilient Indigenous Practice and Customs
Date:TBC
Background
The need to conduct this research has emerged from the ambivalent situation of the built environment profession around the world. The landscape architecture field has considerably evolved over the last 50 years and has experienced controversial mutations since the advent of the Sustainable Development Era (Our Common Future 1987). A whole economy of human, natural and economic capital management has emerged which is significantly affecting the environmental expert’s ability to ethically manage, design, and sustain our biospheres.
Various forms of civil resistance (Sukhdev 2012) have since warned the landscape community about the excesses of the neoliberal ecology (O Connors 1998) and reported on the fair and ethical conducts with which worldwide cultures and regions desire to ensure the future of communities through indigenous practices and customs (Nagoya Protocol 2010).
From this environmental resistance, the ‘Globalisation from the Grassroots’ phenomenon (Magnaghi 2005) was articulated. This work reports on the global insurrectional movement fighting against mechanisms of Western neoliberal speculation in order to reconsider traditional and autochthonous technologies within our contemporary practices and knowledge of ecological management. Studying the political philosophy and political ecology of these environmental phenomena in the regions was investigated through a previous workshop series (Mannisi 2012-2019). This analysed the recurrent and inherent factors of cultures and environments where they emerge.
Outcomes
Building on this previous work, this new project of international workshops aims to: provide an overview of the current situation; develop critical tools and methodologies of engaging in this arena; provide a systematic compendium of case studies of these complex phenomena for the enthusiastic new generation of landscape architects/planners/ environmental designers concerned with the ethical behaviours towards humans and non-humans.
Through the in-situ questioning and dialogue exercise of this problematic experienced internationally by the stakeholders of our sustainable biosphere (Rolston 2012), this research project aims to achieve the following specific objectives:
A series of international embedded on-site The workshops will be documented and made accessible online. Each workshop will have its own outcome formats: films, photographs, audio recordings, academic articles, exhibitions.
Create and publish an observatorium: a linked book and digital online open access resource and sharing platform for generational change. Assembling the various outcomes from the workshop series, the observatorium will provide a guide book and operational tool kit for designers etc. The observatorium will enable an account of an international movement that is still difficult to grasp by the public and experts, and of which apparent heterogeneity does not adequately reflect common foundations. The perceived strong demand from civil society, government and a new generation of experts will thus benefit from a plural, transversal and innovative
Clearly identify what were the mechanisms of deregulation: economic, anthropological, and ecological produced by the planners of the territory, landscape, and communities which result in these massive phenomena of environmental, social, and spatial injustice perceived all over the world during the last 50 years?
Show how the modes currently implemented by a worldwide movement of civil resistance and readjustment of environmental knowledge may be grouped by region, climate, and Build and develop geographical, community, educational, professional, industry, and government networks. This would be something akin to creating a network of networks – something that could be called a globalisation from the grass roots.
Build and develop geographical, community, educational, professional, industry, and government networks. This would be something akin to creating a network of networks – something that could be called a globalisation from the grass roots.
A Network of Networks_External Research Partners
The series of workshops are based on the organisers’ intimate knowledge of cultures, stakeholders and local partners, allowing a fluid logistics of events to initiate the expected conversations / debates. For each location, one or more local private/public partners has been identified and confirmed. Different type of debates are set up according to the problematics and hypotheses envisaged. Each meeting will be an opportunity to renew our knowledge of the transmission of autochthonous practices and customs. The debates will be recorded to be accessible online. Each workshop will have its own outcome formats; films, academic article, exhibition. The whole will then be processed to produce the Observatorium.
