ABSTRACT
Design intervention is never locally circumscribed. All sites of design intervention are intermeshed within a broader ensemble of political-economic interdependencies, infrastructural configurations, and more-than-human ecologies stretching from the microbe to the planetary. Design interventions reshape not only the interdependencies associated with the worldwide urban fabric but the power geometries in which the latter are enmeshed. For this reason, design is always political: it advances visions of spatial order; politico-institutional strategies to actualize those visions; and assumptions about the future use, users, management, and transformation of that space. Barbara Allen writes about performance at the intersection of cultural practices and regional practices, noting that “Performative regionalism provides an understanding of the interaction of people and place that allows architecture to be understood as, in part, an enabler of cultural practice.” Site is everything to a climate scientist. People experience climate change effects very locally: sea level rise on the coast, or drought in dryer areas.
