The Care Hypothesis
Europan is publishing the results of a research that was carried out on the analysis of Europan projects (winners and runners-up) from the point of view of the Care hypothesis in architectural, urban and landscape design, and focusing mainly on the trilogy of the sessions on the topics of Adaptable Cities (Europan 12 and 13), Productive Cities (Europan 14 and 15) and Living Cities (Europan 16 and 17). This perspective becomes strategic in this context of vulnerability of inhabited milieus, impacted by climate change caused by a boundless productivist system and a domination of nature by man.
The great narratives of Care and social-spatial justice establish new bifurcating dynamics in the ways of making human settlements. Against a backdrop of climate change, falling biodiversity and obvious inequalities, we need to understand and change our relationships with nature, with others and with ourselves by activating the powers of Care and by resisting forms of domination in order to respond to vulnerabilities.
The culture of Care doesn't just apply to the health and social sectors. While including them, it extends far beyond. This approach represents an ethical, aesthetic and political threshold. The very meaning of architecture and of its existential role in sustaining life and its future is therefore regenerated as close as possible to embodied situations and experiences, both near and far. From this point of view, the challenge is to awaken sensitivities, to encourage caring gestures and responsibilities, so as not only to be accountable for our actions, but also to respond to what brings us into contact, to what we depend on, to what we value, to what keeps on resisting and to what affects us. This ethos - as a way of relating to the world - is steeped in belonging and interdependence, but also in recognition and transmission, taking into consideration cultural diversity and other living beings, the ordinary and the exceptional, the imprints and the impacts. The aim is to bring about forms of rebirth and rejuvenating metamorphosis.
Four axes of thought and action are particularly significant in regenerative care projects: Welcoming, Maintaining, Holding and Tuning. Each is divided into two sub-sections, each of which identifies one of its main facets. These four processual axes of thought and action give rise to entangled passages, symbioses and synergies that sustain and reinvent a plurality of approaches to care within architecture.
THE AUTHORS
Contributors to this research:
Pierre-Marie Auffret, architect urbanist, uses expert, atelier Isla
Céline Bodart, architect, PhD in Architecture, researcher, professor
Didier Rebois, architect, professor, Europan Secretary General
Charline Rollet, architect, professor, Bureau Polyptyque
Chris Younes, psychosociologist, PhD in Philosophy, researcher, professor
Welcoming
Welcoming New Uses and New Entrants
Societies are facing accelerated transformation and reformation of uses, as well as an intermingling of populations that modifies spatialities and coexistences. How to deal with these diversities, flows and instabilities?
Welcoming Biodiversity
It is all about the importance of making room for the living, which implies greater immersion with plants and animals while paying attention to what contributes to the health of ecosystems.
Maintaining
Repair - Remediation
Operations that establish material and immaterial mending and recycling to accommodate the vagaries of passing time and daily life, while revitalizing what has been damaged.
Reuse
Operations that “remember forward” by reusing materials, buildings and infrastructures while modifying their previous uses. The aim is to propose new uses while contributing to the resilience of an inhabited milieu in connection with transcalar and evolving dynamics.
Holding
Historical Traces and Memory
Traces, memories, past data and values play a structuring role in inhabited milieus, interweaving material and immaterial elements that are crucial to understanding individual and collective experiences. How are continuities and discontinuities articulated?
Geological, Geographical and Climatic Forces
The idea of a structuring natural and cultural substrate is a decisive aspect in revealing a territory in movement within a broader shared geography, namely the recognition of the geological and geographical forces that animate it: climates, mountains, valleys, rivers, forests, fields... but also of productive forces. How to start and interweave different problematic and spatiotemporal scales that correspond to the re-creation of territorial figures based on the great permanences and transformations of the milieu, but also to the overall coherences determined by its resistances and resources? These issues also intersect with those linked to changing climatic conditions: how to develop adaptation strategies to cope with new risks and extreme situations (floods, submersion, drought, heatwaves, etc.)? How to anticipate and at the same time cope with the unexpected?
Tuning
Between Milieus
The challenge is to reinvent how milieus meet, taking advantage of it, and making them compatible: for example between city and agriculture, city and countryside, city and industry, city and river, city and forest… How to interweave them all?
Between Stakeholders
In the multiplicity of voices at stake, between the interests, the needs and the expectations, rivalries and disagreements multiply. How to recognize, deal with and face differences and divergences? How to involve human and non-human stakeholders?
