On July 9th, we held the second “moveable feast” in our research conversation series, gathering in Berkeley’s Faculty Club for an afternoon of peach pizzas and cross-campus exchange. The meeting featured Morgan Ames, Stephen Collier, and James Holston from UC Berkeley, Albert Narath from UC Santa Cruz, and Simon Sadler from UC Davis, in addition to the organizers. Participants shared previous and ongoing research, and with the wider goals of the Making Climates project in mind, identified a number of promising threads that have since occupied our thinking.
If our first session proceeded from a focus on the production of climate knowledge—both by experts and by scholars working to make sense of how expertise came together—the second asked how this knowledge was being put to work. It mapped out moments, especially in spaces between participants’ areas of research, where the social and technical manifestations of climate shaped notions of environment, people’s relations with it, and furnished (or foreclosed) specific capacities to act. From scales from the immediately personal to the globally dispersed, and through sites from municipal governments to the design studio, the session explored the how and where new climates might be made.
A technological mediation of environment—in the form of administrative methods as well as modes of computing—placed the “how” and the “where” in a close relation. The work presented by Morgan Ames and James Holston provided two entry points to this, considering their correlated effects upon the practices and structures of democracy. They departed from anthropologies of technology to frame localized methods of reproducing the bonds of community in a continuum with the hegemonic reach of Silicon Valley tech culture. For James, it presented a matter of participation—a project moving towards direct democracy in the face of increasing bureaucratic constriction. In such a space of practice, democracy materialized in the social ties of a community, uncovering a capacity to build infrastructures unavailable to an abstracted politics of representation. Investigating this question through projects such as “DengueChat”—a platform built upon dense relationships within communities to track and share information about disease vectors—the social and environmental were brought together in a democratic practice decoupled from state governance. Morgan expanded upon the gulf between social organization and political institutions that such cases exposed, charting parallels with the dissemination of computing technologies. Centered on the formation of childhood subjectivities, she described two projects: an account of the One Laptop per Child initiative and ongoing fieldwork in contemporary tech-based primary education. In their received wisdom, especially through ubiquitous reference to phenomena like the “democratization” of computing, these projects raised questions of who could have access, what forms of power they reproduced, and how their resulting politics were rendered apparent in the environment—with technology assuming a determinative role in shaping what social participation looked like. For both Morgan and James, these effects played out at a social register below where liberal democracies locate a public sphere of debate and action. The civic scale in particular, James noted, offered forms of direct democratic practice that had been effaced in modernizing shifts towards the nation-state as a basic site of polity.
Returning to one of our project’s earliest concerns, this view raised an issue of geographic delineation—the presumed integrity of the sovereign state compromised under the stresses of rising sea levels, climate migration, etc. Consequently, the city becomes attuned to the demands of climate politics, assuming a unique influence over the relations between citizens and their environment. In a line of research that asked, “what comes after the modernist city?” Stephen Collier noted that despite this potential, city governments hold very little real power to effect the changes most significant to climate response. Outlining the stakes of environment within a history of modernist planning professions, Stephen described degrees of state control ceded to neoliberal governance and a postindustrial fragmentation of expertise. Paralleled with interest in public works and how we might reinterpret mid-century shifts in infrastructure relative to contemporary climate concerns, the conversation likewise attended to the subject of design. Simon Sadler examined the implications of understanding design as a vehicle for change, specifying how critical questions were often left unanswered—change “from what to what?” He described the complex grounds of environmental discourse that design occupied in the second half of the 20thcentury—from Fuller to Gregory Bateson—as central to the formation of a service-oriented design education, as well as what this might mean in confronting a changing climate. Bringing the conversation about design back to the material contexts of technology, Albert Narath presented histories of adobe and modernist industrial design, exploring how a seemingly anodyne construction method became a touchstone for 1970s debates about understanding and controlling energy costs. From public research and materials science to the infrastructures of design work, standardization, and governance, the objects found in Albert’s research brought together earlier environmental crises and the patterns of response we have aimed to map onto our immediate climates. Adobe, ambivalently reappearing in this discussion as both a material and a software, encapsulated the environmental circuit that brought us back and forth between information and matter.
Overall, our meeting crystallized two additional themes to collectively chart: the politics of representation and the agency of design professionals. Looking ahead, we hope to build upon these and find new outlets for the thinking facilitated by Making Climates. Though the rising COVID-19 caseload has forced us to delay the third and fourth meetings (planned for UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego) we have made alternate plans to keep the network active. This includes launching a website that we aim to use as a platform for the future collaboration and informal publication, as well as a renewed momentum to build the research network. Accordingly, we ask that participants please share this newsletter and bring in colleagues, grad students, and anyone else you feel might want to take part (the easiest way is to cc people in a reply to makingclimates@substack.com).