Locations:

TULANE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE (TuSA) Downtown Campus (at NOCHI), 725 Howard Avenue, 5th Floor RNDC Beverage Lab

TuSA’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, 1725 Baronne Street

[Panel 1] On Visions

Speakers:

• Boyce Upholt
• Richard Campanella
• Nathaniel Rich
• Moderators: Robert Thomas, Jesus Meseguer

Programmed shuttle buses for all guests at 4pm and 5pm.

• Dinner and cocktails at the current exhibition “What Matter’s Here.?!” at the Tulane School of Architecture’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, 1725 Baronne Street.
  • Speakers: Liz Camuti and Margarita Jover

Location: TULANE RIVER AND COASTAL CENTER, 1370 Port of New Orleans Place

Parking at 400 Calliope Street / Lot F and Lot G

[Panel 2] On Tools – Interdisciplinary Thinking

Speakers:

• Joanna L. Lombard
• Annalisa Molini
• Moderators: John Sabo, Rebecca Choi

Speakers:

• Kate Orff
• Sönke Dangendorf
• Moderators: John Sabo, Ehab Meselhe

[Panel 3] On Tools – Modes of Inhabitation

Speakers:

• Richard Campanella
• David Waggonner
• Wes Michaels
• Moderators: Carol McMichael Reese, Edson Cabalfin

Speakers:

• Colleen McHugh
• Wellington ‘Duke’ Reiter
• Kelly Shannon + Bruno De Meulder
• Moderators: Catherine Sckerl, Richard Campanella

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About the Symposium

Gulf Coast: Desired Climate Futures is a day-and-a-half symposium at Tulane University organized by the School of Architecture, with the collaboration of the School of Engineering and the economic support of the ‘Gulf Futures Program’ led by the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine – Gulf Research Program. The symposium will engage in a multidisciplinary conversation to discuss new visions and tools to advance the reform of the Western way of inhabiting the territory in a climate change scenario. The symposium is open to faculty, students, and the public at large. Participants from diverse fields, including landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning, preservation, river and coastal engineering, civil engineering, geography, social innovation and social entrepreneurship, finance, real estate, environmental humanities, and beyond, are invited to attend.

In this specific region of the North American South, we are often told that reforms proposed by climate strategies, such as those posed by the 2015 Paris Agreement, are impossible and even undesirable. At local and regional levels, we are constantly reminded that our economic wealth and lifestyle depend on, what we could critically call, the extractive rationale. This paralyzing mantra is rooted in a hegemonic cultural view sustained by specific ubiquitous values, where progress is tightly related to industrial material growth. In these challenging moments, where a dominant narrative renders the impossibility to counter-act, we should aim to frame the problem from a new lens. New cultural perspectives, the reevaluation of historical knowledge, and multidisciplinary insights can contribute to moving forward toward a different set of values, ultimately redefining how we understand and act within our surrounding environments.

According to J. Purdy in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, North American societies have historically built cultural ideas of how to inhabit the territory, driven by specific values that lead to different environmental imaginations. Imbued with ‘Manifest Destiny,’ the first European settlers in American land understood the natural world as a testing ground for their faith. With this Providential view, nature was meant to serve human needs, which was only achievable by filling the land with labor and development. Over time, other environmental imaginations were overlayed in the territory, adding a Romantic and Managerial view, each with its associated laws, politics, and cultural framework. Today, they all coexist as a palimpsest of ethics and codes that imprint the core ideas behind our most recent Ecological view. The symposium addresses this topic as its starting point. During Panel 1: On Visions, by fostering a dialogue across disciplines, we will examine these legacies, how to move past them, and what new values could reform the built environment.

This revision can only be performed if the social, political, and economic spheres shift from degenerative to regenerative practices. The Gulf Coast’s socioecological crisis reflects centuries of extractivist deterioration and loosely regulated industrial activity, making this area one of the global epicenters of climate change effects. To respond to this reality, a new paradigmatic shift is needed, as Kate Raworth discusses in her book Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like A 21st Century Economist:

In the early twenty-first century, we have transgressed at least four planetary boundaries, billions of people still face extreme deprivation and the richest 1 per cent own half of the world financial wealth. These are ideal conditions for driving ourselves towards collapse. If we are to avoid such a fate for our global civilization, we clearly need a transformation, and it can be summed up like this: Today’s economy is divisive and degenerative by default. Tomorrow’s economy must be distributive and regenerative by design.

This aspirational and radical paradigm towards regeneration is well ahead of what we are currently doing, which could be defined as a shift from degenerative to non-harmful or net-zero. Many needed actions to reform the territory are in this latter realm. To respond to sea level rise already set in motion, we need urgent climate adaptation actions to protect human and more-than-human communities. To halt global warming, we need climate mitigation strategies that range from decarbonization to mobility reform and energy reduction. The benefits of these strategies are already well known and imprinting them in the built environment could help transition from less-harm to no-harm. The complexity of these changes lies in finding ways to implement them within our current context and its embedded values – which we aim to change.

However, a more ambitious shift is needed to transition from non-harmful to regenerative. This second paradigmatic change requires a new set of tools to actively participate in the biosphere’s restoration and preservation. In some disciplines, this has already been acknowledged. For instance, degenerative industrial agriculture could be rethought through permaculture practices that enhance biotic and abiotic cycles. What could this mean for the built environment? Pushing this further could mean rethinking our single-use cities through an ecosystemic mix-use lens, where reframed forestry and agriculture practices could be re-introduced, defining what Kelly Shannon and Bruno De Meulder call Forest Urbanisms. These new frames are what research and design research should aim to discover and what the second part of the symposium will discuss through the topic of tools. Panel 2 will address interdisciplinary tools through the lens of “thinking with”, where other agents such as more-than-human (trees) and bodies of water will be included. Panel 3 deals with the idea of modes of inhabitation from the local to the regional, discussing what tools are needed for a regenerative scenario planning that could help redesign the new worlds to come.