Seeding the Urban
Small-scale interventions for large-scale positive change
At the turn of this century the Catalan architect and urbanist Manuel de Solà- Morales suggested that urban environments benefit from “small interventions, which create a ripple, not comprehensive development”. Two decades on, cities now house over half the world’s population and their health has never been more precarious.
‘Seeding the Urban’ – a collaboration between the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at University of Edinburgh, UK, and Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University in the US – focuses on socially and ecologically strained urban environments. In particular, the focus falls on the capacity for small-scale tactical urban interventions to generate large scale ripples of positive change.
Through an approach to complex situations that requires tightly framed and considered, small-scale interventions, the work will explore and document case studies to develop new knowledge about the impact of this kind of approach. Despite the scale of national and international investment in the multiple ecological and political crises that play out in urban environments, there is relatively little research so far on how novel synergies might foster reparative knowledge. The collaboration here supports a nascent network of international researchers operating in the shared territories of architecture and urbanism, environmental humanities, and ecologically informed, activist practices.
ʰǴڱǰChris L. Smith, University of Sydney
ٰSophia Maalsen, University of Sydney
ٰHannes Frykholm, University of Sydney
Associate ʰǴڱǰLeigh-Anne Hepburn, University of Sydney
ٰVera Xia, University of Sydney
Professor Suzanne Ewing, University of Edinburgh
Professor Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, University of Edinburgh
Dr Moa Carlsson, University of Edinburgh
Dr Miguel Paredes Maldonado, University of Edinburgh
Dr Aidan Mosselson, University of Edinburgh
Dr Sepideh Karami, University of Edinburgh
Associate Professor Lily Chi, Cornell University
Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, Cornell University
Assistant Professor Anne Weber, Cornell University
Assistant Professor Farzin Lofti Jam, Cornell University
Asya Uzmay, Cornell University
