Christian Dimmer: Connecting the Dots: Creating Resilient Communities through Transition Design

Connecting the Dots:  Creating Resilient Communities through Transition Design 

Friday, February 24, 2023 19:00 – 21:00 

Christian Dimmer is Associate-Professor for Urban Studies at Waseda University’s School of International Liberal Studies (SILS). He graduated with honours from the inter-disciplinary Spatial and Environmental Planning program of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. Christian earned his PhD from The University of Tokyo on the emergence of public space concepts in Japanese modern urban planning. As a JSPS post-doc at Tokyo University’s Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, he researched the politics and representations of public space in contemporary Japan. Christian served as an Assistant Professor for Urban Design Studies at The University of Tokyo between 2012 and 2016 and for Urban Studies as Waseda between 2016 – 2021. He also taught courses on urban commons, participatory place-making, planning theory, global urbanism, as well as public and private in the city at Keio University and at Sophia University. He is co-founder of the charitable disaster response organisations Tohoku Planning Forum as well as the Alliance for Humanitarian Architecture. Christian is part of the planning firm Frontoffice Tokyo. His research interests are the emergence of human-centered design theories and practices, new urban commons, transition design, policy mobilities with focus on co-housing and Doughnut Economics.
Registration: http://ptix.at/G6aAJ6

SUMMARY:

Global environmental problems such as climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity and resource depletion have gained rapid prominence on political agendas worldwide, while man-made infrastructure systems and cities have grown more complex yet more vulnerable. Not least the COVID19 pandemic, the Russian Invasion in Ukraine and frequent recent disasters have revealed the vulnerability of highly interdependent, globalised food, energy, or trade systems. Today’s pervasive, interrelated ‘wicked problems’ differ significantly in scale and complexity from those ‘tame problems’ of the past which could be addressed through incremental clean technologies and local policy responses. Although the socio-ecological problems of today require substantive ‘transitions’ in the near future, established professions and institutions are slow to respond.

These required system changes in the energy, transport, community, housing or agri-food systems are ‘socio-technical’ because they not only entail new technologies, but also changes in markets, mindsets, social practices, political cultures and deep-rooted cultural meanings and values. The emergent domain of transition design acknowledges the fact that we live in ‘transitional times’ with perpetual change finally seen as ‘the (new) normal’. Accordingly, transition design takes as its central premise the need for ‘rolling’ socio-environmental and socio-technical transitions to move to more sustainable futures and argues that design thinking has a key role to play. Transition design applies an understanding of the interconnectedness of social, economic, political & natural systems. It seeks to develop synergistic, networked, emergent solutions at all levels of spatio-temporal scale and in ways that directly improve the quality of life and safeguard human-centred development. It advocates the re-conception of entire lifestyles, with the aim of making them more place-based, convivial & participatory and harmonising them with the natural environment.

In this lecture we will first examine the complexity of so-called wicked problems —problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of their complex and co-dependent nature. We will discuss a system of possible metrics that help to assess the appropriateness of transition design interventions. In the second part, we will explore novel, existing design interventions mostly from Japan that are living up to the holistic principles of transition design, as they were developed by scholars at The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Lastly, the lecture will conclude with a discussion of concepts like ‘cosmopolitan localism’ (Manzini), ‘pluriverse’ (Escobar), or ‘inter-localisation’ (Iwasaki) that promise a positive way forward, towards more empowered, resilient communities in an age of intensifying planetary crises.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

After attending this program, participants will be able to:

1. explore how the profound social, environmental and economic crises are impacting cities and rural regions, and how governments, the corporate sector as well as community activists and citizens are responding,
2. map and analyse a ‘wicked problem’ and identify its related ‘leverage points’,
3. discuss different concepts for assessing the appropriateness of transition/ social design interventions,
4. examine how change-makers, creative communities, or social innovators are experimenting with alternative social, economical, environmental, architectural, as well as place-making practices and lifestyles.