Climate Re-Assemblies

Year | 2024

Location | South Yorkshire, UK

Client | South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre and the Climate Re-Assemblies Research Project

The Climate Re-Assemblies Live Project saw architecture students from the University of Sheffield partner with the Climate Reassemblies Research Group to explore how spatial design could help to increase civic engagement with climate policy.

The recommendations produced by the South Yorkshire Citizens Assembly on Climate (SYCAC) in December 2023 had led to little action since, and the design team were challenged to continue the research group’s work in continuing democratic discussion around these recommendations. By creating “support structures” and “rehearsal spaces” for meaningful climate dialogue, the project sought to make climate issues more accessible and relational to place, in order to catalyse community-driven action.

By identifying peri-urban spaces as an under-explored context for these climate conversations, the research was ‘placed’ in the Upper Don Valley. Working with the Upper Don Community Energy (UDCE) group, the team began to map the existing ecologies of social and environmental care in the area. Their work culminated in an experimental physical structure which presents the past and present climate realities of the area in a fun and engaging way. It invites people to speculate about the future, by contributing to the sculpture with their own fabric panels. Two “rehearsals” were hosted, one at Penistone Market and the other at Christchurch social cafe in Stocksbridge, to ‘test’ the outputs and continue co-producing future narratives for local climate action.

The experimental approach adopted by the team demonstrated how architecture can foster “soft spaces for hard discussions,” grounding climate issues in place-based, compassionate frameworks that feel relevant and actionable to local communities. Through this model, documented in the Placing Climate Policy report, the aim of the team was to inspire alternative forms of climate engagement across other peri-urban areas in South Yorkshire. A prototype “Tracker” for mapping local climate activism and its impacts was provided to the research group, featuring the drawings taken from workshops. The iterative, spatially grounded methods developed could serve as scalable examples for activating climate policy dialogue across South Yorkshire.

Credits

Student Team: 

Tia Kidd, Harriet Ward, Ryan Jing Hao Lim, Elizabeth Jackson, Milena Chyla, Ayako Seki, Hannah Spiers, Charles Young, Georgia Marsh, Charles Mahony, Jiatao Li

Mentor:

Adriana Massidda