Tackling climate change: Comparing studio approaches in Sheffield and Cape Town

The urgency of climate change, and the collective responsibility it entails, requires a greater understanding of cultural approaches to environmental change and its interaction with diverse social contexts. This requires an extension of our understanding of climate change from the scientific to the socio-cultural realm. Cultural understanding implies investigation that extends to the human scale, revealing challenges that are often overlooked at a national or intergovernmental level.

This chapter will explore how climate change is approached as a design input in different cultural contexts. An exchange of academic staff from the Universities of Sheffield and Cape Town permitted comparison of work addressing local responses to climate change undertaken by design-research studios in each university. The research explored the extent to which approaches to resilience are interchangeable, or need to be grounded in local conditions.

The Sheffield studio’s work focuses on adaptative strategies that mitigate against the consequences of climate change, informed by evaluation of existing case studies, dynamic simulation modelling of student projects, and assessment of future climate scenarios. Sheffield represents a cultural context where there is a popular political will to devote time and resources to mitigating climate change, and various codes set out minimum standards for response. The Cape Town studio, in contrast, focuses on a context of rapid urbanisation, skills shortages, and a low tax base, where the state is unable to provide basic services such as electricity and water to many citizens. A lack of reliable data about energy consumption means that environmental decision-making is often intuitive; while the peculiarities of the unequally developed economic and political context requires a more nuanced approach to engagement with communities regarding the need for adaptation.