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 paper will compare how climate change is approached as a design input in different cultural contexts, detailing work undertaken by design-research studios in the Universities of Sheffield and Cape Town to address local responses to climate change as part of the Worldwide Universities Network ‘Transcultural Understanding of Designing with Climate Change’ project. The Sheffield studio’s work is focused on adaptation through design, informed by the modelling of future climate scenarios. This represents a cultural context where there is 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 is focused 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 intuitive; while the peculiarities of the unequally developed economic and political context requires a more nuanced approach to engagement with communities.