Reciprocity and design for an era of compressed temporal and spatial scales
From Firenze University Press Journal: Ri-Vista
Kristina Hill, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley
The argument: what does it mean to be human in our time?This essay explores three arguments that emerge from the concept of reciprocity as the human condition. First, that reciprocity is inherent in the human biological condition, and that our relationships with other forms of life inside and around our bodies has always been reciprocal. I will extend this argument that reciprocity is the human condition to argue that we humans are increasingly aware of an unprecedented compression of temporal and spatial scales, as the human population expands, as more infectious diseases become pandemics, and as our planet changes as a result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and oceans. Second, I will argue that humans have responded to our condition of reciprocity in the past by articulating fantastical human-animal hybrids. Re-exploration of these hybrid constructions can counterbalance our disorienting present, expanding the compression of time by evoking the longue durée, in which human self-awareness is a very old and complex phenomenon. Finally, I will use an urban design proposal as an example of how proposals for physical space can embody reciprocity, and provide at least a local, multi-decadal expansion of compressed spatial scales as we adapt to rising seas.Many contemporary people’s perception of future possibilities has been fundamentally altered by predictive numerical climate models. These models link human actions that have occurred in the past and present to specific future climate outcomes. Peri-odic reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) appear in news media and are repeated and amplified in social media, shaping a narrative that the range of possible futures is restricted by both the past and the present. Instead of imagining that many future conditions are possible, the use of these models increasingly links a specific present (defined in terms of gigatons of green-house gas emissions) to a relatively narrow range of possible futures (defined in meters of sea level rise, weeks of drought, days of excessive heat, frequency of pandemics, etc.). This creates an experience of a present-future, which we could define as a com-pressed linkage of hundreds of billions of unique ac-tions taken each day with a set of resulting global conditions that could persist for millennia. The in-tensity of this compression represents an unprec-edented density in both temporal scale (moments determining thousands of years) and spatial scale (billions of local actions resulting in global alterations of rainfall patterns, for example). Like the aesthetic concept of the sublime, these scales and the complexity of relationships that occur across them are difficult to comprehend; and yet this disorient-ing experience of time and space is the current human condition.
The experience of a drastically compressed present-future can produce significant personal anxiety. For many people, this anxiety has become amplified by the experience of a life-and-death global pandemic over the past several years. A pandemic that may have resulted in whole or in part from the expansion of human territories into the territory of bats, which in the overlap of territories is also a form of spatial compression. Interspecies intrusions are not new in themselves, but the speed and spatial scale with which a virus that spills over from bats to human can spread to billions of people connect-ed by airports all over the planet is new in human ex-perience. The speed and complexity of interactions among entities at different ends of the biological size spectrum (humans and viruses) blurs spatial and temporal dimensions in dizzying ways. It’s now perfectly reasonable to wonder how our own bodies might be transformed within months by real-time reciprocity with viruses and bacteria that live on the other side of the world. The human relation-ship with the non-human world has changed in fun-damental ways because space and time are com-pressed into a terrifying, uncontrollable immediacy.Given this altered context that exists across scales, what is the role of design? One answer is that de-signers can become radically anticipatory actors. Designed environments can reveal these compres-sions of space and time, and designers can antici-pate future states and advocate moving to embrace them as a way of slowing the rate of change for managed phases of time, perhaps several decades long. For example, Dutch designers now promote the phrase “living with water” as a maxim for ad-aptation to higher sea levels. The designs proposed to embody this ideal combine engineering models with aesthetic experiences that generate a sense of wonder. Like the best Dutch projects, designers and decision-makers can reject the paralyzing anxiety of a ‘present-future’ in favor of innovation. It won’t prevent change, but it will allow us to live well with some major changes, while recognizing that no act of design will ever make a more extreme climate a good thing.Design in this compressed era is increasingly de-ontological; it expresses an ethical position, rather than a utopian ideal. We are no longer able to design an ideal future, knowing what we know about the consequences of past and present actions and ter-ritorial circumstances. The replacement for utopian visions could be understanding design as a radical form of care and reciprocity. Haraway describes our condition as entanglement, and advocates staying with the trouble as the only ethical action. But no matter how innovative we are, trouble cannot now be avoided. Acting out of a sense of care, despite this unavoidable change, is a radical act.Instead of pursuing ideals, design can be a mean-ingful and ethical form of activism that expresses care as a mix of witness, compassion, and radical anticipation. The socio-biological world in which de-signers construct intentional changes can act as a sort of mirror, revealing the consequences of our decisions. The act of design is simultaneously activism and critique, the taking of a position and acknowl-edging the consequences of that position. Hannah Arendt described action in terms of power, memo-ry, and the space of appearance, but she also high-lighted the unpredictability of action — and pointed out that if the effects of action are irreversible, the possibility of forgiveness is a necessary context for action (Arendt, 1958).. The actions of designers can generate a reciprocal form of care through actions, new awareness, and reactions. That cycle can relieve some of the pressure of living in a ‘present-future’ by becoming radically anticipatory, and by exploring the hybrids of human and non-human that are the cultural legacy of an anxious, pre-literate human past.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-14002
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/ri-vista/article/view/14002
