Spatial Practices Climate Care Award 2022/2023

Central Saint Martins, London
16.06.2023

Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Spatial Practices Climate Care award! This award is given to projects that advance the climate agenda within the field of spatial practices, tackle climate change in our communities and take a proactive role in embedding sustainability practices. Spatial Practices winners for 2022/2023 are:

MArch
Adam Stanford: A New Wood Culture: An Intimate Practice

We live in a time in which green-capital tightens its grip on forestry, advertising it as a silver bullet for the mitigation of climate change. The UK government continues to push for the industrialisation of forestry as a means to offset carbon, build ‘net zero’ buildings and green-wash its carbon sins through the misdirection of public opinion. This is facilitated by the segregation of ourselves from nature, in part created through the development of cities sustained by petrochemicals, steel, and concrete. This binary of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ has allowed the forest to be understood as an object, not a subject. It is treated as property or an item of commerce, to be exploited and destroyed in order to sustain our lives. A New Wood Culture: An Intimate Practice provides an alternative practice, one that acknowledges our segregations from the forest and starts to suggest ways to practice instead in a relational manner. It draws upon historical forestry practices in the UK, while acknowledging the long entanglement of forestry within colonial, industrial and capital exploitation. The project weaves historical forestry practices into the design of the built environment. How can designers practice through connectedness with the forest? Through the conceptual framing of intimate practice.

MA Narrative Environments
Rachel Payne: Consuming Landscapes

Consuming Landscapes’ is an immersive audio walk through UK farmland and soilscapes which has been created to be listened to in a large supermarket. Interviews with farmers offer insight into the farming methods that shape the landscape, and in turn how different landscapes produce different foods, demonstrating the importance of locality. Using soundscapes, the walk aims to bring the seasons and the weather into the artificial and controlled interior of the supermarket. The audio walk aims to highlight the juxtaposition of the realities of modern farming, which contends with the interplay between our need for food production, care for biodiversity and soil, and our experience of a supermarket which contains very little story of the land and the ecological cost of our shopping baskets. The project is situated within the context of the growing urban - rural divide in the UK, as well as rising food costs, food insecurity and changes in agricultural policy prompted by Brexit. The audio walk is aimed at urban supermarket consumers, who are invited to go to their local supermarket and experience this familiar space in a different way.

LINK: Consuming Landscapes – Rachel Payne
WATCH: Consuming Landscapes

MA Cities
Sadia Rahman: Ecology Talks

EcologyTalks.com is a collaborative platform and ‘love-letter’ to our nonhuman cobeings in the city, which engages to form connections with our nonhuman cospecies in the city. It treads between performance, eco-linguistic critique and translations of our surrounding ecologies; often destabilizing English as the assumed norm in our ecological lexicon and bringing value to others often unheard; from lexicon to voices of nonhuman species. The platform intersects notions of tender ecologies, intimacy and seeks kinships with our surrounding nature. Questioning if close encounters in ecology can help feel and heal?

LINK: www.ecologytalks.com

Curriculum Award

WITH: BA Architecture, MArch, MA Narrative Environments, MA Cities.