Building Resilience: Demonstrators for a Changing Climate
the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London (W8 6AG)
About this Event
Join leading architects, policymakers and urban innovators for a day of conversations during London Climate Action Week.
Join us for a day of inspiring conversations with leading architects, policymakers and urban innovators to discuss creative and structural responses to the climate emergency and our responsibility to build resilient urban environments that help our cities and communities thrive.
Anchored by Future Observatory’s Stone Demonstrator at Earls Court, and hosted in collaboration with C40 Cities during London Climate Action Week, we will explore how we can scale ancient materials and bio-based innovations to deliver low-carbon housing at the pace our cities require. Innovators will also demonstrate how to shift our focus from new-build to the essential maintenance, retrofit, and community-led resilience of our existing urban fabric.
The programme connects perspectives from different cities to move past one-off projects and examine how policy leadership and scalable nature-based solutions can secure the inclusive, safe and decent future we all need.
Highlights include: a vision for structural stone with Amin Taha (Groupwork) and Pierre Bidaud (The Stone Collective); case studies of scaling timber and bio-based housing with Andrew Waugh; a panel on community-led retrofit with Immy Kaur (Civic Square) and Sara Edmonds (National Retrofit Hub); and urban rewilding strategies for heat and flood resilience with Adib Dada and Jacek Kisiel (Warsaw city official).
Programme Schedule
10:30 – Welcome
11:00 – Stone: An Ancient Material for the Future
12:00 – From Prototypes to Policy: Scaling Bio-based Housing
13:00 – Lunch break
14:00 – Adaptation: Retrofit, maintenance, and community resilience
15:00 – Urban Rewilding: Design for Heat and Flood Resilience
Future Observatory at the Design Museum
Future Observatory is the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition. The programme is coordinated by the Design Museum in partnership with the UKRI Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Future Observatory curates exhibitions, programmes events and funds and publishes new research, all with the aim of championing new design thinking on environmental issues. In 2022, AHRC and the Design Museum launched a £40m fund bringing UK design researchers, universities and businesses together to catalyse the transition to net zero and a green economy. It has already awarded over 100 higher education institutions and 75 industry and local authority partners across the nation, making it the largest publicly funded design research and innovation (R&I) programme in the UK.
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