themes

Revivification: the act or process of bringing something back to life, spirit, or vigor, essentially a renewal, restoration, or rebirth of activity, health, or prominence.

Two overarching themes define the trajectory of architectural research in our time and in the years ahead.  The first is an imperative to create adaptable, resilient, sustainable and meaningful cities and human settlements; the second is to care for and enhance the historical, artistic, architectural, natural, and landscape heritage we have inherited from previous generations.

Reflecting these themes in 2015, the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provided 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address global environmental conditions and identify work to preserve oceans, forests and global ecosystems.  Goal 11 is titled “sustainable cities and communities” and recognizes that “in 2008, for the first time in history, the global urban population outnumbered the rural population. This milestone marked the advent of a new ‘urban millennium’ and, by 2050, it is expected that two-thirds of the world population will be living in urban areas.”

While these statements draw attention to new cities and metropolitan regions, RURAL FUTURES notes that rural communities must not be left behind.

Indeed, the revivification of the rural might actually need to lead the urban.  Designing and forging links and strategies among urban, peri-urban, and rural areas will in aggregate contribute to the sustainable development of our world.  Global proposals can only be realized through a subsidiarity of particular places and peoples in community.  

Rural Futures is focused on recovering and creating Place-based forms and practices designed to be enhanced, maintained, and adapted over generations in response to changing conditions of a particular place, within a stable framework of value-rich community architectures.  While particular, we expect to develop typologies, patterns and processes that are replicable, scaleable and sustainable, aggregating meaningful and reciprocal relationships with Place.  “Place” as defined here, is a space with a story, and sustainable Places are those in which grandchildren can retell the story told to them by their grandparents in that same Place- not of what was lost but what yet lives and sustains community over time.  Following on Wendell Berry, the work of Rural Futures will be “Solving for Pattern”, and all Places have a pattern integrated ecology to be found through design processes.

Stories, meaning and Spirit are the more-than-material measure of healthy Places.  As a reminder of this, In the same year the 2030 UN Agenda was released, religious leadership around the globe reflected the spirit of the time, with appeals to our care-taking values.  Pope Francis issued the encyclical Laudato si’ (Praise Be to You) subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home”,  inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures, a poem and prayer that praises God for the diversity of creation and variety of aspects of the Earth. In this encyclical, the Pope alerts us to the consumerism and irresponsible economic development that leads to environmental degradation at the global scale, and calls all people of the world to recover and renew values and practices of his namesake’s prayer of praise that will lead us to balanced and meaningful inhabitation within Creation.

The UN and Pope Francis were joined by other calls to joyful, restorative action.  Within days of these publications, Buddhist, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist, and Evangelical Christian, Muslim, Sikh and Jewish faith communities expressed solidarity with these statements.  The timing and consistency of these messages from both secular and religious organizations reveals a renewed global intention to live our values as caretakers of Place, within our common home.  

This is the time we have been given, a time of restoration and revivification- to manifest new life and Spirit.  In our time, Designers of Place are uniquely positioned to articulate and envision physical patterns and practices that are Good, True and Beautiful, in collaboration with the Past and People within the many scales at which we inhabit our common home.  This is a joyful prospect and mission, to be addressed through the lens of an integral ecology.

Building Our Common Home and our common human and biotic community calls for an alliance of all members of our household, across all segments and scales of society.  Rural Futures will explore this home-making effort in a particular place of extraordinary natural and cultural and resources, the Bacino del Lao ecoregion, from a medieval hill town itself in the process of revivification and re-inhabitation.

This is indeed a very good time to be a designer, architect, geographer, urban planner, or engineer in service to our nested communities- local, eco-regional, and global.  Rooted in this Place, we can recover the best true stories, and tell them anew in our designs for appropriately scaled and patterned architectures of land and community.

From Laino Castello, Cosenza, Calabria, Italy we welcome you.