Design Research Studio: Water Reuse as Community Development
This topical studio explores the application of ecological design principles in urban settings to counteract ongoing environmental injustices. Participants will investigate low cost, high impact approaches to water reuse for a neighborhood in medieval Islamic Cairo (Egypt) suffering from poverty, food insecurity, and increasingly severe climate change impacts. As with many other neighborhoods in Cairo and cities throughout Egypt, the residents of al-Khalifa confront the irony of abundance amidst scarcity: living in a hot, arid desert environment where rainfall is virtually nonexistent at the same time dealing with a failing water supply infrastructure (leaky pipes) raising the groundwater table, saturating and undermining building foundations, and exacerbating respiratory illnesses. This studio will investigate possibilities for intercepting and treating this water to help drive community-scale rooftop gardening (in a city where food prices have risen dramatically in recent years), introducing street level evaporative (passive) cooling features to improve comfort by ameliorating the urban heat island effect, and in other ways enlisting recycled water to beneficial ends and premised on the notion that “there is no such thing as waste.”
A “research” studio is a highly collaborative one. Studio participants will have opportunities throughout the term to interact with a Cairo-based team of urban designers, digital animators, storytellers, engineers, heritage conservationists, ethnographers, and others. Students with experience and/or interest in design, food systems, chemistry, the arts, environmental sciences, environmental economics, women’s and gender studies, heritage and cultural history, and anthropology are encouraged to enroll (previous coursework in these areas is not required but will be helpful). This research studio resists “solutionist,” “techno-optimist” approaches (“we have the solution to all your problems”), operating instead from the standpoint of humility in the search for path-of-least-resistance correspondences between available resources and culturally appropriate end uses. To that end, reflection on and articulation of one’s positionality in our global world provides a subtext for all that we do.
Evaluations will be based on participation and sustained engagement with the core studio themes, honing of collaborative capabilities, and commitment to an iterative process involving succinct compositions of written narratives and diagrams and other visual representations of the systems we will be examining. Above all, the studio requires initiative and engagement as we transition from a highly facilitated framework at the beginning of the term (topics, resources and methods that the instructor choreographs) to more independent and applied research given the “life” that project-based work acquires as the term progresses.