DELTA Lab : Deltas, laboratory of change

Date: Exhibition 13th October until 5th November 2023
Date: Workshop 13th October 2023, 2-4pm

 

The Risk & Architecture Workshop association (RAW) invites you to join its participatory exhibition entitled Deltas, laboratory of change, part I: from the Rhone Delta to the Bengal Delta as part of the National Days of Architecture 2023 in France, in collaboration with landscape architect Ahmed Faisal, the Bangladeshi design studio Loudworks, and photographer François Poche. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday 13 October 2023 at the Abbey of Montmajour in Arles. The exhibition will run until 5 November 2023.

How can we adapt our lifestyles and our territories in the face of the collapse of biodiversity, the climate and resources crisis, and the disruption of biochemical cycles on earth? The RAW association invites you to write together the future of our species on this planet by learning from the deltas, where human activities are intimately intertwined with increasingly threatening natural changes. In a world where transition and development are all too often based on technical solutions rarely considering the reality of usages, RAW proposes a cultural reading of territorial risks and invites you to turn culture itself into a project.

The exhibition Deltas, laboratory of change is rooted in an international solidarity program between the Rhône River Delta (France) and the Bengal Delta (Bangladesh) with the aim of understanding the risks and strategies developed by the inhabitants of these areas. Why Bangladesh? The country’s booming economy combined with its extreme exposure to climate change, while having contributed the least to it, make Bangladesh an icon of antagonistic issues of nature conservation and economic development. Through a poetic, scientific, and cultural journey, we invite you to collaboratively design a possible and desirable future towards an alternative development model based on human needs and links between places and their inhabitants.

This participative and evolutive exhibition series is part of the prospective Delta Lab project created by the Risk & Architecture Workshop (RAW) association, in partnership with the Parc Naturel Régional de Camargue, the UNESCO-IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and with the support of the DRAC PACA and the PERRIN architectures studio. Parts II and III are foreseen in the coming years (2024-2027) and will aim at co-creating new strategies for a sustainable future.

 

OPENING INVITATION: October 13, 2023, 2-4pm workshop, 4pm cocktail

The exhibition will take place from 13 October until 5 November 2023 at the Abbey of Montmajour.

Adress: Rte de Fontvieille, 13280 Aries, France

Oppening hours: 10:00-17:00 (last possible entry at 16:00), closed on Mondays.

About the Risk & Architecture Workshop association (RAW)

Founded by architects, urban planners and researchers in 2013, the Risk & Architecture Workshop association (RAW) produces knowledge around the themes of resilience and risk management integrated into territorial projects. The RAW approach is co-creative, situated, transdisciplinary and transformative. RAW creates links between inhabitants, public authorities, academics, civil society and the private sector facing risk situations.

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About

Unsustainable growth (urbanization) and shifting time horizons in delta management increase the urgency of the environmental crisis in deltas. Besides, an opportunity for a ‘reset’ arises because of the near sell-by date current infrastructure systems (mature deltas) and the vast investments planned in the coming decades (emerging deltas). It is essential to identify and understand pathways to a sustainable and inclusive delta in which transformations are likely necessary. Unfortunately, the current practice of ‘delta-management’ falls short, as it lacks integration and design. Collective inter-disciplinary knowledge production is required to develop these (transformation) pathways, and the success of collective knowledge production does require a design-based approach, in which different perspectives are recognized and joint new perspectives are developed. Therefore, we initiated an ambitious, inter-disciplinary and multi-annual project which places design and design-based research at the heart to deliver these outcomes. We propose to use the Delft Approach as a basis on which to build in the process of Redesigning Deltas, in which finding consensus (joint fact finding), making visions, and designing their material, ecological and temporal manifestation in space (design-thinking) help to explore, envision, and project new futures, to evoke and enable change.

The main goal of this project is to build the knowledge and collective commitment in the delta community* to support the shift in paradigm where water (security & safety) management is integrated into planning and design and vice versa in which the role of design and design-based research is revisited and strengthened.
The project will evoke systemic change on two levels:
1. Strategy: transformability (persistence – fragments vs. permanence – main structure)
2. Tactics: flexibility (ability to respond, contingency), continuous learning, adaptability, and innovation (ability to change) and will deliver as concrete outputs pathways to sustainable deltas (national and international context).