Climate Caravan: Mobility is Resilience

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth, “What is certain is that all find themselves facing a universal lack of shareable space and inhabitable land…Migrations, explosions of inequality, and New Climate Regime: these are one and the same threat.” In his recent book Latour argues for an undeniable link between our bleak climate future and globalism, wealth disparity, political polarization, and the spread of nationalism and identity politics. Latour makes evident that climate change has already shifted political landscapes across the globe leading to migration, civil war and unrest, and migrant detention.. Given this incredibly dynamic planetary and international backdrop, this studio disputes the presupposed notion of permanence that accompanies housing production. Housing production is encumbered financially and environmentally by the private land to which it is tied. We question the durability of housing tethered to privately held property, in cities we call home, when such land is in peril. In order to decouple home and land from its associated notions of permanence, this studio proposes prefabricated housing systems designed for future mobility and new organizations of community afforded by unit aggregation. Each prefab proposal is considered against migration scenarios that shape the selection of site test beds for development. Migration scenarios articulate critical stances regarding how and where we might live, the relationships between units, the adaptability and aesthetics of this future housing, and its relationship to existing infrastructure. Our studio accepts the inevitability of migration as a form of climate adaptation and resilience, imagining our future climate caravans.