Monsoon Assemblages was a five-year, interdisciplinary research project funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant from 2016 to 2021 based in the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster in London. It investigated the impacts of changing monsoon climates in four of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities, Chennai, Delhi, Dhaka and Yangon. the project was undertaken at a time when climate change and urban development conspired to produce unlikely futures for urban survival. Extreme weather events, all attributed to the monsoon’s capricious nature, were resulting with increasing frequency in water shortages, power failures, floods, out-breaks of disease, damage to property and loss of life. In responding to these events, the project challenged the dominant view of the monsoon as a meteorological system outside of and distinct from society. Instead it proposed that the monsoon was hybrid of intra-acting of physical and social dynamics entangled within historic lived environments, whose operations could be analyzed and changed. To investigate this hypothesis, an interdisciplinary team of spatial designers and environmental humanities scholars was brought together around the operative concept of Monsoon Assemblages. The aim was to produce knowledge of and design strategies for urban environments as more-than-human, monsoonal ecological systems that operate across multiple scales and through media that are indivisibly natural, social, political and technological.
