Monsoon Assemblages (MONASS) was officially launched on Tuesday evening at an event hosted by the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (FABE) at the University of Westminster. The launch was a joint celebration of two grant funded research projects: Monsoon Assemblages and Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo. There was a great turnout of around 120 people comprising of staff, students (including members of DS18), project partners, researchers from a range of institutions and members of the project advisory panel.

The evening started with introductions and a welcoming address by the Head of Department, Dr Harry Charrington. Following this Professor David Dernie, the Dean of FABE, gave an overview of both projects outlining their interconnections, relevance and importance to the Faculty.

Public space and the role of the architect in London and Sao Paulo was presented by the Principle Investigator, Professor Susannah Hagan. The project compares architectural modernism in London and Sao Paulo as a way of reflecting on contemporary public spaces and the changing role of the architect. Susannah’s engaging presentation covered the research framework, the project members and some initial findings. You can find out more by visiting the website: http://psarchitect.org/

Unfortunately, Susannah’s presentation was interrupted by a fire alarm. After a brief delay, during which people were evacuated from the building, everyone returned to their seats. The interlude certainly seemed to build people’s anticipation!

We were privileged to be joined by the University’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Geoff Petts, who situated the projects within the University’s Research Strategy. Apparently his initial reaction when reading the project proposals was: “Space, place and people? This is geography! What are architects doing?” As a hydrologist working at the interface of geomorphology, ecology and hydrology he reflected on a recent trip to Australia during which the country experienced the wettest week on record. Professor Petts stressed the need for a new paradigm that enables humans and environment to work together and highlighted the importance of social science approaches. The Vice Chancellor’s speech was a perfect lead-in to Monsoon Assemblages.

Professor Lindsay Bremner introduced the project, the team and the three focal cities: Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka. The concept and research approach were further elucidated through a description of Chennai, our first city, and an IT corridor constructed on a monsoon-fed coastal marshland, our first field site. The project explores, and invites people to consider, what it might mean to think about the monsoon as something to co-design with. How might design be transformed if no longer thought of as an exclusive capacity of human agency, but something shared with the material energies of the earth system?

View Lindsay’s presentation here:

[slideshare id=66806158&doc=monasslaunchpresentationlb-161006114614]

View a video of the launch event here:

Following the presentations there was ample opportunity for discussion and networking. As a new member of the Faculty it was a great way to meet new people and put faces to names. All in all the event was a resounding success. From the perspective of one of the audience members: “everybody was gripped by both presentations and there was a real buzz afterwards over the drinks”. Our thanks to all those who attended.

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Having joined the Monsoon Assemblages team in mid-August, I find myself one month in to the project and time has flown. Over the past weeks we have started the process of ‘finding the field’ and locating ourselves within the project. As most of the team have not worked in Chennai before, we have begun by getting to know the city from a distance. This has involved the usual academic activities of reading and conducting literature reviews.

In addition to academic sources, we have mined the ‘grey literature’, as well as English language newspapers, blogs and social media, all of which give a rich insight into the life of the city. According to some it is ‘not a city you will fall in love with at first sight’!

Considering the monsoonal theme of our research, water has been something of a focal point. Rain is probably the element most commonly associated with the monsoon weather system. The floods of 2015 are a recurring and prominent topic in newspaper articles, with much discussion about who or what was responsible for the disaster. In the course of our investigations, certain infrastructural characters have emerged from Chennai’s watery domain including disappeared water tanks, the Buckingham canal, storm drainage systems, the Pallikaranai marsh, an IT corridor, and the Perungudi dumpsite.

Although the connections may not be immediately obvious, these features of the urban landscape relate to the various ways in which ‘the monsoon’ is experienced and managed (or not managed) by ‘the city’. To gain an understanding of the contextual dynamics and complex interconnections we have been getting to know these characters by tracing their histories through travel literature, colonial documents and policy reports, locating them on historical maps, discovering how they have been represented in photographs and drawings, as well as in academic papers written by natural scientists, engineers, historians and anthropologists.

As an anthropologist, my instinct has been to try and familiarise myself with the region by starting the fieldwork process ‘at home’. So as well as reading (and frequent trips to various libraries), there have been more sensory forms of engagement: eating dosas in South Indian restaurants and starting to learn some basics of the Tamil language with a former resident of Chennai.

Working with two architecturally trained urbanists has ensured a strong focus on the spatial elements of the city. Although we cannot physically traverse the space we have embarked on remote explorations of the terrain via google maps, satellite imagery, geological and hydrological maps. Film footage has provided a useful way of sensing the city and anticipating monsoonal conditions. The video ‘Copper House’ by Studio Mumbai captures the sounds and textures of the rain as well as contrasts between the seasons. ‘Shunted to the Margins’, a participatory video produced by relocated slum dwellers, and drone footage of the high-rise, high-tech infrastructure of the IT corridor (our initial field site) offer strikingly different views of the city and provide a sense of the social, economic and political dynamics.

Over the past month we have made valuable connections with others working on related topics. As well as starting to organise guest speakers for the MONASS seminar series, we were invited to attend 3×3 Bangladesh Design, an exhibition of drawings, photographs and presentations of design projects from emerging design studios in Bangladesh. It was particularly interesting to see the ways in which these projects have utilised participatory design approaches, including participatory video.

As the University term begins we are planning our first visit to Chennai in December, with students from the Master of Architecture programme. It will be fascinating to encounter the city for ourselves, after exploring it from afar, and to relate the knowledge we are gaining to our own lived experience.

Imploding the Post-Disaster Information Vacuum: Crowd-sourcing a real-time flood map for Indonesia

For the launch of our Monsoon Assemblages seminar series, on the 23^rd of September, 2016, Dr. Tomas Holderness, research associate at MIT, Cambridge, MA, presented the PetaJakarta open source flood map, for Jakarta.

The project is already in the course of its third year of development, and is built around the construction and operationalisation of a crowd-sourcing – partially language-related – data collection open source free software. The software analyses mostly tweets and Qlue© entries (an Indonesian app for reporting malfunctions and making complaints to city and government institutions) during extreme climatic events and floods in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia, extracting data and making them reliable and rapidly available for the operations of flood alleviation and rescue.

Tomas briefly presented the city, clarifying the natural/man made hydrological conditions which contribute to the floods, then expounded the rationale and implementation of the project. In a nutshell, in case of extreme weather, the software gathers tweets relating to floods (chosen for their georeferenced embedded information), according to pre-set criteria of word recognition. The software architecture is then built to respond to target tweets, confirming the relevance of their content. Qlue© entries are also used, which display the added feature of being submitted by registered users, explicitly with the purpose of interacting with government officials.

This double approach is extremely relevant, since it mitigates the ‘noise’ effect often characterising solely language-related data collection on social media platforms (where the word ‘flood’ could be used metaphorically, for instance).

Based on these data, maps are generated, which assist city and state officials in prioritising interventions, and interact live with affected persons in order to monitor the evolution of the floods. A remarkable feature of the context, which the project could take advantage of, is the small dimension of postcode areas which allow a quite accurate data elaboration and visualisation, and therefore targeted intervention after information is crunched and transformed into interactive maps for the use of city and state agencies. This, also allows precise maps to be later developed in order to build precise information on the ground conditions at a rather local scale.

The presentation raised very interesting questions relating to the limits of technological approaches in empowering local communities in setting their own agenda in terms of flood mitigation (as opposed to institutions), the use of the human body as a scale to assess risk and damage, the possible exclusion of the urban poor as relevant informants on the effects and causes of the floods, the necessity of an anthropological study of the way data is collected and later used, data ownership and protection, the assemblages of objects, bodies and associations necessary to build technical and geographical knowledge on risk.

[slideshare id=66857231&doc=holdernessmonsoonassemblagepublic-161007130321]

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Suggested reading by the guest presenter:

Cohen, D. R., The Earthquake Observers, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013.

As part of the Monsoon Assemblages research project, the MONASS team are organising a series of public seminars. These seminars have been conceived with at least two objectives in mind.

On one hand, the seminars will assist and inspire the research team in following and tracing the many rivulets of associations that flow through and around the interactions of urban materials and people with the monsoon, as a more-than-human phenomenon. A range of guest presenters will offer their views, snapshots, analyses and accounts on and of specific aspects of the monsoon-city interaction, from diverse standpoints and different intellectual disciplines. Presentations will include perspectives from human geography, disaster management, design, human geography, environmental humanities, culture… The linkages between the work of the presenters and the scope of the project may appear loose at times. However, they are designed with the explicit intention of clearing the field from prefabricated assumptions about the monsoon and allowing fresh inputs to inspire new readings, animate novel discussions and open horizons.

On the other hand, the seminars aim at gathering together a cohesive community animated by a broad and shared intellectual interest or curiosity for the monsoon as a multifaceted, evolving phenomenon. The premise of Monsoon Assemblages is that the monsoon should not be interpreted as “something out there”, to which cities and societies have to adapt or perish, but as something that has ever been present structuring and coproducing cities and societies. In turn, cities and societies have influenced our understanding of the monsoon. Responses to this immense weather system can be traced through a vast, mixed and intertwined bundle of cultural expressions, meteorological observations, land uses plans, built forms, social interactions, labour-capital relations, etc.

We hope the seminar series will inspire people with different backgrounds, not only scholars, to take part in these events and join the conversation. The presentations will not necessarily only feature the three focal cities of the project (Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka). Work from other places may also provide insights and perspectives that will inform our understanding of this incredibly complex phenomenon, and contribute to our attempts to ‘reassemble’ it from a multidisciplinary and multi-locational standpoint.

Seminars will feature a short introduction of the guest presenter, the presentation itself ranging between 20 to 45 minutes, followed by a short debate with the public. Attendees are encouraged to bring their lunch and eat in.

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Monsoon Assemblages Seminar 01

Dr. Tomas Holderness, Research Associate, MIT.

Research project: Imploding the Post-Disaster Information Vacuum: Crowd-sourcing a real-time flood map for Indonesia

Date: 23-09-2016

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Monsoon Assemblages Seminar 02

Vaishali Enos, MSc, University of Westminster.

Master graduation thesis: Resilient Urban Edges: Adaptive and Mitigative Strategies in Chennai

Date: 21-10-2016

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Monsoon Assemblages Seminar 03

Niranjana Ramesh, PhD candidate, UCL.

In progress dissertation: Techno-politics of urban water: the case of desalination in London and Chennai

Date: 18-11-2016

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You are very welcome to join us. Seminars will take place during lunchtime, approximately every third Friday of the month at 13.00.  The venue will be 35, Marylebone Road, Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster, NW1 5LS, room M330. Check out our events page to see the latest updates.

For more information please contact: Michele Vianello m.vianello@westminster.ac.uk

The Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment invites you to the launch of two grant funded research projects:

Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and São Paulo | Professor Susannah Hagan

This Anglo-Brazilian research project examines the often neglected role of the architect in the production of public space in London and São Paolo. The project is supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP). The British Council is an institutional partner providing support for the different review stages of the project in both countries.

Monsoon Assemblages | Professor Lindsay Bremner

This project will undertake research on and propose design-led strategies for three South Asian cities, Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka, as more-than-human, monsoonal ecological systems. Monsoon Assemblages has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679873).

When        18.00 – 20.00, Tuesday 04 October 2016

Where       Room M416,  University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Professor David Dernie, Dean of FABE will introduce the projects and Professor Geoff Petts, Vice Chancellor will situate them within the University’s Research Strategy. The event will be chaired by Professor Harry Charrington.

The event is free and open to the public, but requires booking here…

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Public Space and the Role of the Architect in London and Sao Paulo

Principal Investigator – Professor Susannah Hagan | Research Associates – Dann Jessen, architect and Dr Neal Shasore

Public Spaces and the Role of the Architect: a comparative study of influential modernist and contemporary examples in London and São Paulo (PS) is a three-year research project in partnership with members of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. It takes advantage of the complex and often spectacular legacy of architectural modernism in both cities as a way of reflecting historically on contemporary public spaces, and on the changing role of the architect in their production. In a context of growing demand for greater democratic authorship and ownership of the public realm, the project examines the role of design, and asks whether designers need a better understanding of what public space means, and whether present procurement processes deliver the highest quality public spaces. If public space is co-constituted, then attention needs to be paid to spaces as well as publics.

Monsoon Assemblages

Principal Investigator – Professor Lindsay Bremner | Research Fellows – Dr. Beth Cullen and Dr. Michele Vianello

Monsoon Assemblages is a five-year interdisciplinary research project investigating the impacts of changing monsoon climates in three of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities, Chennai, Delhi and Dhaka. The project challenges the dominant view of the monsoon as a natural meteorological system distinct from society. Instead it proposes that the monsoon is a co-production of physical and social dynamics entangled within historic lived environments that can be analyzed, worked with, shaped and changed. An interdisciplinary team bringing together the spatial design disciplines and the environmental humanities has been assembled to develop a novel research methodology around the operative concept of Monsoon Assemblages. This aims 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.