CI

Climate Inheritance

Rania Ghosn

Arts, design, architecture & planning

Climate Inheritance

By Rania Ghosn, associate professor of architecture, and El Hadi Jazairy

Actar Publishers · 2023

The speculative design research publication reckons with the complexity of "heritage" and "world" in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites - from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands - have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, World Heritage sites are cast as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The harms and possibilities of such inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies to bequeath other worlds and values.

From Summer 2023 recommended reading from MIT (MIT News). Cover image via Google Books.