About

Critical Environments is a transdisciplinary spatial design platform examining how interlinked crises shape environments unevenly, and how spatial practice can contest the relations that produce them.

Critical names both a condition and a position. It describes environments in which power, exposure, dependency, scarcity and accumulation are spatially organised and unevenly distributed across territories and forms of life. It also defines a position within spatial design: a refusal to accept as given, and a commitment to rework, the narratives, values and development logics through which environmental inequalities and injustices are produced and legitimised.

No single discipline can grasp these conditions on its own. Critical Environments therefore places spatial design in active relation with environmental humanities, political ecology, science, technology, the arts and situated forms of knowledge. Transdisciplinarity is not breadth for its own sake. It widens the field of inquiry while sharpening what can be recognised, questioned and acted upon beyond human-centred and city-centred frames.

Design here is neither a neutral instrument nor a promise of solution. It is critical inquiry, intervention and proposition: exposing the limits of dominant narratives, reframing the terms of spatial practice, giving spatial and material form to alternatives, and testing what it takes to make them consequential. Through this work, we build collaborative knowledge and common resources, and explore how governance and stewardship can be spatially and institutionally reconfigured through practices of commoning.

Our mission is to contribute to making critical spatial practice consequential in the crises already here. We aim to clarify what is at stake, challenge what no longer holds, and develop situated alternatives for understanding, making and inhabiting environments differently. In doing so, we explore forms of stewardship, care and collective responsibility grounded in difference, interdependence and the conditions required to sustain human and more-than-human life.