ENAC Seminar series // Designing Scarcity: Learning from the Margins

We live in an age increasingly defined by scarcity. The fields of architectural practice and academia are beginning to adapt to the constraints imposed by limited resources, framing a new approach to sustainability within our discipline.
Scarcity—encompassing the lack of natural resources, building materials, unpolluted ecosystems, arable lands, affordable housing, and socio-economic justice—is a pressing issue in our built environments. While it often signals an immediate crisis, scarcity also stimulates new ways of thinking, designing and engaging with stakeholders, offering long-term opportunities for sustainable architectural practices and expanded networks of action. This occurs when we consider resources not as isolated commodities, inevitably heading towards their exhaustion, but as part of a complex social, economic, political and environmental ecosystem.
This lecture, drawing on Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni’s research, practice, and teaching in the adaptive reuse of post-colonial African modern heritage and design in arid regions, will illustrate methodologies for designing with and for scarcity, in contexts under the extreme pressures of climate change, socio-economic inequality and limited financial and institutional support. 
These strategies and processes can, in turn, inform and enrich architectural practices in the Global North, shifting the traditional paradigm of transcontinental knowledge exchange.