| dc.description.abstract | Upon identifying the multifaceted and disparate array of ever-changing
environmental informants to architectural discourse, one is confronted with how to unite
this dialogue in meaningful ways to current modes of thought and action. The question
gains more significance as our knowledge of the greater environmental domain becomes
more systemic and complexly heterogenic, while at the same time, approaches to the
issues have proved to be progressively more reductivist, disconnected, overtly abstracted
or theorized, and universally globalized in regard to multifaceted and content-rich
human particularities in situ.
This research focuses on the implications and applications of Critical
Environmentalism (CE) to propose a corresponding epistemological framework to wide-ranging
socio-environmental complexities occurring across architectural endeavors,
primarily within urban and community developments as comprising the greatest number
of intersections between human constructions and the greater environmental domain.
CE addresses environmental issues reciprocally emerging across numerous disciplines and theoretical stances and fosters critical and systemically collective approaches to
knowledge integration, amalgamating multiple stakeholder perspectives within an
interconnective and operational goal of creative communal development and betterment
of the human condition in relation to environmental concerns. Situating the environment
(Umwelt) as an interconnecting catalyst between divergent points-of-views, CE
promotes a multi-methodological, co-enabling framework intended to foster increased
ethical and participatory dynamics, communal vitality, co-invested attention, and
productive interchanges of knowledge that cultivate an overall quality of knowing and
being within the intricacies of the greater domain. As such, it engages broader
definitions for architecture within its social community, significantly embodied and
epistemologically co-substantiating within a shared, environmental life-place.
Fundamentally a hermeneutic standpoint, this investigation elucidates conceptual
connections and mutual grounds, objectives, and modes-of-operation across knowledge
domains, initiating an essential, socio-environmentally oriented framework for
architectural endeavors. In this, it brings together common threads within critical social
theory and environmentalist discourse to subsequently promote distinct interconnective
components within a framework of socio-environmental thought for architecture. The
research then provides case examples and recommendations toward stimulating
progressive environmental initiatives and thus increased capacity to improve existing
epistemic conditions for architecture, urban design, and community development within
the broader scope of Critical Environmentalism. | en |
