Collective challenges in the era of cyclones – Liberation

From April 3 to 6, 2025 in Bordeaux, The quartus endowment fund for architecture Organizes a series of urban meetings, workshops and explorations on how to design and live in cities. An event that Release is a partner.

In October, Valence, in Spain, was under the waters ; In January, Los Angeles was ravaged by flamesand, between the two, The Mayotte archipelago was swept on December 14 by a tropical cyclone of unprecedented intensity. Water, air and fire, so many elements that shatter habitats and infrastructure and which sustainably hunt the inhabitants who survive there.

These phenomena materialize the new climate regime, and it is a safe bet that their frequencies and the powers do not decrease. In addition to the energy necessary to build buildings and cities with the least climate impact possible, we will also have to prepare these same cities to better resist these new perils. The task is dizzying.

Seven of the nine planetary limits have been exceeded and it is all architectural and urban certainties that this situation calls into question. Exhausting resources, rarefaction of energy, fragility of soils, overflow of various pollution, what remains to build when the raw materials are no longer available?

Well there are human organizations, which are a priori without limits. This is the resource we have left and from which we must take the full measure and assert its potential.

This requires fairly deeply reviewing decision-making chains and hierarchical relations, beyond the domination at work in the world of construction.

It is a question of redefining the arrangement and the ordering of relations between the words need, program, project, site, residents. This apparently logical sequel, of a need expressed by a sponsor, transformed into a specifications by a programist and then entrusted to an architect for his drawing and a manufacturer for its realization, is no longer operating if it does not place at each stage of the process the people who will live in these places, and who are for the first concern.

It is a longer and more complex process which guarantees a much more robust and powerful action. This is the demonstration that is made in Mayotte at the moment following the Chido cyclone, where the inhabitants are the first to rebuild. With what is there, with materials, tools and know-how available. It would be advisable to encourage them, to accompany them, to « empuissant » as their effectiveness is incommensurate with the conventional practices of the act of building. Architects have a real role to play alongside them to avoid rebuilding less well than before, to share good practices proven under other tropical longitudes and to clarify often ubiquitous regulatory situations. In a world that becomes more complex, what could be more useful than practitioners of complexity?

If these new alliances become evidence in a context of disaster, it would be advisable to observe them, understand them and be inspired by them to deeply transform our ways of doing things. Crisis after crisis, we observe that the models at work are exceeded, whether it is access to housing or pressure on ecosystems. Truly taking note of the material limits, we then have collective intelligence which is, for once, endless.