Addressing Climate Change With A Collective Approach

The thesis explores the role of the built environment in enabling social cohesion and encouraging collective climate action. Focusing on the Eastville Park site, the thesis investigates the psychology of social interactions to create spaces that promote a collective mindset, interdependency, sharing of resources, and forming of community relationships.

Recent years have seen the rise of hyper-individualism, which has transformed society into a ‘consumer’ nation, focused on self-reliance rather than interdependence, leaving citizens blind to the consequences of their actions. Each individual is on a journey to convenience, luxury, and personal economic growth leading to hyper-consumerism, overconsumption, excess waste, and an imbalance of resources and wealth.
In light of the current climate emergency, we need to shift our mindset from ‘me’ to ‘we’ and act for the environment and our collective well-being.

The proposal is a “community living room”, where the users can participate in everyday activities such as eating, cooking, growing and learning, in a sustainable manner. The living room comprises various programmes, attracting a range of users and creating interactions and bonding opportunities. The scheme hopes to facilitate sustainable lifestyle changes while building social capital and ecological responsibility for collaborative climate action. The project addresses issues such as participation, barriers to community cohesion and community ownership to create a framework of tangible measures for enabling collective climate action. This was combined with site-specific analysis and community needs to achieve the desired outcome.

Overall, the scheme aimed to create a positive social, economic and environmental impact on the Eastville community. This thesis provides an example of how a series of tangible measures, programmes and spaces can aid in building social capital, increasing our sense of ecological responsibility and enabling collaborative climate action.