Type and Duration
FFF-Förderprojekt, June 2022 until December 2023 (finished)Coordinator
ArchitectureMain Research
Sustainable Planning and ConstructionDescription
Sustainability has become one of the most prevalent buzzwords of our current era. From a built envi-ronment perspective, sustainability can be defined as finding ways to benefit the most people possible, while taking away as few resources as possible from our future generations. However, in this discourse on sustainable development, inequality is often neglected. This is important because inequality does not just occur in income disparity or education; research has shown that the structure of space itself can, for example, preclude access to economic opportunity, subject certain environments to dispropor-tionate impacts from climate change, or impose social costs on people commuting from urban periph-eries to urban centers. Cities and societies worldwide consist of centers and peripheries-not just with-in urban and regional areas, but in relation to one another.The formation of "global peripheries" is illustrated by the raw materials that are required for sustaina-ble transitions not just in the building, but also transportation and communication industries. Copper, lithium, cobalt, manganese, and tungsten are some of the main mineral resources we require, for ex-ample, for the production of mobile phones, computer chips, and electric vehicle batteries. These min-erals are concentrated in several locations around the globe-Southern Africa, South America, and parts of Asia, primarily-which exhibit high levels of inequality, both within their own urban regions and in relation to the rest of the world. These devices are ubiquitous to modern society, but it is not clear how places are globally linked; we should be aware of this because of the environmental impact of resource extraction, but also because we should be aware of how markets function and what impact our consumption has on societies beyond just our own. This has broad implications for sustainable transitions, connecting to larger questions about the ways that globalization and urbanization function such that entire regions of the world are operationalized for the export of the materials we rely upon in highly industrialized places like Europe and the Alpenrheintal.
This project builds on ongoing research at the future lab for Architecture and Society, examining every-day life in the Alpenrheintal to reframe the way we discuss sustainability and inequality in the field of urban studies. It will act as "seed funding" with which to launch a major collaborative research project into the formation of global peripheries. The 12-month project aims to secure international partners at both sites of "consumption" and "extraction," develop the research questions and methods for a grant, write applications to the EU Research Fund and Swiss National Science Foundation, and translate the content of the grant applications into initial findings that can be published for a broad audience. Through partnerships in Switzerland and London, as well as with prominent universities in Brazil and Chile, the project also aims to bring internationally renowned scholars to the University of Liechten-stein. The long-term aim of the grant application, beginning with this project, is thus to establish the university as a center of expertise on urban theory and sustainable urban development, based on the unique qualities and competencies that exist at the university and in the surrounding Alpenrheintal area.
