If we want to build a sustainable world, we have to consider the whole system.
WHY
We are facing major societal challenges. CO2 emissions must be drastically reduced in order to stay within the available carbon budget (linked to the 1.5-degree warming scenario). This presents challenges and opportunities for agriculture and construction, among others. Building materials made from wood, crops and/or bio residual flows offer solutions for the challenges of both agriculture and construction. However, we see that the ‘why this has to be done’ has already sunk in the construction industry, as with the farmer, as with the policy maker, as with the citizen, but that the ‘how to do this’ is still very much the question. How do we ensure that the negative energy of misunderstanding and fear towards each other can be converted into a positive energy of possibilities and getting to work?
We advocate the use of storytelling and imagination of storytellers, scientists and artists to stimulate and accelerate efforts towards a regenerative economy.
HOW
With our projects The Growing Pavilion and The Exploded View, we have proven that the power of storytelling and imagination is essential in this new economy. To reach and involve professionals on the one hand and to make a wider public aware of realistic alternatives to the current polluting system on the other. Possible Landscapes builds on the research and storytelling of these projects, in which the focus is on the possibilities and beauty of biobased materials. With Possible Landscapes we go further and consider the entire system of sustainable building and living even more emphatically. We investigate how the chain, from land to building, from crop to industry and from ideal to financially fair value system, can look per area and what this means for the different landscapes of the Netherlands.
REGIONAL APPROACH
Because the soil and water problems and other social challenges of an area are so important for a sustainable design of our landscape, we opt for a regional approach to investigate the possible chains from land to construction. The starting point of the question can be an area task (for example rewetting), but it can also have a different starting point, for example how do we make a biobased school building using only regionally grown materials?