One may question the relevance of design and architecture festivals, symposiums and exhibitions addressing concerns around social, racial and environmental inequity - subjects that are not explicitly and historically—even perversely—thought to bear association with creative fields. However, amid the digital age, wherein an abundance of information manages to inundate the mind and where narratives popularised by capitalist enterprises and populist hashtags shape popular perception, it becomes imperative for academic spaces to make room for inquiry and contemplation, and for disparate narratives to exhibit a form of soft power.

When discussions upon the common subjects of the climate crisis, sustainability or the political nature of architectural interventions emerge in such free spaces, there is ample room for alternate perspectives to develop around them and for creative inquiry, imagination and hope to drive solutional propositions. Beyond the soft power that such spaces hold, dialogues undertaken within these realms enable the jettisoning of reductive and repetitive solutions for several crises.

Hence, even as most design and architectural institutions and festivals continue to make overarching and rather vague statements about the need to address the climate crisis and employ sustainable building practices, there are a few disruptive entities that escape this pigeonhole by deliberating upon novel ways to explore the inadequacies in canonical approaches and meditating upon new theories that can offer an interdisciplinary understanding of the issues that pervade our environments and the systems that cause them. Felix Guattari’s bygone proclamation regarding the environment, social systems and the individual psyche as interconnected ecologies that impact each other, in his 1989 book The Three Ecologies, serves as a valid vanguard in this case. An excerpt from Guattari’s book reads, “The only true response to the ecological crisis is on a global scale, provided that it brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets.” A similar sentiment is conveyed via the curatorial statement for the 11th edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). Open from June 29 - October 13, 2024, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the theme for IABR 2024 is Nature of Hope.

The biennale proposes to foster the potential of spatial design to move towards an architecture of ecologies. It recognises the demands of the current planetary conditions and proposes that the processes of analysing, imagining and visualising alternative modes of living be employed to reorient the discipline such that it becomes regenerative. IABR 2024: Nature of Hope comprises three main components—an eponymous exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut, a green route to visit various Botanical Monuments and indulge in events organised around them, and an extensive public program that includes the showcase of research projects, guided tours, workshops, talks, book launches and more.

With a rich curatorial proposition in place and an abundance of hopeful presentations, Nature of Hope opened on June 29, 2024, at the Nieuwe Instituut with a ceremonial program. The opening symposium on June 30 elaborated upon the theme of IABR and opened dialogue on how architecture can restore ecological balance by taking biodiversity and nature as its starting point. IABR 2024’s curatorial team, led by Saskia van Stein, further comprises Janna Bystrykh, Catherine Koekoek, Alina Paias, Hani Salih and Noortje Weenink. The event, beyond and over the presentation of tangible entities, seeks to contribute towards the restoration of the social and knowledge infrastructure such that extractive and near-sighted ways of problem-solving cease to remain the norm and the first choice and alternative ways of working are actively sought.

Nature of Hope’s programming is designed to celebrate promising narratives for sustainable architecture and highlight existing practices and projects that envision our relationship with nature as a reciprocal one. The eponymous main exhibition showcases an array of transformative, practice-based examples that explore emerging questions and new directions for spatial design, conceived by architects in collaboration with ecologists, philosophers, scientists and artists. One can witness, within the gallery, 70 different approaches and examples from disparate contexts and conditions existing around the globe that provide an insight into the multifaceted ways in which architecture contributes as a tool for awareness and in helping restore biodiversity and the natural environment.

Some of the showcases in the exhibition include the After Comfort Collective’s Climate Portraits, Japanese artist Aki Inomata’s Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter" to Hermit Crabs?, Théo Demans & Clemence Seilles’ Cake Slices, APLO’s Moon Ants Mangrove, BC architects’ Material Inertia: Stories of Georegion, CHRITH architects & Emma Diehl Studio’s Material Transition - Learning from Grand Paris, CHRITH architects & Studio Stephan Schagen’s Delving into the Dutch Soil, Extinction Rebellion UK’s The Beacon, Forensic Architecture’s If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?, Independent School for the City’s This Is Tomorrow: Rotterdam in a +2.5 ºC World and MOULD’s Architecture is Climate, amongst other experimental and pedagogical presentations.

The rich array of presentations within the gallery apportioned attention to material exploration, soil, barter exchanges, the impact of the capitalist economy, neocolonialism, extractivism, exploitation, violation and other birthed complications on natural resources. Some works grabbed attention with their theatrical propositions—a brick proclaiming ‘first stone of non-building’, an image of a building upon which the words ‘Renovate don’t Speculate’ are digitally embossed, a hoarding within the exhibition that co-opts the gaming interface to present three options to the visitors with the overarching question: ‘EXIT? This is tomorrow’.

The second main part of the larger programme, The Botanical Monuments, is a network of 26 green places in Rotterdam, rooted in coexistence and daily rituals with nature and connected through the regeneration of (informal) ecosystems and communities. During IABR, different activities take place at each of these locations, all of which are designed to address the biennale’s intent of shifting architecture’s relationship with nature. “A network of locations and initiatives that we hope will continue to expand over time, connected by regenerative community and gardening practices and rooted in the coexistence and daily rituals with nature,” reads a description from the press release. Some of these locations include the Bee landscape; Blijdorp Zoo; Steilrand, which is a former peat pond stretching to about 13.5 kilometres and currently being managed for the development of biodiversity; Park 1943, where native plants are being allowed to bloom freely; Spoortuin, which comprises a vegetable garden and forest with old trees along the railroad track between Rotterdam Centraal and Schiedam; Hefpark, which is situated at the foot of the Hefbrug and serves as a space for residents to organise activities; Botanical Garden Afrikaanderwijk, a historical garden with more than 850 plant species on display; and Essenburgpark which is an urban nature area and water catchment basin where citizens initiated a preservation project.

Lastly, the public program, with the Practice Place at its core, provides a space for practitioners to discuss how to build alliances and explore the conditions for a future-oriented architecture. The rich list of programs includes various symposiums and dialogues with Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR), agrarian sociologist Max Ajl, the larger curatorial team, students and teachers from TU Dortmund – Urban Design Unit, gardeners from across the globe and more such interdisciplinary participants. The subject of discussion during these dialogues that are split across the duration of IABR, include biobased building processes, films that can inspire or leverage spatial design for the benefit of the planet and its inhabitants, the future of architecture and urbanism, collaborating to create community gardens, the possibility of achieving positive impacts on neighbourhoods through sustainable design and processes to break the demolition cycle, amongst other topics.

A flurry of performances is also part of the public programme by IABR. Some of these include Musical swampwalk, Dating an ecosystem and Onder het maaiveld - Below ground level. They are designed to help participants reconnect with the land and nature. IABR also witnesses the launches of books, research projects and manifestos concerned with climate action, the transformation of cities into urban ecosystems, decarbonising, ecological regeneration and cultural transformation. Lastly, some workshops hosted during the months-long architectural event are Gardening with permaculture principles; Composting workshop; Transition-Scapes – Community of Practice Meeting, designed to engage with a speculative tool called ‘Transition-Scapes’ designed to depict future scenarios around energy transition; and Nieuwe Vroenten: A Taste for Change, a design session about the innovative power of plant-based food. Other workshops explored the processes that help urban nature flourish and establish the importance of biodiverse and integral work in and with soil to restore and promote urban soil and climate.

Backtracking to the curatorial statement for IABR 2024, an excerpt enunciating upon the themes of the architectural festival, reads, “The central themes of the IABR 2024 – nature and hope, soil and relations – stem from the recognition that the power of transformation lies in those design practices that acknowledge people and materials as part of shared ecosystems, that are deeply rooted in situated histories and social fabrics and that recognise human-nature relations as reciprocal. Nature of Hope celebrates the collective, planetary effort for substantial environmental and social change in and through architecture.” The themes of ‘nature’ and ‘hope’, also visibly included in the title of the event, foretell the association that the architectural exhibition seeks to prompt with natural dispositions and the attention levied on hope as a necessary ingredient for ensuing speculative introspection. The choice of including ‘soil’ and ‘relations’ as two of the four central themes has to do with the recognition that everything is relational to the ground. From the modes of extraction employed to strip away land of its natural resources and cultural connotations to the systemic processes of festooning excesses upon chosen lands to prop them as empires, both extractive and additive behaviours impact lands, people, climate and the environment.

By shifting focus slightly away from the aspect of designing and making, the curators enable a philosophical inquiry into the relevance of soil and land. This also shines a light on the cyclical processes that pertain to changing social and environmental climate and their impact on traditional methods of communal problem-solving, devaluation of existing land positions, exacerbated fragmentation of society, the emergence of right-wing populism and the monetary cutback on sectors that typically drive change by introducing new ideas.

This erosion in the public system and government ministries that drive change and handle newfangled issues coming up with time, addressed in the context of The Netherlands, by IABR’s General and Artistic Director Saskia van Stein in a position paper for IABR, drives home the point that architecture, despite its potential to facilitate spatial change for better communal interactions, lacks the power to birth conditions that sanction these very changes.

Without invalidating the history of Dutch colonialism and the socioeconomic and cultural inequality within The Netherlands, Stein discusses, in her paper, how the Dutch way of managing water and landscapes is an export product. “Our specification of social engineering is inextricably linked to our history of extraction. Historically grown dependencies will have to be acknowledged before a substantially different etiquette in matters such as climate justice can germinate,” Stein shares. “Socioeconomic and cultural inequality in The Netherlands itself is not unrelated to the way we treat the land – it is not without reason that the former peat colonies and other extraction areas such as Oost-Groningen and Zuid-Limburg have the highest levels of deprivation and dissatisfaction. The unequal distribution of the benefits and burdens of extraction is the cause of inequality of wealth and social disruption,” she adds. This overlap in the crisis about ecology, climate and social relations, reveals how systems of extraction exhaust people, ecosystems and the Earth, whilst also impacting the architecture in the region.

In the face of such bleak conditions, one may surmise that our futures are inordinately doomed unless leaders of the world magically cease operations that continue to exploit and inundate individuals, ecosystems and infrastructures; and citizens of the world immediately reject neoliberal and universalised directives in favour of local and participatory ways of working. However, every epoch witnesses, along with deterioration, some arguable progress, too. In this arena, one can trace a different kind of shift in our relationship with nature. With more than 400 natural entities being granted rights since the start of this century, the establishment of our coexistence with nature has taken a turn. The Rights of Nature movement has been slowly surging in recent years, and discussions around eco-philosophy are carving a space in popular culture. Discussions around such subjects pave the way for examining and deconstructing the distinction between humans and other sentient beings and, consequently, not placing ourselves above nature as well as presenting the possibility of individuals regarding a second thought before annihilating natural resources for their own benefit.

Such awareness that leads to a more intimate evolution of the relationship between other sentient beings and humans, gives one the hope for futures where we see ourselves as an intrinsic part of nature and our lands. This hope further swells when one comes across initiatives where architects, policymakers and cognizant citizens are striving to design carbon-positive built environments, envisioning non-extractive systems, utilising local materials, reusing discarded materials, facilitating circular design, restoring the subsoil, working to build and enhance commons, integrating biomimicry in their work, researching and discussing the implications of capitalistic modes of extraction and striving to alter policies and proposals via silent action and protests.