Safe Spaces Exploring Design Possibilities in Preparing for Emergencies

The research investigates the design possibilities and methodologies that underpin the preparedness for uncertain disastrous events by focusing on the design of critical infrastructures, those systems, and spaces considered necessary for the survival and resistance of a human environment. By selecting case studies of safe spaces that present duality in addressing both a state of rest and a possible condition of emergency, and by designing a set of possibilities to test and discuss the findings, the work aims to reflect on the relation between humans, a changing natural environment, and architecture.

In recent years we have witnessed an intensification of environmental phenomena of unusual intensity with catastrophic effects on the human environment. In the environmental crisis of climate change, the increase in the risk generates, on the one hand, new vulnerable environments to which will correspond a growing need for security. 1 On the other hand, global interest in the concept of preparedness.

Instead of mitigating the risk of a disastrous event, the idea of preparedness is to assume that a disaster will happen, enacting a vision of a dystopian future to develop a set of technique for maintaining safety in a time of emergency. 2 This leads to address the protection of critical infrastructures, the backbone of settlements, their irreducible structure, 3 the system on which human safety depends. Structures such as for water supply, energy provision, climate protection, and food production are, in fact, the first line for surviving and the first to fail in the wake of a disaster.4 Considering a disaster as an event, as an alternate condition for the human environment, suggests to thinking of it as part of the biography of a space that lives its continuity through changes. 5 A disaster can be read, in fact, as an event through which a disorder is impressed to a human environment, as a change of form. 6 Adopting the idea that an emergency could be a possible alternative temporal condition that architecture has to contend with, could offer insights for the design.

A risky condition could be read as a potentially unstable context that challenges architecture's functional or formal dynamicity, its capability to transform and adapt. On a methodological level, it leads to consider multiple scenarios, durations, and configurations for a project; it interrogates the permanence and stability of architecture, challenging it as the determination of a certain space, 7 and stressing principles such as transformability, adaptability and typological hybridization: a park could be designed to be transformed into an off-grid emergency camp-site; a mineral square into a temporary water reservoir.

Therefore, how to design a space able to respond to the state of rest and a potential catastrophe? How can the architectural project embody a potential disaster? How can this inform the design process, and what are the possibilities and methodologies underpinned?

The entire work is structured in three macro-sections: one theoretical, one collecting case studies, and one of research by design. The first one articulates a critical reading of preparedness, systematizing theories, revisiting models, and framing the architectural debate. The second and third sections are discussed here in this paper's context.

The second section is composed of two main corpus of case studies that introduce different possibilities, methodologies, and declination of preparedness, with a geographical focus on the Japanese, American, and North European context, where a high vulnerability to natural disasters and subsequent culture of preparedness have a strong influence on the design. The cases are no selected to be compared, but instead, they are portions of reasoning where each example helps arguing the thesis. As anchors drawn to respond to both a state of rest and different times of a potential emergency, raising Kevin Lynch's "What time is this place?", 8 the cases present a dualism that can be drawn in different ways, ranging from a functional mutation to a formal one in the wake of a disaster.

The recognition of the macro-design strategies proposed; the spatial implications of the addressed phase of the emergency; the typology of approaches to the physicality of the disaster; the specific drawing of the mutation are thus the analytic lens through which the cases are investigated in order to build a matrix of possibilities that can be further tested and implemented.

Prepper's Architecture

There is nothing ready, but everything can be ready. 9

The first corpus investigates the Prepper movement's architecture, a sub-culture born in the 1960s in the United States that actively prepares for a potential emergency that could never happen: environmental catastrophes, economic collapse, pandemic, nuclear attacks, apocalypse. By combining scientific literature, D.I.Y. manuals, pop-culture material, and specific case studies through the tool of drawing, the aim is to trace some of the characters of this architecture of paranoia that, albeit extreme, stresses a space transformability and typological hybridization in preparing for a catastrophe, ranging from more defensive and hard solutions to those that address a renews relationship with the natural world. Prepperism is a widespread phenomenon driven not by delirious behaviors but by the precautioning response to generalized anxiety about a permanent crisis, 10 resulting in accidental design strategies. For Preppers, human survival depends on designing a safe and self-sufficient space: architecture plays a crucial role. Definable as a survival architecture within the meaning of Friedman, that facilitate food production, water provision, and shelter with an implicit "build less and use better what exists," 11 Prepperism is characterized by redesigning critical infrastructures as entirely off-grid, self-sufficient hybrid typologies. 12

Their design strategies are, in fact, based on the exclusion and seclusion from urban contexts that, according to one of the most popular survival guides, 13 could become increasingly unsafe in the event of natural disaster due to the collapse of critical infrastructures and the so-called "ripple effect." Two are the fundamental approaches for sheltering: "bugging-out" and "bugging-in," which correspond to different architectural answers. To this, a prodromal activity of trans-scalar mapping and re-reading in a dualistic perspective the human settlements allows them to identify those elements and typologies to transform into autonomous infrastructures for survival: a private swimming pool could be converted into a self-sufficient greenhouse; a courtyard into a hybrid space for food production and water depuration; a former military structure into a hypogeal inhabitable infrastructure; 14 urban gardens, abandoned garages, and subway tunnels could become multi-dimensional shelters. 15 (Fig. 1 half page) From prefabricated bunkers to inhabitable greenhouses, architecture is here conceived as a tool for survival, a machine that operates, 16 an infrastructure to live, produce, provide, and shelter. By converting existing spaces into survival ones, Preppers can represent a model of an accelerated present. Instead of mitigating risk, they anticipate a disaster shifting it from a possible punctual shock to a constant disordered context to face. Their spaces are drawn not to change at the moment of the event but rather to respond continuously to the worst-case scenario, defining thus spatial strategies for a constant response. More than the transitory present, their architectures address the world of "during" and "after" a catastrophe.

Albeit in its eccentric nature, this paranoic architecture seems to raise exportable and translatable methodological insights for the discipline. The dualistic reading of the environment to identify the unprecedented and inner potential of spaces due to formal, dimensional, and performative specificities, as well as the development of hybrid typologies and generic spaces adaptable over time, could define possibilities to investigate in designing spaces for possible emergency responses.

Dynamic infrastructures

The second corpus of case studies catalogs a series of critical infrastructures at different scales designed according to a logic of transformation of the space. These relate to two main hazards: earthquakes and floods. Differently from Preppers' architectures, they are designed to embody a multi-temporality, mutating and responding dynamically at the time of a possible emergency. Cataloged according to the phase of the emergency addressed, they are analyzed with a focus, on a macroscopical level, on the design strategies proposed; on a microscopical one, on the specific design of the mutation, stressing the principles that inform their dynamicity. The mutation can be drawn in different ways: as a functional transformation, where the critical infrastructures are designed as dual-functional elements able to transform in the phase of the emergency according to a programmatic change of the space; as elastic deformation, where infrastructures are conceived to formally transform, temporarily, due do the interaction with the destructive factors; as a plastic deformation, where they are designed to be shaped by the disaster.

The case studies present different relationships with the physicality of the disaster: from defensive approaches based on reinforcing existing structures to symbiotic logics that go beyond the "Man VS Nature" attitude. 17 Differently from Prepper's shelters, which attempt to find different ways to inhabit a place that seems more and more uninhabitable by designing off-grid inhabitable infrastructures, the case studies here proposed dialogue with a precise times of potential emergencies. The moment of recovery, as in the case of the Japanese Disaster Parks, spaces entirely designed as recovery-camps "in power," safe evacuation spaces, where a dual-design informs from the general scheme arrangement to a very detailed scale. Here, a system of punctual off-grid infrastructures is designed to be transformed into the backbone of a recovery camp: benches can transform into kitchens; green areas are drawn as a productive landscape for food in case of shortage; manholes can convert into camp toilets or first-aid necessity closets. 18 (Fig. 2 half page)

The moment of the event, as for the Danish Climate Park by Tredje Natur, a water reservoir designed to transform depending on the different amounts of rainwater and typologies of floods, ranging from a mineral square to a series of ponds, to a liquid landscape and vice-versa.

The moment of reconstruction, as in the case of the M.I.T. PREP-Hub, where a specific local infrastructure, the paati, a water tank in the shape of a covered hall located at the corner of the main streets is retrofitted, hybridized, and redesigned as a site-specific civic center for the state of rest, as the anchor around which to settle the emergency camp and within which to shelter in case of earthquakes, as well as the repository of architectural culture from which to start the reconstruction. Each of these cases presents various degrees of controlling the uncertain disorder by design. From the controlled drawing of the space for evacuation of people left homeless by the disaster as in the Japanese case to an open design that embodies the unexpected, a yielding, incomplete space that, addressing the resistance of the built environment, draws an unfinished narrative universe 19 as in the case of Depoldering.

Whether in this central section of the work the grid of case studies results extensive, the diversity in the scale and typology of the projects is instrumental for building a discourse and defining general principles to be exported and revisited in different scales. The result is thus a fluid matrix of possibilities that investigates the mutation of the space within different times and extrapolates methodologies that are further tested, deepen, and explored by design. A dual-functional approach from the general scheme to the scale of the furniture; the site-specificity and the recognition of architectural and infrastructural typologies that can be drawn as adaptable dynamic and hybrid spaces; and unfinished project where the destructive forces of nature concur in shaping the space are some of the issues that emerge from these cases. (Fig. 3 full spread)

Prepping Norcia

The design as a specific form of research, thus the act of design itself as an investigative act, 20 defines the third section of the work.

Here, the Italian inner city of Norcia, in Umbria region, is the context for a test-bed project to test, discuss and implement the theoretical, analytical, and design matrix built in previous sections. The choice of the site twofold: one the one hand, the area is characterized by a very high seismic vulnerability, risk whose prevision remains a dark art, 21 generating a context that lives with the constant probability of disasters. On the other hand, epicenter of the disastrous shakes of 2016, it provides the opportunity to systematize the spatial responses to the past emergencies and revisit them from an anticipatory and design perspective.

Here, as an open questionnaire, a series of interrogations are investigated by design. What kind of dynamicity existing elements have regarding disordered situations? Which one can be redesigned as dual and adaptable for an alternate condition of emergency? What are those critical systems on which human resistance depends? By adopting a Preppers' perspective of reading the space, and thus overlapping different characters, typological aspects, and behaviors during the past emergency, the different elements that compose the human environment are observed and analyzed through their inherent actual or potential dynamicity. Between them, three types of critical infrastructures (the stables, the infrastructural areas S.A.E., a former watermill system) that, dealing with different aspects of the emergency management, appear as structures that, in a speculative way, concur in the construction of human resistance, are then studied and redesigned as anchors, dual spaces adaptable for a time of emergency. More than a single architectural outcome per se, each of them is developed in options and hypotheses, even contradictory, to explore the range of approaches emerging from the case studies matrix, from more defensive to symbiotic with the natural world. (Fig. 4 half page)

The stables, spontaneously inhabited during the past emergency due to the planimetric arrangement and dimensions that allow adjustments and transformations, can be re-thought as a hybrid, off-grid infrastructures with an architectural scheme that allows different configurations over time, testing a range of possibilities from Preppers' solutions to the Disaster Parks' principles, from a stable to a temporary housing system.

The infrastructural areas for temporary emergency housing, a specific infrastructural platform provided by the Civil Protection, with foundations, water and electricity connections where standardized and prefabricated modules are installed in few months, incubate a duality that can be explored in grafting a relation with the multiple times of the site. Closed to the historical walls of the city, a punctual system of former watermills represents the third test-case of the work. Formerly used to control and divert the flow of an intermittent torrent. This system, critical for the resistance of a fundamental ecosystem of the wetland, could be revisited as an off-grid, adaptive one that, formally interacting with this fast-changing ground, can draw strength from it, becoming new anchors in emergency conditions.

To conclude, although the design phase seems to arrive as the third section of the work, it does not have a demonstrative purpose. On the contrary, it fluidly moves across the work, exploring, questioning, expanding, and overturning the previous parts as an open-ended process.