climate

futures


On view at the Liberty Research Annex
October 17, 2024 - January 1, 2025


about
projects
  1. 22/26 Midwest
  2. Ambiguous Territory
  3. Annotation and Insulation
  4. Asutsuare Rebound
  5. Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse
  6. Becoming Biomass
  7. Bespoke Ultra-Thin Layered 3D-printed Reusable Wood-Bio-Based Formwork for Casting Complex Concrete Geometries
  8. Branch Wall: Geometrically Informed Non-Planar Toolpath and Material Deposition
  9. Deploy 2.0
  10. Detroit Cultural Center
  11. Elephant in the Room, and Other Fables
  12. Fabric-Formed Unstabilized Poured Earth
  13. Frie(s/d)
  14. Functionally Graded Additive Manufacturing
  15. Guidance for Designing and Implementing Constitutionally Valid Local Plans and Regulations to Protect Landmarked Trees, Woodlands, and Tree Canopy in Michigan
  16. Heat and Housing: Co-producing Passive Cooling Strategies and Promoting Health in Informal and Precarious Settlements
  17. Hygroscopic Envelope: Building Enclosures for Climate Adaptation
  18. In My Backyard
  19. In-Svalbard: Cold Coast Atlas
  20. Land, Foodways, and Kinship: The Case of Palestinian Villages
  21. Light Forms
  22. MiCE Architecture: Design Strategies to Mitigate Michigan Coastal Erosion
  23. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
  24. Myco-Composite Furniture
  25. Post Rock Post-Industrial Plastic Facade
  26. re:FE Reimagining Mining Waste from a Wounded Region
  27. Shell Wall: Coupling Non-Planar Robotic 3D Concrete Printing and Topology Optimization
  28. Solar Technology Integration on Building Facades
  29. The Canopy
  30. The Lifespan Project
  31. Unfolding Forms of Conveyance
  32. Urban Climate Law Series
  33. Vertical Wetlands





Land, Foodways, and Kinship: The Case of Palestinian Villages
Athar Mufreh, Gabriel Cuéllar       2023

20

This project aims to support land-based foodways in agricultural villages in Palestine. We focus on Wadi Fukin, near Bethlehem, which is known for its vegetable varieties and food preservation practices and is heavily impacted by encroaching Israeli settlements and climate change. Palestinian smallholders confront the upheaval of settlement construction, such as groundwater loss and land confiscation, as well as the occupation’s marketplace restrictions on local produce. Meanwhile, farming know-how is at risk, because younger generations typically only find work in settlement construction. Nevertheless, local foodways are valued and generational land knowledge and kinship relations persist.

In collaboration with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, we developed a toolkit of interventions designed to address these challenges. These were created in dialogue with farmers and the village council. The toolkit visualizes each tool on a diagrammatic patch of land, leveraging social and physical dimensions to enhance prevailing kinship connections.

The process has revealed that most of the tools can be implemented now. Some, such as low-maintenance crops and collective action, may only be considered under worsening conditions. Others— landlending, social farming, food-based businesses—require little to initiate. Thus, the toolkit offers a set of optimistic, mutually inclusive strategies that, in spite of the occupation, highlight villagers’ agency for uncertain futures.

Additional credits:
In collaboration with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy