Welcome to the companion website for the upcoming Exploratory Seminar Imagining the Landscape of Retreat. We are very excited for the Exploratory Seminar and we look forward to seeing everyone soon. Please feel free to explore this website. We will strive to make sure that the most up-to-date information is installed. Thank you.

Executive Summary

This seminar will advance a platform for research in natural hazard preparedness, by expanding how creative disciplines can grow their contribution to the landscape of risk, response and adaptation. In particular, the seminar will help frame the concept of retreat as a viable adaptive, pre-emptive strategy that avoids ‘last resort’ alternatives arising from environmental vulnerability. The research questions existing structures of climate capital that reinforce rebuild procedures, incentivize resettlement operations, and profit from post-disaster protocols. We are especially concerned with practices that insist upon a ‘return to normal’ paradigm, reducing chronic risk to a series of value-based parameters that rely on solving issues. Instead, the seminar will help generate a multi-disciplinary approach that addresses an alternative to these reflexive, capital rebuild responses that continue to pacify the living environment.. The seminar emphasizes the importance of explaining living processes to an affected public, and the value of offering alternative visions that include an acceptance of the risk itself. We are especially concerned with the public resource of the land that is ‘left behind’, assembling an alternative to developer driven buy-outs. Thus framed, retreat is a form of creative response and an overlooked opportunity to help communities adapt to dynamic littoral processes, infrastructural injustices and policy inequalities that blur the borders of citizenship. This seminar aims to help instigate the pedagogic and practical outlines for retreat by examining case studies in dialogue with designers and artists who are questioning the typical expansionist models of global orders and the temporal perversity of emergency management models. We will conceptualize, imagine and define alternative imaginaries through public, private and institutional frameworks by suggesting that there is a latent infrastructure of retreat driven by an appreciation that includes the relations between biophysical and social processes.

Exploratory Seminar Leaders