PARADE – Publication and Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments, seeks to explore the relationships between the built environment and the following disciplines:

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SOCIOLOGY

As the discipline par excellence that covers ‘the social’ interaction of people with the built environment and with each other – invariably in a built environment context – sociology is a field of study that offers all the disciplines covered in this programme insights into how their own individual practices and modes of operation impact on people.  The built environment categorizes people geographically and symbolically through the building typologies they inhabit or the urban conditions they live in. It also functions as a site of civic engagement and conflict with housing being a typical focal point of social and political antagonism. No discipline better or more thoroughly explores these ‘effects’ of architecture, planning urban and landscape design on users, than sociology. Embedding it into a more interdisciplinary framework is key to a programme such as this.

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HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Human geography and its derivative forms, whether critical or radical, are fundamentally interdisciplinary in a way that engages with this programme’s aims directly. In exploring human interaction with location and seeking to explain the diverse motives and motors behind such decisions – whether freely taken or not – human geography engages with the social, the political and the physical manifestations of these, as they emerge in the built environment and impact on people. In applying a deliberately political analysis to its field of study, human geography helps architects understand their activity on a broader canvas, lays bare the consequences of urban design and planning, and engages directly with community and cultural studies and, of course, sociology. It is another key component of this transdisciplinary programme.

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CULTURES & COMMUNITIES

Cultural studies is, by its own definitions, an interdisciplinary endeavour. Exploring media representation of cultures and communities, the political and ideological framing of peoples and policy agendas of governments – as they affect individuals and communities – as well as exploring the impact of consumer capitalism on ‘indigenous’ peoples, it engages with every discipline it can. When framed directly alongside community studies, the impact of the cultural phenomena it studies become very real, and the direct impact on the way communities and groups of peoples live, survive and grow or decline are evident. Inseparable from the physical environments in which these dynamics operate, cultural and community studies are ‘naturally’ linked to the built environment. This programme seeks to develop a better and fuller understanding of the dynamics in play across these fields.

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HEALTH

The Public Health Movement has its very origins in built environment issues – the living conditions of the 19th century urban poor. Philanthropic movements to house the inhabitants of slums often led to policy changes and the direct involvement of governments in issues of housing, sanitation and the introduction of laws to minimise the negative health implications of industrialized urban settings. Growing exponentially throughout the 20th century, public health is now a discipline whose impact and influence is felt by all others, from architects working to strict building codes, to urban planners following legislative norms for healthy cities, to planners developing integrated transport systems friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. However, it is not only in the pragmatics of design that we see public health cross discipline boundaries, its health promotional campaigns have involved filmmakers, graphic designers, artists and journalists. Contributing to this cross disciplinary expansion of the field is a goal of this programme.