All of the Above
Janette Komoda Kim
My work addresses climate justice by empowering communities to realize a more equitable distribution of land and resources. To address such complex issues, I often collaborate with community-based organizations and municipal agencies, and I combine tools of urban, architectural, and multimedia design.
Over the years, I’ve been drawn to approaches that I believe get to the roots of systemic change. One—decision-making tools—deals with the process of community empowerment. The other—property reform—shapes the space of community life.
My decision-making tools help community members explore, imagine, and debate potential responses to complex urban issues in a healthy, playful way. For example, I designed three board games, called In It Together, Bartertown, and Mix & Match, which play out more just and equitable responses to wildfires and rising seas. I also wrote a book called The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform, which exposes the politics behind sustainable design, and I co-produced a podcast series called Safari, which gives subway riders a tour of urban animal life just outside their windows. I reflect on such methods by writing about public engagement. I advocate for more direct, collaborative governance by those who are most impacted by design.
I also reimagine the space of property ownership. My goal is to foster regenerative economies and a more reciprocal relationship between people and land. In the Resilient by Design Challenge, for example, our team designed collectively-owned housing to protect communities from displacement due to sea level rise and gentrification. I also designed a hotel in Sichuan, China and a farmhouse in Sonoma, CA, where people can engage with bamboo and chapparal landscapes around them. I also research and write about exceptional community-based initiatives. I am currently writing a book called Property Playbook, which illustrates how activists and architects can co-opt property ownership to foster ecological vitality and repair the dispossession of land from workers and BIPOC people.
Books
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on Energy
Selected Writing
“The Infrastructural Commons of W57,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James Graham (Lars Müller Publishers and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City: 2016).
This short essay is a contribution to a “dossier” of architectural ideas on climate. The piece assesses the carbon footprint of Bjarke Ingel’s W57 “courtscraper” luxury housing complex on the west side of Manhattan, to reveal how it outsources investments into carbon-savings devices and the fulfillment of affordable housing requirements to its neighbors in order to lay claim to Ingel’s vision of “hedonistic sustainability.”
“1991: Biosphere II,” co-authored with Erik Carver in The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What is the Power of Shit? Lydia Kallipoliti (Lars Müller Publishers/Storefront for Art and Architecture: 2020).
This short essay provides a provides context and interpretation of the Biosphere 2 vivarium in Arizona as one of 37 “historical living prototypes” of closed, self-sustaining environments meticulously drawn by the book’s author. Our essay revisits arguments made in our 2008-9 article on Biosphere 2 published in Volume Magazine, with an updated reflection on Steve Bannon’s brief but contentious tenure as Biosphere 2’s CEO.
“Crisis in Crisis: Biosphere 2’s Contested Ecologies,” co-authored with Erik Carver in Volume Magazine, “Storytelling,” ed Jeffrey Inaba, vol. 20, September (Archis Foundation: 2009): 29-33.
This article details the transformation of the Biosphere 2 vivarium from its creation in 1991 as a testing ground for holistic theories of spiritual and ecological equilibrium to a porous laboratory at the University of Arizona that simulates climate change futures. This case signals a shift in the ecological function of architecture from one of exclusion and control to one that activates ongoing debates about its own managers’ roles in tweaking and tuning the structure’s environmental systems and enclosures.
See also:The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform