Multi-Species Climate Resilience in Regional Landscapes Through Practice-Led Architectural Design Studios

Abstract

Climate change is intensifying environmental pressures across regional landscapes, requiring architectural approaches that extend beyond anthropocentric models of design. While resilience discourse within architecture has focused largely on technological performance, infrastructural robustness, and the protection of human settlements, the intersection between multi-species scholarship and social-ecological resilience remains underdeveloped at building scale, in regional rather than metropolitan settings, and in accounts of design studio work as research material. This paper asks what spatial strategies emerge when architectural design in a regional intertidal landscape is briefed to treat climate resilience as a more-than-human rather than an anthropocentric condition. The question is pursued through a practice-led reading of five student projects developed within a single design studio on Awabakal Country, in the Carrington Mangrove landscape at Mulubinba (Newcastle), Australia. Two conceptual pillars (resilience theory; and multi-species design read together with Designing with Country) are used to derive three design themes: climate shelter as multi-species infrastructure, regional landscape interfaces, and sensory ecologies and environmental awareness. Each project is read against three operationalised criteria, with documented content held apart from interpretive judgement throughout. Four architectural strategies are then named inductively from these readings: ecological symbiosis, habitat infrastructure, adaptive landscape engagement, and sensory ecological awareness, each reported together with the limit it encountered in this corpus. As speculative, unbuilt work from a single site and brief, these strategies are offered not as validated or generalisable solutions but as a conceptual vocabulary for architects and educators to test elsewhere. The paper further argues that design studio work becomes usable as research evidence only where its interpretive procedure is made explicit.