PhD Fellow in Radical Preservation for Biodiversity Enhancement through Co-construction

PhD Fellow in Radical Preservation for Biodiversity Enhancement through Co-construction

Would you like to take part in the uncovering and activation of unseen aspects of our cultural heritage and enhancement of biodiversity, through transformation, within existing built environments, in collaboration with an active local community?

Across most of the Western world, rural areas are undergoing profound changes. Social migration from the rural areas towards the larger cities, driven by the mechanisation of agriculture and the centralisation of public institutions, has led to rural depopulation, leaving countless villages with vacant, deteriorating houses and disconnected infrastructure.

The PhD call is aiming at the unseen aspects of our cultural heritage in conjunction with the material resources embedded in buildings, emptied of function, in areas affected by depopulation. It seeks to identify opportunities for expanding our current heritage apparatus to encompass more than conventional conservation and preservation based on upholding and prolonging. Aarhus School of Architecture invites project proposals that combine biodiversity-enhancing approaches to preservation, controlled decay, and subtractive as well as reuse-based transformation practices. Moreover, these practices are to be further developed in close collaboration with the surrounding local community. In short, the buildings emptied of function should be investigated as dynamic assets for those living in their immediate vicinity.

Partially ruined rural villages are often regarded as being subject to inevitable decline. Rather than interpreting this development as a loss, however, the PhD project should investigate how exchanges of cultural and historical knowledge can emerge through the transformation of buildings at the intersection of natural and cultural processes, potentially strengthening local community cohesion. Bearing in mind, the Urban Renewal Fund, Denmark’s National Afforestation Plan and the Green Tripartite Agreement, these partially ruined villages represent considerable potential for transforming buildings that have lost their original purpose into biodiversity-enhancing interfaces across species, while engaging with the cultural histories embedded within them.

The PhD project will form part of UTOPIA THY , an interdisciplinary co-construction and research project spanning a specific village community in Thy, municipal government and local and national knowledge institutions. Through full-scale interventions, UTOPIA THY transforms abandoned buildings and unused village spaces in Bedsted Thy into new communal spaces shaped by hybrids of cultural-historical building remnants and afforestation. The project unfolds as a village laboratory for developing methods for integrated regenerative nature and village development.

Aarhus School of Architecture invites project proposals in which the knowledge production to a substantial extent is based on Research through Design. The transformation at full-scale of one or more abandoned buildings in Bedsted Thy is therefore expected to provide the framework for developing and testing combined strategies for radical preservation and biodiversity enhancement. Through these interventions, the project should explore how transformation strategies incorporating controlled decay can activate cultural-historical dimensions while simultaneously initiating pockets of biodiversity.

Co-construction embedded in the local community and local stakeholders should be an integral part of the project proposal. This should facilitate an exploration of how the interventions can mediate between people and nature and potentially strengthen place-specific identity formation. A theoretical framework drawing on international approaches to transformation and forms of coexistence with nature, in partially unregulated societal contexts, could furthermore inform the development of the project’s notions of aesthetics and understanding of nature, both internationally and in the local context of Thy.

Collaboration with a concurrent PhD project in anthropology will provide an opportunity to strengthen the project’s inherent interdisciplinary dimensions. In particular, a focused understanding and involvement of the local community can enhance the relevance and long-term viability of physical interventions.

Overall, Aarhus School of Architecture invites project proposals that embed radical preservation of abandoned buildings and biodiversity enhancement within the village community and the natural environment from which they are to emerge.

All the advertised positions are full-time positions (37 hours per week). The workplace is Aarhus School of Architecture, Exners Plads 7, 8000 Aarhus C. And PhD students are expected to be actively and regularly present in the PhD school environment.

The responsibilities of a PhD student include:

• Planning and carryin