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Design or Default

Part 2 Project 2019
Eva Ibanez Fuertes
Architectural Association London | UK
Design or Default is an integrated protocol to establish a carbon capture scheme in Scotland.

It demonstrates the socioeconomic potential of peatland landscapes to operate as carbon sequestration machines. The protocol coordinates projects of peatland stewardship for the generation of capture credits. The capture credit challenges the instrumentality of the correlation between positive and negative emission units which has instituted the commodification of carbon and its detachment from local socioeconomic realities.
Design or Default intervenes at the core of the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in Europe. While a carbon credit offers a temporary consent to emit, a capture credit grants a temporary carbon usufruct; a legal mechanism which allows for the decoupling of carbon benefits from property rights.

The value of the capture credit does not rely primarily on the enclosure of the source but builds up in relation to a constant input of human work. Labour in the peatlands as the foundation for a carbon capture scheme implicitly generates a series of co-benefits from a local perspective. A structural condition emerges surrounding the peatlands of Scotland manifested in repurposed architectures, infrastructures, artefacts and spaces.

Design or Default challenges the functioning of a stagnant property system on the basis of use.

Eva Ibanez Fuertes

Tutor(s)
John Palmesino
Ann-Sofi Rönnskog
2019
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