Regeneration
We recognize that sustainability and resilience are no longer enough. We are overdrawing resources at an alarming rate and every project must now engage in a regenerative ideology and purposeful cycle to repair the earth and our communities. Our team has engaged with indigenous communities around the globe in finding tapping into cultural wisdom to find the DNA for resilience through the uniqueness of place and people. Regeneration is a new way forward that touches every aspect of our lives.
CHALLENGE
Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm that struck the Caribbean in September 2017, damaged or destroyed ninety-five percent of the homes in the Kalinago Territory on the Island of Dominica, along with the Territory’s central electrical grid. As the poorest indigenous community in the Caribbean, the Kalinago are fully aware that they will face more negative outcomes from climate change if they cannot retool their society to be more resilient and sustainable. They recognize that it is crucial to rethink core mission-critical functions (e.g., housing, energy, water systems, emergency shelters, communications, agriculture, forestry, fishing) and transform them in order to survive with full control of their environment. Dominica has pledged to become the first sustainable country in the Caribbean.
ROLE
As architects trained to respond to immediate post-disaster needs, our director deployed to Dominica via Oviar Global Resilient Systems and coordinated with on island stake holders such as Engineers without Borders. Working with island communities on the recovery process the studio committed to training seven building crews to assess damage and rebuild properly. Later the team expanded the focus to assess carrying capacity as a founding member of the Kalinago Institute for Global Resilience and Regeneration (KIGRR), working with community members and historians to identify a DNA of resilience embedded in Kalinago culture, eventually designing a network of resilience hubs based on historic cultural practices. To move this initiative forward, +LAB through KIGRR coordinated with island governmental entities on grant writing, further advancing the cause at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in San Juan in 2019. Our team, along with Common Earth Climate Resilience and Regeneration, presented the outcomes as ideas for regeneration through culture at the Commonwealth of Nations meeting in London of October 2019.
OUTCOME
The Kalinago Model has been created and is underway.
The Kalinago people wished to create a network of resilient community centers, or resilience hubs, connected by a multi-modal mesh network of collectively intelligent distributed energy, communication, and innovation systems. The first of these centers is located on a site in the hamlet of Salybia and is the pilot project for future centers in St. Cyr, Bataka, Gullet River, Mahaut River, and Sineku, all situated along the east coast of the island. Illya collaborated with tribal elders and community members to develop the Salybia Center through a community-centered planning process. After studying the Kalinago’s existing and future assets, the group developed a complex framework organized around the cultural, physical, social, economic, organizational, and educational domains of community life unique to these first people of Dominica.
Each Kalinago Resilience Hub encompasses four parts:
A central community resilience hub with shelter capacity
Suitable, affordable, and resilient housing with a minimum one-acre contiguous permaculture garden, or a multi-acre shared community garden
An agroforestry landscape linked to a circular timber and homebuilding economy
A scalable, distributed multi-modal mesh network infrastructure, including Internet, communications, transportation, banking, and village-based green trade that supports a sustainable circular economy
