Urban design for future fire risk in Chile

I was invited to Chile by the University of Bío Bío in Concepcion at the end of August to work on a Wildfire Resilient Design studio with a group of researchers and practitioners. Funded by a national grant and the Sustainable Architecture Node, the project I was working on was investigating new ways of reducing bushfire risks in Chile. My task was to run a design studio which developed core principles to reduce risks and which could integrate actions with stakeholders, while developing design solutions. To produce a grounded and demonstrable approach, we examined the range of challenges impacting on an informal settlement on the edge of Concepcion with a history of fire losses, including fatalities. The community has a strong self-organising community group that typically opposed government interventions. 

In addition to community leaders, my studio group includes foresters, risk and fire managers and responders, local government officials, architects, planners, social workers, geographers and PhD researchers. We spent two days working on core principles before undertaking a tour of the site with key community members who had been involved with fighting previous fires. It was immediately apparent that the site faced significant challenges: limited access for response agencies, few fire hydrants with pressure, poorly built structures, and long fire runs in pine and eucalypt forests with considerable elevated fuels.

The studio group is now preparing drawings and advice setting out key risk reduction concepts, including practical methods to improve existing and new typical informal housing styles. The studio outputs will be publicly launched and exhibited in October.

I was also lucky to be invited to give public keynotes in Concepcion at the Faculty of Architecture at University of Bio Bio hosted by Dean Cecilia Poblete, and in Santiago at the University of Dessarollo’s Faculty of Architecture, hosted by Dean Pablo Allard.

Alan March with his team in Concepcion, Chile.