Monsoon as Method: Assembling Monsoonal Multiplicities

An edited volume by Monsoon Assemblages, a European Research Council funded research project.

The book presents the methods that Monsoon Assemblages has evolved for engaging the monsoon, a globally connected weather system, as a coproducer of urban life and space in South and Southeast Asian cities. It challenges views of climate as an inert backdrop to urban life, instead suggesting that it is materially and spatially active in shaping urban politics, ecologies, infrastructures, buildings and bodies.

It combines critical texts with cartography, photography and ethnography to present the project’s methodology and its outcomes and invites urban practitioners to think differently about space, time, representation and human and non-human agency. It offers intra-disciplinary, intra-active methods for rethinking human and non-human relations with weather in ways that meet the challenges of climate change and the Anthropocene.

Lindsay Bremner is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster and Principal Investigator of Monsoon Assemblages. She is an award winning architect and writer, whose book Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008 (2010) won a Graham Foundation Award and the Jane Jacobs Book Award. She was formerly head of architecture departments in Philadelphia, USA and Johannesburg South Africa. Before Monsoon Assemblages, her research explored the socio-spatial transformation of the Indian Ocean world, under the rubric of the Folded Ocean.

Beth Cullen is an anthropologist and post-doctoral research fellow with Monsoon Assemblages at the University of Westminster. Her work explores human-nonhuman relations using ethnographic and participatory visual and spatial research methods. Following her PhD research with semi-nomadic pastoralists in the Rift Valley, she spent three years working on applied natural resource management projects in the Ethiopian Highlands. Beth’s research interests include environmental anthropology, more-than-human ethnography and transdisciplinary approaches for understanding and working with complex socioecological systems.

Christina Geros is an architect, landscape architect and urban designer specialising in conducting and designing research about the intricate relationships between urbanism, ecology and politics. She is a research fellow with Monsoon Assemblages and a studio tutor in the MA Environmental Architecture Programme at the Royal College of Art. Her previous work with anexact office and petaBencana.id in Jakarta, Indonesia informs her current practice of designing engagements, implementations and interfaces of investigation that bridge across platform, scope and enquiry. She is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Anthony Powis is an architect and design tutor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Westminster and a doctoral researcher for Monsoon Assemblages. He previously led public space projects with muf architecture/art in London and has been an associate member of Architecture Sans Frontierres-UK. His masters level dissertation investigated the production of space by the student protests in London in 2010 and 2011.

John Cook is an architect and research associate with Monsoon Assemblages, developing visual methods to investigate and depict the monsoon at a range of spatial and temporal scales. He was co-tutor of the Monsoon Assemblages studio in Myanmar in 2018-2019.