Words that root us back to the Earth — old, new, and repurposed.

Graceful retreat / Retirada digna (ES)

A concept describing a deliberate, just, and creative withdrawal from unsustainable practices, infrastructure, or territories. It reframes retreat not as a defeat, but as a dignified and regenerative step, that opens up possibilities for recovery and renewal. In urban planning, it involves anticipating climate and ecological processes that require the relocation of homes, industrial centres, or other urban facilities. In a broader sense, it can refer to freeing up or suspending areas of action to give space to species other than humans. In the light of recent wildfires across Southern Europe, it resonates as an urgent lens for adaptation.

Un concepto que describe una retirada deliberada, justa y creativa de prácticas, infraestructuras o territorios insostenibles. Reformula la retirada no como derrota, sino como un paso digno y regenerativo, que abre posibilidades de recuperación y renovación. En planificación urbanística, implica una anticipación ante procesos climáticos y ecologicos que requieren un desplazamiento de viviendas, centros industriales u otros equipamientos urbanos. En un sentido más amplio, puede referirse a liberar o suspender zonas de acción para la inclusión de otras especies además de la humana.


Joanna Crowson, Jorge Gallardo and Andrew Zionts (Be.Time)

Climaginaries / Klimaföreställningar (SE)

Climaginaries are the ways by which climate change become meaningful to us, and ways by which we understand it. They are ways by which we shape reality and as such they carry the capacity to break us away from our current fossil-dependent system. They are generative, provocative, disarming, but also sometimes unwanted, disputed, denied. They can interleave or they can conflict. They are sometimes place specific but can also transcend and conjoin different places: the mapping of local rivers, the story of a continental glacier system, national infrastructure plan, globally mediated extinction story, planetary satellite recordings. They provide an index or description which open up understandings of what climate change does. 

Genom klimatföreställningar (climaginaries) görs klimatförändringarna begripliga och meningsfulla för oss. De medverkar därför till att forma verkligheten och därigenom har de potential att bidra till att frigöra oss från vårt nuvarande fossilberoende system. De är skapande, provokativa, avväpnande – men ibland också oönskade, omstridda eller förnekade. De kan överlappa eller stå i konflikt till varandra. Ibland är de platsbundna men de kan också överskrida gränser och förena olika platser: kartläggning av lokala floder, berättelsen om ett kontinentalt glaciärsystem, en nationell infrastrukturplan, en globalt förmedlad berättelse om utrotning, satellitbilder av planeten. De utgör en index eller en beskrivning som öppnar upp för förståelser av vad klimatförändringar gör.

Alexandra Nikoleris, Peter Pelzer, Graeme Macdonald, Janet Stewart (Climaginaries Network)

Redirection / Redireccion (FR)

In the age of the Anthropocene, our ways of organising, our habits, and our know-how are reaching their limits. The ecological redirection approach seeks to identify the attachments and dependencies embedded in our activities and practices, in order to collectively decide how to reorient, adapt, or even discontinue them.

À l’ère de l’Anthropocène, nos modes d’organisation, nos habitudes et nos savoir-faire atteignent leurs limites. L’approche de la redirection écologique vise à identifier les attachements et les dépendances inscrits dans nos activités et pratiques, afin de décider collectivement comment les réorienter, les adapter, voire y renoncer.

Emmanuel Bonnet & Diego Landivar (LFBM)

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