Sam Jacoby

Housing associations play a central role in defining, maintaining, and improving the design quality of new affordable homes. Their decisions are informed by national standards, internal development standards, funding requirements, procurement routes, resident needs, long-term management, and organisational priorities. 

This event brings together speakers from housing associations to discuss what “good” design looks like in practice, how it is defined and measured, how key design-quality decisions are made, and what needs to change to achieve better housing quality in the future. 

Speakers
: Carla Smyth, Head of Design at Peabody 
: David Stronge, Design Director at Peabody 
: Eleanor Warwick, Head of Strategic Policy and Research at Clarion Housing Group 
: Tessa Barraclough, Assistant Director: Asset Strategy and Sustainability at Riverside 
: Dhruv Sookhoo, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism, Manchester School of Architecture 
: Sam Jacoby, Professor of Architectural and Urban Design Research, RCA

Lecture Theatre 1, Darwin Building, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU

What Makes a Good Home? Design Governance in Social Housing

Jon Goodbun

“I do not believe that the original purpose of the rain dance was to make ‘it’ rain. I suspect that that is a degenerate misunderstanding of a much more profound religious need: to affirm membership in what we may call the ecological tautology, the eternal verities of life and environment”
Gregory Bateson

This paper was given as an invited Keynote talk at the Enabling Boundaries conference in Oldenburg Germany, in June 2026. It is an iteration of one of three chapters in the forthcoming book on Gregory Bateson, Architecture and Design which is the final deliverable from the AHRC funded research project on Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. 

This paper develops the idea of eco-surrealism as a way of thinking about ecological design, learning and imagination under conditions of crisis. 
The paper begins from a familiar problem: modern architectural, design and planning cultures have often been shaped by instrumental reason, technical optimisation and fantasies of control of human and more-than-human environments. However, the ecological crises that we face are not simply technical problems which can be solved with design solutions. The crises we perceive are symptoms of deeper patterns of perception, habit and organisation. They reveal how ‘purpose’ itself can become pathological – even the well-intentioned purposes of progressive social movements and environmental activists.

This becomes especially clear when we ask what it means to plan under conditions of uncertainty. Climate change, rising social inequality and intensifying class war, resource scarcities and stresses and ecological degradation do not present us with a single predictable future, or even a gradation of possible futures as suggested in some readings of the future scenarios presented in UN IPCC reports. Rather, they produce branching and unstable futures, where multiple tipping points describe probability landscapes of enormous complexity. The UK for example should now be planning for contradictory futures of both significant warming and significant cooling (as global warming appears to be shutting down the AMOC system). Similarly, at a global scale we need to plan for both a growing human population, but also one which may collapse by 50% within the next decade, given increasing probabilities of global food production collapse.

The task of design is therefore not simply to optimise a solution for one assumed or desired future, but to work carefully across multiple possible futures, understanding that designs and plans themselves might well may have unforeseen effects, delayed consequences or contradictory outcomes at different scales. Critical future scenario thinking becomes important here as an ecological and imaginative worlding or geopoietic practice: a way of holding open different possibilities, testing assumptions, and learning how to perceive how present actions might unfold within changing circumstances.

Drawing on Gregory Bateson, the paper asks what it would mean to design from within these double binds rather than pretending to stand outside them. Bateson’s work helps us understand ecological crisis as a crisis of learning: a failure to perceive the ‘pattern which connects’, and a tendency to confuse parts with wholes, maps with territories, and short-term fixes with systemic wisdom. His account of levels of learning is central here. Ecological design cannot remain at the level of problem-solving alone. It must also question the frames through which problems are recognised, the habits through which solutions are imagined, and the forms of life that design helps to reproduce.

The ‘surrealist’ dimension of the paper does not mean escapism or irrationality. Rather, it names the importance of chance, dream, play, juxtaposition and non-instrumental practice in breaking open hardened patterns of thought. Historical surrealism sought to disturb the habits of bourgeois reason and reveal other orders of association beneath everyday life, in an attempt to combine Marx and Freud. Eco-surrealism I suggest, must extend Freud with a Batesonian model of an extended ecological unconscious, and suggests new forms of totemistic empathy. It asks what kinds of design practices and rituals might become more receptive to the unexpected, the more-than-human, and forms of intelligence that exceed conscious planning.

In this sense, eco-surrealism is also a critique of the impoverishment produced by private property, instrumental reason and capitalist forms of abstraction. Marx’s remark that private property has made us ‘so stupid and one-sided’ becomes ecological: we have been trained to perceive the world primarily as resource, commodity or object of management. Against this, eco-surrealism seeks practices that reawaken and transform perception, empathy and responsiveness. It does not reject technique or planning, but places them within a wider ecology of signs, affects, atmospheres, relations and unknowns.

The paper connects these theoretical concerns to my recent work on urban heat, air pollution and evaporative cooling in Athens. The Towers of Winds project explores how architectural prototypes might operate not simply as technical devices, but as public, pedagogical and sensory infrastructures. Heat and pollution are not only measurable environmental conditions; they are also signs through which urban inequalities, atmospheric dependencies and collective vulnerabilities become perceptible. Citizen sensing, public installation, film and experimental making can therefore become part of a broader ecological learning process.

The significance of the above Bateson quote concerning the raindance is difficult to overstate. Bateson is not defending magical thinking as a primitive form of technical control. He is doing the opposite. He is suggesting that the modern assumption that a rain dance must be a failed technology for producing rain is itself the degraded perception. The instrumental interpretation misses the ecological and social function of the ritual. The point is not to command the weather, but to affirm participation in the more-than-human relations within which weather, life, food, seasonality and collective existence are entangled.

This offers a crucial model for eco-surrealist practice. A non-instrumental rain dance is not useless because it does nothing. It is useless only from the standpoint of a damaged utilitarianism, which recognises value only where a discrete means produces a discrete end. From an ecological perspective, such a practice may be profoundly useful precisely because it does not reduce the world to an object of intervention. It reorganises perception, situates action within relation, and affirms dependency upon systems that cannot be mastered.

Eco-surrealism, then, is a proposal for a different mode of ecological imagination and perception: one that combines critical theory, systems thinking, experimental design, scenario thinking and poetic practice. It suggests that in a time of climate emergency, we need not only better instruments, but stranger and wiser forms of attention.

I hear Bateson challenging us to imagine and practice a rain dance appropriate to our socio-ecological condition today: a rain dance of such staggering multidimensional uselessness that it might just save us.

Keynote: Ecological Planning in Therapy—Notes towards an Eco-Surrealist Manifesto for Uncertain Times

Ines Weizman

In this lecture Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi traces her long-term artistic and architectural engagement with the city of Beirut. Bringing together years of photographic documentation and material research, the talk reflects on practices of attentive looking—before and after rupture—within a landscape shaped by layered histories and ongoing instability. Moving between image-making and spatial thinking, Douaihi examines how Beirut’s urban fabric, as well as villages across Lebanon, bear the marks of destruction, endurance, and transformation. Her photographs unfold as both a personal and critical meditation on witnessing: on the difficulty of seeing amid loss, and on the role of artistic practice in holding memory, absence, and the fragile possibility of renewal.

Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of photography, architecture, and material research. Rooted in an ongoing exploration of vernacular landscapes, memory, and overlooked ecologies, her practice spans image-making, spatial interventions, and hybrid objects composed of found objects, natural matter and household materials. Drawing on her background in architecture and a deep sensitivity to ecological and social entanglements, she engages with overlooked spaces and slow processes of growth, decay, and adaptation. Douaihi studied architecture at the Lebanese American University in Byblos and École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris; she grew up between Lithuania, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. In 2022, she established Takeover, an artist-led project space in Beirut. She is also a member of the Lebanese photography collective Collectif ١٢٠٠ In 2021, she co-founded Digital Fountain, an online platform for photography from Lebanon. In 2021, she received the Boghossian Foundation Award for photography and the ADPP mentorship award.

BEIRUT. Seeing Before. Looking After. Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi

Graeme Brooker

How Rooms have Shaped us and We have Shaped Them

The Story of the Interior

Daniel Fernández Pascual

Alon Schwabe

Cultivating the Rights of Drought-Resistant Peasant Seeds in Southern Italy

Water Buffalo Festival (Manda Festivali)

David Burns

Roads to Maralinga

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

Technologies of the Visible and the Invisible in Ancient Roman Architecture

Hoc Opus, Hic Labor

The Architecture of Disaster

Before & After 

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Water Buffalo Festival (Manda Festivali), Daniel Fernández Pascual, Alon Schwabe

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Before & After , Ines Weizman

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Latest events

What Makes a Good Home? Design Governance in Social Housing (3 Jul. 2026, 2:30pm)

Keynote: Ecological Planning in Therapy—Notes towards an Eco-Surrealist Manifesto for Uncertain Times (5 Jun. 2026, 3:00pm)

BEIRUT. Seeing Before. Looking After. Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi (16 Apr. 2026, 5:00pm)