Corina Angheloiu

From the formal and universal intergovernmental bodies characteristic of the twentieth-century UN system, to an increasing number of smaller country clubs or subnational initiatives such as the Alliance of Small Island States, the notion of the anthropocene blurs the distinction between the public and private sector. Hence, the increasing fragmentation of global environmental governance can be seen as an institutional mirror image of the material complexity inherent to the anthropocene.

This implicitly poses the question: how can institutional responses of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change be pre-emptively designed in the face of interconnected phenomena such as climate change, species extinction and rapidly growing urbanisation?

The specific site of intervention is the mouth of the Wash estuary and proposes the strategic relocation of UK's most deprived seaside town – Skegness – alongside a large-scale infrastructural development – an 11km storm surge barrier.

The landscape intervention as a device of time in the relation to the anthropocene explores the new communality between human and nonhuman systems which moves away from the traditional dualistic separation.

The proposed programmes transform resilience infrastructure into a performative landscape, where the movement of tides, sediments, birds and people is hosted.