Institute of Utmost Environmental Justice: Wicked Problems, Systemic Tools, Global South

On the 14th of April 2017, the Meethotumulla trash dump in Colombo, Sri Lanka (a garbage mountain covering 9 hectares exceeding 60 meters in height) collapsed resulting in 32 recorded deaths and displacing 965 people living in the adjacent slum areas. Meetotmulla is an example of wicked problems and the many interrelated questions of environmental inequalities that are at play within similar sites in the developing world. Moreover, the consequent systematic strategies (environmental management paradigm) taken to rectify the situation is a clear example of attempts at creating environmental fixes through systematic trash management, which in turn renders the complex relation between socio, political, ecological inequalities invisible. How can inequalities in sites such as Meethotamulla be made more explicit via systemic frameworks (ecological paradigm) that can become a constructive component of the design imagination? The paper introduces the notion of “Meta-institutes” as a systemic modeling strategy towards developing new imaginaries that radically change frameworks of negotiating waste injustice in the global south. The concept of a Meta-institute was introduced in the design context by Lebbeus Woods to identify a typology of a building designed to house an institution for the study of the very idea of that institution. A meta institute essentially constructs an open-system, and via its second-order inquiry creates a continuous self-reflective inquiry into its own purpose. On the one hand, the meta-institute shares a relation to radical political attempts to rethink the notion of “institution” with regard to the ecology question ( David Harvey, Felix Guattari, Lebbeus Woods).On the other hand, it shares a relation to context-based complexity mapping tools of second-order systems theory (Donella Meadows, Birger Sevaldson). Using the research conducted with various stakeholders in Sri Lanka and Germany, the paper will lay out how the Meta-institute can be utilized both as a research and teaching tool to utilize design’s capacity to make the abstract issues of inequalities of these sites (scales, agency, relations) visible and formal so that it may be brought back into public discourse and action.