Transdisciplinary architectures: Children, space and climate change

This chapter explores the productive intersections between childhood studies and architecture as a response to the urgent demands of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Drawing on a series of participatory projects conducted with children and young people in educational settings in southern England, the chapter develops a framework that brings together two foundational concepts: the built environment as ecosystem, and participatory design as a strategy for spatial justice. The chapter argues that viewing urban space through an organismic lens — whereby human and non-human elements are understood as mutually constituted and dynamically interdependent — opens critical possibilities for place-based, bottom-up engagement with climate challenges. Mapping is examined as a reflective, transformative practice that makes visible the relational entanglements between children, space and materiality. The concept of design as appropriation is then advanced to show how participatory processes enable children to imagine themselves as active agents within broader ecological and social systems. Theoretically, the chapter draws on post-humanist frameworks, including Barad's notion of intra-action and Latour's actor-network theory, to argue that interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and the social sciences can challenge anthropocentric assumptions and contribute to more equitable and ecologically responsive design futures.