Warm war: we are living through a generalised state of conflict, one in which a series of ultra-rapid intensifications destabilise the relations between polities and their material spaces of operation – their architectures. These intensifications now also accelerate planetary change. Historical complex systems emerge and evolve within the frameworks and constraints of the structures that constitute them. They are coherent entities unfolding in time and space, yet when they approach an asymptote, they can shift abruptly. One defining feature of these transitions is the wild oscillation of all relations, where short-term expectations remain unstable, causing anxiety and violence.

How heavy is a city? Today, this question intercepts the technosphere. It seeks to register the vast array of techniques for sounding the mangle of entities that sustain its existence and shape its entanglements. At DIP4, we pursue projects in which the intensification of material, energy and information fluxes – characteristic of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human actions drive planetary change – are considered spatially. Space is a political and historical construction: of the polis, of the city. It results from conflicts and controversies, from the space-making activities of a multiplicity of human and non-human entities coupled in complex cybernetic systems.

The Anthropocene unsettles traditional notions of agency, intentionality and individuality. Where modernisation emphasised human dominance and rational progress, the Anthropocene exposes humanity as both a geological force and vulnerable to planetary feedback loops. Climate Peace is a way of conceiving today’s challenges of cohabitation as a spatial project – mutuality to be made, not merely respected. It is a project for spaces of intensification, where instability itself becomes the medium through which architecture engages with the ultra-rapid transformations of the city, and of citizenship.