From the Rhine and Nile to the Ume River – Cornelia Redeker is shaping tomorrow’s cities

It was minus 20 degrees and in the middle of the pandemic when Cornelia Redeker first set foot in Umeå in early 2021.

“It was quite an experience. Before that, Umeå was like Mars to me, but once I arrived, it felt really good. I love Umeå School of Architecture as a building, and having the river right outside the window,” she says, who previously worked close to both the River Rhine in Germany and in the Netherlands, and the Nile in Egypt.

I do not think you should underestimate how much the built environment affects our well-being and our understanding of ourselves as a society.

Cornelia Redeker grew up in Germany and the United States with a Swedish mother. Her interest in landscape issues and climate adaptation emerged early in her career. During her doctoral studies at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, she studied flood management in cities. Later, she moved to the megacity of Cairo, where water scarcity and desert landscapes posed entirely different issues to explore, while she was also involved in establishing a new architecture programme[SB1] .

“Architecture is something that affects everyone, and that everyone has an understanding of. I do not think you should underestimate how much the built environment affects our well-being and our understanding of ourselves as a society. That is why design plays such a central role in both social and ecological issues,” she says.

The idea of a "Nature house"

Today, she is a researcher and head of department at Umeå School of Architecture. Her research focuses on urban planning and architectural design – in other words, how buildings and places are designed – with the landscape as a key perspective. Her solutions are about working with nature rather than controlling it, whether through green roofs, cultivation, or water purification.

In the research group "Designing Cycles at 64 Degrees Latitude", Cornelia Redeker and her colleagues draw inspiration from Bengt Warne's so-called “Nature house” from the 1970s – a residential home enclosed in a large greenhouse. The idea was to create a closed loop in which waste, water and energy could be reused within the household, and where cultivation became part of everyday living. This approach was seen as a way of combining architecture with self-sufficiency and environmental awareness long before concepts such as sustainability became mainstream.

Today, the research group wants to take the idea further. Their aim is to transform buildings and their inhabitants from consumers into producers. The subarctic climate zone, with its short growing season and cold winters, and ongoing climate change, makes northern Sweden a challenging but exciting testing ground.

“We are exploring how issues related to preparedness, climate adaptation and counteracting segregation can become part of everyday life, so that  they become a quality instead of a challenge," says Cornelia Redeker.

Smart water use on Holmön

This requires close collaboration with many actors: municipalities, water and food experts, economists, lawyers and inhabitants. Cornelia Redeker also works with researchers from other fields. In an ongoing project on Holmön, her research team is studying water use and sustainable construction, while colleagues from the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics examine energy use.

Ideas are tested in real life and then scaled up. But it is not always easy.

“Research funding is usually intended for investigation, not construction. That is why we work with educational [SB2] projects that also become research infrastructures. For example, we recently built a "tiny house" on Holmön that will next summer be completed with a local water treatment system to test how the water can be reused[SB3] . We also just completed a feasibility study in Stöcke, where an old barn will be given new life as a hub for sustainable rural development.

What can your research contribute?

“That we become more resilient by becoming more self-sufficient. We live in such a complex society with a high level of uncertainty, with food coming from elsewhere and centralised infrastructure, where many people feel they lack influence. Here, our built environments hold great potential – in rural areas and of course also in cities. However, there is a great risk of losing understanding of our systems. Just look here at the architecture school: the building is completely controlled; we can not open the windows to ventilate. It reflects a modernist, top-down perspective, where residents do not play an active role.”

At the same time, Sweden has a strong culture of shared responsibility, with housing cooperatives and for example communal laundry rooms.

“I think that is a large capacity we can build on.”

Epicentre for the green transition

Context has always been central to Cornelia Redeker's research. She describes northern Sweden as an epicentre for the green transition. Industrial development is moving fast, producing challenging conflicts between the traditional land use in Sápmi and Europe’s demand for resources  for new technologies.

“By making the buildnings and cities more resource-efficient and better at giving back to nature, we can ideally contribute to reduce the pressure on landscapes ,” says Cornelia Redeker and adds:

“Collaborating with society is demanding and humbling. It's not just about having a good solution. Everyone wants change, but when it comes down to actually making it happen, there are quite a lot of things that can stand in the way – legally, financially... Urban planning operates on very long timelines, while climate change is happening fast.”