Until the nineteenth century, American urban dwellers cohabited with livestock and cities formed ecologically diverse spaces. In the late nineteenth century, a series of urban livestock policies coupled with industrial agricultural transformations displaced livestock to urban fringes and rural areas. These developments radically altered human–animal relationships in the urban context, limited economic opportunity and over time have shaped contemporary issues of food access and food justice within cities. Post-industrial cities in the United States, such as Detroit, are characterised by patterns of urban shrinkage and high levels of vacancy. Within this context, urban farming has emerged as a framework and movement to stabilise communities, address local food access and leverage vacancy towards new models of occupation. In 2013, the City of Detroit Urban Agricultural Ordinance was passed to formalise decades of community-driven urban agricultural practices. The ordinance provides guidelines for urban farms and gardens and for managing allied resources. Deliberation on urban agriculture and livestock ordinances continues today. While existing policies provide a framework for food-based development of neighbourhoods, they remain focused on the incremental scale of existing single-family housing and adjacent vacant plots versus larger assemblages that may participate in the production of new urban collectives and assemblages. Detroit’s current context presents opportunities to scale operations via new urban design typologies and socially integrated models that leverage vacancy to construct alternate, collective models of urban life. A speculative urban design proposition for Riverbend Farming Cooperative is presented and proposes a courtyard-based cooperative farming development incorporating permaculture and animal husbandry within a formerly residential superblock as an alternative model of urban development. Through this design speculation, the article reflects upon the social, economic and ecological potentials for cohabiting with livestock and illustrates opportunities and challenges for new models of community development balancing social, environmental and economic interests through new models of agri-urbanism.

This article positions the territory of responsive envelopes within the context of contemporary disciplinary questions surrounding the politics of the architectural envelope on one hand, and the agency of material explication of environmental, social and spatial performance on the other. Two recent prototype-based responsive envelope projects undertaken by the authors, the Stratus Project and Resonant Chamber, are described in detail relative to the reciprocity between the development of their materiality, form, production methods and their dynamic interaction with external forces, environments and inhabitants. An argument is made that responsive envelopes, in their capacity to structure continually evolving energetic, material and information exchanges between humans, buildings and the wider environment, have the potential to actively construct and enable political participation through spatial transformation, data driven processing and informatics. These envelopes are positioned as agents within wider ecologies and social systems, and as sites for the design of robotic architectures to engage such questions.

Given that the actions of building inhabitants can account for significant variations in building energy use and their overall impact on the environment, both buildings and their systems can be designed to anticipate and even transform behavior toward more sustainable patterns of living and building use. In the residential sector, differences in individual behavior can produce large variations in energy consumption. Social scientists recognize that motivations behind consumption or conservation of energy are societal and cultural and argue that achieving real and lasting energy reduction in the building sector requires deep social change in addition to changes in building technology and construction. This chapter looks at this and suggests how things can be changed.

This paper describes the authors’ exploration and experimentation with cellular pneumatic aggregates for kinetic, environmentally responsive envelope systems. The work is situated within the history and technology of pneumatic structures, biological paradigms, the agency and aesthetics of material, information translation, and the tension between performance and affect within responsive environments. The paper elaborates on the physical and computational development of novel pneumatic systems, experimentation with their interactive capabilities, and a recently completed installation, Nervous Ether, a pneumatic spatial envelope that operates as an instrument to register and communicate remote environmental information while also developing affective interaction with inhabitants.