Amirio Freeman

In our profoundly social world, much of our thinking is informed by the perceptions of others. Within this collective imagination, binary constructs, centred around a ‘norm’ defined against an ‘other’, have come to proliferate – for example, heteronormativity and queerness; or cisnormativity, as opposed to gender non-binary or transgender identification. This thinking has become so entrenched that we perceive through these dichotomies – constrained as we do so.

Over the past year I've been returning to my 'alma mater’, teaching on the Masters Architecture course at Central Saint Martins, London. Being back in Kings Cross (or NC1, to go by its recently minted postcode), I've been faced with the wall of construction that is the new Google campus. Longer than the Shard is tall, the building – dubbed the landscraper – snakes along a thin site wedged between railway lines and the grandly named King's Boulevard.

In a recent psychological study of British Columbians who lived through the June 2021 heat dome, Canadian researchers had the opportunity to test out a new survey instrument. The Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CCAS), designed by psychologists in Ohio as ‘a measure of climate change anxiety that would allow for consistency in measurement and understandings,’ acts as a mental thermometer for negative feelings associated with climate change.