Dr Richard Bower

(he/him)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My theoretical work develops a post-anthropocentric energetic ethics: an account of care as something that costs energy, is unevenly distributed, and can be spent. This is the argument of my current monograph, Finding the Energy to Care: Toward an Energetic Metaphysics for an Exhausted World. Recent and forthcoming papers carry the idea across a range of conditions: ontological exhaustion, heat, disability and the non-normative bodymind, materialist inheritance, eco-anxiety and the pathology of the normal, and ultra-processed food as ecological severing.

A second strand concerns time. My work on ‘Future Generations’ has turned towards a facing-past temporal ethics, one that reads the future through what the present discards. It proceeds through materialist attention to everyday waste, and through an ecological design that refuses the tidy progression from rural to urban, treating the two as entangled rather than sequential.

Making matters to me as much as the theory. My recent project FERAL carries photographic work into print as zines, a format chosen to sit outside, and unsettle, other conventional authorised academic publications of that work. Similar intentions frame a developing project on circular, materialist architecture in rural Wales, at once a philosophical inquiry and a practical question of how, and from what, we build.

The plotlands remain a long-standing commitment. These informal, self-built settlements were largely written out of planning history, and they hold lessons that planning still declines to learn. The work continues through the Plotlands Digital Archive and through a recently ISRF-funded project on community co-design of plotland stories.

I joined Cardiff in 2017, after posts at the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Plymouth, and several years of architectural practice in London and South-West England. Collaborative projects since have examined children’s urban cycling (Unadulterated Cycling), migration stories narrated through urban food, and explorations of the slow city movement and antifragility. My monograph Architecture and Space Reimagined(Routledge, 2016), read Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey through the alternative spatial practices of John Turner and Nabeel Hamdi: an early statement of the concern with informal and alternative practice that still runs through the plotlands work.

Teaching

I am Course Director for the MSc International Planning and Urban Design (IPUD), where I lead the Planning City Futures, Urban Theory Provocations, and Postgraduate Research Methods modules. My teaching develops exploratory dialogical and creative studio pedagogies that bring speculative design together with critical urban theory. I also supervise student research dissertations across the school’s geography and planning programmes.

Biography

• 2017–Present: Joined the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Recent years have seen a transition toward the role of a research practitioner, integrating philosophical writing with intentional photography and digital media to explore more-than-human ecological futures.
• 2015–2017: Served as Course Director for the MA Urban Design at the University of Central Lancashire, moving into full-time academia following doctoral studies.
• 2014: Awarded a PhD in Architecture and Cultural Geography from Plymouth University. The research examined the critical intersections of spatial practice and cultural geography, marking a transition from practice to architectural history and theory.
• 2009–2014: Held the position of Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University while completing doctoral research.

Honours and awards

• 2026: Research funding awarded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) for community co-design of plotland stories.
• 2026: Opening plenary (with Katie McClymont), UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference, Cardiff.
• 2025: Invited Speaker, Green Man Festival (Einstein’s Stage).
• 2017: Research funding awarded by the Vernacular Architecture Group.
• 2008: RIBA President’s Silver Medal nomination.

Academic positions

• 2017 - 2026: Cardiff University - Lecturer in Design and Philosophy
• 2015 - 2017: University of Central Lancashire School of Architecture - Lecturer in Design and Critical Cultural Theory
• 2009 - 2014: Plymouth University School of Architecture - Associate Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory

Supervisions

I am available to supervise PhD projects that utilise contemporary philosophical frameworks—such as speculative realism, post-humanism, and new materialism—to interrogate questions of design, cities, and ecology. I am particularly interested in proposals related to:

• More-than-human urbanism and environmental ethics.

• Creative methodologies for exploring post anthropocentric research.

• Design futures and "Future Generations" thinking.

• Alternative housing and informal spatial practices.

Current supervision

Jessica Duke