Etienne Turpin
Etienne Turpin is a Research Scientist in the MIT Urban Risk Lab, where he coordinates the Humanitarian Infrastructures Group with Dr Tomas Holderness. The group conducts applied research on urban risk through the development and deployment of platforms for humanitarian response and community-led disaster co-management in South and Southeast Asia. Through strategic community organizing, institutional ethnography, and novel approaches to civic media, data gathering, and designed engagement, Etienne’s research develops new tools, techniques, and methods to help democratize processes of climate change adaptation by meaningfully engaging the concerns and capacities of the urban poor.
With Dr Holderness, Etienne co-founded and co-directed PetaJakarta.org, a community-led, open source flood map in Jakarta, Indonesia; PetaJakarta.org has been awarded the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Award and a Twitter #DataGrant, and has received funding from USAID and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance of the United States, the Pacific Disaster Center, DM Innovation, the Australian National Data Service, the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction, the New Colombo Plan of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Australia, and the University of Wollongong Global Challenges Program. The project has been featured in news media including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, and National Geographic, as well as in the International Federation of the Red Cross 2015 World Disasters Report.
Etienne is also the founding director of anexact office, his design research practice based in Jakarta, Indonesia. The office is committed to interventive urbanism, curatorial and artistic experimentation, and site-based philosophical research; the office operates as both a vehicle for inquiry and a platform for assembly with the aim of producing formations which solicit solidarity and and enable mutual aid in the Anthropocene. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at NTU CCA Singapore, founding coordinator of the Urban Lab Network Asia (labnet.asia) and founding co-director of the Urban Systems & Environments Research Group (USER Group Inc. LLP).
Etienne is the editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2013) and co-editor of Fantasies of the Library (forthcoming MIT Press, 2016); Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation (Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013). As a member of the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network, he is also the co-founder and co-editor with Anna-Sophie Springer of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series as part of Das Anthropozan-Projekt of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Previously, he held research fellowships with the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan. He has also taught architecture theory and advanced design research at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley.