As the Aral School in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region prepares its next programme on climate and landscape, its new programme director, Joseph Grima, explains why the school aims to learn from one of the world’s most profoundly transformed environments rather than impose solutions from outside.

With applications now open for its second cohort, the Aral School is preparing to welcome a new group of international and local practitioners to Nukus in January 2027. The six-month programme, directed by Joseph Grima, will focus on “Climate and Landscape”, building on the research produced by its first cohort.

Applications are open until 25 October 2026. Interested candidates can find further information and submit their applications through the official website: www.aralschool.uz.

The shrinking of the Aral Sea has become one of Central Asia’s most recognisable environmental disasters. Decades of large-scale water diversion for irrigation have transformed the landscape, with lasting consequences for ecosystems, livelihoods and communities across the region.

Yet the story of Karakalpakstan is not only one of environmental loss. It is also a place of knowledge, adaptation and experimentation.

Based in Nukus, the Aral School is exploring how design education can respond to the region’s environmental and social realities. Established by Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), and its Chairperson Gayane Umerova, the initiative brings together participants from different disciplines to work alongside local institutions, researchers and practitioners.

Following a first cohort focused on food and water, the school’s 2027 programme will explore Climate and Landscape. Participants spend six months in Nukus, where the surrounding environment becomes an essential part of their education.

Novastan Editor-in-Chief Mathieu Lemoine spoke with Joseph Grima, the school’s new programme director, about the role of design in confronting ecological crises, the importance of Karakalpak knowledge and the challenge of turning research into lasting change.

“A school has a curriculum to deliver, yet a task force has a problem to solve”

Novastan: You have described the Aral School as being closer to a “task force” than to a conventional school or residency. What does that mean in practice, and what kind of educational model are you hoping to build in Nukus?

Joseph Grima: A school has a curriculum to deliver, yet a task force has a problem to solve. In practice, it means the curriculum here is not fixed; it’s arranged around what the place actually needs. The participants and I are going to work very closely with local institutions that are already deeply embedded in this region, and the learning will happen outside the classroom and in the environment itself.

The school’s base in Nukus is fundamental to the educational model, because the context is the school’s unique superpower. Essentially, the model is spotlighting the idea of place-specific design education. I really hope this sort of micro-contextually responsive school can also become a model for elsewhere.

During your recent visit to Karakalpakstan, you met scientists, architects and historians and visited sites including the Amu Darya, the Academy of Sciences of Karakalpakstan and the International Innovation Centre for the Aral Sea Basin. What did you learn from these encounters that changed or sharpened your understanding of the region?

Spending time in Uzbekistan recently has definitely increased my conviction that design schools need to shift away from an approach that asks “how do we bring good design here?” to “how does the landscape itself teach the discipline something it doesn’t already know?”

Read more on Novastan: “My Childhood Was Spent on the Shore of a Sea That No Longer Exists”

Spending time in the landscape and with local communities is a masterclass in itself.

The next cohort will focus on “Climate and Landscape”. Why did you choose this theme, and what specific questions do you want participants to investigate?

The school, founded by Uzbekistan’s Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), has been set up with an intentional knowledge-sharing structure between cohorts.

The graduates of the 2026 cohort have now shared research, findings and lines of inquiry around their cohort theme, which was “Food and Water”. The theme for the 2027 cohort is chosen specifically because it builds upon the work already done by the alumni, importantly not starting at zero.

Food and water are undeniably connected to climate and landscape; we want to create continuity, where participants build upon knowledge and facilitate the transmission of what has already been learned. We cannot pick off single issues in isolation to solve.

Beyond the narrative of environmental catastrophe

The Aral Sea crisis is often represented internationally primarily through images of ecological catastrophe and loss. How do you avoid reproducing that narrative while still confronting the scale of the environmental damage?

We have to acknowledge that this ecological collapse is real, but that is not to say that this is a region devoid of life or hope.

I think it is brilliant that ACDF and its chairperson Gayane Umerova had the foresight to establish a platform such as the Aral School to effectively reframe this unfolding crisis as an opportunity to address local and regional problems in a way that could have value elsewhere.

The Aral Sea region is one of the most extraordinary laboratories we have for understanding the larger climate and environmental challenges facing the whole world.

Read more on Novastan: From the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: Following the Amu Darya Through Central Asia

The fact that it’s tackling very specific challenges makes it the perfect testing ground for thinking about how something like a school can address the question of the landscape and its future, and all of the implications that come with having to deal with urgent crises.

The school places particular emphasis on regional knowledge and existing local institutions. How will Karakalpak and Uzbek researchers, communities and practitioners shape the programme rather than simply participate in an internationally designed initiative?

This only works if local expertise sits inside the design of the programme; every cohort of the school works directly with regional professional bodies, which gives the work a foundation to stand on.

Without significant local participation in each cycle, it would be impossible to get past a very superficial first level of observation of the landscape, and we really need to go in-depth.

The participation of people who really know this place well and who have gathered experience and knowledge over many years is absolutely fundamental.

At the same time, international participants bring something local practitioners can’t always give themselves: fresh eyes. People who’ve lived in this landscape their whole lives sometimes need help seeing it again, as if for the first time, to discover new possibilities.

The exchange has to run in both directions, otherwise it doesn’t work.

One of the central challenges of international projects in the Aral Sea region is ensuring that knowledge is not merely extracted from local communities and then circulated elsewhere. How is the Aral School approaching this question?

Time is the biggest factor, with participants spending six months living in Nukus, which is a significant residency, and it changes what kind of knowledge students are capable of producing.

The school is being deliberate about the six-month cycle itself. A single cohort can’t build a lasting body of knowledge alone, so we’re thinking hard about how participants pass on what they’ve learned to the next group rather than letting it end with them.

Done right, the school becomes something closer to a condenser, where it pulls in knowledge from many directions and turns it into something genuinely useful for policymakers and for people actually shaping this landscape’s future. There is no point in creating an archive of good intentions.

In any case, one of the most immediate outcomes will be the emergence of new international networks between Aral and the growing number of participants who have passed through the school.

Can design contribute to ecological regeneration?

Your previous work has explored non-extractive architecture and the relationship between design, materials and ecological transformation. How does that experience translate into the particular environmental and social context of Karakalpakstan?

My earlier work and research asked whether you could build without depleting finite resources. Here, the same question extends to a specific regional context, and our hope is that Aral can become an opportunity to test new approaches on the ground.

Therefore, I don’t think of the Aral School as a design school in the conventional sense. I think it’s closer to a school of learning from the landscape and Karakalpak culture.

“Design” is still the right word, but only if you mean it as a syncretic practice: something that combines and blends different forms of knowledge from many different backgrounds and channels them into an output that’s actually useful.

What can design realistically contribute to ecological regeneration in a region where many of the underlying causes are linked to large-scale water management, agriculture and state policy?

I will not suggest that “design” directly fixes issues related to cotton irrigation policy or basin-scale water management, for example, as these clearly require a specific order of intervention.

But what design does well here is think at the level of the whole system and then let that filter down into actions that are quite small, but certainly not insignificant. Those actions can be scalable.

That’s really what I mean by design in this context: it’s the strategic capacity to coordinate very different kinds of knowledge into something that can actually be acted on, at a scale people can work with directly.

Building knowledge that lasts beyond a single cohort

The first cohort has already completed projects around food and water. Which questions or ideas from that first cycle do you most want the second cohort to develop further?

When I met participants from the first cohort, what struck me most was the sheer diversity of backgrounds and forms of knowledge they brought, and how directly they responded to living in this context for six months. It proved what’s actually possible here.

We’ve gathered a huge amount of feedback from them on what worked and what to evolve; the next cohort will be building on these foundations in 2027.

There’s plenty of insightful material from the alumni to carry forward, such as work on salt-tolerant irrigation, oral histories of water and projects grown directly out of Karakalpak tradition.

I am very excited to see how the new cohort evolves this project. It will be theirs to shape and define.

In five years’ time, what would make you consider the Aral School a success: new research, practical interventions in the region, a new generation of practitioners, institutional change or something else?

I know from working closely with ACDF and Gayane Umerova in my new role that key priorities include seeing a growth in regional participation alongside the development of deeper working relationships with local institutions. And a key success indicator is seeing the projects conceived by students actually move into implementation, rather than remaining ideas on paper.

I am also looking for the school to keep adapting, year by year; it has to evolve rather than become fixed to one format. I would love this small, contextually responsive kind of school to become something other places can draw from, not by copying it exactly, but by taking the underlying idea elsewhere. The clearest sign would be other design schools in Central Asia starting to look at this as a reference point.

The ambition is to be a lighthouse – a new paradigm for what a design and ecology school can be.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan English.

The post Can design help reimagine the future of the Aral Sea? Joseph Grima on a different kind of school appeared first on Novastan English.