Build alliances of solidarity – and work across hierarchies

Barrial Túpac Amaru: Uprising for Spatial and Gender Justice

1999-present

Jujuy, Argentina

A movement that emerged against inequitable neoliberal policies in Argentina and evolved into a political party in 2012, embracing unemployed workers, marginalized queer, and Indigenous women, transforming resistance into action through spatial subversions and transformative community building

Context

Gender based discrimination and criminalisation have a long history in Argentina, particularly for women who belong to marginalised communities, such as Indigenous women, women of colour, and women who identify as queer. Climate change also exacerbated existing inequalities by disproportionately affecting Indigenous women who often have limited access to resources, decision-making power, and financial stability. During the 1976-1983 dictatorship, Argentinian women who have been politically active have faced criminalisation and persecution by the state and were often subjected to detention, torture, and disappearance.

Practice

In 1999, the Organización Barrial Túpac Amaru (Túpac Amaru Neighbourhood Association or Túpac Amaru) was founded in Jujuy, a province in the north-western region in Argentina, by political activist and Indigenous leader Milagro Sala. The association was established as a response to the neoliberal, inequitable policies of then-President Carlos Menem, which disproportionately impacted marginalised communities in Jujuy and throughout Argentina. It took its name from Túpac Amaru II, an Indigenous leader who fought against Spanish colonial rule in the late 18th century. Through multiple activist actions, the association’s main objective was to address the shortage of affordable housing in Jujuy and other marginalised areas, and to support the development of housing solutions for all. By utilising funds by the National Emergency Housing Fund, Túpac Amaru implemented several housing developments, healthcare facilities and community amenities for religious and cultural events in Jujuy, which were designed and built with the participation of the local community. Through the implementation of the Federal Programmes (2004), during Nestor Kirchner’s presidency, Túpac Amaru managed to grow its community and work. In 2012, the association became a political party and sought to bring the concerns of marginalised communities to the forefront of political discourse addressing social welfare, education, employment, and healthcare needs. By 2015, Túpac Amaru “had 70,000 members, provided work for 5,000 individuals in the organisation’s five factories, and had over 250 cooperatives, with most of the workers being women”.¹ The party’s leadership was primarily composed of queer and Indigenous women, who were not only involved in building the movement, but also in the construction of the housing projects in Jujuy, disrupting traditional binary norms. The party was often met with resistance from the political establishment, which sought to undermine its efforts and discredit its leaders, including Milagro Sala who was sentenced to jail in 2016 on charges that were widely criticised by many countries as politically motivated.

Through their work, Túpac Amaru challenged the dominant notions of public and private space and created new forms of community building that take into account the needs and aspirations of women in ethno-racial minorities and Indigenous communities. The organisation’s focus as a counter-hegemonic practice resists cultural, social and political norms that uphold the status quo, breaking down spatial barriers that kept large segments of Jujuy society from accessing certain privileged areas. Such alternative spaces and narratives subvert dominant ideologies and offer a vision of a more just and equitable future while empowering women of colour, queer, and Indigenous women to take leadership roles. While not specifically related to issues of climate, Túpac Amaru provides an inspiring example of how alternative forms of leadership and representation can disrupt and supplement the norms of the status quo. It is such models that are needed for climate justice to ally with social justice.

Notes

1
“Community Development in Organización Barrial Túpac Amaru, Argentina | Critical Perspectives on International Planning.” <https://sites.utexas.edu/internationalplanning/2020/05/24/community-development-in-organizacion-barrial-tupac-amaru/> [accessed 2 February 2023].

GenderCC: Coalition for Ecofeminist Policy-making

2007-present

Global

A coalition working for gender equality, women's rights, and climate justice

Context

Climate breakdown affects different demographics in varying ways. It has been shown that women are impacted more by climate impacts than men through, for example, displacement that prevents access to stable sources of food and healthcare.¹

Though increasing numbers of people recognise that effective climate policy needs to integrate a gender perspective, knowledge on how such gender-responsive policy can be implemented is still lacking. Knowing how to position more women in policy-making roles, and to urge women and men to think about the needs of women when designing climate-responsive policy, is paramount. These are the goals of the global coalition GenderCC: Women For Climate Justice which formed in 2007.

Practice

GenderCC integrates gender justice into climate change policy at local, national, and international levels. The coalition does this through research, action-oriented learning, knowledge exchange, advocacy and lobbying, training, and facilitating. Its primary target is policy-making because policy is where women’s rights, gender justice, and climate justice can be secured in a simultaneous and integrated manner. As GenderCC organisers write:

“The challenges of climate change and gender injustice resemble each other, in that they require the existing (and deeply flawed) systems of power, politics and economics to be addressed and overcome. This means not just gender mainstreaming but the transformation of gender relations and societal structures. It means more than just technical amendments to reduce emissions, and instead requires real mitigation by raising awareness and making extensive changes to unsustainable lifestyles and the current ideology and practice of unlimited economic growth. Instead of perpetuating the current division of resources and labour, it also means finding alternatives based on a responsible, cooperative approach to create sustainable and equitable societies.”²

The coalition has developed a comprehensive package of information on a website for climate experts and decision-makers, introducing vocabularies and methods for mainstreaming gender into climate policy.³ The website explains gender and equity concepts, and gives an overview of options and ideas which users can adapt to their contexts, for example, transferring gender equity concepts into spatial practice in terms of the accessibility design of buildings. Access to adequate data is integral to developing resources such as this website. GenderCC’s requirement that any data used for policy-making be gender disaggregated is an important step in recognising and challenging gender inequity and exploitation within the context of climate policy and beyond. Its focus on data resonates with the work of feminist designers, theorists, and policymakers including Caroline Criado Perez, Leslie Kern, and the coalition Women 4 Climate.⁴ In highlighting gender disparities in the impact of climate change, GenderCC’s work has important implications for designers, understanding climate breakdown also as a condition of social inequality.

Notes

1
Bulges Osman-Elasha, ‘Women…In The Shadow of Climate Change’ United Nations <https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change> [accessed 5 November 2023].
2
Gender CC, ‘GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice.’ gendercc.net <https://www.gendercc.net/who-are-we/our-vision.html> [accessed 5 November].
3
GenderCC, ‘GenderCC Publications’. gender cc – women for climate justice <https://www.gendercc.net/resources/gendercc-publications.html> [accessed 5 November].
4
See for example: Caroline Criado Perez. Invisible Women (London: Vintage, 2020); Leslie Kern. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (New York: Verso, 2020).

Climate Camps: Disrupting the Illusion of ‘Normal’

Since 1980s/90s and ongoing

Global (this entry focusses on the UK and Germany)

Encampments targeting focal points of climate breakdown, such as power plants, extraction sites, road building, and airport expansion, raising awareness, confronting people with the violent operations that make their lives comfortable and can force long-term changes in policy and culture

Context

The smooth running of critical infrastructure such as energy, transport, and communications is often in direct conflict with longer-term environmental concerns. The “carbon state”—a term describing the interdependency of corporate and state economies on fossil-fuels—relies on the availability of an uninterrupted supply of carbon-based energy, and deprioritises the urgency of facing climate breakdown. The denialism inherent in functioning “as normal”, even in the face of stark warnings and incontrovertible evidence of climate breakdown, also denies citizens’ democratic rights to contribute to society’s management through leadership and systems of infrastructure.

Practice

Direct action taken in the name of environmentalism disrupts the smooth running of society and its infrastructures to question society’s values and priorities. Despite having much in common with urban protest encampments, climate protest camps are distinct in their targeting of sites such as power stations, new fossil fuel projects, road construction sites, and airport expansions—sites that are often located in rural areas. These camps’ presence is designed to disrupt ongoing activity such as construction, while also drawing attention to it, and to rural sites that are sometimes little known.¹ With a view to increasing visibility, climate camps draw both from what the Swedish environmentalist Andreas Malm calls a “long and venerable tradition of sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure” in regions including Nigeria² and the tradition of peace camps such as that at Greenham Common RAF base in the UK, where women gathered to protest nuclear weapons in the 1980s. Climate camps also share features with protests such as that at Standing Rock, though those are distinguished by being part of very particular Indigenous land struggles.

In Europe, recent climate camps include the recurring Camp for Climate Action, active between 2006 and 2011, which grew out of an activist camp at the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005, and targeted a new site each year. Throughout the 1990s, a series of camps opposing motorway expansions united environmentalists and local campaigners. In the UK, Grow Heathrow—a ten-year occupation of four acres of land on a site near the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport in West London—became the focal point of local campaigning, as well as of a prolonged legal battle.³ A series of protests at Balcombe in Sussex in 2013, meanwhile, played a significant role in raising public awareness of fracking.⁴ More recently, Lützerath in North Rhine Westphalia in Germany became the focus of international media attention after protestors occupied the village, which is facing complete demolition to make way for mining coal.⁵ In the UK, the campaign groups Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil launched high profile campaigns in 2021 which targeted transport and fossil fuel infrastructure, with multiple European groups subsequently adopting their tactics of disruption. In direct response to the UK actions, the British government introduced new public order laws that are widely seen as some of the most repressive in the world.⁶

Climate camps and protests often provoke debate as to whether disruption to people’s lives alienates public opinion on climate change, and therefore reinforces mainstream orthodoxies on the “need” for a fossil-fuel economy. Other approaches, such as the Moderate Flank and Extinction Rebellion’s shift away from direct action announced in January 2023, use alternative strategies of engagement.⁷ Undeniably, however, forms of direct action play an important part in disrupting the ongoing practice of what is considered “normal” in a society built upon extraction, by imposing a sudden and radical change. Climate camps demand systemic change by forcing people to reassess what is inconvenient and to confront the denialism of short-term planning. They can be effective and appealing, meanwhile, in the way they unite global concerns with local struggle and create a tangible sense of solidarity.

Notes

1
See also Center for Land Use Interpretation: Documenting Extractivism.
2
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2020), pp. 70-71.
3
Charlotte England, ‘Inside Grow Heathrow: The UK’s Most Famous Protest Camp’, Huck, 13 July 2017 <https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/activism-2/grow-heathrow/> [accessed 2 February 2023].
4
Fiona Harvey and Peter Walker, ‘Caroline Lucas among dozens arrested in Balcombe anti-fracking protest’, The Guardian, 19 Aug 2013 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/19/caroline-lucas-arrest-balcombe-anti-fracking> [accessed 2 February 2023].
5
Ingmar Björn Nolting, ‘The eviction of Lützerath: the village being destroyed for a coalmine – a photo essay’, The Guardian, 24 January 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/24/eviction-lutzerath-village-destroyed-coalmine-a-photo-essay> [accessed 2 February 2023].
6
Chris Hilson, ‘Public order bill: new law is designed to stop climate protests – but it could actually give activists a legal tool’, The Conversation, 31 October 2022 <https://theconversation.com/public-order-bill-new-law-is-designed-to-stop-climate-protests-but-it-could-actually-give-activists-a-legal-tool-193051> [accessed 2 February 2023].
7
Robert Booth, ‘Extinction Rebellion announces move away from disruptive tactics’, The Guardian, 1 January 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/01/extinction-rebellion-announces-move-away-from-disruptive-tactics> [accessed 2 February 2023].

Women 4 Climate: A Global Alliance

2018-present

Global Led by mayors of cities including Yokohama, Paris, Freetown

A programme of research, education and campaigning led by a global coalition of female mayors who take a non-sexist approach to climate planning and foster women-led governance to help ensure equity

Context

In many regions of the world there remains a tremendous gender disparity in representation within state and municipal environmental ministries. This imbalance impacts decision-making processes with direct effects on women’s lives. To address the disproportionate harm women face through climate breakdown and ensuing socioeconomic vulnerabilities,¹ more women must take up leadership positions to counteract predominantly male perspectives and experiences. Greater consultation with women during policy making, better analysis of gendered needs in terms of budgeting, and more infrastructural provisions of safe spaces, transport, housing, and working environments, are also paramount in creating gender-responsive spaces and societies.

Practice

This is where Women4Cities comes in. An association of women-led municipal authorities based all over the world, Women4Cities researches women’s needs and campaigns for change. It collects gender-disaggregated data to gain insight into how climate change disproportionately affects women, and conducts women’s safety audits. Such audits are vital components of research because they reveal numerous concerns that impact women’s movement around a city, for instance that women are not being able to walk alone. A city cannot be green if it is not also walkable, and it cannot be walkable if it is not also safe. Using its data findings, Women4Cities makes policy recommendations, examining the gender responsiveness of local policies and identifying entry points to integrate gender-informed strategies including budgeting. Alongside its research and policy activities, Women4Cities runs mentoring programmes for women to achieve positions of leadership, harnessing mayoral support from leaders including Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Freetown’s initiatives to help secure greater agency for women include an investigation into mobility and transport options available to women.² Part of this investigation has led to Freetown securing funding from the C40 Cities Finance Facility to conduct a feasibility study on the possibility of implementing a cable car system which would relieve road congestion, improve air quality, and provide a fast and safe alternative to private cars and taxis.³

Women4Cities achieves reach and impact because it leverages mayoral power, and mayors’ financially influential networks, to gradually win more control for women through education, employment, and accessible infrastructure. With colleagues in cities across the world, each mayor is both supported by and accountable to a wider infrastructure of critical friendship. Similar and networked initiatives, including Transform Freetown and C40, evidence the powerful potential of municipal alliances collaborating within intersectional frameworks for action to create policies and infrastructures for social justice.

Notes

1
For more, see the United Nations information <https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change> [accessed 10 July 2022].
2
Many women face considerable economic constraint due to socio-cultural patterns that restrict women’s access to education and employment while burdening them with productive and reproductive responsibilities. See Eliot Froment et al., 2020. Driving Freetown Towards Enhanced Mobility: Emerging opportunities from health crises for improved access to livelihoods. [Group output produced for the Learning Alliance between the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) and the Environment and Sustainable Development (ESD) MSc Practice Module at the UCL Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU)] <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/development/sites/bartlett/files/esd_mobility_report_final.pdf> [accessed 10 July 2022].
3
For more on this and other schemes, see Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr OBE and Councillors and Staff of Freetown City Council, Transform Freetown Third Year Report (2021-22) <https://fcc.gov.sl/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Transform-Freetown-3-Year-Report.pdf> [accessed 6 March 2022].

Architects’ Climate Movements: Building Networks for Change

Especially since 2019 and ongoing

Global

Agile, democratic, and interdisciplinary networks for building change towards decarbonising the industry, by constructively rethinking architects’ daily work and their role within wider cultural transformations relating to energy and climate

Context

Architects—particularly young architects, architectural assistants, and students—have in recent years become much more acutely aware of the complicity of architecture within environmental crises and source depletion. They have also realised the significant agency they might have in their positions for changing the ways in which things are done. However, they find existing professional and regulatory bodies to be unwilling to engage with issues of climate with necessary urgency and scope.¹ In response to the global demand for a shift in ecological consciousness and a comprehensive transformation of the global economic system, various movements and manifestos are emerging, particularly within the construction industry. These groups, recognising that traditional practices and approaches are no longer viable in the face of environmental challenges, advocate for fundamental changes in the way buildings are designed, constructed (or not), and operated—to minimise carbon emissions, reduce resource consumption, and promote regenerative practices.

Practice

Seeking to build change from within, groups of architects and other professionals are organising beyond professional bodies, across industries, and from the bottom up—both to examine what kind of changes architects can and might make, and to enact change through political campaigns, research, and wider public engagement.

In the UK, the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) was launched in 2019 through a series of public meetings and assemblies around how to decarbonise the industry by making change from within. Employing a fleet-footed, bottom-up approach inherited from activist groups, ACAN’s tactics include political campaigning (significantly in relation to building regulations relating to embodied energy), as well as protest and direct action and public engagement. ACAN’s education group—one of several working groups into which their work is divided—published the first version of its education toolkit in 2020. The toolkit is based on a set of principles derived from workshops with educators and students, and contains resources on decarbonisation, ecological regeneration, and cultural transformation. It is provided for both students and educators, recognising that there is a lack of expertise and capacity amongst tutors in some schools.

Architects Declare is a network of architectural practices that signed up to a broad declaration in 2019. The network initially included a number of high-profile former Stirling Prize winners, before the apparent contradictions of having such ‘starchitects‘—whose work included new airports—led to rifts between the steering group and practices such as Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects, who eventually withdrew.²The network still aims to be a “broad church”, however, and acknowledges that the declaration is an ambition more than a current reality for most of its signatories. Their current work is particularly focussed on ideas around systems thinking and regenerative design, and their Practice Guide, published in 2021, is split into practical ways in which architects can enact change in both their own practice and through their projects. The format has been adopted by other built environment groups including Built Environment Declares and Education Declares, as well as by architects internationally.

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, Architects for Future (A4F), founded in 2019 by architecture graduates in Wuppertal, aligned itself with the Fridays for Future movement and is dedicated to achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, particularly limiting global warming to 1.5°C. With a focus on the building sector, which contributes around 40% of global carbon emissions, their aim is to bring about a holistic sustainable transformation in construction practices. A4F operate at national and international levels, comprising activists from various disciplines, not limited to architecture. They have established about 40 local groups with approximately 2,000 active members across the three countries.³ Despite initial challenges in gaining recognition from the professional world, A4F has garnered support through various tactics such as events, workshops, and exhibitions, as well as engaging in political advocacy and lobbying for stricter building regulations and policies. They emphasise decentralised organisation, democratic decision-making, and cooperation among different groups, encompassing ecological, social, and economic aspects, circularity, and the use of healthy and climate-friendly materials. They acknowledge the importance of both low-tech and high-tech solutions in achieving the necessary transformation, challenging conventional practices, advocating for policy changes, and prioritising conversion, renovation, and adaptive reuse over new construction.

Focussing more on cross-industry collaborations, the Low Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI) is a network of “developers, engineers, housing associations, architects, planners, academics, sustainability professionals, contractors, and facilities managers” in the UK making connections across professions towards the goal of developing and delivering zero-carbon technologies.⁴ It is a model for combatting the isolation and marginalisation of the architectural profession within the wider field of building and construction. Their publications, including the Climate Emergency Design Guide, help to build carbon literacy and detail real-world strategies to help the UK meet both its immediate and longer-term carbon reduction targets.

By bringing together individuals committed to building change within built environment industries, these movements are able to achieve change in ways which higher powers, the accumulators of control, are unable or unwilling to. They do so partly through confrontation with traditional professional bodies, but mostly through building networks and constructive rethinking of architects’ daily work, and their role within wider cultural transformations related to energy and climate. They show the power of fleet-footed bottom-up initiatives to effect real change in the built environment.

Notes

1
Whilst the RIBA have been frequently criticised for lack of progressive action on climate and a general failure to keep up with the changing shape of the profession, in 2022 they published a significant report, ‘Built for the Environment’, with Architects Declare, and co-authored by a team from Buro Happold engineers.
2
Tom Ravenscroft, ‘Leading architects ‘clearly contravening’ climate pledges says Architects Declare’, Dezeen, 25 November 2020 <https://www.dezeen.com/2020/11/25/architects-declare-studios-contravening-declaration/> [accessed 8 February 2023].
3
‘Kontextur Interview: 22/014 – Architects for Future’, Kontextur, 2022 <https://kontextur.info/project/architectsforfuture> [accessed 4 July 2023].
4
Originally the ‘London Energy Transformation Initiative’.

Designing Economic Cultures: Facing precarity

2011-present

Europe

A theoretical and practical research project, which identifies the relationship between economic precarity in design practice and the inability to do good progressive work, prototying and developing tools for redesigning forms of practice

Context

Architectural practice is firmly tied into the service economy: too often financially beholden to flows of global capital and with it the addictions to extraction and growth that contribute to climate breakdown. This financial dependency restricts architects’ ability to engage critically and realistically with issues of climate through their work, beyond the limited mitigations of sustainable design. How can designers do socially-minded and climate-oriented work when they need to make a living, potentially outside of the standard service model? How do architects get paid if they are opposed to the kinds of work that those holding the money want them to do? Any such new forms of practice need to be considered within the context of new economic models of professional delivery.

Practice

“Designing Economic Cultures”, a project conducted by Bianca Elzenbaumer as part of the design practice Brave New Alps, is one example of practitioners turning their attention to more systemic issues in relation to the conditions in which they produce work. The project is grounded in feminist critiques of narrow economic measures, which exclude all kinds of reproductive work by only recognising commercial relations and those forms of practice that are financially-valued. It asks “how can designers, who have a critically engaged practice, keep on developing this practice without selling themselves off or being crushed by the market?”¹

The research combines theoretical review with conversations, student workshops, and experiments in establishing and inhabiting micro-economies—mostly in the form of residencies. Based on this research, Elzenbaumer speculates on how design practices can be deployed in relation to the production of resources, spaces, and systems that “undo procedures of precarisation”: how artists and designers can design new forms of economy.² The project suggests that “designers are trained to accept and reproduce the conditions that precarise them, [and that] this training inserts itself in the wider logic of a capitalist economy”. The team argues that, by developing tools that can be used to counter this trend, designers can create “economic cultures that defy precarisation within and beyond the field of the profession”.³

The aim of this work, therefore, is not to “stabilis[e] precarious design practices as they are”, but rather to “creat[e] conditions in which it is possible for designers to imagine and actuate what they could become when not pressured by precariousness to conform to the needs of the market”.⁴ The project delivered two gallery-based collective residencies in 2011 as a means to explore new working conditions: “My castle is your castle” in Warsaw; and “Construction site for non-affirmative practice” in Milan. In both, Elzenbaumer invited practitioners as co-residents for both research and prefigurative practice. In the second workshop in particular, the space was designed as an “economy of support” that highlighted the importance of such structures in a traditionally competition-based industry.⁵

The follow-up “Precarity Pilot” by Brave New Alps and artist Caterina Giuliani further develops this idea into a set of tools for designers, at different stages in their careers, to redesign their working lives. Resources provided online include guidance on career stages, employment, and progression; quotidian tips on time management, fee calculation, and financial tracking; as well as more expansive prompts around network-building, revaluing, and hybridised work.⁶

Though anchored around Brave New Alps, this work on new forms of practice is the product of a number of individual researchers and organisations working collaboratively, internationally, and intra-actively, such that it is almost impossible to distinguish one element entirely from another. This is intentional: the ideas behind community economies suggest that the reproduction of livelihoods is not only an individual task—as in the competitive economics relations of capitalist economies—but a shared one. If designers are to work in innovative ways to face climate breakdown, it can only happen alongside new economic cultures.

Notes

1
‘About’, Designing Economic Cultures <http://www.designingeconomiccultures.net/about/> [accessed 8 July 2022].
2
Bianca Elzenbaumer, ‘Designing Economic Cultures: Cultivating Socially and Politically Engaged Design Practices against Procedures of Precarisation’ (Doctoral Thesis, Goldsmiths College, 2013) <https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/9920/> [accessed 14 December 2022], p. 9.
3
Ibid.
4
Precarity Pilot <https://precaritypilot.net> [accessed 8 July 2022].
5
Elzenbaumer, Designing Economic Cultures, pp. 127-165.
6
Precarity Pilot.

Architectural Unions: Challenging Unethical Conditions

UK USA

Worker-led groups campaigning for unionisation and wider industry reforms, linking issues of labour exploitation and entrenched hierarchies within education and practice to climate breakdown

Context

Uncared for, depleted of resources, and part of a system of value production of which they are unlikely to ever enjoy the benefits—many architectural workers are starting to draw parallels between their own exploitation and the damage their industry is wreaking on the planet. Mainstream architectural practice is a servant of capital markets via the financialisation of space for profit. It is built upon and perpetuates the most destructive aspects of the modern project: growth, excess, and endless accumulation. The fact that the industry, and particularly more famous offices in richer countries, makes use of un- and under-paid labour acutely mirrors the ways in which extractive industries such as construction are built upon the exploitation of supposedly “cheap natures”.¹

Practice

Workers in the architectural sector are now starting to take a closer look at the state of their profession in relation to climate breakdown, change working patterns brought on by events such as Covid-19, and challenge the dominant architectural work culture. In the UK, the first union of architectural workers was formed only in 2019, as a section of United Voices of the World (UVW). UVW’s Section of Architectural Workers (UVW-SAW) grew out of a workers’ inquiry into conditions of overwork, bullying, stress, and depression.² Their key demands are around pay, workload, and crucially more democracy in architectural practices, allowing workers to have a say on issues relating to how architectural offices approach climate and social justice.

“We architectural workers want to address the climate crisis not only through building to better standards and ensuring the legislation is introduced to hold developers to account, but also to address the social aspects such as landlordism, housing as profit and fuel poverty. We want workers who share our ambitions to put pressure on their employers, governments and clients to commit to net-zero carbon build standards and practices now. […] There are routes and technology available to designing buildings that are sustainable, but this is not always the priority of private clients or developers who may only be interested in asset values and rental yields. We as workers in the architectural sector want to make a change from the bottom up to demand an end to fuel poverty through insulated homes and more robust building standards while tackling the social issues behind climate justice. […] Architectural workers could be shaping vibrant and sustainable communities rather than facilitating housing as profit.”³

In the USA, as well as internationally, The Architecture Lobby is focused on building the collective power of architectural workers towards making an impact on the profession at large. Beyond their own experiences of architectural labour, these workers are also linking their conditions, and their demands, to calls for wider systemic changes in architectural practice. The racism its members experience in architectural workplaces, for example, is understood as inseparable from architecture’s complicity in racism. Likewise gender-based discrimination “within and enabled by the discipline”.⁴ The Architecture Lobby takes a holistic view in trying to hold the industry to account, linking the working conditions to social justice and climate justice, both broadly and in the specific ways in which they can affect change from within architecture.

In 2021, the group Future Architects Front started campaigning to highlight the exploitation and marginalisation of architectural workers, via an open letter with 2000 signatures.⁵ They used tactics of internet culture—confrontational meme tactics advertising poorly paid jobs and unpaid internships. They also held online conversations to debate the role of architectural education as the foundation of a poor work culture and an indoctrination that limits their grasp of architectural production.⁶ A coalition of groups including FAF, UVW-SAW, and the London chapter of The Architecture Lobby were a significant force in the election of an architectural worker, Muyiwa Oki, as RIBA president in 2022. The groups recently issued a second call to action under the banner of The Just Transition Lobby, which more explicitly links the issue of workers’ power to the kinds of political and economic transitions made necessary by climate breakdown.⁷

Within these movements there is hope for change—not only in relation to working conditions but by regaining the power to no longer serve a vast machine of value production. By linking their working conditions to the inequality and exploitation that architecture enacts in the world—refusing to stay in their niche—architectural unions demand a halt to the violence that the architectural profession exerts on both, the workers and the planet.

Notes

1
See Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
2
Workers’ Inquiry: Architecture <https://archworkersinquiry.wordpress.com> [accessed 3 February 2023].
3
‘UVW Architectural Workers Join Tenant Unions at COP26 Protests’, UVW, 5 November 2021 <https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/en/news/2021/11/uvw-architectural-workers-to-join-tenant-unions-on-cop26-protests/> [accessed 3 February 2023].
4
‘About’ The Architecture Lobby <http://architecture-lobby.org/about/> [accessed 3 February 2023].
5
Ella Jessel, ‘AJ Investigation: Architectural Assistants Break Silence on Poor Working Practices’, The Architects’ Journal, 24 March 2021 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/aj-investigation-architectural-assistants-break-silence-on-poor-working-practices> [accessed 3 February 2023].
6
Architecture Social, ‘A List of Demands to RIBA from the Future Architects Front’, YouTube, 27 March 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfRpuDz80D8> [accessed 3 February 2023].
7
The Just Transition Lobby, ‘Call to Action! RIBA Council Election 2023’, May 2023 <https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/16rduCZZwf_kkF1wn-xTQvisWq64Zmg3V7L_ncqwzpOs/mobilebasic> [accessed 10 May 2023]

Ignoring Other ways of being and doing

Business as usual controls activity through a narrowly defined set of behaviours compatible with capitalist modes of production and privatised profit. Its control of the dominant modes of knowledge and action excludes other ways of being and doing. Other ways of being and doing are often marginalised as unrealistic or irrelevant, thereby wasting the potential they hold for facing climate breakdown. This ignoring is fatal in the face of climate breakdown because the disrupted world cannot be fixed with the same methods that broke it: other forms beyond the dominant need to be recovered.

Because climate action is often framed through a scientific and technocratic worldview, it tends to ignore wider social impacts. When social indicators are suppressed, unevenly experienced vulnerabilities of climate breakdown are silenced, with the world’s poorest communities and regions suffering the most, and the world’s richest protecting themselves against further disruption. Climate justice is closely linked to social justice and resists such unequal distribution by drawing human rights into conversation with the rights of nature.

Separating Forms of Knowledge

Academia and wider societal structures organise themselves by separating disciplines based on particular forms of knowledge. Disciplinary boundaries are guarded, with certain ways of knowing overriding others so that technocratic and market-compatible activities dominate. The technocratic approach to climate breakdown splits it into distinct conditions to which specific methodologies and techniques are applied. However, climate does not respect such disciplinary boundaries, and so needs to be treated through trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking, understanding the world as a network of situated relations. Architecture in its breadth of approaches, from the humanities to science, is well placed in this respect.

Separating Functions from each other

The separating urge of modernity extends to the division of functions and policies: political life is organised into separate ministries, buildings defined by functional type, and cities divided into use zones. Such a tight-fit, functionalist approach to a systemic condition suppresses opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and imposes fixed typologies, where alternative, more flexible, and locally specific practices could flourish. Similar to the way cities are often zoned by function and their populations unfairly segregated, the practice of separating functions isolates and emaciates potentials for systemic change. Any policy or action to face climate breakdown must transcend functional and political siloing.

Culture

Dominant cultural attitudes are implicated in the production of climate breakdown and limit potential ways of facing it. Assumptions around the primacy of progress, growth, reason, and order suppress or ignore other cultural approaches. At the same time, the prevailing culture of the architectural profession prioritises high art over labour, external aesthetics over human welfare, and works “for” rather than “with” target groups in its approach. Anthropocentric ways of seeing the world as a set of problems to be fixed leads to technocratic and divided mindsets. Against this, climate breakdown requires relational and diverse ways of thinking and acting. Culture becomes a shared realm, not the domain of the privileged few. The ideas, customs, and behaviours of architecture as we know it are only one way of understanding, creating, and occupying space. Architecture’s professionalised and academic culture has profound effects on climate, whether by normalising the extraction of materials from the earth or discarding waste back into it, or overly relying on techno-fix solutionism. Rethinking cultural approaches to and of spatial practices enables their transformation.

Work

Climate breakdown is bound to the over-intensive extraction of the earth’s resources, the associated carbon-intensive processing of materials, mass consumption, and accompanying waste. Such intensity often relies on the exploitation of labour and labourers. In this light, architecture is conceived in isolation from its forms of production and reproduction, ignoring the various exploitations of labour and extractions of resources, which enable its creation. Labour is not an abstract form but a human condition. Addressing labour injustices, therefore, also acknowledges important planetary boundaries. Rethinking hierarchies, building alliances of solidarity, recognising and introducing ethical labour practices undermines larger forces and is an important step in reimagining the relationship of architecture and climate. More equitable systems of labour, from the architectural office through the outsourced contractors such as renderers to the construction site open up a different sensibility to the way that architecture is conceived, seeing it as a relational discipline which places the ethics of planetary care at its core.

Architecture is Climate

Sarah Bovelett

Anthony Powis

Tatjana Schneider

Christina Serifi

Jeremy Till

Becca Voelcker