Confront orthodoxies – and question the status quo

Ecological Education: Learning in Community

1991-present

Schumacher College: Dartington, near Totnes, Devon, UK

New forms of educational institutions that break from modern disciplinary “education for industry”, developing trans-disciplinary and immersive forms of learning in community

Context

It is not only the things we learn but the ways in which we learn—the environments, relationships, and boundaries inside and through which we learn—that establish our worldview, and direct the ways in which we inhabit the world. Critical Pedagogy, a discipline often traced back to the work of Brazilian socialist and educator Paolo Freire, links questions of pedagogical practice to issues of social justice. Most modern industrialised societies, Freire argued, practice education as a unidirectional form of “training” designed to reproduce the status quo.¹ Separating forms of knowledge into disciplines, and separating humans from nature, eliminates the possibility of holistic thinking, and perpetuates a system whereby nature is exploited and people are separated by hierarchies. Freire proposed an alternative model of learning that is self-led, interdisciplinary, and anti-hierarchical. This model advocates for “education as the practice of freedom”,² and with its liberatory appeal, invites a way of learning and living that takes greater care of the climate.

Practice

Across the world, a number of experimental colleges have adopted Critical Pedagogy in their provision of ecology and design courses, aiming to provide education for an age of environmentalism, not industry, and within a context of ecological breakdown.³ One of the longest-running of these is Schumacher College in Devon, founded by the environmental activist and pacifist Satish Kumar in 1991.

Schumacher College offers programmes on various aspects of agroecology, philosophy, and economics that follow a principle of educating head, hand, and heart together: learning by doing, as well as by living together in Schumacher’s community.

Responding to the frequent criticism that his style is somehow irrational, oddball, or overly-spiritualist, Kumar responds:

“Is my approach unrealistic? Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me ‘unrealistic’ to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed, and wholly exaggerated concept.”⁴

Schumacher College’s postgraduate programme in Ecological Design Thinking encourages students to evaluate their own design practice through an ethos of whole-systems thinking, and approach design as a holistic and trans-disciplinary practice. This course speaks to the challenge of facing climate breakdown by addressing issues through their social, economic, human, and environmental relationships.

Working with some of the same principles, Black Mountains College, in South Wales, offers a single undergraduate programme in Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology and Systems Change.⁵ Established by a Welsh human rights researcher and a poet, both from the Black Mountains region of South Wales, the College provides environmentally-situated education in an immersive, sensory way. Its undergraduate programme revolves around asking what kinds of transformation are needed to build an ecologically sound and socially just future, and looks at ways of understanding the past, examining current practices, and experimenting with new futures, across disciplines. The College also offers free vocational courses, fully-funded by the Welsh government, which are designed to foster ecological care and stewardship.

The Schumacher and Black Mountains College examples demonstrate the viability and fruitfulness of shaping education around ecological and social principles of care. Numerous other examples, from the Centre for Alternative Technology (also in Wales) to the Indigenous University of the Territory in southwestern Colombia, could also be mentioned. In these centres for learning, as students are encouraged to rethink the world around them and to challenge institutions of power, education realises its full potential for working across disciplinary and methodological boundaries for greater social and ecological good. Such an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to education is paramount in facing climate breakdown’s combined social and ecological challenges.

Notes

1
Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2001).
2
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
3
Dartington Trust, ‘Schumacher College in the words of Satish Kumar’, YouTube, 22 July 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EpnK6UMYEQ> [accessed 3 February 2023].
4
John Vidal, ‘Soul man’, The Guardian, 16 January 2008 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jan/16/activists> [accessed 3 February 2023].
5
Though its name recalls the Black Mountain College—an art school which became a hive of creative experimentation between 1933 and 1957 in North Carolina, USA—the Black Mountains College takes its name from the group of hills spread across parts of Powys and Monmouthshire in southeast Wales, where the College is located.

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].

15-M Movement: Practicing Radical Spatialisation

2011-present

Madrid, Spain

A series of protests, demonstrations, and occupations in Spain against austerity policies, which transformed into ad hoc socio-spatial experiments to create neighborhood initiatives and alternatives while emphasizing provisionality as a key principle of spatial production

Context

How can citizen-led protests help construct spatial alternatives to the status quo? Following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a growing wave of social movements used long-term occupations of urban spaces not only as a form of protest, but as sites for reappropriating, reimagining, and rebuilding societies on a tangible scale. Occupied spaces became prototypes and experiments with the social forms and spatial organisations that emergent political programmes were generating. Responding to a political landscape that sought the solution to crisis in more financial instruments that deepened existing inequality, including austerity measures, privatisation, and the increasing commodification of public space, occupy movements transformed urban spaces into “commons”.¹

Whilst there is no absolute or clear-cut means of grouping the Arab Spring, 15-M, Syntagma Square, and other protests between 2010 and 2012, including the global Occupy movement, it is clear that these diverse movements identified a strong need for alternative spatial and social formations to generate radical political imaginaries.

Practice

On 15 May 2011, amongst a wave of anti-austerity protests in Spain, a demonstration called by two protest groups—Juventud Sin Futuro (“Youth Without a Future”), and Democracia Real Ya (“Real Democracy NOW!”)—ended in the occupation of the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid. Emerging in the context of poverty created by the economic crisis, austerity policies, and youth unemployment, these groups channeled widespread anger through online platforms including social media, and organised in-person mobilisations. Police disbanded the first occupation, but protestors returned, bringing others, and soon an encampment occupied the whole square. Forming a kind of city in miniature, the camp provided spaces for meeting and debate.

After a month, the growing protest camps and assemblies of what was now called the 15-M movement had established other temporary spaces across the city, including children’s playgrounds, libraries, information centres, dining areas, and spaces with solar panels to provide energy.

Feminism permeated the 15-M movement through practices of care and inclusion and a rejection of competitive and hierarchical values. 15-M became a counter-project to the neoliberal city, demonstrating socio-spatial alternatives rooted in participatory space-making, mutual support, and deliberative democracy. Since 2011, 15-M has grown into a series of solidarity-economy initiatives, social centres, community gardens, and campaigns against housing evictions. Forms of organisation and decision-making practiced at 15-M inspired neighbourhood assemblies who established garden initiatives with political agendas that brought local authorities into climate-focused conversations.²

15-M’s potential as a spatial prototype for non-hierarchical decision-making and open planning has sparked much political and scholarly attention.³ 15-M’s intersection of radical action with radical spatialisation demonstrates the possibility of achieving social-spatial projects of political transformation that begin at the grassroots scale of local communities. The movement’s diversity of spatial outcomes reflects its diverse social composition and its collaborative, open-ended approach to occupation and ad-hoc creativity.

Notes

1
Stavros Stavrides, “Occupied Squares, Societies in Movement”, in Common Space: The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016), pp. 159-80.
2
Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, ‘Laboratory of Conversations: The 15M Movement’, Public Books, 5 December 2021 <https://www.publicbooks.org/laboratory-of-conversations-the-15m-movement/> [accessed 3 April 2023].
3
For example, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, “‘This Square Is Our Home!’: The Organization of Urban Space in the Spanish 15-M Movement”, Progressive Planning, Fall 2011; Silvano De la Llat, “Open-Ended Urbanisms: Space-Making Processes in the Protest Encampment of the Indignados Movement in Barcelona”, URBAN DESIGN International, 21.2 (2016), pp. 113-30 <https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2015.17>

Transform Freetown: Putting Gender and Climate Justice First

2018-present

Freetown, Sierra Leone

A woman-led policy agenda for municipal and local governance, aimed at facing climate change by foregrounding gender equity in climate justice

Context

How can communities ravaged by poverty, gender inequity, and the aftermath of colonial rule and civil war respond to climate breakdown effectively? Women are disproportionately affected by climate breakdown and, as more women are displaced from rural areas suffering drought, flash flooding, and crop failure, female populations in cities grow. Facing combined issues of housing scarcity and climate degradation (urban sprawl has caused biodiversity loss, pollution, and water contamination), women are caught in an infrastructure still dominated by patriarchal control. Women’s rights, capabilities, and agency as potential leaders are routinely violated and ignored. Addressing infrastructures such as waste management, housing, transportation, food supply, and so forth, in an integrated manner that prioritises the needs and safety of women and children, is paramount in ensuring that urban areas such as Freetown, Sierra Leone, experience greater climate justice.

Practice

Realising these challenges, in 2018, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr became the first woman elected as mayor of Freetown in 40 years. Since then, through her Transform Freetown policy agenda, Aki-Sawyerr has led women in resilience-building strategies in the face of the climate breakdown by helping communities become safer and more prepared for disasters. Across the city and its municipal divisions, the Transform Freetown agenda is employing women to lead in formal roles of representation and in smaller community-based organisations. More than 1,200 new jobs have been created through tree-planting, shaded shelter construction, water management, waste collection, and other activities. Beyond a significant rise in green jobs such as these, the provision is also important because, where possible, jobs and projects are supervised by women-led local governments. In informal settlements where government is less formalised, local organisers receive support from the Mayor. Projects have included designing community-based early warning systems for natural disasters, forming savings cooperatives that allow households (particularly women) to recover after losses to livelihoods, and working with C40 Cities funding to undertake a feasibility study for cable car transportation that would reduce the amount of polluting car traffic in the city.

Although many regions like Sierra Leone experience continued and pervasive gender inequality whereby men block women’s access to vital infrastructures of education, finance, and land tenure, and where extreme poverty limits people’s capacity to engage in resilience-building initiatives, Transform Freetown fosters collective struggle and presents a transparent role model for further initiatives.¹ Like other projects that conduct gender-responsive data collection with regards to climate and cities (Women4Climate, for example), Transform Freetown understands the intersectional challenge of supporting women, poor people, and the climate as interrelated constituents. This eco-intersectional approach is vital for climate justice, if it is to address legacies of colonialism and patriarchy, and stand in solidarity with those most vulnerable to colonialism and patriarchy’s structural harms.

Notes

1
For more, see Molly Kellogg, ‘Women Building Resilient Cities in the Context of Climate Change’, n.d. <http://giwps.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Women-Building-Resilient-Cities.pdf> [accessed 6 July 2022].

Accumulating Control

Modernity has always attempted, conceptually and operationally, to impose order on an unruly world to better control it. The accumulation of control within the realms of politics and economics leads to a stifling of situated and canny actions. Against such restrictions, some of the most productive and poignant climate-facing initiatives start out precisely through critiquing and resisting monopolised systems of control. Centralised systems and normalised values of control further exclude exactly those alternative voices that are needed to face multiple crises.

Accumulating Identity

A core aspect of the modern condition is the accumulation of identity at a personal, institutional, corporate, and national level, a superficial obsession which obscures the fundamental aspects of climate breakdown. This focus on one type of controlling identity necessarily excludes other voices. Within the architectural profession, myths of individual genius perpetuate an elitist system of ‘starchitects’ whereby designers are celebrated for aesthetic identity, eclipsing the interdependent role that architecture can play by collaborating with other people, and in careful relation with ecosystems and the climate.

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.

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.

Economy

The orthodoxies and operations of the capitalist economic system are major drivers of climate breakdown. Growth, as a purely economic measure and profit for the benefit of the few is pursued irrespective of nature’s limits and planetary boundaries. The beyond-human world is treated as a site to be economically exploited. Architecture becomes a pawn in economic trading, and with it architects the handservants of capital. To avoid the most devastating effects of breakdown, other diverse economic models, ignored by dominant economic theories, need to be brought to the surface. Climate justice necessitates a re-evaluation of what constitutes value, and the introduction of other measures of growth, which respect the rights of all humans and beyond-humans. Enacting distributed, shared, and ethical economies engenders new social, and so spatial formations, all of which have implications for architecture.

Infrastructure

Infrastructures are critical support systems inseparable from climate. Infrastructures affect their surroundings, introducing physical and organisational structures that shape the operation of a society. From motorway systems to gas-pipelines, infrastructures conventionally rely on technocratic approaches, usually using carbon-intensive means to ‘fix’ individual situations, overlooking the integrated nature of problems by isolating them in closed systems. Too often, various infrastructures are overlaid on each other in a wasteful and non-relational manner, or new ones endlessly replace older ones in a cycle of obsolescence. Instead, infrastructures need to be understood as processes with profound impacts on the human and beyond-human. Such an understanding combines the material with the immaterial and brings together the physical, social, and digital; new forms of infrastructure need to be dynamic, complex, ambiguous, and situated. In the face of climate breakdown, it is crucial to recognise and recover infrastructures as support systems that work with the world rather than from above. This involves drawing from principles of regeneration and a deep understanding of change and temporality.

Knowledge

The way that climate is conceived determines how it is addressed. Knowledge systems are still dominated by Eurocentric and imperial modes of modernity, which reduce the planet and its peoples to forms of logic and control. Knowledge, including that of architecture, is guarded canon. Within this closed system, vocabularies of scientific reason exclude and devalue other ways of knowing, not least those developed in other cultures and regions. Within these systems of epistemological power, climate becomes another abstraction, subject to human manipulation. Humankind is separated from nature, enabling nature’s exploitation. However, the devastating ecological impact of such a limited canon of thinking is now so apparent as to demand other ways of thinking and knowing, which admit to human vulnerability in contrast to the presumed authority of previous times. Different ways of knowing enable different ways of being and acting, with architecture released from its conventional confines. Such an approach sees expertise everywhere, surfacing forms of knowledge that have been suppressed by modernity.

Land

Land is fundamental to life on earth, and yet this existential dependency is overwritten by the way that modernity treats land conceptually and operationally. Land’s political, ecological, and cultural conditions shape the lives of those living on it. Enclosed, privatised, and financialised, land only serves the profit of the few. Logged, fracked, and polluted, land is wounded and depleted. The colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands is closely tied to related exploitations of resources and people which contribute to climate breakdown. Against land’s abstraction and commodification, architecture needs to engage not just with what goes onto the land, but the conditions of land itself. Understanding the ecological value of land as soil is part of more emancipatory forms of spatial practice. Acknowledging land as a living being, as a vibrant entity that sustains life with rights of its own, engenders a more holistic approach.

Policy

Policies at a national, regional, and local level frame and thus determine action in relation to climate. Often attributed to elites, policies are criticised for their ineffectiveness, narrow focus on single issues, and tendency to reinforce the status quo through risk management approaches. Climate-related policies are more effective as relational devices that cut across disciplinary, political, and conceptual boundaries, consistent with the relational conditions of climate. This suggests the need for policies that are beyond partial fixes and expose the conditions in which things are made, as a form of analysis as well as future projection: policies that are informed by activism, a concern for Gaia, the rights of nature. Bringing policies back to their original roots in citizenship as means for collective betterment is crucial, particularly given that the lack of effective climate action is tied to democratic deficits. This is why citizens assemblies, practices of participatory governance, and other forms of redistributed decision-making become central to more equitable climate action.

Resources

Architecture has long relied on an extractivist regime in relation to resources. The over-intensive extraction of resources and the polluting effects of their consumption and waste vastly contributes to climate breakdown. Resources are placed into networks of economic exchange, rather than being seen as part of an ecological system. Respecting planetary boundaries is paramount in altering this unsustainable and unjust cycle. Keeping resources in the ground and using what is already available in circular systems enables a form of resourcefulness attuned to planetary boundaries and multi-species wellbeing. Such change requires rejecting alienated supply chains and creating transparent and accountable distributed systems. Knowing the origins and production methods of materials and products and then acting upon this knowledge is key. Implementing appropriate technologies (including methods often considered ancient and traditional) is also important for using resources in ways that respect ecosystems and planetary health.

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