See expertise everywhere – and work in coalitions that come together around a concern

Environmental Justice Atlas: Cartographies for Resistance

2015-present

Barcelona, Spain

An open-access online atlas that catalogues social conflict over environmental issues around the world as part of a drive for greater transparency and a culture of critical inquiry

Context

Throughout the world people fight to defend their land, air and water ways, forests, and socioeconomic livelihoods from extractive projects that harm environments and communities through mining, damming, monoculture tree plantations, fracking, gas flaring, waste disposal, and so on. Much of the global economy operates in commodity chains of extraction, processing, and disposal, whereby climate and social damages are outsourced which results in burdening the world’s poorest and most marginalised peoples. Such commodity chains are rarely visible to citizens or consumers of the end products as the exploitative actions that cause climate breakdown are often hidden from view.

Practice

In 2015 a group of researchers in Barcelona devised the Environmental Justice Atlas to tell the stories of communities struggling for environmental justice. Using an interactive world map on a website, the Atlas functions as a catalogue of issues and a starting point for concerned citizens and activist groups to gain information and to see the work of similar groups elsewhere. The Atlas highlights claims and testimonies, calling for corporate and state responsibility for climate and social injustice.

The Atlas is made by hundreds of collaborators, including academic researchers, concerned citizens, informal committees, NGOs, and other activist groups.¹ All data are moderated by the editorial team who double check the information. Anyone can create an account and contact the editorial team to contribute information. A commenting function is available on each page representing an “ecological conflict” in order to facilitate discussion.²

Cases are added to the Atlas, which maps conflicts across 10 categories (nuclear, mineral ores and building extractions, etc.) if they fulfil one or more criteria for environmental conflict:

“Economic activity or legislation with actual or potential negative environmental and social outcomes; Claim and mobilization by environmental justice organization(s) that such harm occurred or is likely to occur as a result of that activity; Reporting of that particular conflict in one or more media stories.“³

Clicking on the map, visitors to the Atlas website can access a database that contains information on investors, stakeholders and the impacts of their trade deals, basic data regarding the source and nature of a conflict, outlines of impacts, outcomes, legislation, related academic research, videos, and pictures.

Since 2015, further maps have been developed for the Atlas in collaboration with ongoing campaigns or research projects. These show a number of socioeconomic indicators in the form of colour intensity (known as choropleth maps) They indicate GDP, poverty or material extraction, for example, or represent different types of land uses and biophysical parameters such as pasture lands, forests, or areas with water scarcity. Geodata stem from national planning agencies, international agencies, and organisations working on specific issues such as shale gas (www.unconventionalenergyresources.com) or land use (www.globallandproject.org). Socioeconomic data from sources, such as materialflows.net or the UN’s Comtrade, also form geographical layers for the Atlas maps through geo-referencing statistical data.

The website also contains an informational section explaining that environmental conflict usually arises from structural inequalities of income and power, and that environmental justice works to secure distribution, recognition, and participation. The informational text cites examples of conflict and justice issues, including the distribution of pollution and access to environmental resources, the right to participate in decision-making and the recognition of alternate worldviews.⁴ Action, the website explains, may include formal claim-making, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, legal actions, civil disobedience, collective violence, international campaigns, and more.⁵

“Growing consumption of resources is fueling ever more conflicts globally. Most of these are used to satisfy the material needs of the rich segments of the world population. But over-consumption by the rich visits ecological violence on the poor. It is a story of luxury for some v. livelihood for many.”⁶

Of the cases currently on the map, approximately 18% qualify as successes for environmental justice where court cases have been won, access to common land reclaimed, or destructive projects scrapped.3 Such victories demonstrate the transformative power of resistance, community organising, policy-making and practicing ecologically-driven philosophies such as Sumak Kawsay and Ubuntu. The Atlas provides a teaching, solidarity and advocacy resource for activist organisers, researchers, policy-makers, educators and citizens seeking information about often invisible conflicts occurring behind the scenes of a commodity chain or service. By increasing the visibility of environmental conflicts and the many solidarity movements that face them, the Atlas provides a space for both critical focus and future-oriented hope.

Notes

1
Environmental Justice Atlas. <https://ejatlas.org/> [Accessed 5 November 2023].
2
Mariana Walter, and Lucrecia Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina. The Keys of a Successful Story of Mobilisation’. The Extractive Industries and Society 8, 4 (1 December 2021): 100940 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.100940>
3
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
4
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
5
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
6
Remembrance Day For Lost Species. ‘The Environmental Justice Atlas’, 11 October 2018 <https://www.lostspeciesday.org/?p=1110> [accessed 21 November 2023].

Chile’s Constitution: Social and Ecological Justice

2019-2022

Chile

A proposed national constitution, written collectively by over 150 people representing diverse backgrounds and perspectives, calling for widespread legal, economic, social, and ecological reform, including the recognition of the rights of nature

Context

Chile’s current constitution was written during Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship in 1980 and has not been replaced. The country’s new, left-wing leader Gabriel Boric came to power in 2022 promising a new constitution, which was to be co-written with a convention of 154 democratically elected members. Most of these members were independent politicians, and a large number of them were leftists, feminists, environmentalists, and advocates of Indigenous groups. 78% of voters approved Boric’s suggestion to rewrite the constitution in a referendum held in 2020.¹

Practice

The constitutional convention drafted a document containing 388 articles which drew on their breadth of perspectives and expertise. Written by and for people outside the traditional political sphere, with the wellbeing of an array of social sectors, minority groups, and natural habitats in mind, the constitution was acclaimed the world over for its far-reaching ecological and social foresight.²

The constitution emphasises the rights of nature, its first article stating that it “recognises as intrinsic and absolute” the “dignity, freedom and substantive equality of human beings and their indissoluble relationship with nature”.³ Any business enterprise and scientific development, the constitution warns, must also “be developed according to the bioethical principles of solidarity, cooperation, and responsibility, and with full respect for human dignity, animal sentience, nature’s rights”.⁴ The constitution stresses the importance of Chile’s Indigenous nations, and their rights to land, self-determination, cultural heritage, and linguistic independence. Other social rights include those regarding education, health, housing, and gender equality. In sum, the constitution takes an eco-intersectional approach to understand people and planet as a symbiotic or holistic system.

When it came to the vote concerning the adoption or rejection of the constitution, 62% of Chileans voted against it. People have speculated about the reasons for this rejection, citing the fact that the constitution was overly complex and long, that its contents were damaged by fake news on social media ahead of the vote, and that most private donations were given to the constitution rejection campaign.⁵ Time will tell whether the constitution’s re-drafted iteration will uphold the values of solidarity, ecocentrism, democratic and representational governance, and territorial autonomy that make the first draft so extraordinary.

Notes

1
Maria Contesse, ‘Why We Failed to Approve the New Chilean Constitution | LSE Latin America and Caribbean’. LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog (blog), 15 September 2022 <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2022/09/15/why-we-failed-to-approve-the-new-chilean-constitution/> [accessed 5 November 2023].
2
Contesse, ‘Why We Failed to Approve’.
3
International IDEA, DRAFT Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile, July 2022 <https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/International%20IDEA%20Translation%20Chile%202022%20Draft%20Constitution.pdf> [accessed 15 November 2022].
4
International IDEA, DRAFT Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile
5
Another factor was voter turnout, which increased for the constitution vote, but brought more new voters who rejected the constitution than those who approved it.

Girjegumpi: A Travelling Archive for Resourcefulness and Ingenuity

2018-present. Developing earlier work going back to 2007.

Sápmi, Norway

A travelling archive and online equivalent for sharing and developing knowledge of Sámi architecture, which also makes space for wider discussion about Indigenous architecture, focussing on cultures of resourcefulness and ingenuity

Context

Overconsumption within capitalist economies is widely recognised as a core determinant of climate breakdown. The production of the endless new—materials, products, food, energy, clothes, etc.—and the systems that enable such cycles of consumption propel global warming and biodiversity collapse. Alternatives take many forms but are often plagued by equally materialist emphases on novelty, reinvention, and superficial trends. In particular, appeals towards Indigenous ways of life as offering solutions to a Modern detachment from nature often repeat limited and limiting colonial definitions, ossifying ways of living by summarising them in particular forms, technologies, or aesthetics.

Practice

This limitation is precisely what the Sámi artist-architect Joar Nango resists by publicly presenting information about traditions of resourcefulness and ingenuity found in Sámi and other Arctic-region Indigenous cultures. Crucial to Nango’s initiative, which is titled the Indigenuity Project, are a number of platforms that collect and disseminate stories, photographs, practices, materials, and writing. These materials form an archive, which is both a library and a travelling exhibition. Named “Girjegumpi” (from “girji”, meaning “book”, and “gumpi”, a small mobile structure used by reindeer herders), this archive hosts workshops and conversations and visits art galleries as a mobile exhibition. By travelling in such a way, Indigenuity Project’s Girjegumpi archive inserts Sámi spatial practices and concepts into existing institutions from which they are often excluded, for example, urban galleries in Norway and abroad. This mobile strategy deliberately reclaims space within institutions and conversations that often exclude Indigenous knowledge, constituting a tactic for building change from within structures of power. The archive is supported by a website offering a digital version of material to an even wider audience.¹

Avoiding the often rather generalising tone of appeals to Indigenous knowledge, which risk romanticising and essentialising non-Western cultures, the Indigenuity Project collects ways of living that respond to, dismantle, and repurpose objects and systems of the capitalist world. Countering stereotypes of Indigenous cultures that rely on exotic images or folklore, the project presents Indigenous spatial practices as live, contemporary cultures.²

Rather than offering a narrow definition of Sámi spatial practice, Nango’s project is emancipatory in the way it creates space for conversations about both, what Indigenous cultures are and what they have not been allowed to be due to social marginalisation. Facilitating these conversations enables the project to move beyond a demonstration of Indigenous typologies (such as the Lavuu, a temporary shelter similar in its aesthetic to the tipi) within gallery spaces. Simply exhibiting a tipi, in Nango’s words, would epitomise a “giant Lavuu syndrome”.³

Instead, the Indigenuity Project exhibits and engages with a multitude of outputs—digital, physical, and discursive—hijacking exhibition institutions to transform into relational sites for learning and critical discussion. Foregrounding the resourcefulness of Sámi spatial practice through documenting numerous instances of improvisation, adhocism, recycling, and ingenuity, the project inevitably critiques the wastefulness of capitalist modernity as well as its narrow remits for defining spatial practice.

Notes

1
The Virtual Library of Sámi Architecture <https://gumpi.space/> [accessed 12 April 2022].
2
The World Around, ‘Sámi architect Joar Nango presents The Virtual Girjegumpi’, YouTube, 11 February 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPcQ8KztOmY> [accessed 27 September 2022]. Nango developed a related project, ‘Post-capitalist Architecture TV’, during the Covid-19 pandemic as a prologue to a postponed exhibition. Nango’s various activities, across TV, website design, archiving, photography, and more have an additive and choral quality, which traces back to his student work making FANzines such as “Sámi huksendáidda” (Sámi Art of Building) and resonates with traditions of adhocism in art, media, and communication. See Reanna Merasty, “‘Joar Nango”‘, ICON, Spring 2022, pp. 156-64.
3
‘Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV #Part 1–3’, Bergen International Festival <https://fib.no/en/post-capitalist-architecture-tv/> [accessed 27 September 2022].

The (Indian Ocean) Southern Collective: Postnormal Knowledge Production

2020-present

Northern Indian Ocean region (currently Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand)

A network of researchers and practitioners building and sustaining collaborative partnerships aimed at democratising knowledge production in South Asia, and creating frameworks for a more distributed and democratic research culture that includes other forms of knowledge and knowledge production

Context

In the northern Indian Ocean region, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent storms caused by climate breakdown, in addition to socioeconomic pressures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, such as displacement and migration, are fundamentally challenging everyday life. These challenges require thinking about society and climate in ways that stay with the trouble of environmental crisis and forge means for working and learning in solidarity.

Climate breakdown is not just a product of the material relations of capitalism—fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and the violence of extraction—but also, or even more so, the modes of thought that perpetuate such relations to climate. As the Portuguese sociologist and legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes:

“Modern social sciences rely on methodologies that extract information from research objects in very much the same way as mining industries extract minerals and oil from nature. The epistemologies of the South, on the contrary, by relying on knowing-with rather than knowing-about […] offer some guidelines as to the methodologies that can carry out such tasks successfully.”¹

Confronting the challenges of climate breakdown requires precisely these shared forms of knowledge production. Practicing alternatives to ways of learning and thinking which continue to dominate academic practice and research funding, particularly in the Global North, shared methodologies are better able to face climate breakdown as a collective, interdisciplinary, and planetary challenge.

Practice

The Southern Collective exemplifies this practice of alternative, shared methodologies. It comprises a group of researchers working in the northern Indian Ocean region, focusing on the ways in which climate breakdown and its social impacts demand a transformation of conventional and dominant forms of knowledge production. Climate breakdown, Covid-19, and migration require working within conditions of uncertainty and urgency. The Collective calls this way of working “postnormal” knowledge production.²

Although some of the Collective’s members work in northern-European universities, their focus is on creating south-south collaborations whose regional specificities (such as coastal locations facing erosion and rising sea levels) challenge conventional structures of funding, idea generation, and exchange, and generate new research agendas centred upon climate and climate justice.³ For example, the Southern Collective’s project, “Connected Ethnographies”, explores forms of “immobile” research (research that does not necessitate travel) initially brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.⁴ Whilst envisaging ways in which research can connect people via technological networks, this project also acknowledges the asymmetry of such connections by exploring digital accessibility.

By developing collaborative projects outside and within universities, and by expanding dominant research models to encompass more ecological and intersectional concerns, the Southern Collective enables a greater diversity of knowledges to impact fields of research focused on climate and climate justice.

Notes

1
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 14-15.
2
Aarthi Sridhar, Annu Jalais, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, and Sridhar Anantha, ‘The Indian Ocean Southern Collective: Collaboratory for Postnormal Coastal Knowledge Production’, Items, 12 April 2022 <https://items.ssrc.org/crisis-and-collaboration-across-the-indian-ocean/the-indian-ocean-southern-collective/ [accessed 8 July 2022].
3
‘About’ The Southern Collective <https://thesoutherncollective.org/about/> [accessed 18 August 2022].
4
Annu Jalais and Aarthi Sridhar, ‘A Collaboratory of Indian Ocean Ethnographies’, Fieldsights, 23 September 2021 <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/a-collaboratory-of-indian-ocean-ethnographies> [accessed 18 August 2022].

Tzoumakers: Practice Peer to Peer

2018-present

Tzoumerka, Greece

An open lab to cooperatively design and manufacture tools for small-scale agricultural production, providing peer-to-peer and open-source practical solutions through mutual coordination networks, and aiming to reach a commons-centric economy and society

Context

Peer to peer (P2P) are decentralised networks mostly known as ways of bringing people together over the internet in a non-hierarchical and non-coercive manner. P2P is typically associated with the production of digital goods like Wikipedia and other free and open-source software models. However, peer production can also be manifested through inter-regional or intra-regional exchanges of physical resources and tangible goods between individuals. Peer production or Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) has the potential to play an important role in building forms of value creation and distribution in ways that are not dominated by capital and state. It can be seen as an alternative to the system where private corporations use capital (money, resources, technology, etc.) to create and distribute goods and services in order to generate profits, while the state enforces laws, regulations, and policies that support the interests of capital.

Practice

Tzoumakers is an example of a peer production practice in the mountainous region of Tzoumerka in Northern Greece. In commons-based peer production, contributors create shared value through open contributory systems, governing the work through participatory practices and creating shared resources.¹ Tzoumakers is an open-source agricultural community of local farmers and researchers who collaboratively design and build practical solutions and tools for their production needs, using modern and traditional technologies. Tzoumakers were formed around a practical problem: finding appropriate tools for their everyday activities. They began with simple gatherings in an abandoned school building where they gradually created a space to share, reflect, and ideate on their common challenges and aspirations. These gatherings were initiated by a group of young researchers called P2P Lab, a local research collective focused on the commons.

The work of Tzoumakers is based on the concept of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP)² establishing an open network for anyone with skills to contribute to a common project where the knowledge of all participants is pooled. Their practice is built upon local knowledge systems by applying self-management and peer-to-peer methodologies — inspired by the commons and solidarity economics – and using digital and technological innovations. Tzoumakers belong to a wider network of commons-oriented open agricultural communities who share knowledges, experiences, designs, and resources regarding regenerative agricultural methods and distributed manufacturing technologies towards new forms of open cooperativism. Such an approach has the potential to play a powerful role in shaping re-imagined rural futures. In the face of climate breakdown, community organised P2P networks such as this present an alternative to the extractivist tendencies of capitalist systems, allowing circular and shared economies to flourish. The decentralised and collaborative nature of these networks allows them to operate in a more equitable manner promoting the efficient use of resources and creating value that is shared among all participants. They can also be scaled up to create wider networks, increasing their reach and impact.

Notes

1
P2P Foundation, GB; Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Tallinn University of Technology; P2P Lab, EE, Alex Pazaitis, and Tallinn University of Technology; P2P Lab, EE. Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto (London: University of Westminster Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.16997/book33>
2
Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum. “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 4 (December 2006), pp. 394-419 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00235.x>

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>

Aldea: Expertise is Everywhere

2015-present

Chile

A foundation working across heritage, architecture, and social work through programming for young people, participatory design, and research—breaking down the language barriers that prevent citizen participation in defining their own heritage

Context

Cultural heritage is often the preserve of elites: government departments, international commissions, and academic experts who define what heritage is, and how it should be managed.¹ When done badly, this model has a tendency to caricature, objectify, depoliticise, and ossify the living aspects of heritage. It is, however, the engaged aspects of heritage—as directly experienced by and through the citizens who live with them—that are of crucial importance to developing the built environment in parallel with building the capacity of communities and alongside a sense of ownership over the space they inhabit. The failure to adapt places and settlements to the challenges of climate often stems from a simple lack of regard for the knowledge of the local people.

Practice

Fundación Aldea (from the Spanish for village) is an organisation that works in and between the fields of architecture, learning, and heritage to question both by whom and for whom heritage is being preserved. Aldea—“a team of architects, social workers, heritage experts and art historians from the U.K. and Chile”²—works with communities to promote an attitude to heritage that is less about definition, and instead more a form of cultural empowerment: evaluating what we have, recognising its value, and using this as a base to develop social justice.

Aldea’s work is done through engagement with participatory research and action methods, confronting expectations through embodied experiences and respecting everyone’s knowledge as equally valid. Workshops are often intergenerational, and build on existing concerns, expertise, and organisations. Working with young people, in particular, is about supporting them to develop both an understanding of their built environment, and the language and skills to participate in its development. Acknowledging the lack of formal built environment education in most national school curricula as the root of “reduced confidence in communicating qualities and issues that exist in people’s areas”, Aldea’s work seeks to transcend the limits set by this language barrier, allowing young people’s embodied expertise and knowledge of their environments back into the conversation.³

Aldea’s ongoing activities include the organisation of Open House Santiago, which grew out of similar programmes developed by Open City in the UK. Similarly, in the commune of Castro, on the Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile, Castro Abierto is also an annual festival of free tours, workshops, and discussions aimed at celebrating local identity whilst providing a platform for communication and dialogue. Much of Aldea’s work is in the realm of architectural and landscape preservation: including buildings and construction, but also crafts, skills, and intangible heritage. As part of the research of co-director Magdalena Novoa they have recently been collaborating with 50 women from Lota to make arpilleras—patchwork quilts that narrate urban stories from the women’s point of view. The arpillera urbana is an activist textile art that originated during the dictatorship as a form of political statement and denouncement of human rights violations.⁴

Aldea’s work demonstrates the power of interdisciplinary spatial practice when it recognises the knowledge held by so-called ‘non-experts’, and when professional skills are utilised to break down the language barriers that otherwise prevent people form participating in their own built environment. Aldea’s empowering approach is transferable into fields beyond heritage, including that of climate, as a means of engaging citizens with the spatial complexities that climate breakdown induces.

Notes

1
Magdalena Novoa, “Insurgency, Heritage and the Working Class: The Case of the Theatre of Union No6 of the Coal Miners of Lota, Chile”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24.4 (2018), pp. 354-73 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378904>
2
Robert Newcombe and Soledad Díaz, ‘A Language for Communicating Your Built Environment / Un Lenguaje Para Comunicar El Entorno Construido’, in Procedimientos / Procedures of the Conferencia Internacional Imaginación Política y Ciudad, Santiago, 7-8 July 2016, pp. 207–16.
3
Ibid.
4
Arpilleras also featured in the V&A’s Disobedient Objects exhibition (2014-2015). See Fundación Aldea, Facebook, 15 January 2020 <https://www.facebook.com/somosaldea/posts/1521919551295544/> [accessed 31 January 2023].

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.

Band-aiding by disciplining

As long as band-aiding remains confined to disciplinary silos, then wider structural issues driving climate breakdown continue unchallenged. When a technocratic breakthrough fixes a discrete problem, it often displaces the issue to another context. For example, geo-engineering and automation are designed to solve narrowly defined problems but ignore relational and long-term considerations such as habitat conservation and labour rights. Band-aiding also risks perpetuating global inequities whereby the Global North “fixes” problems it caused elsewhere. Climate breakdown resists such fragmented ‘solutions’, instead calling for a relational approach which acknowledges cause and effect.

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.

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.

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.

Architecture is Climate

Sarah Bovelett

Anthony Powis

Tatjana Schneider

Christina Serifi

Jeremy Till

Becca Voelcker

See expertise everywhere – and work in coalitions that come together around a concern