Sense the possible in the impossible – because things do change

Dakota Access Pipeline: Protesting for Climate Justice

2016-2017

North Dakota, USA

A coalition of Indigenous and climate protesters who build a protest camp to defend lands threatened by the construction of an oil pipeline

Context

Large oil corporations routinely displace Indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for industrial extraction and piping. Around 2016, for instance, plans were announced for the construction of a pipeline to connect the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota with southern Illinois, USA. The proposed pipeline would cross beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, destroying natural ecosystems and cultural sites including sacred burial grounds.

Practice

When construction of the North Dakota Access Pipeline was announced, hundreds of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people gathered at Standing Rock. They set up a camp and recruited others. By the end of the year, thousands of Indigenous protestors were joined by allies from environmental campaign groups, social justice movements, and the press. The protest gained increasing positive media attention with the hashtag #NoDAPL spreading on social media. Resonating with protests worldwide against corporatisation, institutional racism, and climate damage (Occupy, BLM, XR), #NoDAPL’s challenge was timely. The camp proved that a seemingly powerless grassroots organisation could attract thousands of supporters and sustain itself.

The camp based its organisation principles on practices of mutual-aid, interdependency, and responsibility in a system of Dakota and Lakota cultures that exists since before colonial settlement. A rallying cry at the protests was “water is alive” or “water is life” (“Mni Wiconi” in Lakota), signifying the protestors’ understanding of natural elements such as water as being animate and worthy of respect, in contrast to the US government-backed oil corporation’s extractive approach to nature as an inert and lucrative resource for the taking. Standing Rock and other areas in the North and South Dakota region contain Native American Reservations, to which Indigenous peoples have historically been confined, and into which white Americans have trespassed in search of gold and other natural resources. #NoDAPL was not simply about protesting the construction of a pipeline, it was also an opportunity to expose centuries of massacre, forced displacement and assimilation, structural impoverishment, and cultural prejudice against America’s Indigenous populations.

The story of the North Dakota Access Pipeline Protests is an unresolved struggle between grassroots politics and corporate power. The camp used familiar occupation and protest methods, including blockading paths for construction machinery.¹ They also faced familiar methods of oppression, such as militarised policing. Though the camp and protest nominally failed, and the pipeline, built in 2017, continues to operate, the protest is remembered for its rallying cries for intersectional justice which garnered widespread support and forwarded important agendas of decolonisation and climate justice.

Notes

1
Amongst many other examples of land-based environmental camps and protests are: the Sanrizuka Struggle (Japan, from 1966) where farmers and other activists protested against the construction of an international airport at Narita; the Larzac Struggle (France, 1971-81) in which farmers prevented the construction of a military base; Zad (Zone à défendre) (France, 2009) in which protesters diverted the French government and the construction firm Vinci’s plans to construct an airport; and Rojava (Syria, from 2016) where the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) was established as an eco-socialist, direct-democracy political system in which women play a prominent role through decentralised governance.

Mehr als Wohnen: Pioneering Collective Living

2007-present

Zurich, Switzerland

A radical housing co-op that challenges the norms of private and shared space to provide a model for significantly reducing individual consumption whilst making the most of communal luxury

Context

The standard model of developer-led housing that dominates cities around the world typically delivers rigid, single-family units that are prescriptive in how they can be used. This creates a number of problems: firstly, units lack flexibility and adaptability; secondly, provision is standardised around the most common ways of living, excluding anything and anyone with non-standard housing needs. Such rigidity and lack of diversity in the provision of housing breeds redundancy: as times change, and patterns of occupation and family structures evolve in response to social and environmental change, certain buildings become difficult to use and (instead of being retrofitted) end up being demolished and replaced.¹

At the same time, these houses are seen as much as investments as they are places to live— investments that are to be defended, not shared. The financialised model of housing not only excludes vast swathes of the population from access to good housing, but creates a culture of where housing is primarily valued as property (exclusive, individual) rather than community (enabling, shared). In relation to climate, alternative housing models are needed to avoid the built-in obsolescence, inflexibility, and restrictive patterns of ownership and tenure that are built into the market system of housing.

Practice

The protagonists behind the radical housing cooperative Mehr als Wohnen (“more than housing”) describe their flagship development Hunziker Areal in Zurich as both urban settlement and research project.² This attitude reflects the unfinished or experimental nature of the community. Supported by the City of Zurich—who owned the former industrial site—and realised through an international architectural competition, Mehr als Wohnen was intended as an experiment into the radical potential of co-operative living, and as both a celebration and reinvigoration of Zurich’s urban housing policy.³ It makes use of experimental leasing and financing models: “Social and ecological commitments as well as investment in art within architecture are part of the long-term lease contract”, and membership rules prevent residents from profiting from their dwellings.⁴ Rents are kept low by the co-operative’s principle of non-profit, meaning “average costs for apartments are 20-30% less than market values for comparable apartments”.⁵

The design was led by Anne Kaestle and Dan Schürch of Duplex Architects, with other architects leading on different blocks. The combination of housing, workspace, and communal facilities that makes up the development as a whole is reflected in the planning of individual blocks, which mix private and communal spaces in innovative ways, generally by minimising the individual accommodation (a one-person studio can be as little as 25 square meters) to allow for generous shared facilities such as kitchens, dining and living areas, laundries, and playrooms. This system of clustering around shared facilities also works at a large scale, as the thirteen blocks are intersected by open spaces for a wide range of uses, as well as workspaces, restaurants, and shops.

“It’s exactly this tension that makes up the special feature of this project: on the one hand, security and privacy and, on the other hand, the wide range of opportunities to be part of the community.”⁶

Mehr als Wohnen builds on existing co-operatives housing models, which have a particularly long history in Switzerland and significant financial and political support, by going to quite extreme lengths to challenge spatial norms vis-à-vis private and shared space. It is planned according to the principles of the 2000-Watt society, and reflects this holistic philosophy of radically reducing individual consumption whilst making the most of communal luxury. Conditions of climate breakdown will require new spatial models of how to live together in a manner which is equitable and does not rely on financialised and exploitative systems of land and housing. Coop schemes such as Mehr als Wohnen, and the stems of ownership and tenure within the coop protocols, provide inspirational examples of how new living patterns are not just feasible but desirable.

Notes

1
Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Flexible Housing (London: Routledge, 2008).
2
Anna Haller, Andreas Hofer, Agnès Laube, Peter Schmid, and Andrea Wieland, A Vision Becomes Reality – 10 Years Lessons Learned (Zurich: Mehr als Wohnen, [n.d.]) <https://www.mehralswohnen.ch/fileadmin/downloads/Publikationen/Broschuere_maw_engl_inhalt_def_181004.pdf> [accessed 4 July 2023], p. 5.
3
Ibid., p. 7.
4
Ibid., p. 9.
5
‘More than Housing’, World Habitat <https://world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/more-than-housing/> [accessed 4 July 2023].
6
‘More than living, Zurich , 2009–2015’, Duplex Architects <https://duplex-architekten.swiss/en/projects/more-than-living/> [accessed 4 July 2023].

La Borda: An Innovative Housing Cooperative

2018-present

Barcelona, Spain

A housing cooperative that provides decent, non-speculative housing by repurposing industrial premises, challenging the traditional notion of private space through shared facilities and communal spaces, and exploring new models of organising living spaces

Context

Building on successful models of mutual ownership, building and housing associations, and co-living arrangements, cooperative housing can resist norms of privatised ownership that privilege the wealthiest and marginalise everyone else in substandard housing. Moving away from a profit-driven model of housing provision, co-housing and shared ownership schemes can flourish as spatial forms of social welfare.

Practice

In June 2011, after 30 years waiting for city officials to transform Can Batlló, a former industrial site located in Barcelona’s Sants-Monjuïc district, people from the adjacent neighbourhood occupied the site. They established a participatory process of open assemblies with neighbours and local organisations to determine how the site could be used. Through this discursive process, they formed sub-committees to focus on financial management, the design of open spaces, and media communication, offering a collective response to some of the community’s needs. By involving different people (including architects), the initiative reconfigured the production of housing as a grassroots and participatory experience.¹

In 2012, the group established La Borda housing cooperative under the legal term “cession of use”, referring to the right of tenants to occupy a housing unit for free or in exchange for some type of economic or in-kind compensation. Importantly, La Borda’s housing model provides long-term affordable housing, unlike some development projects that offer social housing for a limited period before it is sold on the private market. La Borda worked with the architect cooperative Lacol to build an environmentally low-impact block comprising 28 units, communal space, a rooftop garden, and extensive shared facilities. Using Cross Laminated Timber and repurposed scrap material, the 6-floor structure’s ecologically careful design chimes with its social aim of reconfiguring what it means to consume materials and inhabit space, shifting parameters towards the recycled and shared.

Radically reinterpreting what housing is, La Borda focuses on sharing ideas, space, and facilities in a process of co-design and cohabitation, challenging the traditional model of individual ownership and consumption. Emerging from public debate and iterative learning processes, La Borda demonstrates the social and environmental value of designing housing carefully, over time, and with enough imagination to move beyond private ownership conventions towards convivial and climate-attuned alternatives.

Notes

1
Eduard Cabré, and Andrés Arnau, “La Borda: A Case Study on the Implementation of Cooperative Housing in Catalonia” International Journal of Housing Policy 18.3 (July 3, 2018): pp. 412-32 <https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2017.1331591>

Langholm Initiative: Reviving Lands, Nurturing Communities

1994-present

Langholm, Scotland UK

A community development trust that has purchased 5,200 acres of land, creating a nature reserve as part of a wider economic regeneration project that breaks up large estates formerly owned by private landowners

Context

Enclosure—the conversion of common land into private property—has had a profound impact on both rural landscapes and the lives of the people who lived and worked there. In the medieval period in the UK, local communities used common land to graze livestock and grow crops, harvest timber from woods, and share water resources such as streams and wells. Over time, however, the increase in population and the growth of towns and cities exerted pressure on this land. To meet the growing demand for food, and to generate more income from the land, landowners began to enclose the land—by constructing physical barriers such as walls and fences, and by establishing legal property rights.

The process of enclosure accelerated in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the growth of the wool trade, when landowners forcibly evicted tenant farmers and began to convert large areas of common land into sheep walks. This was reinforced by a series of government acts authorised by powerful land owners and aristocrats, culminating in the General Enclosure Act of 1801, which divided and privatised the remaining common “wastes” such as fens, marshes, heathland, downland, and moors. Rights of access were stripped away from tenant farmers, and landless cottagers lost access to common pastures. Enclosure maps, in particular, were important instruments for organising and controlling land, and they reflected and strengthened the power of those who created them.¹ The rural landscape was transformed, with fields, hedgerows, and woods being replaced by large, open fields and pastureland.² Today, the legacy of enclosure can still be seen in the British landscape, with large areas of private farmland and the decline of biodiversity and natural habitats.

Practice

Around 2,300 people in Langholm, a small town in Dumfries and Galloway, came together in 1994 to address the issues of land use and biodiversity loss in the area, which is one of the most intensive sheep-farming regions in Scotland. Langholm experienced a significant recession in the 1990s as the textile and coal industries began to decline, and many residents moved away in search of work. The initiative was focused on restoring the natural habitats and ecosystems that have been impacted by centuries of human intervention and promoting sustainable land use practices. Their goal was to buy Langholm Moor, “one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch”.³ The area encompasses around 10,000 hectares of land and is known for its rich natural beauty and diverse wildlife including a mix of farmland, forests, ancient woodland, and wetlands.

In 2021, the Langholm Initiativesuccessfully raised the funds to purchase around 2,100 hectares of land and put them back under communal ownership. This community buyout was a historic moment for Scotland’s land reform movement and paved the way for the creation of the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve aiming to establish rewilding practices at huge scales and regenerate the biodiversity of the area. Currently the initiative has launched their campaign to purchase further 2,000 hectares of land, planning to plant new areas of native, broadleaf woodland and aiming to create a wilder landscape that provides a rich mosaic of habitats, allowing a wide range of wildlife to thrive.

The Langholm Initiative’s community buyout brought the land back under communal ownership, allowing the community to exercise stewardship over the land and make decisions about its use, preventing future possible developments driven solely by profit motives while preserving the cultural and historical heritage of the area. This is an important tool for community-led development and sustainable land use, as it empowers communities to shape their own future and protect their natural resources for future generations.

Notes

1
Roger Kain, John Chapman, and Richard Oliver. The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales 1595-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2
Harriett Bradley. The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001).
3
Severin Carrell, ‘Scottish Villagers Plan to Buy out Landowners for Eco Moorland Project’, The Guardian, 25 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/25/scottish-villagers-plan-to-buy-out-landowners-for-eco-moorland-project-langholm> [accessed 3 February 2023].

Granby Four Streets: Resisting Marketisation

2011-present

Liverpool, UK

Community-led project engaged in rebuilding Granby, a Liverpool neighbourhood that had fallen derelict after decades of poorly-planned regeneration initiatives. A successful Community Land Trust that rebuilt several houses with and for its residents

Context

In recent decades, housing policy in Britain has often devastated communities through structural neglect and chronic underfunding. People have been forced to occupy mouldy, unsafe, cramped homes. Such issues have led to mass demolition, substandard housing, and state-led urban regeneration schemes whose mass reconstruction projects have not only escalated carbon emissions, but also displaced communities and damaged their cultural heritage.

A key housing policy of the New Labour government (1997-2010) was the Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI) introduced in 2002 with a focus on the regeneration of specific regional housing markets in selected areas, particularly deprived, working-class areas in the North of England. Under these schemes, also known as Pathfinder initiatives, local authorities and other public sector partners received funding to acquire and clear derelict and abandoned properties, and redevelop their sites.¹ The HMRI led to the demolition of historic buildings and the displacement of many communities, prioritising the interests of property developers and markets over those of residents.

Practice

Granby Triangle is an area of Liverpool’s Toxteth district and home to one of the UK’s oldest Black communities.² Developed primarily as a residential neighbourhood to accommodate the growing working class during the industrial revolution, its streets comprise Victorian houses built by Welsh immigrant workers in the late 19th century. During Britain’s postwar period, Toxteth attracted many immigrants looking for job opportunities and by the end of 1970s was hit by high unemployment due to Britain’s economic decline. Steady shrinkage of Granby’s economic activity continued during the 1980s and many businesses closed. Meanwhile, racial tensions and police hostility towards young Black men began to grow. The HMRI Pathfinder initiative, which covered areas of Merseyside including Liverpool and the Wirral, had a particular impact on Granby’s Welsh Streets neighbourhood, with housing destroyed and residents displaced for the purposes of reviving what was seen as an insufficiently profitable area.

In 1993, Granby Residents Association was established. Ever since, local residents have worked together to resist the demolition of terraced houses and the displacement of the community. Association members care for abandoned properties, cultivate shared spaces, and facilitate a monthly Granby Street Market.³ Looking for strategies and funding to collectively buy and renovate derelict properties, without support and guidance from the City Council, the Association established the Granby Four Street Community Land Trust (CLT) in 2010.

The wider community of Toxteth offered support and together with Association members organised social gatherings and participatory projects establishing a network of “projects, partnerships, and collaborations forged through long standing negotiations with public and private stakeholders”.⁴ Granby Four Streets CLT partnered with several housing associations to oppose the HMRI’s demolition plans in 2011. They were successful with their campaign emphasising the importance of community engagement and participation in shaping the design and use of public space.

In 2012, the local authority transferred several properties to the CLT. Working with the London-based architecture collective Assemble, the CLT renovated more than twenty-five empty properties, including ten affordable homes to own and rent.⁵ Much care was taken in the renovation work to consider environmental impacts. Making use of existing structures and recycling materials was as important as involving local people in practical handicrafts, such as tile-making.

In these coalitions, campaigns, and renovation projects, Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust presents a model of citizen collaboration towards the progressive renovation of neighbourhoods in a way which builds upon rather than erases existing infrastructure.

Notes

1
Owen Hatherley, ‘Liverpool’s Rotting, Shocking “Housing Renewal“: How Did It Come to This?’, The Guardian, (27 March 2013) <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/27/liverpool-rotting-housing-renewal-pathfinder> [accessed 14 February 2023].
2
Raymond Henry Costello. Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black Community 1730-1918(Birkenhead: Picton Press, 2001).
3
Aditya Chakrabortty, Ames Lily, and Phil Maynard, ‘The Alternatives: How a Liverpool Suburb Upended Its Housing Market’, The Guardian podcasts (17 February 2018) <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/audio/2018/feb/14/the-alternatives-how-liverpool-suburb-upended-housing-market-podcast> [accessed 1 February 2023].
4
World Habitat Awards, ‘Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust’, (2016) <https://world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/granby-four-streets-community-land-trust/> [accessed 1 February 2023].
5
Assemble, ‘Granby Four Streets’, (2013) <https://www.assemblestudio.co.uk/projects/granby-four-streets-2> [accessed 1 February 2023].

Snowchange Cooperative: Rewilding Programme

2000-present

Karelia, Finland

An organization focusing on climate change, Indigenous policy, and research in Northern communities, prioritising embodied experience, challenging conservation strategies and advocating for Indigenous communities as integral part of local ecosystems to become a major force in global climate policy

Context

In sparsely settled places in the Arctic, changes due to climate breakdown are happening rapidly. Warming is occurring twice as fast as in other parts of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.¹ While this situation has led to a detailed and specific approach to resource management and environmental protection, implementation is not easy. In this context, Snowchange has pointed out the need to address issues of equity in conservation practices, and to avoid repeating colonialist interventions. They foreground and critique the deep history of nature preservation strategies which have ignored Indigenous communities living in protected areas, who most of the time have been forcefully removed.² In areas with this violating historical legacy, Snowchange work with Indigenous communities to effect more situated climate-oriented practices.

Practice

Since 2000, Snowchange has started to monitor climate and environmental change in the Circumpolar North, working closely with local and Indigenous communities in Arctic and Boreal regions. Their work challenges traditional, top-down restoration and conservation processes, which often have been imposed on Indigenous communities without their consent or involvement, resulting in the loss of their traditional lands and resources. Instead of these previous approaches, Snowchange builds on the situated knowledges and traditional governance of Indigenous communities, recognising them as stewards of the land. They are a multidisciplinary team, including scientists and local practitioners, working in 51 sites conducting ecological, biological, geographical, and ornithological research. Due to the extensive problems of land-use, peat extraction, and intensive foresting industries, many natural sites in Finland are being devastated by the effects of weakened water bodies.

The cooperative have acquired multiple parcels of land as part of the Landscape Rewilding Programme, allowing nature to take its own course. Through this programme, they managed to rewild Finnish and Sámi peatlands, forests, rivers, and lakes and to restore over 26,000 hectares of land, making them one of the “largest forest owners in Finland after forest companies and the government”.³ Lying at the heart of their rewilding programme are all the native communities who make their living from the landscape—such as hunters or fishers. Snowchange’s approach highlights the situated traditions and culture of these communities as a means to restore the sites by working with natural forces.

They pay attention to and closely monitor all the dramatic changes taking place in such remote regions — from thawing permafrost to changes in reindeer migration – gathering scientific data crucial for informing and adjusting their processes. Eventually, the intention for these areas, once fully restored, is to serve as biodiversity hotspots and active carbon traps. By turning these ecosystems into thriving natural habitats, local communities are able to rebuild and strengthen their connection with subsistence activities such as fishing, hunting, and gathering that are at the heart of traditional Finnish culture. Snowchange’s approach is applicable beyond their specific context as an example of drawing on situated and nature-based methods to revitalise climate affected landscapes and infrastructures.

Notes

1
Mika Rantanen, Alexey Yu. Karpechko, Antti Lipponen, Kalle Nordling, Otto Hyvärinen, Kimmo Ruosteenoja, Timo Vihma, and Ari Laaksonen, “The Arctic Has Warmed Nearly Four Times Faster than the Globe since 1979”, Communications Earth & Environment 3, no. 1 (August 11, 2022), p. 168 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3>
2
Tero Mustonen, ‘Indigenous Knowledge for Environmental Conservation’, Goethe Institut, 2020 <https://www.goethe.de/ins/fi/en/kul/sup/rbc/tra/22045720.html> [accessed 12 December 2022].
3
Titta Kaltola, ‘Snowchange Cooperative’s Landscape Rewilding Programme Restores Run-down Natural Habitats’, Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation, 2022 <https://www.nessling.fi/en/snowchange-cooperatives-landscape-rewilding-programme-restores-run-down-natural-habitats/?lang=en> [accessed 12 December 2022].

Zenab: Gender Justice and Sustainable Agriculture

2000-present

Sudan

a women’s rights organisation advocating for the rights of women and girls to enhance their roles in development processes and decision-making across Sudan

Context

Poverty levels in Sudan are high, and climate change is bringing increasingly extreme and lengthy droughts to its lands and communities who depend on agriculture. The overgrazing of livestock has turned much of Sudan’s fertile land into desert, while slash-and-burn agriculture has destroyed two-thirds of the country’s forests. Soil erosion has increased flooding, contaminated drinking water, and spread water-borne illnesses such as cholera. Due to poverty, many men leave the countryside to seek work in cities, leaving women responsible for households that average 5-10 people in size. 70% of Sudan’s farming is conducted by women.¹ Famine is a real and increasing threat due to the interconnections of climate change and poverty. Climate change in Sudan adds to existing problems farmers experience in meeting external targets for production that see them resort to an over-reliance on certain crops, a dependency on certain seeds and chemical fertilisers, and ways of working the land that are too rapid to respect natural cycles.

Practice

Facing these combined issues of food scarcity, poverty, and gender inequality from the 1940s onwards, the educator and advocate Zenab Mohamad Nour promoted girls’ rights to education in Sudan by teaching, founding schools for girls in rural regions, and working with the Ministry for Education to build further infrastructure. Empowering girls and women to take charge of their own wellbeing through paid work, initiatives for agricultural development, financial literacy, education, and healthcare was paramount in breaking age-old relations of patriarchy within Sudan, and debt and dependency with Sudan and former colonial rulers.

In 2000, Zenab Mohamad Nour’s daughter, Fatima Ahmed, established Zenab for Women in Development (ZWD) to continue her mother’s work. To this day, ZWD undertake financial and conservation agricultural education to provide women and girls with skills to help with food and economic security, and find ways to diversify income in the face of crop failure. Such education is vital in Sudan, where girls’ education has historically been considered unnecessary due to customs confining women’s role to marriage and reproduction. Lacking education in finance and conservation agricultural techniques prevents girls and women from acquiring skills to self-organise and challenge both patriarchal barriers to self-determination and material challenges of poverty and climate change. Education is a tool for self-sufficiency that helps women see themselves as “agents of change”.²

ZWD’s provision of education and tools for women involved in the social and spatial production of farms, food sources, and agrarian communities suggests a way of working towards the empowerment of people most vulnerable to poverty and climate change. Similar approaches are seen in grassroots initiatives such as Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement, which supports women to grow their own food, and the political scientist Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons.³ The emphasis on solidarity and mutual aid in these approaches could inform design by encouraging principles of accessibility and inclusivity based on the needs of those in most need, and future-planning to ensure justice for generations ahead. Projects like ZWD demonstrate that achieving climate justice in spatial practice requires taking gender into account when considering social questions such as fairness of access, divisions of labour, and inclusive governance. ZWD also demonstrate the value of education in securing an ethical, gender- and climate-responsive future.

Notes

1
‘Boosting Resilient Livelihoods of Women Farmers: Food Security & Sustainable Agriculture – ZENAB FOR WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT’ <https://www.zenab.org/our-results/boosting-food-security-and-nutrition-through-sustainable-agriculture/> [accessed 5 November 2023].
2
‘OUR APPROACH – ZENAB FOR WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT’ <https://www.zenab.org/our-approach/> [accessed 5 November 2023].
3
Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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.

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.

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.

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

Sense the possible in the impossible – because things do change