Could we resist the narrative of perpetual growth? What can architecture do about it?

The recent climate strikes happening globally show a growing consciousness among the people on the issue of climate change. Yet, as inheritors of this market-is-always-right attitude, we hardly know of any other way of life than have every aspect of our modern life to be dominated by the idea of perpetual growth. Needless to say, in contemporary times, the building industry and as a consequence, architecture has always been a party to the idea of perpetual growth. We have been building as if we could build infinitely and the idea of our planet as an unending resource has shaped our mentality with which much of the built environment is being built today.

'How much is enough?'

Schumacher in his book ‘Small is Beautiful’(1973) couldn’t have formulated this better:

What is 'enough'? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues ‘economic growth’ as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of ‘enough’. There are poor societies which have too little: but where is the rich society that says: ‘Halt! We have enough’? There is none.

Below is a list of aspects that I have been thinking as necessary for a more responsible view on architecture. Although not exhaustive, this list contains my thoughts and concerns that have been accumulating recently that has also made me approach architecture differently.

1. Buildings are not a commodity

The commodification of buildings and the built environment has become an ever-pervasive urban reality. Projects that are developed for foreign investments and for people to buy them as assets most frequently create a rupture of the social and economic fabric of the immediate surrounding. Here, buildings are therefore not valued for the qualities they offer as places of security, identity and social well being but as a form of currency that could be exchanged for something else.

• As Madden and Marcuse   argue in their ‘In Defense of Housing’(2016), .”What needs defending is the use of housing as home, not as real estate. (...) - our concern is squarely with those who reside in them and use them  - the people for whom home provides use value rather than exchange value”.
• An Architectural Review article titled, "On the money: the merits of degrowth (Harper & Smith, 2019) suggests a classification of commerce into tradable groups based on their environmental and social value such that ‘no amount of fizzy drinks could be exchanged for felling trees’. Translated to the built environment, 'The land, materials and labour which go into the creation of schools, for example, might be traded in a wholly separate marketplace as those which go into luxury flats, radically reorganising their price'.
• The Co-operative housing model widely popular as in Switzerland where the land and the housing are collectively owned by a co-operative trust. This model isolates the land and the housing from the market-oriented speculative model thereby keeping housing and social infrastructure affordable and accessible to all

2. Building off the grid - less reliant and more resilient

• Global chains of production and consumption, although have the reasoning of scale and manageability, have proven to be the cause of widespread ecological damage - from agriculture to transport to energy. 
• With the available technological developments, the paradigm for the future is to be local as much as possible - to situate a building and everyday life to the local environment. To produce and consume locally and ideally in a closed-loop cycle is reducing stress on globalized processes. Therefore a building or a group of buildings in a collective cluster could grow its own food through community gardens, generate its own energy through collective renewable energy sources, a shared water recycling and waste management hubs.
• Systems of mass global production are invisible to us. And all we see is a finished product or a commodity in the supermarket, and we flush away the waste unconcerned of its after-life. The result is a sort of alienation to the products and energy that we consume. But by bringing the production and management of basic stuff such as food, energy and waste locally and at hand, one is more in contact with these resources and therefore more mindful of its use.

3. Building less and what is necessary

• I strongly believe that architecture is not art - it has the capacity to move and emotionally induce us but architecture also has a responsibility to respond to a physical need - that is, architecture cannot exist for architecture’s sake. Buildings exert enormous environmental pressure - so we need to think with careful restraint on what we build. Is affordable housing better over another mega-mall?
• What if building processes could respond to local needs? - For instance, ‘Baugruppen' in Germany as an alternative to speculative housing. These are self-initiated housing projects by people who would live in them. This is unlike large-scale private developers who reason a project into existence based on its financial viability. Such models of building must, therefore, be encouraged and pushed forward bureaucratically and in building practice.

4. Building with humility

• A sensible, empathetic architecture is something that recognises buildings as a background for life to unfold and therefore welcomes and even celebrates heterogeneity and change.
• To be humble is to view architecture not as an egotistical declaration of a design against nature and all odds but as a process that welcomes and smoothes out discrepancies.  Such processes encourage participation and visualise architecture as something that changes over time.
• acting with humility means situating a building in a place, its context - physical, social and economic - in the most empathetic way possible.

5. Building affordably

• Conventional approaches to affordability treat it as a problem of quantity. But affordability is not a top-down but a bottom-up approach. Affordability is about giving agency to the future inhabitants of the city in shaping their built environment.
• Affordability is not merely designing cheaper buildings but enabling social and economic possibilities. Affordability is finding and offering the best possible standards with very limited resources.
• To approach every building as an exercise in affordability is to treat the resources at hand as precious and to work with them consciously and judiciously.

6. Living Slowly

• Contemporary culture proceeds at a restless with speed, always looking for the next thing - constantly hurtled forward without time or opportunity to savour what is at hand. Such speed and overload of information have created a certain degree of numbness - a numbing of senses to the physical environment.
• As Schumacher rightly articulates, “For the modern economist, this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption”.

Read the full article on my blog here

References

1. Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs.
2. Madden, D., & Marcuse, P. (2016). In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.
3. Harper, P., & Smith, M. (2019, August 30). On the money: the merits of degrowth. The Architectural Review.
4. Kristien, R. (2016, November 22). Reinventing Density: how baugruppen is pioneering the self-made city. Retrieved from The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/reinventing-density-how-baugruppen-are-pioneering-the-self-made-city-66488
5. Neylon, L. (2017, August 30). A New Group Wants Dubliners to Team Up to Build Their Own Homes. Retrieved from Dublin Inquirer: https://www.dublininquirer.com/2017/08/30/a-new-group-wants-dubliners-to-team-up-to-build-their-own-homes
6. More than housing. (n.d.). Retrieved from World Habitat Awards: https://www.world-habitat.org/world-habitat-awards/winners-and-finalists/more-than-housing/#award-content