Organizing at the community level and putting pressure on politicians can go a long way, but it’s not enough. Architects have to start seeing themselves as political actors with high stakes in the same way communities and unions do. Architects are workers and they depend on work.
The fight for climate justice, resiliency, and workers’ and tenants’ rights are only going to get harder in an era of political decay, cronyism, and systemic crisis.
— The Nation
The fight over congestion pricing and residential building retrofits in New York City are just a couple of the many flashpoints architects should involve themselves in heavily in order to better advocate for the profession, critic Kate Wagner writes. Rightly, she states, “The field’s most meaningful efforts to combat climate change are actually quite mundane.” Progress on a number of fronts, including the decarbonization of the building sector, is being either stalled or eroded at the hands of real estate and other interests. Now professionals face the choice of further subjecting their labor or pushing back via activism or other means.
3 Comments
I'm always happy when Kate's name shows up on Archinect!
I'm currently working with two municipalities to give grant funding to nonprofit organizations to do energy efficiency upgrades to their buildings: solar panels, increased insulation, electrification of HVAC systems, LED lighting. It's good work that I'm proud of, and it helps the nonprofits spend their limited funds on their *real* work, not utility bills.
Great write up, though the inevitable "architects as actors" turn is a bit vague, as it always is. I also leap whenever a Wagner piece comes onto my radar.
Something similar is going on here in LA. The city got landlords to seismically retrofit about 15,000 soft-story apartment units in the span of 5 years. Huge success, really just took political will.
Architects can only be agents of change through design, not politics. Otherwise they end up another discredited branch of DC, like journalists did when they divided to become 'activists'
I've become convinced we need to redesign school curriculum around design history, which is primary to politics. Design is how empires are built, cities made, and culture grows.
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