MORE OF WHAT WE NEED (LESS OF WHAT WE WANT)
Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him. Wells, H. G., 1905. A modern utopia
The contemporary globalised economy is dominated by models of growth and consumption. In the 1970s, scepticism about the sustainability of these models underpinned counter-cultural movements and notions of decroissanceor degrowth. Fifty years later, much of the counter-culture has been assimilated, and mainstream politics largely takes place within a capitalist, growth-orientated, resource-hungry space in which, ‘even after the event, economics gives no signs of acknowledging the role of natural resources in the economic process’ (Georgescu-Roegen, N, 1971). This has social and environmental implications, with the ‘have-nots’, mostly in the global south, working in brutal circumstances for the ‘haves’, mostly in the global north.
In the north, this hasn’t resulted in happiness. While quantitative standards of living have increased, and the world has never been more peaceful, sources of pleasure – knowledge, fulfilling work, friends and family, embodied experience – have been displaced by products. Capitalism has reached into all aspects of life, monetising social relations, cultivating envy, packaging experience, commodifying love and atomising society. Depression, diabetes and anorexia are new marketing opportunities – for drugs, for therapies, for exercise.
How should architects respond to this situation? Most projects in degrowth focus on food and water - pop-up cafes, community gardens or temporary swimming pools. Such pleasures risk becoming a brief respite from the economic and institutional mainstream. If architects’ role in the nineteenth century role was to materialise an ethic, and their twentieth century task was to spatialise social change, then their twenty-first century mission should be to imagine joyful, low-carbon, high entropy environments predicated on adaptation, improvisation and re-use. In the 1920s, architects drew a new machine society of steel and glass prefiguring the future. In the 2020s, architects urgently need to describe pleasurable low-carbon scenarios to encourage them into being.
Our aim is to imagine how the politics of degrowth might translate into strategies for making architecture, and to do that in an institutional setting with a long-term outlook. In the past, architects have attached value to novelty, completeness and formal perfection. In the future, architects could work in both contemporary and archaic ways, they might accept gradualism and enjoy improvisation. In some ways this architecture looks back to vernacular construction which used local resources in established ways to gradually change environments for the better. Often imperfect and sometimes gimcrack, vernacular ways of building privileged material economy, practical need and experiential quality over purity or rhetoric. In other ways this architecture is forward looking - embracing collaboration and commoning, demanding a forensic attitude to energy, and making the preconditions for a fairer society.
This semester we will work on the site of a former gasworks in Bedford, in the valley of the river Great Ouse. Bedford is a good example of a post-industrial British town – the glory days of brick manufacture and railway infrastructure are gone. As the High Street atrophies, Bedford needs ‘less of what it wants and more of what it needs’. Extreme pressure on housing has encouraged politicians to release public land to private capital and economic short-termism. This is a Faustian mistake. Public ownership of land is critical to a lower intensity future in which there is space to respond to opportunity and invent a better urbanism, more connected to the environment of the river.
Our project will be to design a day centre for people with disabilities where sensitivities to tempo, physical ease and environment should be heightened. We will begin by studying vernacular ways of building in Britain - examining how questions of construction, energy and society have been linked in the past. We will develop our technical expertise in earth construction and students will be expected to imagine contemporary ways of using clay, lime and timber to challenge the dominance of concrete, steel and gypsum. Later in the semester, we will work with a disused locomotive shed, discovering ways it can be adapted for new public uses. Time will be critical to our thinking, and the project will culminate in descriptions of the living relationships between architecture, horticulture, humans and ecology in a place that has been ravaged by the fossil-fuel economy. Fundamentally, we will imagine the pleasures of degrowth, arguing that sustainability doesn’t involve sacrifice but does imply simpler, slower and more pleasurable lives.
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Nadav Kander, Qinghai Province II (Fallen Bridge), 2007
