News

UK Architects Declare has been working hard with partners to finalise our policy document, Building Blocks to Transform the Built Environment, for its Parliamentary launch on 12th March. Key industry voices will be joining MPs and Lords to hear about and discuss the policy priorities in AD's manifesto for the next UK Government.

A 1-page briefing document, highlighting key 'early adoption policies' in the manifesto, has been endorsed by a range of industry bodies. AD will be presenting these at ACAN's stand (D40) at Futurebuild on 6th March: Come along to find out more!

UK Architects Declare and Architecture Today have launched the world’s first Regenerative Architecture Index.

Benchmarking participating practices on their regenerative policies, actions and working practices, the Index aims to share best practice, celebrate success, raise awareness across the wider construction sector and act as a catalyst for regenerative practice across the industry. We will also use the initiative to identify obstacles to progress, encourage knowledge sharing and identify tools, methods or policy measures required to support the transition to a low-carbon, high well-being and resilient future.

AD will also very soon be publishing a free Regenerative Design Primer. Complementing our 2021 Practice Guide (and replacing its short chapter on regenerative design), this Primer will support practices participating in the Index - and all built environment designers looking to make this transition.

The Index asks participants about their practice and its projects under three broad headings:

Part 1: Being a good ancestor.

This is about a shift in practice mindsets to consider truly long-term thinking. Our decisions today should consider seven generations ahead, ensuring adaptability and flexibility for the future. This requires innovative thought, as current models are rarely beneficial in the long term.

Part 2: Co-evolving with nature.

This is about recognising that we are part of nature, within integral living systems, not separate from it. Our work should actively regenerate ecosystems by learning from and working with natural systems. This requires designing for circularity and encouraging closed-loop energy, material and water cycles.

Part 3: Creating a just space for people.

This is about providing social connection, economic opportunity and wellbeing for all. Our design processes should foster a shared sense of stewardship where neighbourhoods can self-organise and build their resilience. This requires ethical, inclusive and participative approaches.

The deadline for entries is Wednesday 17th May.

The results will be published in September 2024 in a special issue of Architecture Today and on the Architecture Today website.

Responding to the recent announcement by the Labour Party reversing its pledge to invest £28 billion annually on investment to combat the climate and biodiversity emergency, the Steering Group of UK Architects Declare today said:

"We are deeply disappointed by Labour’s recent decision to scale back investment in a safer future. This is a massive missed opportunity to show true climate leadership at a time in history where it matters most. The tragedy is that there are a plethora of solutions that could solve our planetary emergency, whilst also bringing about greater social justice. The Climate Change Committee has estimated that up to 725,000 jobs could be created in the low carbon sector, proving that greater investment makes both scientific and economic sense for the long term.

"We are hopeful that there are still some courageous voices within parliament, and we encourage them to speak out against the short-sighted mindset that is driving the destruction of the living world. As UK Architects Declare we remain committed to shaping a positive future and will be presenting our ‘Building Blocks’ policy manifesto at Portcullis House on the 12^th of March. We encourage our signatories to write to their local MP to invite them along.

"We agree with Muyiwa Oki, President of the RIBA, who recently said of this announcement that, with the climate emergency intensifying, urgent national action is needed: ‘Ambitious and sustained investment from whomever forms the next Government, and the private sector, will be critical to address the scale of this challenge. ... Act now, or future generations will pay the price.’"

We plan and deliver our activities through small working groups, with Steering Group members and other volunteers from across our signatory practices and beyond. These are mostly ‘task & finish’ groups, typically working over periods of a few months up to a year.

We now wish to expand our groups with suitable volunteers. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved in any groups below! Skills you might contribute could include research, drafting, graphics & design, proofreading, building networks, and promotion - among many other ways to support us. You can find details in our Call Out.

We have new vacancies on our Steering Group and are keen to recruit new members from among our signatories, reflecting the diversity of practices as we develop AD’s programme. Our Steering Group are all volunteers and actively lead on many aspects of our work through small SG groups as well as full Steering Group meetings.

New members will contribute to the full range of the Steering Group’s discussions and decisions. It's a great opportunity to get involved in our busy work programme! You can find out more of what's involved and how to apply in our Role Description.

Leading construction industry and built environment experts from 11 organisations - including UK Architects Declare as part of the Built Environment Declares family - have today called for policy action in this election year.

UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), The Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE), Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), Construction Industry Council (CIC), Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), Built Environment Declares, RIBA, RICS, Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE), and Part Z and have joined forces to send a consistent message to UK political party leaders about the urgent need for regulation of embodied carbon emissions in construction.

They assert that this is necessary as buildings and construction form a substantial part of UK carbon emissions, which are a main driver of climate change. UK policy has stalled, and urgent action is needed.

The group of experts has issued a paper to political leaders with a key ask: to include in their manifestos a commitment to move to reduce embodied carbon emissions in construction within two years of starting government.

Additionally, the experts list specific steps for action:

In 2024: Policy signalled confirming the dates and interventions below.

By 2026: Mandate the measurement and reporting of whole-life carbon emissions for all projects with a gross internal area of more than 1000m2 or that create more than 10 dwellings.

By 2028: Introduce legal limits on the upfront embodied carbon emissions [those emissions due to the use of materials in the initial construction] of such projects, with a view to future revision and tightening as required.

The group says these actions are essential as around 1 in 10 tonnes of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions are “embodied carbon” emissions. These relate to the production and use of construction materials, which account for a substantial part of the UK’s overall carbon emissions.

You can view the one-page Position Paper here on the Institution of Structural Engineers website.

With Architecture Today, we are launching the world’s first Regenerative Architecture Index (RAI) as a means of benchmarking architects on regenerative projects, policies, working practices and actions.

The Index rejects the notion of ranking practices by profitability and size, instead benchmarking participating practices on their regenerative policies, actions and working practices. Its aim is to share best practice, celebrate success, and communicate this work to the wider construction industry to raise awareness and act as a catalyst for regenerative practice across the industry.

The RAI 2024 will launch with a call for entries in January 2024. Participating practices will be invited to answer questions both on the practice itself and on the projects it delivers, under three broad headings:

Part 1: Being a good ancestor, will look at evidence of long-term thinking and a concern for the well-being of future generations.

Part 2: Co-evolving with nature, will look at measures to support a mutually enriching coexistence with the natural world.

Part 3: Creating a just space for people, will look at issues around inclusivity, diversity, equality and engagement.

The results will be published in September 2024 on the Architecture Today website and in a special issue of Architecture Today. Graphs and tables indicating practices’ progress in specific areas will accompanied by case studies, commentary and analysis designed to produce a comprehensive compendium of best practice in the transition to regenerative architecture. Just as importantly, the RAI will also identify obstacles to progress, encouraging peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and advice, but also identifying any tools, methods or policy interventions required to support the transition to a low-carbon, high well-being and resilient future.

The Index is not a conventional awards programme – the focus is educational rather than competitive, with an evolving series of activities based on benchmarking, sharing experience and acknowledging challenges and mistakes. That said, a practice, or practices, that have performed particularly well will be rewarded with a bespoke retreat at Schumacher College in Devon, as an opportunity to recharge and establish a roadmap to regeneration for the year ahead.

We're looking forward to sharing more details very soon. For further information, in the first instance contact [email protected]

It is clear that 30 years of sustainable design has not got us where we need to be. The United Nations concluded in 2022 that current policies and pledges do not create a credible pathway to achieving the Paris goals and limiting temperature increases to 1.5°C. The best science tells us we are heading for horrific climate impacts globally, particularly in some of the poorest parts of the world. Even before the UK Government's recent retrograde policy shifts on Net Zero, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero's revamped strategy itself admitted its policies will achieve only 92% of the cuts required - which many experts said could be a generous estimate.

We are in a period of inaction on the climate and ecological crises. Since the formation of Architects Declare in 2019, the construction industry has offered many practical solutions to these crises, to create a regenerative and just built environment – but these have not been incorporated into national policy. We now require true climate leadership by a goverment that embraces far-reaching system changes and implements them at a national scale.

Our mission is to turn a climate catastrophe into a climate opportunity. The Architects Declare Building Blocks aims to create a regenerative built environment that enables society and nature to thrive – creating jobs, improving health, and restoring the natural world. The Building Blocks, underpinned by a foundation of systemic change, offers a practical, impactful and implementable set of policies to transform the built environment.

We have worked with industry partners to develop the Architects Declare Building Blocks draft and are now sharing it publicly. We welcome your feedback at our online event on 19th October, and at an industry in-person event in November (date to be announced very soon). If you have specific experience in influencing policy or connections with policy-makers or politicians, please do get in touch via [email protected]. We will be revising the document over the coming months, ahead of a final launch early next year.

UK Architects Declare Communications Position

UK Architects Declare is hiring for a flexible, part-time position to support our social media engagement - either freelance or secondment.

We promote AD through Twitter, LinkedIn & Instagram, our website and newsletters. Our communications priorities are: Make the urgency of AD’s mission relevant; Be strong on AD’s achievements so far; Be positive, practical and focused in face of the Climate & Biodiversity Emergency.

‘Are we on track to prevent widespread collapse?’ is a question that increasingly feels like the elephant in the room in many gatherings and as an undercurrent in much journalism. Unlike many questions that the media might explore with a degree of detachment, this one is more troubling because the ‘we’ in this case involves not just designers but also the media. We need to collaborate if we are to stand a realistic chance of addressing the planetary emergency and, across the UK, Architects Declare, Design Declares and Interior Design Declares would like to initiate a constructive discussion about what this might mean. Our children’s generation are likely to view climate change as the most serious crime ever committed against poorer nations and future generations. We should therefore be prepared for the question that will surely come: “What did you do when you knew?” Their judgement is likely to be harsh if the best answer that can be given is “We ran regular pieces on zero carbon buildings and the circular economy and introduced some sustainability criteria to our awards categories.” We would like to address some gaps in the debate about the role of the design media in the unfolding metacrisis.

An oft-quoted phrase about journalism is that when one person says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, the job of the journalist is not to give them equal coverage but to look out the window and see who’s telling the truth. That perhaps applies mainly to the national news media but there are countless examples in which the design media celebrates new technologies without establishing whether they will help or hinder the transition to a safer future.

There are a lot of powerful players in business who would like us to believe that nothing radical needs to change about our societies or economies and that technology has all the answers. This is the pathway that humanity is currently on and it’s a profoundly dangerous one. We need the media to ask more searching questions about new technologies because the outcome is heavily dependent on the dominant mindset. For example, within a paradigm of conventional sustainability, 3D-Printing could easily result in us drowning in tonnes of consumerist crap whereas, within a regenerative mindset, it could be transformative: allowing us to use the right materials and assemble them in ways that facilitate perfect circularity.

Of course, the relationship between designers and the press is interdependent but there’s no doubt that the media drive design behavior to a large extent. For many architects, having a project featured in one of the respected magazines is what they crave and this influences how they design. If the media celebrates mainly flashy, resource-intensive projects then designers are more likely to produce work in that category. If as a magazine you only feature ideas or projects if there are strong images, then it’s worth asking yourself the following question: If the apocalypse photographs better than the rescue mission, which one will you focus on?

The same applies to awards. The organisers need to ask themselves challenging questions: do the awards perpetuate problematic aspects of the status quo (like the pursuit of growth or profitability as ends in themselves)? Or do they make a meaningful contribution to addressing the planetary emergency? Some awards have already been substantially transformed: The Pritzker Prize, for instance, has shifted from a focus on largely white men from rich countries to a more diverse range of designers. Many other awards systems remain largely unreformed and, where planetary issues are considered, they are firmly within a frame of conventional ‘less bad’ sustainability.

A useful question to ask in a whole range of contexts is ‘What’s missing?’ and currently there is a galaxy of important thinkers that barely get any mention in the design press: Bill Reed, Daniel Christian Wahl, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Fritjof Capra, Freya Mathews, Janine Benyus, Joanna Macey, Johan Rockstrom, Jeremy Lent, Pamela Mang, Polly Higgins, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kate Raworth and Tyson Yunkaporta to name just a few.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, there was a time when the design media embraced ideas from other fields such as anthropology, biomimetics, neuroscience or psychology. Since Peter Buchanan’s ‘Big Rethink’ essays were published in 2011, it is hard to think of any magazine articles in the UK design media that have come near to that level of erudition.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is one of the clearest thinkers on existential questions such as ‘Will our civilisation survive?’ and, while it is hard to convey the persuasiveness of his thesis in short form, he makes the case that any civilization that combines exponential technology (such as nuclear weapons and AI) with rivalrous dynamics (forms of human interaction that are divisive) will be self-terminating. He goes on to argue that, since we can’t uninvent technology, our only hope is to transform the way we relate to each other in addressing contemporary challenges. Social media companies that profit from making us addicted, polarised and angry, clearly exacerbate this problem. Magazines that build readership numbers by engaging in polarising commentary fit into the same category. We can hear the objections: “You don’t understand the commercial realities of publishing – we have to maximise our readership to be commercially viable”. There are equivalent, agency-minimising excuses in just about every field and, as Ichioka and Pawlyn have stated in their book Flourish “this defence does not represent leadership; to coin a phrase, it’s trailership - trailing edge thinking that makes our current situation worse”.

So what would constructive public dialogue look like? It would mean structuring our debates so that they define points of agreement that can carry us forward, rather than points of division that hold us back. This might involve each party in stating at the beginning what it would take to change their mind (if they are unwilling to do this, it suggests that the discussion will be of limited use). The standard form of debate involving ‘for’ and ‘against’ parties contributes to polarisation and prioritises ‘winning’ over the pursuit of truth. Across society we now need to nurture more constructive ways of discussing contemporary challenges. This means that, when engaging with people who we may disagree with, we should ask ourselves “Am I expressing myself in a way that this person could conceivably be persuaded to change their mind?” The media should feel free to critique efforts to address the planetary emergency but the criticism needs to make a meaningful contribution to the debate, otherwise it is likely to spread cynicism and demotivation in an area that is crucial to charting a safer future.

Considerable progress has been made in shaping a new approach to journalism, initially by organisations such as The Constructive Journalism Project and subsequently by Solutions Journalism and The Constructive Institute - all have useful resources to help those in the media who want to demonstrate leadership.

Image credit: https://constructiveinstitute....

Similarly to other sectors, a good place to start the journey towards regenerative practice is to establish the extent of any negative impacts. One straightforward way to do this is for a magazine to allocate a score to each of its most recent 100 features as follows: +1 for any article that describes a project / technology / idea that is demonstrably net positive/ regenerative, 0 for something that is neutral / all negative impacts fully mitigated (or “100% less bad” to use Bill McDonough’s term), a -1 for something that involves partially mitigated negative impacts (this includes the vast majority of what has been conventionally described as ‘sustainable’), and -2 for an article that gives uncritical coverage to something that is clearly unsustainable. We did this assessment for an online magazine recently that considers itself progressive and the score was minus 85. This gives an indication of the scale of the challenge that is ahead of us. Having established a baseline, a magazine can then strive to improve on that by actively seeking out net positive work to feature and ramping up the criticism of ‘business as usual’ or clearly unsustainable projects.

Our firm belief is that architects and designers can play a major role in addressing the planetary emergency. We need the media to be on-board with this and we recognise this is going to be disruptive to established ways of doing things. As Naomi Klein observed about the planetary emergency, “This changes everything” and the real struggle over the next ten years will not be for notoriety or wealth but for something much more precious: whether we will maintain the respect of our children.