News

18 industry experts have been selected to help shape the first Built Environment Summit (BESt) that will take place from 28-29 October 2021. Grouped into panels corresponding with the six conference themes, they will help review open call submissions and programme the two-day event:

Panel for Theme 1: The Significance of the Built Environment

• Mel Allwood, Director and Sustainable Buildings Lead, Ove Arup & Partners
• James Mitchell, Co-Founder and CEO of BuildX Studio

Chaired by: Hélène Chartier, Head of Zero Carbon Development at C40 Climate Leadership Group

Panel for Theme 2: The Environmental Footprint of the Built Environment

• Jake Attwood-Harris, Sustainable Design Advisor of Hawkins\Brown Architects
• Michael Ramage, Director of Centre for Natural Material Innovation, University of Cambridge

Chaired by: Jane Anderson, Director of ConstructionLCA Limited

Panel for Theme 3: How to affect change in the Built Environment

• Asif Din, Sustainability Director, Perkins & Will
• Christhina Candido, Associate Professor and Director of Sustainable and Healthy Environments (SHE) Lab, The University of Melbourne

Chaired by: Duncan Baker-Brown, Founder of BakerBrown

Panel for Theme 4: The Built Environment Industry’s Capabilities

• Sonja Oliveira, Founder of Radical Architecture Practice for Sustainability Network
• Pete Winslow, Associate Director of Expedition

Chaired by: Nigel Tonks, Director and Senior Adviser to Climate Champions Team of Ove Arup & Partners

Panel for Theme 5: The Industry is Committed to Change

• Adrian Campbell, Founder of Changebuilding
• Ted Ochieng Otieno, Chair of Kenya Green Building Society

Chaired by: Caroline Pidcock, Director of Pidcock PTY

Panel for Theme 6: The Industry needs governments’ support to change

• Ben Derbyshire, Chair of HTA Design
• Judit Kimpian, Chair of Environment and Sustainable Architecture Work Group, Architects Council of Europe

Chaired by: Pooran Desai, CEO of OnePlanet.com

The international open call for research will close on Monday 5 July at 9am (BST).

Thu, 28 Oct 2021, 09:00 – Fri, 29 Oct 2021, 17:00 BST Click here for details and to book.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Architects Declare have launched an open call for research to present at the inaugural Built Environment Summit and to form accompanying report, which will be presented to global leaders at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26).

Co-hosted by RIBA and Architects Declare, the Built Environment Summit (BESt) will take place in London from 28-29 October 2021. The summit will share examples of innovative practice and explore ways to harness political support to decarbonise the built environment, ahead of COP26.

The open call seeks evidence, research, and exemplar projects (built or un-built) under the following themes:

1. The significance of the built environment – research that demonstrates the social and economic benefits of sustainable buildings.

2. The environmental footprint of the built environment – analysis on the current environmental impact of buildings.

3. How to affect change in the built environment – research on the cultural, economic, and industry landscapes affecting the built environment.

4. The built environment industry’s capabilities – examples of innovative technologies and methodologies.

5. The industry is committed to change – initiatives and educational reforms that demonstrate commitment to climate action.

6. The industry needs Government support to change – evidence that shows the benefits of environmental regulation.

The deadline for these submissions is 14 June. More detailed information about all these categories can be found on the RIBA website here as well as an opportunity to register your interest in attending the Built Environment Summit in October.

Alongside the call for research, the RIBA and Architects Declare also invite Expressions of Interest to sit on the BESt Expert Advisory Panel. The Panel will support the selection of contributors and curation of the conference. Please apply by June 1 using this link

We are recruiting for members of both our Steering Group and Working Groups.

Steering Group (SG) - As the scope and reach of Architects Declare has grown, some SG members have become more involved with our umbrella body Construction Declares. This has provided an opportunity to recruit for four positions in an exciting time as we lead up to COP 26 in November 2021. Please click here for the role description and details of how to apply

Working Groups (WG) - We currently have two working groups engaging signatories with ongoing work, and usually led by a Steering Group member. We would like to expand these and move to a more autonomous model, so would like to recruit people to lead on these. Please click here for the role description and details of how to apply

Over the past 18 months, UK Architects Declare has grown into a collaborative force of more than 1000 architectural practices in the UK working towards transformative change, but last week saw the departure of two of our founding signatories, Foster + Partners and ZHA. We are saddened and disappointed that two such globally influential practices have found it necessary to withdraw.

It continues to be our goal to work collectively to bring about change while recognising that this is a journey and not a simple linear process. Different collaborative groups are needed to bring different perspectives. For example, AD’s role with practice signatories, is different to ACAN’s with individual members, and from the outset it has been AD’s policy not to publicly “call out” our signatory colleagues’ work. We recognise that practices have varying approaches to meeting the goals of the declaration. What unites us is a shared vision of a built environment that addresses the climate and biodiversity crises.

The reason we felt compelled to respond to Patrik Schumacher’s recent statements was because they appeared to represent a shift away from this shared vision and thereby undermine the principles of the declaration. Having read ZHA’s withdrawal statement, we regret not having sought further dialogue with ZHA before suggesting that they withdraw from the declaration. We would like to encourage both Foster + Partners and ZHA to consider signing the declaration again soon in order to be part of this growing collaborative network.

We believe that high ambitions for change will benefit from unity and the coming together of all architecture practices, large and small, and that this collective, practice-level action is central to the strength of Architects Declare.

We are disappointed that Foster + Partners has chosen to withdraw from the declarations and we would welcome a conversation with them on the points raised.

We recognise that addressing the climate and biodiversity emergencies challenges current practice and business models for us all, not least around the expansion of aviation. We believe that what is needed is system change and that can only come about through collective action. Architects Declare is not a ‘protest’ movement but a collaborative support network to innovate positive transformation. Our movement is global. As of today there are 1037 UK practices committed to the declaration and over 6000 companies signed up in 26 countries under the broader banner of Construction Declares.

The debate, and indeed the very definition of sustainability, has evolved considerably as the depth of the crisis we face has become ever clearer. Our declaration represents a positive vision of how our profession can respond to the planetary emergencies. This involves embracing new approaches and being realistic about what can be solved with technology in the next crucial decade.

We’re looking forward to working with our signatories to raise the level of ambition in preparation for the critical COP26 climate negotiations next year.

Last week The Architects’ Journal reported that Patrik Schumacher of ZHA (a signature practice to Architects Declare) had asserted that ‘we need to allow prosperity and progress to continue and that will also bring the resources to overcome [the climate crisis] through investment in science and new technologies. That must be built on continuous growth’. He also warned against ‘those voices who are too quick to demand radical changes’.

We believe these statements are fundamentally in conflict with the Architects Declare commitment to ‘advocate for faster change in our industry towards regenerative practices’. We also believe these statements are scientifically flawed and decades out of date in terms of informed intellectual thought. We would like to explain why.

For decades, the global economy has grown exponentially and so too have greenhouse gas emissions, material extraction, energy consumption and a whole host of environmental damage indicators. Meanwhile, social, economic, and health inequalities have widened and improvements in life satisfaction and genuine progress indicators have plateaued.

The too-commonly held belief that the pursuit of economic growth brings prosperity for all has proven mistaken. The ideas that our economy is dematerialising, or that we will eventually become rich enough to reverse the harm we have caused, are not only wrong, but extremely dangerous – now more than ever.

It is now 56 years since Ronald Reagan kickstarted the era of neo-liberalism with his notorious speech A Time for Choosing. His argument was deeply rooted in the ideas of Milton Friedman and others who argued for unfettered market forces.

Since then we have extinguished two thirds of non-human animal life on the planet and have breached a range of planetary boundaries in the pursuit of ever-increasing economic growth. What conventional economists regard as a ‘healthy’ level of 3 per cent annual growth will result in a doubling in the size of the economy every 23.5 years and bring along with it a doubling in the environmental damage required to power that growth over the same period.

The obsession with growth goes even further back to an economist called Simon Kuznets, who formulated the idea of Gross National Product (GNP) in the 1930s at the request of the US Department of Commerce. He observed at the time that it would be a big mistake to make this the primary measure of the economy but his warning went unheeded and maximisation of GNP increasingly became an obsession for governments around the world.

Robert Kennedy’s famous speech in 1968 listed a range of things that GNP excludes – the health of our children, the beauty of our arts, the integrity of our officials, the intelligence of our debate – and concludes that GNP ‘measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’. The economist Kenneth Boulding observed in 1973 that ‘anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist’.

What is striking about these examples is how old they are and how little has changed. This is partly a testament to the success of neo-liberal ideas championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the vast system of thought they created – a Pyrrhic victory that has brought us to the brink of catastrophe, according to the world’s top scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The idea that growth can clean up the environment was advanced by free-market ideologues in the 1980s and comprehensively debunked by Mariano Torras and James Boyce in the 1990s. They showed persuasively that what improves air quality, water quality and other environmental issues is people power – not economic growth, but collective action, such as public sanitation or a national health service.

A widespread feature of developed economies was the way they shifted from manufacturing to service industries and, by doing that, shifted the environmental pollution from the goods they consumed to poorer parts of the world. When countries like the UK purport to be reducing their emissions while increasing their GDP, it is because the emissions being counted are only those produced within our borders, not the emissions associated with our ever-increasing consumption of materials and products produced overseas.

We need a more sophisticated discussion about growth and, encouragingly, we have seen much more coherent alternative models – particularly since the financial crash of 2008, which even persuaded economically traditional media such as The Financial Times and The Economist to accept that there may be flaws in neo-liberal dogma.

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics has shown with great persuasiveness, the urgent need, and clear potential, for a new model that is based on planetary limits and climate justice. Similarly, academics such as Jason Hickel in his book Less is More have set out a compelling critique of indiscriminate growth. In other fields, such as medicine, the Planetary Health Initiative has shown that our current economic system threatens to reverse 50 years of health gains and that our long-term health is dependent on the health of our planetary systems.

What these other disciplines have argued is that we need a much more sophisticated discussion about growth that distinguishes between qualitative and quantitative growth. There are some things we need to grow – such as ecosystems, human health, community cohesion, political unity, the vitality of the commons – and some things we need to urgently shrink, such as hyper-consumption, luxury lifestyles and unconstrained aviation.

Given the richness of debate going on in these other fields, it is troubling to hear leading figures in architecture like Patrik Schumacher talking about the need for continuous growth and progress. As Edward Abbey observed, ‘growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell’ and ‘progress’ in these blinkered terms means progress towards collapse and the most grotesque crime against future generations and developing nations ever committed.

In setting up Architects Declare (AD) – necessarily organised almost exclusively with pro bono input, we had hoped that practices would be self-policing. For AD to do otherwise would be so complicated and resource-intensive that we would need substantial funding and a whole team of full-time staff. This approach has been partly successful and we salute those hundreds of practices in the UK and globally who are energetically seeking to be true to the declaration and make the necessary positive changes.

To date we have avoided calling out individual practices (as explained in our statement in July), recognising that we all struggle sometimes to do what is necessary. However, when statements are made that contradict the fundamentals of the declaration, we have no option but to speak up. Sadly, there remain signatory practices who appear determined to continue with business as usual. This is seriously undermining the effectiveness and credibility of AD, so we call on those practices to either join the wave of positive change or have the integrity to withdraw.

Architects Declare have responded to the Planning for the Future Consultation.

View our response here

Architects Declare needs financial support and we suggest that every signatory practice makes a contribution. How much we raise will guide what we can afford to take on. The more we raise, the more we can do. Please support AD at this crucial time of change.

Our hope is to raise at least £50,000 a year to cover operating costs including staff, maintaining our website and social media, promoting our work to the press, keeping communications with signatories regular, coordinating regional meetings and strengthening links with fellow declarations under the international, multi-disciplinary Construction Declares umbrella. There are also other expenses to take care of such as adding functionality to our website and paying for digital subscriptions. Rather than relying on practices to fund this in the background, we would like to put a more equitable model in place. We are in the process of setting up Architects Declare as a charity but this takes some time, and we need to start fundraising sooner than completion allows.

Based on our estimate of future costs, we suggest that each signatory practice contributes £20 annually for each architect they employ. Contributions are limited at a maximum of £2500 so large practices do not pay more than this amount. If this is not affordable, please contribute what you can; your status within AD will not be affected by your ability to contribute.

For us to receive your complete contribution, please email us for details of how to transfer via BACS. Otherwise here is our PayPal link:
https://paypal.com/paypalme/architectsdeclareuk…

Architects Declare has won the AJ100 Sustainability Initiative of the Year for 2020. Judges unanimously named AD winner of the award, which is given for an exemplary or innovative approach to sustainability.

From the AJ:

"Judges unanimously named Architects Declare winner of the award, which is given for an exemplary or innovative approach to sustainability.

The jury said the initiative deserved ‘praise for recognising that the climate emergency cannot be solved at the scale of an individual building and that an industry-wide coalition is needed to change the system’. Impressed with the clarity of its concept and the level of industry engagement achieved in the first year to build a global movement with more than 5,000 signatories, the judges admired ‘the skill of the initiators in assembling the founding practices and their savvy in understanding where the pressure points are’."

Construction Declares has partnered with the Architects Climate Action Network in a response to DEFRA's England Tree Strategy. We see this as a chance to influence this strategy for the next 30 years, and help the government to maximise benefits of tree planting. To support this, and for more information about why this consultation is so important for architects to respond to, please click here . You have until 11 September.