Earth Overshoot Day is the date at which humanity’s consumption of natural resources exceeds what the planet regenerates in a year. In 2023 that date was August 2, approaching midyear. This figure is a global aggregate. Many countries in the global south, like Uruguay, Cambodia, and half of the nations in Africa, do not reach an overshoot day; they are not borrowing resources from future generations. In contrast, the most industrialized nations are meeting their biocapacity budget by Spring — early March in the United States. Not only are we borrowing from our children, we are looting our neighbors. 

Building upon recent issues of the Journal of Architectural Education that have asked contributors to speculate on how a new energy order might restructure society and the built environment, and how the present built environment is broadly entangled with modes of extraction characteristic of neoliberal capitalism, this issue of JAE insists on the fundamental impossibility of limitless economic growth in any sustainable planetary future. As scientists from across disciplines have claimed for decades, in order to reach a just and sustainable society, a phase of degrowth is unavoidable (Georgescu-Rogen, 1976; Herman Daly, 1996; Jason Hickel, 2020). By degrowth, we refer to a reduction in the production, circulation, and consumption of our energetic, material, and informational resources — all variant and interconnected forms of energy dissipation when conceived from a thermodynamics perspective. The correlations between energy dissipation, economic growth, climate change, and social violence are well substantiated. Attempts at decoupling environmental degradation from supposed “green growth” have proven to be not only scientifically impossible, but also a distraction from effective strategies for transitioning into sustainable practices (Parrique, 2019; Vogel & Hickel, 2023). So too, technological innovation in renewable energy will not save the day. The shift to renewable energy is far from enough, and each new technology necessitates regimes of resource extraction that reiterate ecological degradation and social inequity. Only a fundamental and radical reduction of energy dissipation, and by extension, Gross Domestic Profit, will be effective.

As a discipline and as a profession, architecture is intricately entangled with economic growth. Especially in the context of neoliberalism, there are scant professional commissions with proforma not grounded in bases of economic expansion. Meanwhile, our disciplinary imagination assumes the development of the new as a given — this, the pervasive legacy of a modernist avant-garde pitted against the past. All the while, it is clear that any new construction is unsustainably energy intensive, as evidenced through recent calls for a “moratorium on new construction” (Malterre-Barthes, 2024).

We are interested in a multiplicity of responses that situate architecture’s past, present, and future at the intersection of the social, –

A happy sobriety

While the specter of degrowth often elicits associations of austerity or decline, we are most interested in submissions that instead forward alternative notions of abundance and prosperity. If GDP measures the monetary value of overall economic activity, how might we design the built environment to center and celebrate other values? Building on philosopher Kate Sopers notion of “Alternative Hedonism” and sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s “Real Utopias,” we seek submissions that forward alternative value systems and their consequent lifestyles and built environments. What examples — either elsewhere, past, or in speculative futures — can we share that would celebrate the luxury of restraint and moderation in our consumption of materials and energy? By embracing socio-bio-centric ways of living such as that of a “happy sobriety” (Rabhi, 2018), “buen vivir” or “sumak kawsay” (Acosta & Abarca, 2018) already present in non-Western economies, can we preempt any forthcoming scarcity — the product of capitalist accumulation and finite resources — with equitable models of distribution, devised in our own terms and with architecture as a complicit agent? This could encourage us to rediscover the potential lavishness of shared infrastructures and amenities through the dyad formulated by George Montbiot as “private sufficiency, public luxury” (Monbiot, 2020). Can we imagine ebullient aesthetic regimes of degrowth? 

Power is power 

In physics, Power is proportional to how fast we move matter across space (or raise its temperature). Power is maximized when the rate of energy expenditure is maximized. Not so coincidentally, that effect resembles profit-driven capitalism (or war). Through this lens, we understand the building industry as a technique for administering energy and material flows in the service of a competitive growth economy. The greatest obstacle to reducing energy expenditure is that unless equitably regulated, energy is extracted from those who already hold the least power, at both the local and global scales.Thus, while any new construction is ecologically extractive, a full moratorium in the present would thereby threaten to ossify patterns of uneven development, inequity, and asymmetrical societal well-being. Given this context, where, and for whom, should architects focus their efforts, in terms of new construction? What forms of government and sovereignty, and corresponding physical environment can we imagine to implement degrowth globally, while addressing regional inequity and historic and persistent colonial extraction? 

Low-tech futures

With the global increase in energy cost and load shedding power cuts, how do we fundamentally rethink the total amount of energy consumed by our built environment each day — especially during ever more frequent heat waves or cold spells, and given the energy demands of evermore interconnected objects? As explained by the Jevons paradox, advances in energy efficiency have proven to either displace or increase our total energy consumption (Kallis, 2017). Put simply, we will not innovate our way out of the climate crisis. Instead, how can we radically reduce consumption through low-tech and passive means? Can we put our capacities at the service of exnovation processes that, far from being restrictive, offer an opulence of pleasures and creative engagements with life itself? How might the built environment participate in the (re)emergence of energetically frugal ways of dwelling, lifestyles, and rituals? Can an ethic of care, maintenance, and repair enable the recovery of lost know-how and mindful behaviors that would help restore a healthier socioeconomic metabolism? What can we learn from non-western, indigenous, or vernacular practices and epistemologies about the stewardship of our social and physical environment?

Pedagogy and institutions

Given the threads above, how do we rethink our model of architectural education and curricula? Precisely as planetary limits are becoming more and more established in science, universities and schools of architecture are embracing growth as a means of economic survival in the context of neoliberalism – an accumulation process that predictably coincides with the simultaneous dissolution of regional nonprofit and liberal-arts colleges (Gardner, 2023). Instead, how can we insist on academia as a space of radical alternatives? What is a sustainable number of architects to graduate each year, given that we educate students for a profession that is currently reliant on growth, development, and the exploitation of finite natural resources? How can we retool education to center the care and maintenance of the existing built environment?

The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is July 14, 2025. Accepted articles will be published in issue 80.1 (Spring 2026). For author instructions please consult the author guide.

Bibliography

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Lee Gardner, “Flagships Prosper, While Regionals Suffer,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 13, 2023)

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Mireille Roddier, “Degrowth, Energy Sobriety, Low-Tech: Towards an Architecture of Conviviality,” a Reading List, Places Journal (July 2024). https://placesjournal.org/reading-list/degrowth-energy-sobriety-low-tech-towards-an-architecture-of-conviviality/

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