JAE - Journal of Architectural Education

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JAE 78:2 Fall 2024

Worlding. Energy. Transitions.

October 15, 2024

CALL FOR ENTRY

JAE 79.2 Call for Papers

JAE 80.1 Call for Papers

JAE 79:2

Palestine

DEADLINE

January 21, 2025
05:00pm

THEME EDITORS

Nora Akawi

The Cooper Union
New York, NY

Nick Estes

University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN

Omar Jabary Salamanca

Université Libre de Bruxelles
Brussels

Zoé Samudzi

Clark University
Worcester, MA

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In the face of the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education calls for urgent reflections on this historical moment’s implications for design, research, and education in architecture. This volume will build on existing knowledge, research and publications to continue to learn from and with practices of resistance to the Zionist, militarist, carceral, and capitalist regime of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid. Refusing systemic military annihilation, containment, fragmentation, erasure, and designed uninhabitability in the ongoing Nakba, Palestinians have practiced anti-colonial life- and land- protection, from marches of return to siege and prison breaks, from rebuilding homes and institutions to constructing cooperative farms and infrastructures of mutual care, from archival retrievals and documentation to anti-colonial educational platforms. Solidarity movements worldwide have joined in practicing and imagining decolonized futures through mass protest, student encampments, and the disruption of global trade and business-as-usual.

We invite contributions that document the architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in imperial formations of settler-colonial apartheid and genocide. Contributions could evidence how bombing, demolition, destruction, ruination, and scorched earth constitute military strategies planned and implemented for decades to fragment, debilitate and destroy Palestinian built, social, economic, cultural, and natural environments. “Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in Gaza,” writes UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, “is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure.” Contributors might map, represent, theorize, and historicize genocide, ecocide, spaciocide, terracide, and urbicide as practices of colonial erasure and unpack the way they appear and operate. They may consider destruction as a form of design and planned operations entangled in a multiplicity of imaginaries, actors, materials, media, spaces, laws, capital, and power relations.

The Palestinian philosopher Abdaljawad Omar argues that Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and resistance to it—“no matter how horrific, bloody, and tragic”—cannot be reduced to a “pathology of violence.” Palestinians are not hapless victims nor motivated merely by “vengeance.” Omar advocates, instead, that a “pathology of hope” in a decolonial struggle “might ultimately create the space for new possibilities.” Those new possibilities have emerged not only in Palestine, where the prospects of liberation seem closer despite immense suffering and death, but also around the globe. Millions have taken up the cause of Palestine, tapping into what Anishinaabe theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “constellations of coresistance,” bringing into relationship seemingly disparate struggles by using “mechanisms for communications, strategic movement, accountability to each other, and shared decision-making practices” that refuse to center colonial narratives and institutions. These constellations, however, are not new. Palestinian solidarity could be described as an infrastructure of resistance that maps onto global movements from below. A decline of imposed Western hegemony corresponds with the rise of new formations of struggle and power that draw from radical possible histories, presents, and futures. Through this call for papers, we invite authors to engage with such formations of anti-colonial struggle within and beyond Palestinian geographies, reflecting on how Palestine has inspired pathologies of hope, constellations of coresistance, and infrastructures of resistance, the world over.

We enthusiastically invite contributions in the categories of Essay, Design, Narrative, and Image, and welcome work that challenges conventions of politics and forms. Submissions could emerge from or comparatively engage with Palestine as an appositional and diasporic geography (i.e. geographies of Palestine contra geographies of Palestinians), the metaphysics of funerary ritual and the creation-destruction of Palestinian cemeteries, domicide and the multiplicities of homelessness, the worlds woven by resistance literature, and sumud (“steadfast perseverance”) as a material and spatial practice.

Though not human-built borders, the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea form the boundaries of aquatic imaginaries of sovereignty: the latter’s shores are equal parts a respite for Gaza’s citizens and the banks of now-heavily polluted waters weaponized by Israel in counterinsurgency efforts against Palestinian military resistance and the health of its soil. The water bodies are at the heart of a heavily policed articulation of freedom from settler domination whose global reiterations hail a decolonial internationalism that makes reference to a history of shared struggles and futurities of freedom.

In addition to weaponized environments of soil, water, and air, sites of consideration include the tunnel as a route of militants’ fight and prisoners’ flight, the blockade as carceral infrastructure, the safe haven of the hospital, the intergenerational sanctity and stewardship of the olive grove, the absenting of sacred space and cultural memory, the resistive archive, the breaching of the border fence and the rupture of settler containment, the expansion and contraction of worlds through media and procedures of the international courts and UN bodies. One might also consider the troubled intimacies between the life-affirming creativity in, and maintenances of refugee space, preclusions of citizenship, and the unwavering dream and materialities of return.

The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is January 21, 2025. Accepted articles will be published in issue 79.2 (Fall 2025). For author instructions please consult the author guide.

Image Credit: Image Courtesy of Amal Al-Nakhala

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JAE 80:1

Degrowth, Low-tech, and Alternative Hedonism

DEADLINE

July 14, 2025
05:00pm

THEME EDITORS

Mireille Roddier

University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

McLain Clutter

University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

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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

Ashish Kothari, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, “Buen Vivir, Degrowth and Ecological Swaraj: Alternatives to sustainable development and the Green Economy.” Development 57, 362–375 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2015.24

Philippe Bihouix, The Age of Low Tech: Towards a Technologically Sustainable Civilization (Bristol: Policy Press, 2020)

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

Nicholas Georgescu-Rogen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971)

Nicholas Georgescu-Rogen, Energy and Economic Myths: Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976)

Daly Herman, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)

Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (London: William Heinemann, 2020)

Ivan Illich, Energy and equity (Harper & Row, 1974)

Giorgos Kallis, “Radical dematerialization and degrowth” in Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 375, nº 2095, Theme Issue: Material demand reduction (13 June 2017): 1–13.

Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, & Giacomo d’Alisa, The case for degrowth (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019)

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, A Moratorium on New Construction (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2024)

George Montbiot, Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: Land is the Key to the Transformation of Society (Great Barrington, MA: Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2020)

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2020)

Timothée Parique, et al., “Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability”, European Environmental Bureau (July 2019).

Pierre Rabhi, The Power of Restraint (Actes Sud, 2018)

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/

Kohei Saito, Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (Westminster, MD: Astra House, 2024)

Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, Andrea Vetter, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022)

Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (London: Verso, 2020)

Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel, “Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries,” The Lancet: Planetary Health 7(9) (September 2023): e759–69.Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (London: Verso, 2023).

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