Degrowth entails the downscaling of material and energy throughput of high-income societies in order to mitigate the metabolic rift between geographies of capital accumulation and the vast territories and populations whose resources they unsustainably consume. It calls for a convergence between “imperial modes of living” and regimes of structural scarcity, and for the need to lower total global energy consumption while reducing gradients of inequality. This article posits the architectural design studio as a significant pedagogical space for exercising a close accountability of energy and material flows as a practice of resource management that demands negotiating the physical limits to growth with distributional social justice.

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