Kate Wagner: Rescinding progress means architects must become the agents of change
Organizing at the community level and putting pressure on politicians can go a long way, but it’s not enough. Architects have to start seeing themselves as political actors with high stakes in the same way communities and unions do. Architects are workers and they depend on work. The fight for climate justice, resiliency, and workers’ and tenants’ rights are only going to get harder in an era of political decay, cronyism, and systemic crisis.The fight over congestion pricing and residential building retrofits in New York City are just a couple of the many flashpoints architects should involve themselves in heavily in order to better advocate for the profession, critic Kate Wagner writes. Rightly, she states, “The field’s most meaningful efforts to combat climate change are actually quite mundane.” Progress on a number of fronts, including the decarbonization of the building sector, is being either stalled or eroded at the hands of real estate and other interests. Now professionals face the choice of further subjecting their labor or pushing back via activism or other means.
Organizing at the community level and putting pressure on politicians can go a long way, but it’s not enough. Architects have to start seeing themselves as political actors with high stakes in the same way communities and unions do. Architects are workers and they depend on work. The fight for climate justice, resiliency, and workers’ and tenants’ rights are only going to get harder in an era of political decay, cronyism, and systemic crisis.
The fight over congestion pricing and residential building retrofits in New York City are just a couple of the many flashpoints architects should involve themselves in heavily in order to better advocate for the profession, critic Kate Wagner writes. Rightly, she states, “The field’s most meaningful efforts to combat climate change are actually quite mundane.” Progress on a number of fronts, including the decarbonization of the building sector, is being either stalled or eroded at the hands of real estate and other interests. Now professionals face the choice of further subjecting their labor or pushing back via activism or other means.
