This paper explores activist organisations in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries that advocate for climate justice in the name of Just Transition. Just Transition, a segment of the climate justice movement, emphasises the need for those workers who will be most affected by a transition to a green economy - construction workers - to participate in the formation of the policies that will affect them. The paper makes the point that architects must recognise their role in the construction industry and hence participate in Just Transition advocacy. It explores the different organisations, in both the construction and architecture industries, that promote a Just Transition, examining the varied methods, targets, and scales of advocacy. It points out distinctions in these groups according to how far the group goes in linking Just Transition advocacy to a critique of capitalism’s call for continued growth and development. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of targeting local policymakers versus more global and systemic power brokers as well as the varied effectiveness of groups that identify as agitators, non-profit organisers, or NGOs. At the end, the author reconsiders some of the assumptions that were used in creating the ‘effectiveness’ hierarchy imposed on the listing of organisations that the paper describes and speculates on the various ways a person can be called to action in the name of Just Transition.

This text results from the dialogue established between two research projects within the field of Production Studies. One, a doctoral study, investigates the relationship between society and nature, highlighting contradictions within the concept of sustainability in architectural production. The other is part of ongoing postdoctoral research at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (IAU-USP) and focuses on material culture, specifically studying aluminium production. Both studies explore their themes through the works of Sérgio Ferro, following the methodological approach of the project ‘Translating Ferro/Transforming Knowledge in Architecture, Project, and Labor’ (TF/TK).Bringing these two research projects together enables an illustration, from different perspectives, of how the capitalist model of value extraction operates behind architectural production, functioning as a kind of ‘illusion game’.

This article proposes alternatives for the conceptual scaffolding needed to ecologise architecture production studies. It engages Sérgio Ferro’s seminal work O canteiro e o desenho and expands Ferro’s critique of design’s inherent role in the exploitation the building site by introducing the concept of negative accumulation, the recognition of combined human and nonhuman labour grounding value extraction, and the entropic potential of building technologies. Drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of labour in connection to the transduction of energy, the article reintroduces forms of labour that fall outside the juridical definition of wage work into the calculus of value, and amends Ferro’s original claim for the liberation of construction work with the notions of reparation and restitution. Additionally, it presents the rupture of ecological relations as the grounding action in turning humans and nonhumans into propertied property, as explored by Ferreira da Silva and Kathryn Yusoff. By recognising the combined human and nonhuman labour resulting from mutually exacerbating movements of extraction, the article presents the possibility that design also reassembles previously disaggregated nonhuman labour towards the production of architecture. Finally, it draws on Bernard Stiegler’s work to focus on the entropic tendencies of technics as expressed in the building site and on how the configuration of these sites impacts workers’ style of energy expenditure and individuation. It proposes that the economy of resources in construction should also be understood as an economy of gestures and an economy of energy, and that this perspective can be extended to other sites of production.

Timber, forests, and plantations are increasingly positioned within global visions of architectural futures as critical to the future of architecture, both materially and discursively. Yet current global timber imaginaries tend to produce aestheticised environmental relations and rely heavily on desituated accounts given to the selection of materials for construction. This article resituates contemporary architectural knowledges of timber, following Araucaria cunninghamii (hoop pine) through a deep-dive case study into a complex web of ecological, historical, colonial, economic, aesthetic, and cultural relations. In thus resituating knowledges of hoop pine, a fuller entanglement with what is materially ongoing within colonial and ecological injustices is revealed, setting out a critical first step towards situated imaginaries in practice.

This article analyses the impacts of modernisation projects and conservation policies on Traditional territories in Brazil, highlighting the resistance and adaptation strategies developed by rubber tappers, everlasting flower gatherers, vazanteiros, and veredeiros. Critiquing the notions of nature implicit in both modernisation projects and conservation policies, the text draws on decolonial ecology and environmental racism to assess how territorial expropriation and environmental degradation have disproportionately affected Traditional Communities while benefiting exclusionary economic development models. Each case examined illustrates this dynamic based on the historical constitution and way of life of the groups in question. The article argues that conservation policies, by adopting an exclusionary vision of nature, often disregard the knowledge and rights of Traditional Communities, perpetuating social and environmental inequalities. It concludes that biodiversity conservation efforts must integrate the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of local communities, challenging hegemonic logics of development and conservation.

In the context of escalating global environmental pressures and ecological breakdown, current trajectories of material resource use in the construction sector are overwhelming the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, causing severe repercussions to the interdependencies of humans and ecosystems across different scales. Research into bio-based building materials such as hemp, straw, stone, and earth has received widespread attention as a holistic tool for envisioning human development on a stable and resilient planet. However, the supply of these materials at scale remains dependent upon the continuation (and expansion, in some cases) of an economic and political model that is based on large-scale extraction and dependent upon an infinite resource pool. We argue that materials are not fixed commodities but are continuous with the landscapes they come from: co-constituted by people's livelihoods, land ownership and cultivation models, and more-than-human inhabitants, so they should not be separated from these entangled relations. This research critically examines what the shift to a bio-based construction material palette means for current material-ecological systems, and what new natures are born from these interspecies sociomaterial relations. Focusing on bats (a high mobility, keystone species in the UK) to re-evaluate how the production and use of bio-based materials is an interspecies endeavour, here we map out the systemic cracks in land use, ecology, and conservation planning created by capitalist structures. We found that the excluded relations fall under three typologies: value, temporality, and knowledge. Our research also revealed how systems of material production can create spaces for alternative forms of cohabitation and non-extractive production, or interspecies repair. This critical study makes a case for a broader discussion of interspecies spatial-ecologies born out of new bio-based architectures.

Through a discussion of a place awaiting development this article asks: what is ecologically and culturally at stake in the production of large-scale, suburban housing? Examining a case study of a proposed 2,700-unit development in North Tyneside, UK, the article offers a multi-narrative account of the various political-economic, ecological, and cultural landscape factors at risk in these processes of building. The paper develops an approach which links a political-economy perspective - through a focus on the political and economic drivers and processes of housing development - to a micro-focus on affect and place attachment. Drawing on diary entries, ecological surveys, policy analysis, creative responses, interviews, and prose, the article highlights the cultural meaning the proposed development site holds for local people, and the importance of well-maintained arable environments for protecting biodiversity. The paper urges the need to rethink value and care in the production of housing, to get a better deal for both human and more-than-human nature.