A Just Transition for the Building Sector

<p>For this episode, our editor Charlie Clemoes talks to Adare Brown, Elisa Iturbe, Geneva Strauss-Wise, Josh Barnett, and Ryan Ludwig from the Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group.</p> <p>The Architecture Lobby (TAL) is a grassroots organization of architectural workers that advocates for just labor practices and an equitable built environment. Founded in the United States and international in membership, TAL brings experience and expertise from many design fields—architecture, construction, planning, landscape, engineering, academia—to protect the rights and livelihoods of all workers. The Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group focuses on organizing for ecological justice as it relates to architectural labor, the built environment, and sustainable futures for all.</p> <p>Right now, TAL GND is organizing for a Just Transition through policy response, consciousness-raising within the architectural industry, and coalition building across architecture, engineering, and construction. Their recent projects include an 8-point report responding to the Green New Deal for Public Housing titled “Toward a radical transformation of housing and the built environment.” As they have explained, this response identifies the business-as-usual approach to building performance, growth economics, and private capital that is embedded within the GND policy as written. TAL GND is also engaged in an ongoing Just Transition Campaign, public and private workshops, and pamphleteering. Most recently, the group has engaged in direct action through the Alternative Building Industry (ABI) Collective, a New York-based campaign that aims to bring together a political constituency of building sector workers around Just Transition principles.</p>