The rationale behind my approach to architecture.
Over time, the focus of my social design practice progressively shifted from a great interest in green design to an anthropology-informed, people-based focus. I no longer design by myself; instead, the people who are the intended beneficiaries of the projects with which I am involved design by and for themselves. My role as an architectural designer in those projects is limited to facilitating the community design process.
I began my architectural career with a great eagerness to relate to this field in a creative way. I felt this was necessary partly because of the predominant philosophy of my alma mater in Colombia, which was heavily based on the dry dogmatism of Corbusian modernist design. Examples of that initial technological and design focus include my early explorations with geobiology; a passive solar ventilation design in the Madreselva farm; experiments with waterless composting toilets; and alternative structural designs using comparatively less resistant bamboo poles.
The shift from this green enthusiasm happened progressively, as I was confronted with strong field evidence of the limited social outcomes of celebrated green approaches. Those outcomes led me to strongly question the paradigm of green design for social work: Who cares about climate-adapted housing when some people don’t even have access to basic housing? Who cares about water-saving technologies when, in a world of generalized social conflict, some people can’t even save their own lives?
As nihilistic as they were initially, these questions have stayed with me as a stark reminder of the social limitations of popular measures for dealing with environmental issues. Undoubtedly, from a technological standpoint, so-called green solutions like the ones I implemented do work. Passive solar ventilation technologies work. Composting works. Bamboo construction works. However, does the fact that a green solution might work from a technological standpoint necessarily mean that it is viable as a social solution?
One of the most important lessons I have drawn from my social design practice pertains to the limitations of a popular assumption in social design’s advocacy of sustainability—the assumption that, if a given environmental problem is solved, then the social problems connected to it will be solved automatically as well. In terms of architecture, this assumption suggests that, if a given architectural design works from an environmental standpoint, then it should automatically have a positive social impact.
Throughout my practice, I have learned that, if anything, the logic should instead be the opposite: Attack the social problem first, and the solution to the environmental problem will follow. Granted, one does not exclude the other, and in fact both must be acted upon simultaneously. However, we as social designers often put too much emphasis on the former while neglecting the latter, assuming that its solution will just follow by default.
On the basis of that key lesson, I have modelled my practice to steer clear of the classical, technology-based consensus on sustainability and instead advocate for a form of environmentalism that puts human beings front and center. However, I am also mindful that, in the end, there is no global model of a human being with a paradigmatic form of behavior. Instead, there are different people with different concerns, needs, and wants, all of which need to be considered when engaging in a social design project.
I consider these variables by embracing an approach to community participation that differs from the one conventionally used in social design practice, which I find problematic. In its mainstream sense, the notion of participation—like that of sustainability—is simply too compromised to be of use for social design practice. Participation is too easy to manipulate, as I explain in detail in my 2020 JAE paper and 2022 book.
However, I do not go so far as to argue that we as designers should do away with participation. Rather, we need to strive for more participation, albeit of a different kind. The main issue with participation has to do with control—that is, the inherent control that a professional who leads a participatory process has over this process. Consequently, the main issue with participation is the issue of positionality: Being in command of a participatory process means being in a position of great, and often unchecked, power.
A widely proposed solution to this issue prescribes that, in a participatory process, practitioners should make sure to always position themselves at the same level as the subjects of their intervention. This premise is at the core of the notion of co-design.
I go beyond this premise, arguing that co-design is not enough. The reason for this is that the claims of co-designing often mask the same issues that affect the conventional “top-down” forms of participation. That is, the use of the term “co-design” is often just as rhetorical as the practice it pretends to contest.
Instead, I advocate for a more radical positional shift on the part of practitioners. As I explain in the JAE paper:
“This proposition […] embraces instead a radical positionality shift where, in the hierarchy of the design process, designers move down from a position of power at the top, and also past the pretense of equality in easy-to-coopt forms of codesign, to position themselves instead at the bottom of the hierarchy in order to support community design processes.”
I describe this type of practice as architecture from below—a type of architecture in which we as social designers move down from our position of privilege and defer to people’s own visions of a good life.