Sustainability and Privilege

Socially engaged design (or social design in short) is one of the most popular fields in architectural practice today. Social design transpires everywhere in this practice, through design-build projects, school programs, conferences, exhibits, publications, and awards. Indeed, along with LEED (the green building standard), the movement of architects massively going into the area of poverty alleviation is arguably one of the most important developments of the last two decades of architectural practice.

Attesting to the great relevance of this subject, there exists a large body of published work on social design. However, the overwhelming majority of this literature is laudatory. Critical literature on social design is comparatively scarce, and this is especially true in the case of book-length critiques. In fact, most of the social design debate has taken place online—for example, through blog posts such as Bruce Nussbaum's Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism? (2010).

Sustainability and Privilege: A Critique of Social Design Practice studies social design’s main focus, which is sustainability. In particular, the book explores the paradigm of bringing sustainability to impoverished populations living in regions such as Sub- Saharan Africa and Latin America.

The book examines the main criticism that has been raised about social design—that it is fundamentally an imperialist practice. The rationale behind such argument is that social design projects often recall the presumably benevolent interventions of colonial times in so-called Third World settings. As the “humanitarian imperialism” critics argue, and I describe it in the book, European and American designers often arrive with a comparatively high degree of power to places with which they are unfamiliar. Indifferent to this unfamiliarity, they make decisions that deeply affect local communities, which often are vulnerable ethnic communities in conditions of dire poverty. The designers set out to impose their own ideas, ignoring the expertise of local designers and input from community stakeholders.

To overcome the challenge of imperialism, both critics and supporters of social design coincide in proposing that this practice should be left to local designers, “local” defined as the residents or nationals of the place where a given project takes place. Also, they propose that social design projects should be designed with community participation.

Although I agree with the basic tenets of the imperialism critique, in this book I go beyond by arguing that the main problem currently faced by social design has to do with the privilege of architects, rather than their origin. One can be a local anti-imperialist architect and still do work that is detrimental, materially and socially speaking, to people in marginalized communities, even if those are the communities within one’s own country. That is the case even when architects use a community participation approach in their work.

In order to support this argument, I explore the interventions by local architects in a representative number of well-known and/or large-scale social design projects. The sustainability goals of these projects were very compelling, including for example greening urban spaces or using traditional construction materials. However, these projects ultimately caused urban displacement for so-called “green gentrification,” and in other cases traditionalist experimental “green” buildings failed to the point of even collapsing. Other negative outcomes included economic burdens, expropriation, dissatisfaction among the projects’ intended beneficiaries, their rejection and abandonment of the projects, and conflict between community members and designers.

I observe how, in these projects, achieving sustainability was the goal invoked to justify what was in reality the designers’ imposition of a privileged viewpoint on poverty alleviation, based on beautification and the celebration of the designers’ own creative strokes. However, I argue that the problem with these projects, and with social design as a whole, is not due to privilege in and of itself, but rather to the lack of awareness among designers about the power of privilege in a social design intervention. Such power can alternatively be used for the common good—in fact, as designers we can use our privilege to support socially emancipatory processes, even if that support does not advance our own design agenda.

The Challenge of Social Design

In the book, I argue that the main issue with present-day social design practice is that the most popular form of this practice, the mainstream one, too heavily relies upon the regular paradigms of architectural design. These paradigms put a great emphasis on the figure of the architect and their creative genius. As it turns out—and I explain this in the book by quoting extensively from beneficiaries of the studied projects—when it comes to poverty alleviation the solutions that work best tend to be the simplest ones in terms of form, technology, and method.

This finding, of course, poses a challenge for us as architectural design practitioners because we like sophistication. If the solutions that work best are the proven, most conventional, and less convoluted ones, in the eyes of an architectural designer this might translate as solutions that could be “boring” and “ugly;” and yet, they are tremendously effective.

Notably, one of the most critical findings from the book’s field research was that, often, the imposition of the architects’ ideas was not blunt, but instead it came in the guise of community participation. In the majority of the studied cases, these ideas were imposed in a subtle way, making them look as if beneficiaries had arrived at, or had agreed with, the ideas through a process of community participation.

This was possible because, in reality, a process of community participation is very easy to manipulate. Using examples from the studied cases, in the book I identify six strategies to manipulate participation, which I name participation as labor, participation as information provision, deceptive participation, manipulative participation, anodyne participation, and participation as everything. When it comes to participatory design, and participation theory as a whole, I consider this to be my book’s main contribution.

Considering that participation, as is commonly understood in social design, is in the end very limited, in the book I propose an alternative way to tackle participatory practice. The proposed approach is based on the project beneficiaries’ own vision of their problems and possible solutions. I call it ethnoarchitecture, with the prefix ethno- referring to the ethnographic principle of from the people’s own perspective. The ethnoarchitectural approach comprises a positional shift in a community design process, by which the architect leaves their privileged position as the driver of a participatory process and moves down to the bottom of that process, acting from there as a supporter of people’s own design ideas.

Book Contributions

In addition to its contributions to participation theory and social design methods of practice, both of which are presented in chapter 4, the book offers other contributions that are also worthwhile highlighting. For example, the introductory chapter is very relevant for those readers who are just becoming acquainted with the topic of social design, and for young practitioners who are considering involvement in this field of practice. This chapter provides a general context as to why this topic is relevant today. The chapter also includes a section on definitions, where I present in simple terms concepts that are common in the social sciences, but that sometimes can come across as arcane for architecture students. They include positionality, subaltern, orientalism, imperialism, and many others.

Chapter 1 is very relevant for readers interested in the critical theory of sustainability. I believe becoming familiar with this theory is crucial, because the common consensus in architecture and other disciplines is that sustainability is only a good thing, and therefore it should be immune to criticism. This chapter clearly explains the limitations of sustainability when it comes to poverty alleviation practice.

Chapters 2 and 3, which are devoted to the case studies, provide details that are illustrative of the many nuances typically found in social design work in the field. The stories I tell in those chapters are also significant insofar as they provide an alternative version to narratives of success about award-winning projects that have been traditionally celebrated in media and literature. This alternative version is from the project beneficiaries themselves, who provide a firsthand description of their real experience with those projects.

Sustainability and Privilege can be purchased from any major retailer including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-A-Million. I suggest looking first at your local bookstore.

• Read:

Description of the book on the University of Virginia Press’ website.

Google Books preview

JStor access to eBook through your institution.

Sample chapter