Justice as a Material Quality

If a project aims to support progressive social or ecological ends, yet the material production and exchange of capital supports injustice, repression, or even political or racial violence, is the project doomed before it is even completed? This paper will articulate this question and the many challenges associated with it. It will first examine the limited ways that designers can currently interrogate the social impacts of material choices, at the point of their production, within major architectural and landscape architectural rating systems. It will then suggest alternative ways to consider justice through more readily available tools we have today. Material acquisition and production are often not considered within the social equity components of rating systems like LEED, WELL, and SITES. In my experience, questions of social justice are often only considered with regard to the program and purpose of the project, community engagement during the design process, the giving of contracts (based on race or gender), hiring of local workers, and as a post occupancy evaluation to name a few. This does not engage the full scope of influence of a project. In a truly circular analysis of a project, we would ideally also look at how the proceeds of a project’s design and construction impact the world and where those funds go. Articulating these questions and challenges leads to a series of theoretical proposals for where within a project’s design we might be able to account for the way project funds are spent and where within rating systems the design and construction industry might reach a higher standard for what a just project looks like. This will begin to trace the impacts of a project throughout its full material ecology and political economy. This paper recognizes the difficulty of asking these questions, the harder task of trying to answer them, and as such will end with a call for action. A call to recognize our collective responsibility to go beyond the surface understanding of a material and trace its potential to impact political, economic, and social systems in addition to ecological and environmental regimes.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.InterMaterialEco.23.29

Volume Editors
Caryn Brause & Chris Flint Chatto