Degrowth, Energy Sobriety, Low-Tech: Towards an Architecture of Conviviality
Degrowth. Post-growth. Beyond growth. The terms are nuanced, but they stand for a multidisciplinarity whole, engaging various scales, methods, and fields, from the sciences to the humanities through the social sciences. The starting point is as challenging as it is clear: we need to pull an emergency brake on our total planetary energy expenditure.
We’re not talking about simply lowering the rate of expenditure with ever more efficient structures of energy dissipation — which risks an increase in total consumption — but about a reduction in the total number of joules or kilowatt hours consumed each day. Moreover, this quantity needs to be subtracted where it is most lavishly expended: in high-income societies.
But aren’t we growing green energy infrastructure? If our energy is clean, do we still need to decrease consumption?
Because of our growing demand, all energy production is increasing — clean and dirty. So, while the global availability of renewable energy increased 50 percent in 2023 alone, non-renewable energy production has also increased. Production of coal, crude oil, and natural gas reached all-time highs in 2023, despite the fact that their respective shares of total energy production have decreased. We’re not transitioning between sources of energy as much as accumulating more sources. Our growing renewable energy infrastructure may be a reason for celebration, but renewables still account for less than 20 percent of total global consumption. Moreover, this construction is far from sustainable (photovoltaic panels require rare metals; wind farms need enormous amounts of steel, and so forth). Even if we could meet current global demand with renewables, simply building the infrastructure would drive us over planetary tipping points, which are irreversible.
Why is my energy consumption growing? Until recently, my energy bills had not significantly increased in years, relative to inflation.
Coupled with increased consumption and governmental subsidies on energy, the real cost of electricity has dropped steadily for the past century, while appliances have become increasingly efficient, not to mention numerous. Three decades ago, my first laptop ran on 4MB of RAM. I’m typing these words on a 16GB machine, but it didn’t cost four thousand times more. It operates significantly faster. But the demands levied on it by energivore applications have increased as well, and its energy consumption has more than doubled. (Photoshop’s minimum requirement moved from 2MB to 8GB in that same 30-year period.)
Energy consumption is growing similarly in most sectors, e.g. transportation, the building industry, and computing. Cloud computing and storage aren’t truly dematerialized; worldwide, data centers currently consume energy at rates equivalent to that of the United Kingdom; AI and cryptocurrency need as much yearly, each, as Argentina or Sweden. More concerning is the 20 to 40 percent annual increase in these rates, despite gains in efficiency. In reality, the more efficient a system is, the more we demand of it. This is a textbook example of the rebound effect, which explains the ubiquity of exponential curves in the era known as “the great acceleration.” Our mascot is the Red Queen, who tells Alice that “here, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Examples of the rebound effect: half-off sales encourage acquisition more than savings. The fuel-efficient car enables further travel on the same transportation budget, but does not motivate limits on fuel expenditure. Or take agriculture: use of pesticides and fertilizers has reduced fallow lands, increasing productivity along with water consumption. Time and money are saved, leading to a measurable if misleading increase in efficiency, and hence decrease in cost. But all this comes at the detriment of soil and water.
When efficiency technologies lead to an actual increase (rather than a measured decrease) in total resource consumption, the rebound effect is called the Jevons Paradox, after William Jevons’s 19th-century observations on the increased consumption of coal following the development of James Watt’s energy-efficient steam engine. This increase is potentially unlimited: investment in a better-insulated home can result in cost savings that are reinvested in a Dubai vacation.
So, should I return to my old typewriter?
It’s not so simple. In the same way that, if you don’t keep running upgrades, your computer will become dysfunctional, societies have few options but to keep “upgrading,” since the measure of a nation’s well-being is based on the growth of its GDP. But each upgrade increases gradients of social inequality. Try living without the internet, an email address, or a smartphone. Such disconnectivity is either a luxury for those with personal assistants, or a form of digital poverty.
Decoupling GDP growth, primary energy consumption, greenhouse-gas emissions, and global warming is a myth; at planetary scale, these indicators track one another closely. In short: we need to keep producing stuff to feed a growth economy, but a) we don’t need most of it, and b) it’s killing the planet. A third of the global food supply now goes to waste; the environmental consequences of fast fashion are staggering; bullshit jobs dominate the workforce; batshit jobs have emerged as an environmentally disastrous category. Yet none of this waste is extraneous. We meet and exceed our consumption demands precisely because wasteful production grows our GDP.
The pattern is independent of scale. As demand increases when resources are limited, competition drives distribution, resulting in another synchronous growth pair: accumulation (a.k.a. hoarding) and inequality. With each round of this toxic musical chairs, a seat is removed, until resources are held by a fraction of the population. Consider the finite (even dwindling) “resource” that is college-bound students. One cannot realize the growth mission of flagship universities without the simultaneous dissolution of regional colleges. More significantly: to see students (or even crude oil) as a resource is symptomatic of the problem.
This sounds like a lot of physics, geopolitics, economics …. What about architecture?
We cannot rely on legislatures to make up for our loss of common sense. Radical change needs to come from the ground up. Narratives must be rewritten, epistemologies shifted. The built environment accounts for over 40 percent of energy consumption. Architects cannot ethically ignore this conversation.
We can, on the other hand, help to redraw a world in which total energy demand is equitably lowered. We can engage at the scale of the room or that of the bioregion; through passive technologies or programming for low-energy lifestyles; through the spatial articulation of what George Monbiot has termed “private sufficiency, public luxury.” A built environment is a physical reification of fictions we mistake for certitudes, and our built environments index our belief in economic growth. Culturally, we are attuned to economic costs; we have been trained, simultaneously, not to see or feel energy costs. Yet the built environment does not only reflect our values, gestures, and behaviors. It (re)produces them. New forms and practices of dwelling can thereby, over time, help to transform our most deep-seated perspectives.
The readings assembled here are organized into four sections, and represent a wide spectrum of disciplines, methods, and genres, on scales from that of the cosmos to the individual person’s hand. Together, they aim to instruct our gaze and help us to read, in the material world, the impact of energy flows. Edifying our imaginations and perceptions transforms how we represent the world, which helps us to begin to write it anew. In this cycle there flourishes the most renewable resource of all: optimism. As the youth of 1968 claimed, “be realistic, demand the impossible!” Or, as the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University phrased it: Aim high, Degrow!
I. HOW WE GOT HERE: SUBJUGATION AS A MEANS OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
We may struggle to think outside expansionist capitalism. Yet growthism is characteristic only of the past 500 years, roughly the last three percent of human history. There was nothing natural about the rise of capitalism. But, once launched, it triggered escalation of elite accumulation, from which all processes of colonization derive: privatization of natural resources (enclosure); territorial expansion (Indigenous dispossession); appropriation of bodies (slavery); demonization of animistic worldviews (witch hunts); and normalization of cultural hegemony.
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution
Harper & Row, 1980
An environmental scientist and historian explains the paradigm shift in 16th-century Europe from an organic conception of Earth as a nurturing mother to a scientific rationalism that legitimated views of nature, peasants, and laborers as inexhaustible sources to fuel power — matter to be controlled, exploited, and turned into mechanical work (the unit of work in physics is equal to the unit of energy).
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Autonomedia, 2004
A feminist philosopher analyzes the role of women in the reproduction of labor power, and helps us understand the mechanisms of capital accumulation through enclosure — appropriation of communal lands and bodies, but also of social relations and know-how, as well as through the dismantling of local autonomy and mass pauperization.
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
Penguin, 2021
An economic anthropologist makes explicit the connections between colonization, economic growth, elite accumulation, and environmental degradation. Hickel concludes by outlining pathways towards a post-capitalist imaginary: “Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that’s fizzing with life.”
Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity
Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form (Fall 2019)
In an architectural-historical narrative whose catchphrase might be “form follows energy,” Iturbe introduces the concept of “Carbon Forms” — elements of the built environment that are not only adapted to the availability of cheap energy, but have irreversibly given “form to energy-intensive ways of life” that require relentless spatial development and the concomitant intensification of energy demand.
II. ON ENERGY-FLOW MANAGEMENT AND THE PRODUCTION OF POWER
The greatest obstacle to reducing energy expenditure at global scale is that it demands those with the most power to relinquish it. Power is power: this is not a tautology. In physics, power is proportional to how fast we can move matter across space or raise its temperature. Power is maximized when the rate of expenditure is maximized. Not coincidentally, that looks like profit-driven capitalism, and war. (And love, but all too few have noticed.) Texts in this section help us see the world as an administration of energy flows.
Energy and Economic Myths
From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen’s "New Economics" in Eight Essays
Routledge, 2011
A pathbreaking ecological economist explains how our economic system is rooted in the myth of perpetual motion, never having incorporated key findings of 19th-century thermodynamics: while energy remains a constant entity (First Law), some of it will irreversibly degrade into heat (Second Law). Margins of error between theoretical models and physical experiments due to, say, friction, are therefore not negligible, but define the limits of our material world. For instance, the more a handful of coins are traded (GDP growth), the faster they erode into dust (entropy), and consequently, the more ore will be needed to keep coins in circulation (resource extraction).
Energy and Equity
Harper & Row, 1974
Originally published in Le Monde, this essay uses the development of industrialized transportation — from the bicycle to highways — to illustrate the mechanisms of dependency and control that emerge in a society beyond an optimal threshold of energy consumption, at the cost of social freedoms, equity, and cultural diversity. In other texts, Illich illustrated this “threshold of counterproductivity” through examples drawn from education or healthcare, all characterized by a switch between means and ends.
Dreams of Disconnection: From the Autonomous House to Self-Sufficient Territories
Manchester University Press, 2021
Tracking the history of architecture’s increasing connectivity and energy dependency, Lopez presents the development of infrastructural “grids” and “webs” as political instruments that have simultaneously enabled social progress and legitimized economic subjection. In the second half of the book, she examines the energy autonomy movement that bloomed after the 1973 oil crisis, as seen through its many architectural and urban experiments, e.g. the Drop City community in Colorado, and Alexander Pike’s Autonomous Housing Project.
World Without End
Penguin, 2024
A graphic artist (Blain) works with a climate expert (Jancovici) to explain the impact of energy on our social structures. In France, where it was first published, their graphic novel became the best-selling book of 2022.
BONUS ROUND: MORE GRAPHIC NOVELS
◻️ Dan Nott, Hidden Systems, Random House Graphic, 2023
◻️ Claire Alet & Benjamin Adam, Thomas Piketty's Capital & Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, Abrams Books, 2024
◻️ Céline Keller, Who's Afraid of Degrowth? (free pdf), 2024III. ON LOW-ENERGY ARCHITECTURES: LOW-TECH AND VERNACULAR VALUES
Institutions, technologies, and apparatuses, a.k.a. “Carbon Forms,” create demand and control its escalation through the imposition of “necessary updates.” This process concerned Ivan Illich who, in the early 1970s, identified the “thresholds of counterproductivity” beyond which unrestrained growth reverses roles: institutions no longer serve publics but mobilize users at the service of industrial productivity. Illich saw emancipatory alternatives in tools that support “a life of action over a life of consumption,” and in vernacular practices that counter manufactured dependencies with autonomous self-sustenance. These texts offer examples.
Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
The New Press, 1995
In this chapter, hooks contrasts state-built standardized housing with her grandparents’ self-constructed shack, shaped to meet the needs of their family. Denouncing the former as a dehumanizing “blueprint of sameness” that conjoined poverty with powerlessness by disrupting people’s ability to shape their environment, hooks praises the emancipatory capacity of the latter, which she locates in a cultural genealogy of resistance. The absence of material privilege, she tells us, far from limiting meaningful engagement with living spaces, enabled for her grandparents a liberatory creativity.
The Clothed Home
After Comfort: A User’s Guide
e-flux Architecture (October 2023)
An architectural historian and curator reminds us that a building’s operational energy use is not determined solely by its mechanical systems. Traditional responses to seasonal change entail “clothing” for the building; to partition and insulate volumes of spaces for heating in the winter, or to shade and aerate spaces in the summer. Unlike mere control of a thermostat, these vernacular practices of dwelling foreground, rather than hide, cyclical environmental changes. In the process, dwellers are empowered.
The Age of Low Tech
Bristol University Press, 2020
An engineer and rare metals expert urges us to privilege crude, controllable, resource-efficient technologies over those whose manufactured necessity, built-in obsolescence, or irreparability are ethically questionable. Bihouix’s argument is as appealing as it is powerful, urging quality, common sense, and slowness to make a refreshing return.
BONUS ROUND: EXHIBITIONS
◻️ BIO27 Super Vernaculars: Design for a Regenerative Future (Museum of Architecture and Design, organized by Jane Withers (Ljubljana, 2022)
◻️ +/- 1 °C: In Search of Well-Tempered Architecture, organized by Jure Grohar, Eva Gusel, Maša Mertelj, Anja Vidic, and Matic Vrabič (Republic of Slovenia Pavilion,18th International Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2023)
◻️ Lightweight Energy: Uses, Architectures, Landscapes, organized by Raphaël Ménard (Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Paris, 2024-24)IV. ON LOW-ENERGY LIFESTYLES: MAINTENANCE, CARE, AND CONVIVIALITY
Defenders of high-energy (high-income) societies — more specifically of the imperial mode of living they have normalized — tend to dismiss alternative forms of social organization as sinister, predicated on extreme austerity measures, retrograde living conditions, and/or totalitarianism. Rather than equate purchasing power with happiness, defenders of social and environmental justice may oppose the term “austerity“ with “frugality,” “sobriety,“ or even “alternative hedonism.” Such framings privilege sustainable well-being over regimes of scarcity. Walter Benjamin traced, in the built environment, genealogies not only of capitalism, but also of architecture’s complicity in manufacturing commodity fetishism. Yet he also identified a reverse phantasmagoric power: one that awakens, demystifies, and illuminates. In this way, the following texts might read as design briefs.
Maintenance and Care
Places Journal
A media studies scholar and urban anthropologist mends holes in disciplinary literatures (from architecture to economics) that exclude discourses of maintenance. From the scale of urban infrastructures to that of the computer chip, Mattern invites us to critically rethink hierarchies of societal stewardship, and attend to reproductive laborers — carers, repairers, those who care for those who repair — hidden behind officially revered agents of economic growth: innovators and producers.
Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury
Schumacher Center, 2020
An environmental activist and journalist considers enclosure (land-grabs) and the loss of commons as these have led to acute inequality, in which “private luxury deprives other people of their private sufficiency.” In this 40th annual E. F. Schumacher lecture, Monbiot discusses the commons as a system that ensures equal shares of resources — whether land itself or the products arising from it — and calls for its urgent restitution.
The Trouble with Consumption
Places Journal
A philosopher points to the contradictions between governments’ claims of environmental concern and their support of financial sectors, all too often achieved through the systemic suppression of alternatives to high-carbon consumerist lifestyles. If voters in affluent societies were to express the fears provoked by the resulting cognitive dissonance, and make explicit their — our — desires for radically healthier, low-energy ways of life, we could pressure our governments to regulate toxic consumption. These arguments are developed in Soper’s book Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (Verso, 2020).
In Conversation with Salima Naji
Journal of Architectural Education (Fall 2023)
A Moroccan architect, in conversation with the editors of the JAE issue about deserts, shares her “ethics of preservation.” Far from the mummification of heritage, she sees in the restoration of and care for vernacular structures a means to access forgotten know-how on building sustainably in hot arid climates. Rather than respond to a short-term logic of productive performance, these traditional practices were slowly developed to ensure the long-term reproduction of life.
BONUS ROUND: PODCASTS
◻️ Katy Shields and Vegard Beyer, "Tipping Point: The True Story of The Limits to Growth," 2023
◻️ Aristide Athanassiadis, Circular Metabolism: "Pathways towards Post-Growth with Julia Steinberger, Jason Hickel, and Georgios Kallis", 2023