Negotiating Worldly Relationships

Abstract

Workers and nature are exhausted by architectural production. WE ARE TIRED. As a trade union of architectural workers in the UK, UVW-SAW members reflect on the project of workplace organising as renegotiating relationships: between workers, and the world. Worker and nature exploitation are closely intertwined: both are subject to the extractive rationale of capital. Although an awareness of architecture’s entanglement with environmental destruction is flaunted in academia, practice and professional institutions, little is done beyond the pledge. Across the sector, the green-washed discourse of necessary transformation still conceives of architects as the agents of change - without recognising the ties to capital which restrict meaningful action. Instead, we position ourselves as architectural workers: realising our crucial position in feeding planetary exhaustion through our own overwork. Radical possibilities emerge when recognising our plural subject position, inclusive of all workers implicated in the production of architecture, thus opening real opportunity for disruption.

Keywords

• workers
• trade unions
• exploitation
• environment
• exhaustion
• climate justice