Putting trusses of house in place. Missouri 1938 | Russell Lee, Library of Congress | Public domain
“We will drill, baby, drill!”
Donald Trump, 20 January 2025
Counter-Growth is an active machinery of interruption. Its goal is not adaptation to ecological disaster, but the dismantling of the extractivist logics that sustain it. This article inaugurates a trilogy that articulates a Counter-Growth Movement, both in society at large and within the architectural field.
Counter-Growth is not a promise of patience, but emergency politics for a world on fire. At a historical moment in which the forces of neoliberalism and climate denial are growing and spreading under the wings of the far-right, the field of architecture is caught in a permanent contradiction: on one hand, it needs to evolve towards sustainable practices; on the other, the very definition of architecture is entwined with the idea of limitless construction – a logic that is depleting resources and speeding us towards collapse. Growth is presented as prosperity, development and creative freedom, while degrowth is perceived as condemning us to austerity, scarcity and containment. This dichotomy means that we see the emergence a kind of polarised bipartisanship in which growth is beefed up by financial resources, while degrowth is marginalised and frequently used as a marketing tool for extractive practices. To arrive at a logic of degrowth, we would need to revise its meaning in order to make it accessible, popular and attractive. However, to stop extractive practices, what we need is a “Counter-Growth Movement.”
The Counter-Growth Movement does not palliate the ecological disaster, it attacks its causes.
XXXI aphorisms
I. Against the Economy of Excess
Growth is the unlimited expansion of production based on acritical accumulation, the idea of progress and the pursuit of economic profit over life and available resources.
The architecture of growth is based on systems of unlimited exploitation and extraction of natural and human resources inside and outside of architectural studios, academia and cultural production.
The pedagogy growth encourages disinterest in both politics and the responsibility for the actions needed to bring our designs into being.
The pedagogy of growth turns creativity into performance; imagination into a product; collective thinking into individual competition.
The pedagogy of growth is capitalist, i.e. it promotes the acritical depletion of resources and relies on the exploitation of the labour of certain classes for the benefit of others.
The architectural pedagogy of growth is based on the accumulation of technical knowledge with the aim of building for market logics. Its ultimate goal is to train professionals who could contribute to architectural and technological innovation without taking into account the depletion of natural or human resources.
The architectural pedagogy of growth encourages competitiveness and discourages collaboration among students, focusing on the 19th-century idea of singular genius. It is an education based on ambition not for knowledge, but for individual performance and results, as a prelude to neoliberal dynamics, i.e. those based on economic profit.
The architectural pedagogy of growth does not emphasise critical thinking regarding ways of working, which are reproduced in universities through the exercise of over-production, exploitation and self-exploitation.
II. Against Resilience
The construction sector depletes approximately 40% of global resources, it produces 40% of solid waste and 30% of energy-related CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, sustainability and degrowth have been put forward as solutions to save the industry.
Degrowth is the deliberate reduction of consumption and production as a strategy to minimise the ecological and social impact of growth, without necessarily challenging the structures that sustain it.
Degrowth, while necessary, runs the risk of becoming a practice that fails to address the causes of environmental and social disaster, circumscribing itself to an ethic of reduction that preserves the extractive logics of power. This approach leads to a discourse around sustainability often used for commercial value and as an advertising strategy by companies and institutions alike.
The pedagogy of degrowth, when lacking a critical perspective, runs the risk of becoming a practice that trains in resignation.
The architectural pedagogy of degrowth often focuses on techniques for the reduction of environmental impact, recycling and the reuse and optimisation of materials. However, it is often limited to a discipline of containment – a technical exercise in damage control.
The architectural pedagogy of degrowth can lead students to see architecture as a discipline of efficient resource management, limiting their creative and speculative potential.
The architectural pedagogy of degrowth runs the risk of sacrificing imagination in the name of obedience to standards, training architects to managing the ruins, but not to transform their causes.
Degrowth, if not radicalised, becomes an ethic of endurance: a pedagogy of exhaustion that trains to survive rather than to imagine other futures.
III. In Favour of Creative Resistance
Counter-Growth is the disruption of the logic of growth through the redistribution, reprogramming and filtering of resources, proposing alternative ways of producing beyond unlimited extractive development.
The pedagogies of Counter-Growth trains students to analyse and confront the logic of destructive growth.
The pedagogies of Counter-Growth shows how to identify the systems of power, organisations and economies that sustain ecological destruction, promoting a proactive creative stance.
The pedagogies of Counter-Growth fosters collaboration over competition, emphasising collective work as a strategy for architectural production.
The architectural pedagogies of Counter-Growth vindicates architecture as a political tool of transformation and resistance, countering its apparent neutrality.
The architectural pedagogies of Counter-Growth focuses on design to explore fictions and alternative narratives that propose a spatial, social and economic organisation distinct from both the colonial expansive logic of growth and the resilience of degrowth.
The pedagogies of Counter-Growth teaches tactics of cultural infiltration and design methods that dismantle market logics.
The Counter-Growth Movement seeks to cultivate citizens capable of questioning the systems that perpetuate environmental and human deterioration by identifying them, making them visible and studying how to deactivate them in order to ultimately create others.
IV. Towards a Counter-Growth Movement
The Counter-Growth Movement is not just a theoretical framework; it is an active mechanism of disruption and reinvention. Its aim is not to contain the disaster, but to dismantle the logics that feed it. It does not simply imagine possible futures; it works to build them.
Counter-Growth moves away from the aesthetics of disaster and proposes an ethic of creative insurgency.
Counter-Growth acts from the margins, infiltrating the dominant structures and generating alternative systems out of the spotlight.
Counter-Growth understands that the real battle is not just about resources, but also about narratives. Hence, it fights through language – infiltrating discourses, rewriting symbols, altering meanings, morphing the narratives that justify exploitation.
The Counter-Growth Movement is a call to rethink architecture, economics, education and cultural production, while rejecting both resilience and adaptation.
The Counter-Growth Movement does not teach resignation, but rather attack and defence; not waiting but re-invention.
Counter-Growth is not a promise of patience, but emergency politics for a world on fire.
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