Economy frames any discussion of architecture and climate. Every move one makes as a spatial practitioner is haunted by the shadow of economic orthodoxies — a monetary darkness that shuts out other possibilities. Fredric Jameson’s infamous dictum, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, started as a provocation for people to act. Yet it has since become an accepted statement of inevitability. However, it no longer holds water. The end of capitalism is not simply being imagined; its founding tenets are being challenged, here and now, by the conditions of climate breakdown. This actualisation rewrites the dictum: the threat of the end of a world demands that we imagine and enact the end of capitalism. The reason is simple: the history of capitalism is bound to the history of climate. The machinations of capital have directly caused the crises of ecological collapse. In relation to knowledge, the term Plantationocene recognises the role of colonial activity in expropriating human and natural resources in service of expanding European economies. In the Capitalocene, everything — human and more-than-human — is reduced to abstract units of exchange, there to be traded and profited from.

Architecture is not an innocent bystander in this relentless process of economic exploitation of people and planet. First, it is deployed as a marker of the sustained progress demanded by the Modern Project and its economy; continuous innovation is hard-wired as a necessity for both modernity and architecture. Second, the discipline of architecture is the agent and materialisation of the endless growth that capitalism relies on. The consequences of this growth on environmental conditions are profound, with human consumption far exceeding planetary boundaries. Finally, the acts and products of architecture are inevitably shaped by market demands and are therefore bound to the consequences of those economic systems — most notably their extractivist base. Architecture has followed a broader shift from public to private sectors of the built environment’s design, production, and maintenance. As everything from housing to infrastructure has been outsourced to the market, architecture, both as discipline and profession, has been overwhelmingly exposed to and controlled by neoliberal forces.

The discipline and profession of architecture are thus bound to the dominant economic structures of modernity, and with this are complicit in capitalism’s role in climate breakdown, particularly as the culture and operations of architecture have become increasingly financialised. This is not an accusation but a statement of fact. This complicity challenges the liberal foundations of the profession, which has long positioned architecture as a public good. To avoid the charge of collusion with the darker forces of capital, the discipline of architecture plays two cards. First, it asserts itself as an art form that is somehow elevated above worldly concerns. Second, it positions its practitioners as experts who are there to fix the world’s problems, a seemingly worthy posture that continues today under the guise of architectural sustainability. But if architecture is to become genuinely effective in engaging with climate breakdown, it must acknowledge its role in the systems that produced the crisis. This means looking upstream to the past conditions that have shaped the discipline, and recognising how architecture is implicated in the economic causes of climate breakdown.

Because the forces of capitalism have propelled the trajectory of ecological collapse since the colonial era, it is necessary to recognise and implement other economic models to divert that path. However, such is the hold of late capitalism that it blocks the potential to envisage other economies. Capitalist realism, a term of the late British critic Mark Fisher, suggests that there is only one feasible and acceptable mode of economic conduct — one that permeates all aspects of life. Within this system, architecture is overseen and tormented by the demands of profit-obsessed economics, and under these restrictions, cannot release its spatial imagination in support of new social and economic formations.

There are several broad approaches to dealing with these impasses. The first is to employ the practices of capitalism but in ways that subverts or bypasses standard systems. However, one of capitalism’s most irrepressible traits is its ability to appropriate and use such tactics to its own ends. Open-source peer-to-peer networks, for example, often begin as disruptive alternatives but are quickly assimilated and controlled by corporate capital. Both the telephony software Skype and developers’ resource GitHub — which started out as free software — were bought out by Microsoft and absorbed into its corporate infrastructure. In urban contexts, similar dynamics apply. The collective spirit of temporary urban installations or markets has been commodified by developers as ‘pop-ups’, used to maximise return on empty sites awaiting development; there are now architects specialising in ‘meanwhile’ design. A second approach is to work within systems of the capitalist economy and attempt to make them more responsible in relation to planetary boundaries. This is the logic behind so-called green capitalism, where environmental issues are addressed through market-based mechanisms using redistributive measures such as carbon credits and offset trading, or government incentives such as those found in various versions of the Green New Deal.¹ In architecture, this approach often manifests in an obsession with sustainability metrics, counting the carbon load of buildings in terms of embodied energy and energy-inuse. However, the ‘greening’ of capital and architecture has a fundamental contradiction: it remains tethered to systems and principles of a market-based economic system that demands perpetual growth. And growth, as a core tenet, is a key driver of climate breakdown. While green capitalism and sustainable architecture may mitigate the worst aspects of environmental collapse, they remain reliant on dominant economic assumptions, and so they fail to disturb them.

A third approach is to look for cracks in existing systems and lever them open to establish hopeful alternatives. Living in a permanent state of anger, anxiety, and critical frustration with existing economic orthodoxies risks paralysis, shutting down the potential of envisioning other ways to act. In Andy Merrifeld’s metaphor, we stand before a Kafkaesque castle, as a symbol of entrenched authority and violence. Rather than attacking it head-on, Merrifield argues for a tunnelling operation that at the same time undermines the castle and finds new routes for the future.² These other routes might begin with a critique of the existing economic structures, but must move quickly beyond to imagine new horizons and values.

A good starting point for surfacing economic alternatives is to think about different growths and measures. Currently the overriding measure of growth is that of GDP, but GDP growth is not accompanied by growth in other indicators such as health, equality, let alone happiness or freedom.³ In fact, growth in GDP is a driver for increasing global inequality, as the wealthiest nations compound their yearly growth from a higher base, leaving the poorest countries further behind. This inequality also plays out at an individual level within the countries, as growth in GDP directly benefits the few over the many. But the most profound effect of economic growth is on planetary ecosystems. One of the most startling economic graphs is one that tracks GDP against material extraction. The correlation is almost exact, one line relentlessly dragging the other up. The people pulling fastest are the world’s top 1% who produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people who make up the poorest two-thirds of humanity.⁴ The politics of growth are thus inseparable from natural resource depletion, degradation of biodiversity and knock-on effects on climate, as well as rising social inequality. All evidence suggests that this addiction to growth has already breached several planetary boundaries, limits that are not abstract measures, but fundamental to human survival.⁵

Dominant architectural paradigms and operations are fully implicated in the systems and consequences of economic growth, not least because the construction of the built environment is so resource-intensive. The sheer material scale of architecture means that it is both a rapacious extractive medium and tied to symbolising and materialising the excesses of growth through thin veneers of progressive form. Architecture is inevitably extractivist, drawing on stocks of planetary resources and exploiting labour in order to maximise returns. Architecture here becomes an agent in widening what is termed the metabolic rift: the alienation of humanity from the natural world. It is more productive to release the definition of growth from the myopic grip of GDP and talk of different growths: to reinstate notions of other forms of abundance by asserting other measures and understandings of value.⁶ This is not a radical proposal — it is already enshrined in the politics of countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, with its Treasury’s adoption of a Living Standards Framework, which supplements standard economic indicators with measures of well-being, social cohesion and environmental health.

Introducing different growths begins by understanding what GDP does not measure. GDP counts economic activity regardless of its social or ecological value (or damage). Crises such as oil spills, earthquakes and wars raise GDP because of the costly rescue and reparation projects they entail. Meanwhile, the unpaid labour of raising children or caring for sick and older people is excluded entirely. What is valued economically has always been determined by white, patriarchal, colonial power — rewarding the kinds of work typically done by white men in the global North, and ignoring other forms of work that support or enable it. Actions that are fundamental for planetary well-being, such as keeping oil and trees in the ground, maintaining water health and halting air pollution, have zero value according to GDP. A recalibration of the economy to value these aspects of the living and social world is urgently necessary to stay within planetary boundaries.

The idea of different growths extends the more commonly used notion of degrowth because it introduces other ways of measuring the world beyond reversing the economic growth of GDP. This shift has direct implications for architecture. First, it requires decoupling the Eurocentric link between progress and growth, so each term can find new, independent meanings with which architecture can engage. Released from the obsession of announcing progress through spectacles of polished form and technique, architecture can spatialise and materialise other interpretations of progress, most notably those that align with climate and social justice. By stepping off the linear treadmill that binds growth to progress, architecture can detach from its servile role within financial markets and find purpose and value beyond delivering short-term profits. Such a purpose can be elaborated through re-understanding the role of the economy not simply as the generation of growth and gain but as the management of resources. This original domestic meaning based on the conditions of the home (oikos), must be seen in a planetary context: as the collective management of the world’s human and more-than-human resources within ecological boundaries.

How a society, and a profession such as architecture, views the use of resources plays a substantial part in determining its economic ethos and systems. In the 1970s, economist Herman Daly proposed steady-state economics, which is defined as an economic system that works within ecological limits. Daly envisioned a square (the economy) placed within a circle (the planetary ecosystem), resisting growth and maintaining closed-loop resource flows.⁷ This diagram influenced Kate Raworth’s influential ‘doughnut economics’ model, where a socially — and ecologically — viable economy sits within an outer circle of environmental limits and an inner circle of social well-being indicators. In the economic diagrams of Daly and Raworth, social and ecological considerations are inseparable. A steady-state model for architecture implies a model that redistributes, renews, repairs and maintains existing resources. This is very different from the default mode of architecture today as determined by the dominant financial models, which is to add more to the human world by taking more from the natural one.

The most productive examples of a steady state approach for architecture extend beyond the retrofit and repair of single buildings (valuable and necessary though this is) into a more systemic design of infrastructures and services that encourage the redistribution of existing materials and resources. A steadystate architecture also draws on the principles of the circular economy, where the linear flow of extraction-use-obsolescence-waste is redirected into a looped system. The architect’s role moves here from designing objects to designing systems that allow these loops to be realised — such as in the work of the Belgian firm Rotor, which has established a platform for tracking salvaged materials for reuse in construction projects [opalis.eu].

Alternative economic systems can also shift timescales. Current dominant economic models are based on short-term targets for profit and growth, particularly when these are tied into the expedient rhythms of politics, which are too often determined by the demands of election cycles rather than any longer-term thinking. Urban development and its architecture typically mirror this short-termism, with the supply of space reflecting the immediate processes of financial exchange from developer to tenant. In this context, architecture is employed to materialise a swift transaction, cut off from long-term cycles. There is a clear severing at play in this commodification of contemporary architecture, with the insistence on financial outcomes separating spatial production from its social and environmental implications and responsibilities. The frenzied pursuit of immediate profit ignores the impacts and consequences downstream in the future and learns nothing from lessons upstream in the past.

Economic and spatial short-termism also disregards the relational and temporal structuring of planetary resources. The ideology of the free market asserts its primacy as a single force that subsumes all other conditions into its logic, overwhelming the interdependence of human and beyond human relations. Instead, the economic and spatial conditions required under climate breakdown need to work with and within the relational contexts of planetary systems, remembering the joint etymology of the words economy and ecology. This means bridging between otherwise disparate disciplines, scales, and geographies to reflect that climate needs to be understood and addressed as a set of relations. These relationships are held together spatially, which is where the architect’s role as spatial agent comes in, working with others to envisage new socio-economic conditions and their spatial implications.

Economic, political, and spatial short-termism is also incompatible with the temporal aspects of planetary resources, which have evolved in epochal timescales that far exceed human cycles. Any spatial negotiation in the face of climate breakdown thus needs to respect the temporal depth of natural systems, from how they have evolved to their future endurance. Such an approach draws on the work of the feminist economists Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, who talk about economics in terms of ecology, as a living and evolving system of interdependencies.

An economic obsession with the now, and the production of instant futures, leads to a forgetting of the past conditions that have constituted the present. There is a disregard to the exploitation of human and natural resources on which modern economies were built — particularly in relation to colonial histories and slavery, where the conjoined expropriation of Indigenous people, land and resources laid the foundations for climate collapse. Here human and beyond-human resources were treated as abstract units of financial exchange. Remembering these racist foundations is necessary if such divisive and violent acts of accumulation are not to be repeated. Tragically, these colonial methods are still being deployed: from the accumulation of agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa by Global North nations to the planting of lucrative forests for spurious carbon-offset schemes. In both cases, this leads to the displacement of Indigenous communities and shifting of carbon load from the Global North to the Global South. In architecture, the same neo-colonial behaviours are apparent in the expansion of Western architectural practices into the Global South, bringing with them the same economic and spatial models that have historically damaged vernacular networks and natural ecosystems. Angola’s capital city of Luanda is a prominent case. Following the end of the civil war in 2002, the city experienced a building frenzy, funded by offshore oil. Over 200,000 city dwellers were displaced as German, US, British, Chinese and Portuguese consultants transformed the city into a vision of Western modernity, largely inappropriate for the tropical climate and the living patterns of the Angolan citizens.⁸ Similar patterns of Chinese and Western neo-colonial urban development are repeated across sub-Saharan Africa.

Because the status quo holds such sway over our lives, any thinking outside the strictures and structures of capitalism is too easily dismissed as fanciful. However, the entrenched connection between market forces to ecological collapse makes this rethinking a necessity. The potential to think beyond the existing system is not a utopian impulse, but an urgent need. Alternative economic systems can be found in South America that intentionally move away from colonial models into ones that relate climate justice with social justice by establishing new social contracts. The best-known of these is found in the concept of buen vivir (Spanish for ‘living well’), which is based on the Indigenous Amazonian concept of sumac kawsay or ‘living in completeness’. Buen vivir emerged in several regions of South America around 2000 as a coalition of Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, ecologists, feminists, and activists. These groups worked from long-standing processes of resistance to fight austerity measures imposed by neoliberal political regimes and industrial damage to habitats and Indigenous territories. In the regions of Ecuador and Bolivia, Indigenous organisers promoted plurinationalism, intercultural identity, and the rights of nature as foundational principles. Though buen vivir avoids prescribing a formalised set of rules or practices, it is characterised by its multi-species definition of rights and its nonlinear understanding of life as an ongoing process of regeneration and evolution. Buen vivir’s non-linear temporality is a direct rebuttal of the colonial and neocolonial industrial development projects that have damaged ecologies and societies across the Andes and the Amazon basin. Rejecting colonial economies of land ownership, buen vivir understands territory as a living system of multispecies relations, which must be supported by ecologically respectful worldviews, principles, and customs. Driven not by instrumental systems aimed at economic growth but by relations of human and non-human value, buen vivir redefines growth as a flourishing of communities and ecosystems in tandem.

Alternative economic models also exist in Europe, some of which bring inventive and surprising spatial conditions–for instance co-housing schemes based on shared ownership that liberate the dwellers from the traditional markers and boundaries of property ownership and use. The Spanish housing cooperative La Borda focuses on sharing ideas, space, and facilities in a process of co-design and cohabitation, challenging the traditional model of individual ownership and consumption. La Borda demonstrates the social and environmental value of designing housing carefully, over time, and with enough imagination to move beyond private ownership conventions towards convivial and climate attuned alternatives. The spatial difference between these and standard market-led housing is sometimes startling, with much more common space, and less private boundaries, promoting different living patterns.

This approach can also be seen in the Swiss housing cooperative Mehr als Wohnen, where architects Duplex mix private and communal spaces in innovative ways, generally by minimising the individual accommodation (a one-person studio can be as little as 25 square meters) to allow for generous shared facilities such as kitchens, dining and living areas, laundries, and playrooms. This system of clustering around shared facilities also works at a large scale, as the thirteen blocks are intersected by open spaces for a wide range of uses, as well as workspaces, restaurants, and shops. The opportunity now is to expand these alternative economic models into other social and spatial conditions. These are acts of imagination and hard work, opening possibilities in which new economic models are spatialised in both material and immaterial ways. All aspects discussed here — different growths, management of resources, temporal depth and relational aspects — can be brought together in a renewed understanding of an economy designed to serve the many (human and more-than-human) and not the few.

Capitalist economies consistently drive wealth into the hands of privileged individuals and private corporations away from the arena of public and planetary good. This has direct spatial consequences: territorial boundaries are erected to protect private assets. Against this, on the premise that we are all in this together, an economy of the commons sets conditions for mutual support and multiple forms of abundance. US economist and Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom has been instrumental in reframing economic debate with her theories of the commons.⁹ She showed how communities can, and do, manage common resources in a sustainable and collaborative manner that resists the exploitations and inequalities of capitalism. They are economies that value stewardship over ownership, conveying interspecies and intergenerational responsibility: land, water, and air are not assets but something to be cared for with others. And because the commons are never isolated, such collective economies are necessarily embedded in planetary networks. When these networks collapse, so do the commons. New economic models act as a profound liberatory force and collaborator for a future architecture. They bring with them new social and ecological contracts, and with those, new spatial relations.

Bio

MOULD is a research collective of Sarah Bovelett, Anthony Powis, Tatjana Schneider, Christina Serifi, Jeremy Till, and Becca Voelcker. MOULD’s latest research project, Architecture is Climate, grew out of the research grant Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is supported by Technische Universität Braunschweig and Central Saint Martins (UAL). More information can be found at architectureisclimate.net.

Book

Architecture is Climate (by MOULD, dpr barcelona, 2025) reimagines the very foundations of architecture in an age of crises. Rejecting outdated paradigms of endless linear growth, technocratic fixes, and the separation of humans from nature, this provocative and hopeful book argues that architecture must be fundamentally rethought — not as the design of objects, but as a practice entangled with climate, politics, history, and social justice.

Through eight key themes — knowledge, economy, land, resources, infrastructure, work, policy, and culture — Architecture is Climate explores how climate breakdown reshapes every aspect of architectural thinking and doing. Drawing on diverse voices, and grounded examples from around the world, it offers not just a critique of the status quo but a vision of other possible architectures — and climates — already in the making.

Notes

1 For a critique of the underlying premises of Green Capitalism see: Adrienne Buller, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

2 Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

3 For a detailed analysis of the impacts of growth see: Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (London: Penguin, 2020).

4See Oxfam International, Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99%, (2023), https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/ resources/climate-equality-a-planetfor- the-99-621551/. GDP vs Extraction graph in United Nations Statistics Division, “Goal 12”: https://unstats. un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-12/.

5“Planetary Boundaries”, Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2012, https://www. stockholmresilience.org/research/ planetary-boundaries.html.

6 See for example: “GDP Alternatives: 7 Ways to Measure a Country’s Wealth”, Ethical Network, n.d., https://ethical. net/politics/gdp-alternatives-7-waysto- measure-countries-wealth/.

7 Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1977). See also Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

8 See Claudia Gastrow, “Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda, Angola: Aesthetic Dissent”, Antipode, 49.2 (2017), pp. 377–96.

9 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).