Publication: Special Issue of AD

In early 2012, the Wiley journal Architectural Design (AD) will publish a special issue with the working title ‘The Scarcity Report: Architecture in an age of depleting resources’, edited by Jon Goodbun with Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova.

Leading analysts of all the major resource domains - water, food, material, energy and finance - all tell us that our global industrial growth models driven by the irrationality of financial market speculation are taking the planet to the brink of a series of chronic scarcities. Some of these are determined by real natural limits in terms of diminishing quantities of mineral resources. Other scarcities are based upon our problematic mis-management of natural flows of resources such as water, timber and food (both animals and agriculture). Many others still are simply based upon the socially and geographically uneven development and distribution of these flows, with a transfer of real metabolic value from the poor to the rich areas of the globe. In parallel to these metabolic inputs, industrial economies are also externalising - in a generally catastrophic manner - all kinds of waste sinks. Again this is characterised by an uneven development, typified by flows of waste from rich to poor regions. In all of these cases, existing systemic stresses are expected to transform and intensify in unpredictable ways as a result of climate change and ecosystem shifts. Scarcity, both actual or constructed, has been largely suppressed as topic in recent debates, which have centred around the more emollient term ‘sustainability’. However, there is a rising interest in scarcity as potentially the central feature of societal change in the coming decade. Architectural, urban, planning and design research has multiple forms of engagement with these issues, from developing new forms of analysis of global flows and scarcities, to specific local and global design based responses. In all cases, a full engagement with these issues has the capacity to completely reconfigure design practices in new, radically post-sustainable, directions. The Scarcity Report will make a major contribution to these developments, and will be welcomed by architectural and design practitioners and theorists, and by activists and entrepreneurs more broadly.