BRIEFING
2. The Walter Segal method building at Coin Street Building has now been recycled for a new community use in South London as the Oasis Play Building in Stockwell. © Ben Marks
that once over 3.5% of a population become actively involved in non-violent civil disobedience, it is likely to tip the government to take action. I set up Landscape for Future as a social media campaign in March to help get the message out to my landscape companions. Since then we have formed into a small group and along with many other landscape architects attended the Global Strike for Climate on Friday 20th September. Some of us congregated with the Green Building Council in London, others joined strikes in St Albans, Cambridge, Sheffield and Bristol. Our President, Adam White, attended with the International Federation of Landscape Architects in Oslo. So next time I’d like to see us all out on the street. It is worth quoting Greta Thunberg in her speech made to the US Congress this September: “And no matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we cannot make “deals” with physics.” Anna French is a landscape architect and founder of Landscape for Future
he Anthropocene T Equation, Owen Gaffney, Will Steffen. First Published February 10, 2017 2 “Why Civil Resistance Works, The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict”, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan – https://www. ericachenoweth.com/ research/wcrw
Julia Barfield I woke up to the urgency of the situation last October when I read about the IPCC report – and became obsessed. When the world’s top scientists warn that we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe we have to listen and act – professionally, politically and personally. As professionals there is a lot we can do: –– We need to be fundamentally rethinking our approach and move towards more regenerative design principles based on a model of Doughnut economics and the circular economy –– We need to design low energy buildings, both embodied and in use and go further to be energy positive –– Buildings need to be loose fit, flexible and adaptable to changing needs and uses –– We need to design for long life, with durable, low embodied carbon, renewable materials with building services components that are easy to maintain and replace –– We should be designing with
disassembly in mind and build out of reused and recycled materials so that we generate less waste, based on cradle to cradle principles –– We need to share knowledge and research on an open source basis and get much better at post occupancy –– We also need to crack the most difficult challenge of all – the decarbonisation and upgrading our of existing housing stock I am on the steering group of the Architects Declares movement. Having morphed into Construction Declares to include all of the construction community, we now have 1500 practices around the world who have signed up and it’s growing daily. The movement sets out 11 commitments of positive action and in November we are gathering to discuss collectively – ‘what next’. It is a grassroots, decentralised network where every signatory has committed to push ahead with their clients, co‑professionals and supply chains. This is where it gets political, because we need government commitment to higher building standards, a fabric first approach, phasing out fossil fuels completely. The government should remove VAT on refurbishment – VAT was even recently added to solar power while tripling subsidies on fossil fuels! The
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