SUSTAINABILITY COLLECTIVE/ Guiding Principles & Actionable Objectives

Emerging in 2018, the Waterloo Architecture Sustainability Collective has had a continually evolving role within our school, community, and profession as we advocate for environmental justice. For today’s global day of Climate Action, September 25th 2020, members of the Sustainability Collective would like to take a moment to draw attention to some of our previously unpublished work. The following two documents were developed following the workshops and discussions which took place at the School of Architecture around the 2019 Climate Strike, but remained unpublished in the wake of COVID-19 :

1. A list below of our Guiding Principles, an evolving manifesto and ongoing guide for the Collective and our school. 
2. As well as a link to our list of Actionable Objectives, developed in response to our December 2019 curriculum workshop, a conversation with students, faculty and staff from the School of Architecture on sustainable curriculum. 

While these documents are certainly somewhat dated and will evolve in the future, especially as we continue to collaborate with Treaty Lands, Global Stories, we feel strongly that they still serve as a valuable record of student and faculty work, and provide some clear insight into steps and principles for the creation of a more equitable curriculum and profession. 

Within the context of the ongoing protests for Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and the formation of new racial and environmental equity initiatives within our own school, now is a critical moment to reflect on our values as architects. We must recognize that environmental rights and human rights are inextricably linked. Climate Change has not been an even process, but a crisis which disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous and people of colour. As architects we must also recognize that buildings and building construction constitute nearly 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. While this makes us complicit in climate injustices, it also provides one very clear route to action. We must serve as advocates for environmentally conscious building practices. Now, more than ever, it is vital that we recognize the interconnected nature of these movements and their relationships to environmental justice.

If any staff, faculty, or students, have interest in this type of work, we encourage you to reach out to us with any initiatives or ideas at sustainability.uwsa@gmail.com.

Guiding Principles

1. We advocate that the existential threat of a changing climate must inform our personal, educational, and professional practices. We aspire to foster a conscientiousness, empathetic, and active responsibility for the climate crisis, which will lead to productive conversations and actions in our school and beyond.

CLIMATE JUSTICE

2. We acknowledge that environmental rights and human rights are inextricably linked. Our profession must emphasize climate justice with the same value we equate to other issues of social inequality in design.

3. We recognize the need to respect and promote indigenous land and resource rights, and maintain that architectural institutions must address the intrinsic relationship between colonial narratives and the climate crisis.

ENCOURAGE INNOVATION IN DESIGN

4. We advocate for innovative, principle based thinking which goes beyond prescriptive approaches to environmental design.

5. We recognize architecture’s intrinsic relation to material consciousness. We must encourage and celebrate more thoughtful approaches to material use and sourcing at all levels, both in design processes and construction.

DEVELOPING PATHS TO CRITICAL PRACTICE 

6. We aspire to bridge the gap between architectural education and practice, empowering the development of alternative paths towards environmental design.

7. We acknowledge that architecture and architects are directly complicit in the rapid degradation of the environment. Architects must take responsibility in advocating for systemic change, beginning with design systems. 

8. We reject architectural greenwashing. We must remain critical of leveraging the climate crisis in the pursuit of profit or publicity.

CONTINUED LEARNING AND GROWTH

9. We promote networked knowledge sharing across the educational and professional community.

10. We celebrate, support, and establish community initiatives, curricular objectives, and architectural practices that respond to the climate emergency.
    
11. We reflect on our own inadequacy, ignorance, and hypocrisy in navigating the climate emergency, remaining open to continued learning, discussion, and dissemination of emerging information.