Housing Justice Carnival

Join the Anthropocene Architecture School and many more for a Carnival-spirited day of housing education: to practically resource and support those working towards housing and spatial justice; to celebrate the home and housing as spaces for transformative change; and to champion the role of healthy housing and compassionate retrofit as part of any Just Transition.

The housing system, as we experience it, is not an inevitability nor is it broken in any way, shape or form: it is working exactly as it was designed to. It atomises and isolates us as housing conditions continue to plummet and fuel poverty continues to rise in poorly maintained homes, with costs of survival rising every year.

Despite radically more energy efficient, more healthy, and lower carbon homes having been technologically possible for decades, growing numbers of people continue to be affected by damp and mould in homes not fit for today's changing climate, impacting their health and wellbeing, and new homes rarely perform as well as we know is technologically possible. Health workers see the impacts of poor housing and rising energy bills on a regular basis, and we deserve far better than the housing we are forced to live in, and that is being built as you read this.

But housing as we experience it has never been an inevitability, alternatives are possible, and in some cases, people have organised and gotten these alternatives up and running. So...what if the provision of accessible, adaptable, affordable, energy efficient and healthy homes, collective care, and the transformation of our material conditions, was put at the heart and soul of a Just Climate Transition?

This will be a day of political, practical and prefigurative educations, and a community meal: bringing together and connecting those building community and people power to positively change things, those building - and those that have built - collective and cooperative alternatives, those looking for where to start directing time towards changing Scottish housing, and those with experience in architecture and the built environment - to provide answers to questions you may have on acquiring community spaces, about healthy homes, on construction and retrofit as climate actions, and otherwise.

Programme

10.00 - Welcome: Our Past, Present and Housing Futures

11.00 - Practical Workshops

• Living Rent - Campaigns and Collective Organising for Tenants Rights
  
• Redcurrant Housing Cooperative - What’s the difference between a commune and a housing cooperative?
  
• Glasgow Commons - Supporting the Vision of Cooperatively Owned Housing, Community and Work Spaces in Glasgow

13.00 - Community Meal with SKIFA

14.00 - Assembly for Healthy Homes - with the Architects Climate Action Network's Climate Literacy Group, Fuel Poverty Action, Living Rent, Medact (TBC), the Scottish Tenants Organisation, the Wyndford Residents Union, and more.

About the Hosts

The Anthropocene Architecture School burst into life during 2019's Architecture Fringe, and in the 6 years since, has created space for, and directly engaged, more than 7600 people through events, lectures and workshops, and many, many more through podcast appearances and published writing - in industry journals, essay collections and contributions to published books. The prefigurative education project fuses Climate Literacy with explorations of Agency, Entanglement, Spatial Justice, and the Radical Imagination, providing insights into the intersections of architecture, construction and the built environment with climate breakdown and the political landscape, how buildings could be reimagined in service to a Just Transition, and the scale of the possible - in academic, community, and industry settings. Since 2019, the AAS has been involved in contributing to and catalysing more than 160 events, taught cohorts at 22 academic institutions internationally, and signposted learners towards over 100 resources through its library. Over its duration, the AAS has been one of architecture's loudest advocates for a Just Transition - challenging ongoing inertia in the architecture and construction sector on taking action during a climate emergency, and of the place of housing in that - challenging the ongoing, exclusionary and industry-centric approaches and attitudes to decarbonisation, demolition and retrofit.