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Building Our Collective Future: Architecture of a Green new Deal

Schartman, Mary
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6192-992X
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999697008043

Abstract Details

2020, MARCH, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, neoliberal ideology structures all relations of production and consumption. Within this atmosphere “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” The 2018 IPCC predictions of impending climate catastrophe make this statement darkly prescient as a future where struggle over access to resources becomes imminent. At the same time it opens a gap in the hegemony of capitalist realism: another world must be possible. This emergency has been known to be impending for decades. “The market” has proven its inability to tackle and solve it. For all the benefits of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and net-zero goals for individual projects, this individualized way of lessening energy consumption in our build environment falls incredibly short. The Green New Deal as brought into the public discourse by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in 2018 presents the beginnings of the necessary alternative vision for a program of systematic change to the existing order to reshape not only our energy and infrastructure systems, but the very economic system that brought us to this brink. The Green New Deal is a design idea. It is a request for proposals to make a generational investment to transform land use and the built environment at an unprecedented scale. It will involve not only the design of individual projects but the design of a process for the collective transformation of the entirety of what and how we design and build. Architecture is necessarily implicated in this. And there is opportunity here to transform the very practice of architecture in the process: from a service profession responding primarily to private capital to a profession serving and responsible directly to the public interest both of today and the future. In part this thesis is an analysis of the implications of the Green New Deal on the practice of architecture. It is also a work of speculative fiction. To achieve the sweeping changes necessary, the political will to take this path must still be solidified. This requires the shared belief in not only the desirability but the possibility of a carbon-neutral, economically-just future. Instead of climate crisis requiring a future of individual privation, we have the opportunity to collectively build a world of public luxury. I will examine both works and design processes of other examples of transformative public investment, like the Green New Deal of the 1930s and Red Vienna of the 1920s. Architecturally, what would this new world look like, how would it function, and how do we build it together?
Elizabeth Riorden, M.Arch. (Committee Chair)
Michael McInturf, M.Arch. (Committee Member)
48 p.
Architecture
Green New Deal; Elmwood Place

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Schartman, M. (2020). Building Our Collective Future: Architecture of a Green new Deal [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999697008043

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Schartman, Mary. Building Our Collective Future: Architecture of a Green new Deal. 2020. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999697008043.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Schartman, Mary. "Building Our Collective Future: Architecture of a Green new Deal." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1583999697008043

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1583999697008043
136
© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Building Our Collective Future: Architecture of a Green new Deal by Mary Schartman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.