To build is to destroy. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies—finance, real estate, and the corporate construction industry, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting air, climate, soil, geological features, water resources, fauna, flora, food systems, labor, health, farming activities, and vulnerable local populations; humans and non-humans everywhere. The industry’s actors conceal their role in the ongoing devastation by deploying flaccid ‘sustainability’ campaigns and design gimmicks. In reality, little is done to mitigate the harmful acts of excavating, mining, smelting, manufacturing, transporting, assembling, etc. But as housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines, these stand at the difficult threshold between home provision and depletion: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?
To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, from respecting soil to embracing repair, reuse, and dismantling, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead. The task is immense: It demands an alternative way of making worlds, one that demands a careful inventory of actual and vacant stock, the revaluation of caretaking tasks, a global demolition ban, state commitment to public housing, just zoning plans, robust rent control, anti-vacancy policies and ownership reforms, but also materials end-of-life etiquette and maintenance protocols, to be imagined, designed, formulated, planned, implemented according to context.
Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have: Not demolishing, not building new, building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.