As c\a\n\a\d\a’s leading voice in architectural journalism, and at a time when support for architectural criticism has waned, Canadian Architect’s review of Not for Sale! by Architects Against Housing Alienation at the Venice Biennale is important. We are grateful for this interest, and we appreciate Adele Weder’s detailed engagement with our work (see CA, August 2023). Her review is helping us hone our arguments and work to improve the quality of our project and its direction.
However, we question the impression of our Not for Sale! campaign that your readership received and are writing here to share our perspective. Our project is ongoing and won’t end when the exhibition closes in late November. The exhibition is just one step in a long process of creating real change and new forms of advocacy that architects across c\a\n\a\d\a can participate in. In other words, it’s a “hot mess” for a purpose, and in the best way.
First, we wholeheartedly agree that transforming the housing system is significantly a design problem and requires images as well as words. Second, the radically collaborative nature of the project is essential to its functioning as an inclusive campaign. It might indeed require a “dog’s breakfast” of different approaches to solve the magnitude of brokenness we face. Third, we think meaningful demands need to exceed what is currently possible in our political climate in order to change the conversation about housing.
On our first point, each of the ten demands that comprise the campaign is richly illustrated with an architectural project, designed by a number of the country’s most celebrated architects, though the review unfortunately did not describe this work. We purposely designed the pavilion–the heart-quarters of a campaign to imagine possibilities for decommodified architecture in c\a\n\a\d\a–to be a “graphic riot”. It includes over a hundred architectural drawings, perspectives, and diagrams, in order to represent the many diverse voices who have come together to make a common campaign. The review states that the “modest” design transformation has two main features: the Land Back garden and the interior mezzanine, somehow missing a third architectural transformation: the exterior hoarding that blocks the pavilion for viewers approaching and presents them not with words, but images of a tent encampment in Vancouver, illustrating the real housing conditions for the most housing-insecure Canadians.
Second, this project is unique, not only because of its subject matter, but because of its collaborative formation. This collaboration is on display in the hoarding mentioned above, whose images were made for a documentary with the tent community, and the selection of images from that documentary was done with the community’s participation. Not for Sale! was initiated by six people who bring different skill sets to the project; although we all teach, some of us are designers, some historians, and half of us are registered architects. Indeed, the project is “overcrowded” (which seems fitting for a project about housing). Though the review lists some contributing architects, it omits Urban Arts Architecture’s Ouri Scott, Grounded Architecture, SOLO Architecture, and the work of David T. Fortin Architect—all Indigenous practitioners whose contributions are crucial for understanding both housing alienation and an architecture of connection–as well as SvN, whose senior partner John van Nostrand is the most experienced affordable housing architect in this campaign.
We collaborated initially with thirty organizations, which form ten teams, each including an architect, an activist and a housing advocate—though the campaign has grown to over forty organizations and over a hundred contributors. The ten demands, which are the centrepiece of the campaign, emerged in a collaborative and bottom-up process. Hardly “compiled by academics,” the ten multi-disciplinary teams wrote and designed them, and they evolved over regular meetings with all participants. This campaign is a radical experiment in uniting architects, activists and advocates in what we hope is a new form of architectural activism, collaboratively created with direct ‘on-the-ground’ experience from across the country. What is perhaps most important is that the campaign has built a national conversation about architecture that includes people with other expertise who share similar and overlapping goals around housing justice in c\a\n\a\d\a. While the review doubts our ability to “enforce such demands,” its contributors are already doing the work—applying for grants, building coalitions of allied organizations, lobbying politicians and organizations, hosting events, and boosting the profiles of each campaign through diverse print and digital media. The project builds on this momentum and will continue to raise awareness and advocate for change.
Finally, we want to underline that we strongly believe the project’s proposals, while ambitious, are realistic and realizable. The review is unconvinced by the Land Back team’s demand and also doubts the demand for a gentrification tax. Taxes very much like the one the Gentrification Tax team proposes were implemented in Vermont, New Zealand, Ontario, and Washington in the 1970s; the main distinction of this proposal is that it is earmarked so that the profits from housing sales fund housing affordability. There is nothing unrealizable about this proposition; it simply needs to channel an already existing political will. Nor is the Land Back demand of co-ownership of crown land unrealistic. It is an invitation to imagine a different future, one where First Nations leaders work with Canadian governments to reimagine how housing provision is addressed/redressed. The provocation of the team here is, in fact, designed to unsettle the settler imagination, and, in this, it seems to be working.
Our campaign makes ten demands that link c\a\n\a\d\a’s legacy of colonialism and the theft of Indigenous land to the deep inequality that characterizes c\a\n\a\d\a’s current housing system. We do this because today’s unsustainable ideas about the speculative value of property were formed through the process of land dispossession and because it is Indigenous practices that have so much to teach us about how to dis-alienate our homes. Government policies only change for the better because citizens make strong arguments that exceed the limitations of the current legislative and political system. Each team, the students working in the pavilion, and other members of AAHA, are all taking concrete actions toward their realization. As the review rightly points out, we are more concerned with this ongoing campaign than the exhibition itself, and we appreciate the words of encouragement for its success. We agree that our students will have much to teach us along the way—they will in fact be subject to the conditions for housing for longer than we will. We’re just not sure that they will settle for “realistic” adjustments that preserve the status quo.
-Adrian Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart, Tijana Vujosevic (Organizing Committee, Architects Against Housing Alienation)
I reiterate my appreciation of the great challenge and complexity of addressing the housing crisis, and respect that the Not For Sale! team holds a difference of opinion on how to address that crisis. However, I must point out two inaccuracies in their letter of concern.
First: I agree that the Indigenous perspective is significant, which is why I deemed it important to include curator Simoogit Saa Bax Patrick Stewart’s specific comments. But just as that doesn’t negate the three non-quoted curators, there was no “omission” of any of the other team member names supplied to us. Each of them—including Ouri Scott and David Fortin—are named in the credits. In fact, this complaint affirms my own critique of the project: the pavilion had so many contributors that it was impossible to highlight them all. Whatever insights they could offer—Indigenous and otherwise—tended to be lost in the crowd.
Second: Nowhere in my review do I suggest that co-ownership of crown land with Indigenous peoples is “unrealistic.” On the contrary, here is what I wrote: “If and when that land and its income-generating resources revert to Indigenous stewardship, the Canadian political economy will transform in a major way. Even if the transformation involves co-ownership, the governments’ power and financial strength will almost certainly diminish. You can support that consequence wholeheartedly as historic justice—a fair and necessary transition—but you cannot then assume that our governments will have the wherewithal to bankroll the manifesto’s funding demands for housing, urban revitalization, and reparation payments.”
We do agree that architecture is political and that architects should have a far greater role in the political life of our cities and our country. For that to happen, we need to encourage more—not less—healthy and robust debate and disagreement, and we need to interpret and reflect each other’s views with accuracy.
-Adele Weder