Architecture as the practice of accountability: extractivism, externalities and alternatives

This paper explores architecture's relations with extractivism, drawing on both recent scholarship and practical examples to seek new modes of action which disentangle those relations and move towards accountability. The vast bulk of architectural production is both dependent upon regimes of extractivism and complicit in their expansion — the networks of materials, knowledge, and labour that produce architecture rely on the production of externalities in the form of sites, networks, and epistemologies that are unaccountable. In the face of climate and ecological breakdown, such externalities become impossible to hold apart from the work that architects do, as the effects of violent extractivism reassert themselves. The first section gives a summary of the condition of extractivism, its history, and how its continuation is challenged by climate breakdown. Drawing on decolonial and psychoanalytic perspectives, it argues that the ideology of extractivism is built on infrastructures of ignorance, the operation of which is rife within the built environment. The second section further considers how architecture is implicated and bound up in extractivism, including ways in which alternative forms of architectural practice are already offering other modes of action, which emerge from unpicking those existing relations. The conclusions summarise these modes in terms of an approach to architecture as the practice of accountability, which emerges both from activist practices and a fuller acceptance of the challenge of climate.