April 12, 2023
Words by Revisions Editorial Team Artwork by JAZSALYN
"It is imperative that we communicate around these urgent topics with precision and care, especially as the rhetoric of activist, justice, and reform work is readily and continuously co-opted, branded, and depleted of both meaning and potential."
This platform is a home for conversation around architectures of planetary well-being. As we set out to explore and, ultimately, to help shift discourse around the relational frameworks that connect our social and ecological systems, we want to first examine with intention the language we will use to shape our editorial.
It is imperative that we communicate around these urgent topics with precision and care, especially as the rhetoric of activist, justice, and reform work is readily and continuously co-opted, branded, and depleted of both meaning and potential.
Here, we offer and expand upon four terms, and concepts, with and through which we will build our narrative point of view.
architectures are infrastructures for social relations. These can be elements of our built environments, or non-physical systems that structure how we cohabitate in our communities and interact with the earth's ecosystems. 1
- 1
Critical Care. Architecture for a Broken Planet
Edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien
This book was pivotal to the thinking around the formation of re:arc institute through an urgent proposal for alternative visions for architectural and urban practice rooted in radical care.
planetarity is our framework for the interdependence of all life. It acknowledges the interconnectedness of all living things to one another and to the planet we share, and honours the delicate reciprocity of this coexistence. Planetarity transcends the distinction between humans and our natural environments, and moves beyond “global” or “world” -views that fail to appreciate this symbiosis. 2
- 2
Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
We are inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term planetarity that calls for us to move towards a greater collectivity that does not reduce ways of imagining and conceiving our existence and interrelationship through our frameworks for exchange rooted in extraction.
Here we attempt to shape this term to create a dialogue through this platform and do not seek to summarise Spivak’s expansive term, intended to open up space for subaltern dreaming.
well-being is our ability to collectively and sustainably survive and thrive. This approach reorients the concept of wellness away from the individual and towards a metric that can account for a mutual and relational state of being. 3
- 3
Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown
Emergent Strategy is a guide for shaping change, in particular, “ how we get in right relationship with the planet”. In this text well-being becomes a possibility through which personal and collective transformation are intertwined through practices of adaptation, shifts in temporality, critical connections and network building, the importance of trust, presence and attention.
plurality expresses the importance of holding differing and even dissonant experiences, perspectives, wants, and needs together, horizontally and harmoniously. Through this literal state of being multiple, we prioritise the subjectivity and variety of our realities and aim to address as wide and diverse of an audience as possible. 4
We hope that you will join us in this ongoing and exploratory conversation.
- 4
Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar
Arturo Escobar’s book highlights the nourishing potential of design, moving away from functional, rational traditions of the past to a more relational comprehension on how all forms of life co-exist.
- 1
Critical Care. Architecture for a Broken Planet
Edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien
This book was pivotal to the thinking around the formation of re:arc institute through an urgent proposal for alternative visions for architectural and urban practice rooted in radical care.
- 2
Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
We are inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term planetarity that calls for us to move towards a greater collectivity that does not reduce ways of imagining and conceiving our existence and interrelationship through our frameworks for exchange rooted in extraction.
Here we attempt to shape this term to create a dialogue through this platform and do not seek to summarise Spivak’s expansive term, intended to open up space for subaltern dreaming.
- 3
Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown
Emergent Strategy is a guide for shaping change, in particular, “ how we get in right relationship with the planet”. In this text well-being becomes a possibility through which personal and collective transformation are intertwined through practices of adaptation, shifts in temporality, critical connections and network building, the importance of trust, presence and attention.
- 4
Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar
Arturo Escobar’s book highlights the nourishing potential of design, moving away from functional, rational traditions of the past to a more relational comprehension on how all forms of life co-exist.
- 1
Critical Care. Architecture for a Broken Planet
Edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny and Architekturzentrum Wien
This book was pivotal to the thinking around the formation of re:arc institute through an urgent proposal for alternative visions for architectural and urban practice rooted in radical care.
- 2
Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
We are inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term planetarity that calls for us to move towards a greater collectivity that does not reduce ways of imagining and conceiving our existence and interrelationship through our frameworks for exchange rooted in extraction.
Here we attempt to shape this term to create a dialogue through this platform and do not seek to summarise Spivak’s expansive term, intended to open up space for subaltern dreaming.
- 3
Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Maree Brown
Emergent Strategy is a guide for shaping change, in particular, “ how we get in right relationship with the planet”. In this text well-being becomes a possibility through which personal and collective transformation are intertwined through practices of adaptation, shifts in temporality, critical connections and network building, the importance of trust, presence and attention.
- 4
Designs for the Pluriverse, Arturo Escobar
Arturo Escobar’s book highlights the nourishing potential of design, moving away from functional, rational traditions of the past to a more relational comprehension on how all forms of life co-exist.