Sustainability and Privilege

Social designthe practice of designing for poverty reliefis one of the most popular fields in contemporary architecture. Its advocates, focusing on the architects creativity and good intentions, are overwhelmingly laudatory, while its detractors, concerned with the experience of its beneficiaries, have dismissed it as an expression of cultural imperialism. Placed midway between innocuous celebration and radical critique, Sustainability and Privilege highlights the lessons that can be learned from social designs current limitations and proposes a feasible way to improve this practice. In this broad-ranging account, enlivened by fieldwork and case studies, Gabriel Arboleda contends that social designs invocation of sustainability often serves to marginalize and displace vulnerable populations through projects that involve experimentation of faulty alternative technologies, or that result in so-called green gentrification, or that impose untoward economic and other burdens. Arboleda is fiercely critical of the way social design has been carried out in impoverished regions of the world, most notably in Africa and Latin America. In addressing the challenges posed by issues of privilege in social designs use of sustainability, the book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach called ethnoarchitecture, arguing for a simpler, open-ended, and stakeholder-driven process that eliminates the casual imposition of the architects ideas on vulnerable populations, foregrounding the peoples voices, experience, and input in social design practice.