Yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. Without which there will be no tomorrow.¹

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“Sustainable construction” does not hold meaning any longer. Real sustainability is an impossible endeavor and a delusion in the present modus operandi of global construction. Building is a destructive process from land consumption to material use: urbanization devours hectares of unbuilt land every year, and the construction industry relies intensively on resource extraction.² Through mining, manufacturing, and building, the energy used in construction impacts the planet at a tectonic scale. Waterbodies, ecosystems, topography, geology, climate, food systems, labor conditions, humans, and non-humans everywhere are destroyed or damaged to propel voracious global supply chains.

The end of the world has been ongoing for many. From the tons of toxic bauxite residue stored in unstable pools inHungary to the devasted social landscapes surrounding the coltan mines ofChile, this damage is a prerequisite of designed spaces, affecting all non-constructed surfaces—from forest to farmland.³ Despite loud calls to reexamine our faulty growth model, the expansionist global enterprise of land and resource exhaustion fueled by construction activities and real estate mechanisms goes on relentlessly.

Stop Building?

The call for a moratorium on new construction emerges from these global urgencies and the palpable lack of action on the side of the building industry and planning disciplines beyond flaccid corporate strategies (green labeling, carbon compensation, material “reinvention,” and LEED, for example). Devised to cover up the ongoing devastation, construction’s greenwashing enterprise is deployed in full force. Little is done to curb the damage done through commodified and speculative construction schemes. Moreover, global material use is expected to rebound with post-pandemic economic policies and to double by 2060; a third of this rise is attributable to construction materials.

And this is but a fraction of what ultimately makes up the built environment. The transformation of raw resources into exploitable architectural elements (aggregates to concrete, sand, and silica to glass, petroleum to insulation foam) not only necessitates the combustion of fossil fuel at every turn but also relies on a host of facilitation technologies. Automated mining systems and computer-aided drawing software, for example, steer an increase in the extraction of critical minerals (aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel, platinum, tin, titanium, tungsten, and zinc, among others).

Frontlines of extraction are moving in all directions, and further rapid devastation is ongoing. Paradoxically labeled as unavoidable for transitioning toward less carbon-intensive lifestyles in selected parts of the planet, this commodity shift predicts that sustainable oil rigs and e-caterpillars will be undertaking the green enterprise of destruction we design. 

A moratorium on new construction calls for a drastic change to building protocols while seeking to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives.

House Everyone

Because housing is a human right and the mandate of design disciplines, these stand at the difficult threshold between housing provision and depletion: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction? According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development census of 2020, the median size of new single-family homes was 2,261 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet in the1960s, despite the shrinking of the median household size, down from 3.29 in the 1960s to 2.52 persons today.⁴ This trend sees more land, more materials, more appliances, and more infrastructures directed toward larger homes built to host fewer people, with debt at the core of its financialization. In a talk at the GSD in February 2022, HUD secretary Marcia L. Fudge said that the days when one can have a plot to build a house were numbered—despite her lecture being titled “Building the World We Want to See.”⁵

Jettisoning the dictate of building new as a solution to the housing crisis directs us to a myriad of other routes: decent minimum living wages, just protocols to housing access, rent control, zoning reforms, purchase of private property to provide public housing, fostering of collective ownership and cohabitation forms, and alternative value generation schemes. These solutions allow us to move beyond the struggles and dichotomies that plague the debate: rental vs. ownership, YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs, nature vs. humans, and housing crisis mitigation vs. zero net emission, among others.

If new construction stops, even for ashort while, the current built stock—buildings, infrastructure, materials—will be reassessed, and the productive and reproductive labor that goes into it will be revalued. Varying widely from well-paid “skilled” workers to exploited manual laborers, the labor force involved in construction remains mainly un-automated—and overlooked. We can anticipate the emergence of societal and ecological values and the revaluation of care tasks, from surveying the existing stock to engaging in reparative works to acts of daily upkeep. These are to become higher than the value of constructing new.⁶ 

The effort ahead is immense. A different way of designing the world emerges, demanding a careful assessment of present and vacant inventory, strong policies on occupancy and demolition, anti-vacancy measures, densification plans, maintenance protocols, materialsend-of-life etiquette, and overall upgrading tactics. These will all need to be imagined, formulated, planned, and implemented according to the needs of the context. 

Who is to Say Build or not Build?

At the same time, a moratorium’s “global” validity must be interrogated. The geography of harmful extraction and the political economy of construction are mirrored in today’s neocolonial modes of extraction capitalism, with gendered and racialized populations most affected. Assuming that the bauxite extracted in Guinea ends up on the facades of pencil towers in New York, shouldn’t a call be limited to a suspension of new construction where a consolidated stock already exists? Indeed, the suspect and flattening sustainability narrative points at weaponized environmental laws and the limitations of the degrowth narrative.

As Peter Marcuse argues, “the promotion of ‘sustainability’ may simply encourage the sustaining of the unjust status quo and how the attempt to suggest that everyone has common interests in ‘sustainable urban development’ masks very real conflicts of interest.”⁷ Achille Mbembe spells it out: “In Africa especially, but in many places in the Global South, energy-intensive extraction, agricultural expansion, predatory sales of land, and destruction of forests will continue unabated.”⁸ Thus, with overbuilding and resource consumptionon one side and lack of housing and material extraction on the other, a new construction moratorium could be restricted to extractive “built”nations—dividing countries along GDP lines.

Yet, upon closer inspection, the need for nuance emerges: In Cairo, there are 12 million vacant units, high vacancy rates grounded in locally specific conditions such as outdated rent control laws, proactive suburban development state programs, and a lack of trust in banking institutions.⁹ In Costa Rica, the bulk of the new construction is constituted of coastal residential units aimed at tourists or expatriates fueling socio-environmental issues of displacement and degradation.¹⁰ In South Africa, the demolition of scarce public housing to make way for market-rate units shows the limitation of the construction-as-solution storyline.¹¹

Nevertheless, building more is heralded everywhere as the sole answer, a questionable leitmotif served from the Bay Area to Mumbai that conceals the reality of severely inadequate building activity—namely the commodification of housing fueled by debt-generating financialization. It is not housing needs that are in question when home insecurity is such an acute suffering for many.¹² It is not the construction of much-needed infrastructures that is condemned when not all countries are equally equipped. Contextual complexities call for a deeper investigation into where and what is constructed and what should not be built.

Beyond GDPs and other faulty divides, beyond moral confines and neo-Malthusian indictments, how are we to grapple with sustainability as a contested concept, legacies of degrowth theory, green capitalism, and problematic CO2 reduction policies becoming the stuff of riots?¹³ How many of the thousands of new units builtevery year everywhere are accessible to those who need them most? How can we optimize and maximize our existing stock before extracting new materials? How do design disciplines face their complicit role in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, and challenge the current modus operandi of global construction?

Imagining Possibilities

The following vignettes play out in various locations to answer some of these interrogations. Drawing from “A Moratorium on New Construction,” two design studios at Harvard GSD and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) point to what must stop and what needs to change from sites in India to Switzerland. These ideas point at what must stop and what needs to change, from India to the US. By questioning the standard claim of “building right,” predatorial real estate, high-tech-heavy solutions, and the assumption that architects must build new rather than practicing methods of repairing and prolonging, as well as redistributive modes of ownership and commoning, a vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerges. 

In Mumbai, a city where affordable housing is in high demand, the ongoing demise of chawls—collective units built in the 1930s for mill workers and now home to active but modest communities—epitomizes the rapid destruction of affordable housing at the hands of the state and the private sector. High-rises for wealthier owners replace the chawls, and the tenants are displaced. Devashree Shah (MARCH ’22) argues for a moratorium on the demolition of chawls and all subsequent new construction. However, because aging chawls’ structures need upkeep, Shah proposes a post-moratorium design strategy that envisions physical and social repair as a unified design task. From maintenance protocols (cleaning, clearing trash, painting, and re-plastering), to reparative works (replacing broken shingles, sistering, straightening structures), to strategic interventions (co-living arrangements, shared amenities), to additions aimed at increasing social capital (community kitchens, daycare centers), to strengthening neighborhoods networks (pooling capital, sharing facilities), the design of an entire repair strategy at every scale advocates for a value shift, with care labor being of higher worth then newness. Primarily undertaken by gendered and ostracized populations, upkeep work is considered be littling to many. Shah’s project challenges this perception through a socio-spatial tandem design by illuminating the crucial relevance of repair work both for buildings and communities—in a context where new construction is halted.

On the shores of the Yucatán peninsula, Tulum is the latest Instagrammable ecotourism destination, its pristine beaches overlooking the Caribbean Sea already dotted with so-called “eco-resorts”and “sustainable” Airbnbs. Tourism growth is highly contested by local communities who oppose the construction of a high-speed “Mayan train” aimed at ushering in more visitors. Indigenous voices have pointed at the harm caused by the constant growth to their economies and to the area’s fragile ecosystem. Turning these calls into a radical design brief, Gerardo Corona Guerrero (MAUD ’23) designs the incremental recess of tourism activity in Tulum. The project disputes the “success story” of eco-tourism as a suspect narrative and imposes a moratorium on tourism-oriented infrastructure as a first step. Considering that the “reconstruction of nature” is an equivocal concept bordering on eco-fascism, the project embarks on an incremental approach, phasing measures across a 70-year timespan, from reparative ecologies to deconstruction and material reuse. It articulates a decolonial understanding of degrowth toward a negotiated human stewardship of the land.

Going against the grain, Aziz Alshayeb (MAUD ’23) proposes a critique of the current trend of demolishing highways. He exposes a national enterprise operating under deceptive betterment storylines of post-oil mobility only to camouflage hardcore gentrification schemes and CO2-heavy operations. Under these conditions, the project activates a moratorium on the demolition project of Highway I-45 in Houston, forming a counter narrative based on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “complaint as resistance.”¹⁴ With community grievances as a mandate, the project seeks to listen to all—from complainers to children to bees—to establish a valid program articulating an alternative to solutionism as a design curse. With tools including legal frameworks and ecological measures, the project engages against the evils of urbanization, such as flooding, environmental degradation, and gentrification. A future envisioning a peaceful cohabitation between non-humans, humans, and our obsolete infrastructures emerges. 

Starting with a radical questioning of the single-family house as an unsustainable and energy-intensive housing type grounded in dispossession and displacement, Bailey Morgan Brown Mitchell (March ’22, MDes ’22), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, demands a moratorium on suburban sprawl for Edmond, Oklahoma as a paradigmatic site of settler-colonialism. Because the single-family house exemplifies the burden of legal, economic, environmental, social and environmental pressures (fragmented land, mortgage, lawns, AC, car infrastructure, normativity, consumable materiality, low occupancy, etc.), Brown argues that the harm perpetuated must be stopped. Going further, she develops protocols for a sovereign suburban space, namely how would ‘land back’ actually play out, offering a vision for a non-extractive future. A multi-layered strategy unfolds, following a land transfer of ‘unassigned lands’ to a Tribal Cooperative Council, the non-displacement of existing residents, the termination of property lines and of zoning, replaced by new land use definitions, and the creation of ambiguous, contested, fluid and temporal spaces to deal with energy production, medicinal vegetation, non-humans, crops production, and new taxation models.

Conducting an appropriate and urgent critique of the demolition economy and building upon Keller Easterling’s Subtraction, Maria Beatrice Fenoglio and Vanesa Santillan Messina (EPFL Master ’24) argued that densifying existing housing without building anew can be resolved by moving existing elements and materials that make our built world, at all scales.¹⁵ The physical barriers and walls that define our interiors, cities, and society can be moved and removed. Existing components such as fences, partitions, windows, and radiators shall endlessly replace new construction materials (and take their place in warehouses) to create denser living spaces for new habitable realities. A fuller city appears over a merry-go-round of materials, introducing an architectural aesthetic of used elements. Carefully crafted and assembled details show movements and traces of previous uses and construction components, acknowledged and celebrated. The project offered a path toward an architecture that values every existing element and all matter by surrendering some of its controlling power to foster the end of the demolition and construct another economy based on what is there.

Arguing that the nine billion Francs state backup of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse in Spring 2023 means the bank's real estate is state-owned, Juliette Auer, Patrick Grand jean, and Charline Hugues (EPFL Bachelor 23’, Master 24’) articulated an alternative to housing provision as a captive system at the hands of private forces—banking competitor UBS by absorbing Credit Suisse became de facto the largest residential property owner in the country. Instead, their project offers a vision where homes come as political rights to be administered by a city’s citizenry. Properties are subtracted both from the state and the speculative market and are managed through trans-scalar governance by the inhabitants and for the inhabitants. Building upon centuries-old examples of commonly managed resources in Switzerland and abroad, the project,through a cautious and minimal removal of partition walls and the limited addition of circulation spaces, turns these properties into architectures of democracy and self-sustenance—easily accommodating the expected population increase without new construction.

In the Canton of Vaud federal Constitution, populations are guaranteed a “carefully” managed territory by law. However, despite this legal accountability towards housing provision, the state has overwhelmingly failed to provide adequate homes. In their project, Laure Melati Dekoninck, Adam-Joseph Ghadi-Delgado, and Nathalie Marj (EPFL Master’24) sue the state for carelessness. In the lawsuit, architectural interventions are demanded as remedies to achieve an agenda for spatial justice through care work.Refuting the official data of residential vacancy as failing to account for the thousands of empty square meters contained within oversized condos of wealthy areas, empty office spaces and under-occupied hotel rooms, the project drafted a lawsuit brought about by care workers associations, otherwise invisibilized populations. It deployed requisition as a legal instrument to engage with ways to provide housing through design strategies, such as fire escape-style staircases plugged onto facades to reach and equip vacant rooms in apartments without disrupting the residents, allowing for the existing stock to be fully and fairly utilized and managed.

These few examples speak of the incredible potential not building anew holds to confront the built environment’s past, present, and future and to engage with the existing stock to move forwardwhile questioning the current economic development model. Pausing construction problematizes the narrative of progress and techno-positivism established around capitalist societies in which design mandates rest. Tied to the suspect universalist growth imperative linked to postcolonial powers and utilitarian forms of growth, those mandates sell “a better life for all humanity—a mentality that continues to structure global asymmetries,” as articulated by Anna Tsing-¹⁶

Nubian architect and decolonial scholar Menna Agha frames the call to “stop building to start constructing” asa prerequisite to setting off the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the built environments of the racialized, gendered populations that bear the brunt of ecological and social devastation.¹⁷ A pause would also allow design professions to pivot toward resource stewardship, remodel our tasks, and deploy organizing abilities to (begin to) think about new constructions of emancipated practices, engage in remedial work, and set the care of the living as our sole agenda.¹⁸ Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, a moratorium on new construction is a leap of faith to envision a non-extractive future. made of what we have. It is about building less, building with what exists, and caring for it. 

Nota Bene: An earlier version of this text was published on the Harvard GSD webpage in 2023 and in the Journal for Architectural Education.¹⁹