The aggressive expansion of industrial wasteland and polluting resource extraction is hard to reconcile with Germany’s ambitious climate plans. Dubbed the Energiewende, or energy transition, the plan to completely replace nuclear power and fossil fuels with renewables and to democratise energy production includes generous subsidies for solar panels, the construction of wind farms and the closure of all nuclear power plants by 2023.³ At the same time, a third of the country’s energy production is still based on lignite. This leads to the seemingly contradictory decision to bring forward the coal phase-out to 2030, while at the same time increasing energy production from coal-fired power plants and investing in the further expansion of fossil fuel, resource-intensive infrastructure, making additional emissions inevitable for the long-term future.

Just 20 kilometers from Lützerath lies the Hambach Forest, where activists have had more success. There, on the edge of another open pit lignite mine, a remaining 200 hectares of a natural oak forest is being protected by a community of around a hundred activists who live permanently in the forest in treehouses high above the ground. This preservation strategy was not only locally successful, but also had a profound media impact. The Hambach Forest Movement became a symbol of the energy transition, and is just one of the inspiring examples of how citizens and local communities are resisting destruction and showing ingenuity to inhabit the earth in a more enduring way. History is full of such ideas, experiments, and projects for sustainable futures, but many have failed to live up to the expectations they created. They remained marginal, experimental, or too fragile to sustain. Or, to put it another way, mainstream institutions did not accept or support these alternative futures. The political, technological, and societal conditions were simply not there. But what if those conditions were to change? What if, for example, climate change and biodiversity loss, and the economic and political structures that drive them, began to destabilise? What if a momentum for deep and transformative change occurred? What if society actually started to experience the limits to growth that have been anticipated for so long?

1972, a Pivotal Year

We begin in 1972, a pivotal year that marked the beginning of the end of ignorance in terms of an emerging environmental awareness on a global scale. In that year, the Club of Rome, an international group of academics, businessmen, diplomats, and industry leaders who were deeply concerned about the general conditions of life on planet Earth, published The Limits to Growth. The report provided a remarkably accurate outline of the global emergency we face today, showing that unless changes were made to historical growth trends in population growth, agricultural production, consumption of non-renewable natural resources, industrial production, and pollution, threats to the habitability of the Earth would become apparent in the twenty-first century, leading to a sudden and uncontrollable decline of life on Earth. Although the findings of the report were alarming, its authors were optimistic: back in 1972, they firmly believed that destructive growth trends could be reversed and that ecological and economic stability could be achieved. The sooner the world’s population began to coordinate toward this goal, they claimed, the better the chances of achieving it. Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Peter W. Behrens III argued that ‘under the most sanguine conditions imaginable… growth must end within 100 years.’⁴ Using the year 2072 as a horizon, they showed the possibility of a better future. In 2022, when this project began, we were right in the middle of that prospective timespan, with another 50 years ahead of us.

The Limits to Growth was just one of a growing number of publications warning of the dangers of fossil fuel-based economic growth. It coincided with the first UN environmental conference and was accompanied by a flood of public actions, initiatives, and policy proposals. In popular culture, the prevailing concern translated into films, television series, and comics that sometimes offered a prophetic view of the future. In architecture, pioneering designs had been depicting a sustainable future since long before the 1970s. Architects experimented with renewable materials, high-tech solar systems, utopian communes, and even inflatable architecture. They used the latest technologies, but also fell back on historical building techniques. Economic growth and globalization were long seen as the only way forward; technological innovation seemed to be the solution to every problem. Convinced that inspiration can also lie in the past, our research puts the previous 50 years into perspective and frames the incoherent accumulation of predictions, debates, experiments, and their ripple effects since 1972. What has been the role of architecture since then? Which design attitudes can be framed by reviewing historical examples? How can these lessons from the past help formulate a new set of design tools, methods, and practices?

The Final Warning

Over the past 50 years, the impact of mankind on planet Earth has taken on alarming proportions. Today we are confronted with the consequences of climate change, declining biodiversity, and social frictions that are of an overwhelming and seemingly hopeless magnitude and complexity. The effects of climate change are clearly manifesting themselves and will intensify and have progressively severe impacts. Today, the carbon concentration in the atmosphere is more than 50 percent higher than in premodern times,⁵ and 20 percent higher than what Johan Rockstrom and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified as the planetary boundary — the threshold beyond which the changes to the Earth system may be irreversible and catastrophic.⁶ It is not the only planetary boundary that has been exceeded. The loss of biodiversity is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural extinction rate. Chemical pollution from elements like plastics and heavy metals has crossed the threshold, fertilisers have permanently disrupted the natural biochemical cycles and land-use changes have destabilised natural ecosystems. All these parameters indicate that human societies are living beyond the planet’s means and that devastating human consequences such as mass migration are already manifesting. The assessment reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 provide solid scientific proof of climate change and its causes and effects. The accompanying projected future scenarios have become more ominous, and the call for action more insistent. Upon the release of its sixth report in March 2023,⁷ UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: ‘This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.’⁸

The Guardian reported shortly after: ‘Scientists deliver “final warning” on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late.’⁹ As alarming headlines like these continue to appear, a growing number of professionals and citizens in the Western world is developing a sense of ‘green guilt’ regarding their lifestyle or the environmental impact of the industry in which they work. As they become aware of the severity of the climate problem, they also realise that they are trapped in economic, political, and institutional systems that are not working for the common good, but for profit and growth. But while individuals may feel hopeless about their potential impact, a critical mass is building.

Toward an Architecture of Change

To achieve a climate-friendly and socially just world, radical changes are required in energy, mobility, circularity, food, and nature. Transition science and practice offer insights into the patterns and mechanisms of systems change, as well as in the ethics, practices, and logics for proactively and pragmatically contributing to them. These explorations do not have to start from scratch but can build on decades of research and experimentation. With the knowledge and skills that have been built up, opportunities for real change appear on the horizon. The current transition moment calls for an architecture of change.

How can architecture contribute to establishing a climate-positive and socially just world? Answering this question first requires fundamental changes in the way constructions are financed, organised, practiced, and valued. It implies a work ethic that puts ecological and social values first. It requires moving outside one’s own discipline and finding alliances and co-creators in other fields. It suggests more experimental, reflexive, and modest practices. Most importantly, it calls for a collective journey or practice, one in which emerging ideas and practices in different domains achieve fundamental transformation at a systemic level. A practice in which we use the tools of architecture for change: by documenting, measuring, constructing, researching, and conceptualizing not (only) the product but the process of transformation in physical, ecological, social, and economic terms.

Climate Change, Time, and Transition

The history of climate change and the history of architecture are intrinsically intertwined in many ways. To reveal those entanglements requires an alternative understanding of past, present, and future. One of the claims we make is that time is an essential yet neglected parameter in designing sustainable futures. Our ever-accelerating Western society is so focused on the here and now, on short-term gain and profit, that humans have lost the ability to see the fundamental, long-term patterns that drive society. The urgency of the climate crisis reinforces our short-termism: the immediate need for change leads us to a focus on optimizing the sustainability of current systems. In the process, we become oblivious to the deeply political design of our current socioeconomic systems: they have a history and determine our long-term future.

Using time as a lens forces us to see the bigger picture and start to appreciate the different velocities of change. It enables us to see deeper lying patterns and mechanisms that could lead to systems change in the long term. It allows us to appreciate what has been lost or marginalised in history, and to imagine sustainable futures. We thus explore time as a nonlinear or progressive pattern and ask ourselves the following questions: What happens when we start bending time? Can we envision a performative history in which the reciprocal engagements of climate action and architectural design contain the seeds for alternative futures? Can we start from a radical future to reinvent the present? Can we go forward to the past, and what new narratives would emerge?

Our aim is to provide an actionable long-term perspective for those concerned about climate change and interested in the role of architecture. We observe that society is fixated on the here and now. The urgency of climate change and the constant stream of alarming news amplify this. Most discussions revolve around problems and solutions that have to work in the limited concept of the ‘short term.’ Stretching time might allow us to better understand the time we live in and recognise the opportunities that lie ahead. Understanding current disruptive dynamics in a historical perspective helps to recognise the possibilities of future uncertain, relational, and non-linear transitions. In contrast to the strategy of forecasting, back-casting is then a way of imagining desirable futures and stepping back from that future toward the present to see where transformative action can be taken. In addition to diversifying the time horizon, different velocities are introduced to work on alternative futures, from the immediate to the long-term, and from resisting to embracing acceleration. Three complementary protagonists — the accelerator, the activist, and the ancestor — are introduced. They are grounded in the history of architecture of the last 50 years and consciously adopted in contemporary practice.

While environmental policies and climate agreements failed to change our course, numerous hopeful projects, ideas, and experiments have provided elements for building narratives for powerful futures. The urgency, awareness, and opportunities have put so much pressure on existing social and economic structures that systems change is emerging, at least to some degree. While the Western world should learn to let go of the systems it has created, architecture and design can bring hope and perspective, along with material change. By making visible what is possible and imagining what is needed, architects can guide and accelerate the transition moment in the right direction.

Bios

Derk Loorbach is a professor of Socioeconomic Transitions and the director of DRIFT, the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research focuses on the development of transition management in both theory and practice, combining theoretical advancements with action research. Through his transdisciplinary work, he is actively engaged in transitions across various sectors, including energy, mobility, food, healthcare, finance, education, and welfare. In addition to his academic contributions, Loorbach is involved in public speaking and has contributed to both academic literature and more accessible publications and events. Beyond his role at DRIFT, he serves as the academic lead for the EUR strategic platform Design Impact Transition (DIT), which aims to accelerate the transformation of the university. He also chairs two foundations dedicated to sustainability transitions, iFund and Lenteland. In 2022, he co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, It’s About Time.

Véronique Patteeuw is an associate professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage in Lille, where she combines research and teaching. In addition to her academic position in France, she has been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Study Abroad Program (2010), the Catholic University Leuven (2019–2025), and the EPFL Lausanne (2020–2024). Since 2008, she has served as the academic editor of OASE, Journal for Architecture, an international peer-reviewed publication. Her research focuses on postwar architectural history and theory from an environmental perspective. Alongside Mathieu Berteloot, she directs Studio Spolia, a pedagogical unit exploring the transformation of as-found situations. In 2020, she co-founded PASZA, a Platform for Architectural Research focused on late 20th and early 21st-century architectural culture, together with Léa-Catherine Szacka. In 2022, she co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, It’s About Time.

Léa-Catherine Szacka is a senior lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. Previously, she was a lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (2013–2017) and a visiting lecturer at institutions such as the Harvard Study Abroad Program (2018), the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design (2019–2024), ETH Zurich (2020–2021), and EPFL Lausanne (2024). Her research centers on the history of architectural exhibitions and the history and theory of postmodern architecture, particularly from a media perspective. In 2020, she co-founded PASZA with Véronique Patteeuw, a research platform dedicated to late 20th and early 21st-century architectural culture. She also co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, It’s About Time, in 2022.

Peter Veenstra is a landscape architect and co-founder of LOLA Landscape Architects, with offices in Rotterdam and Shenzhen. LOLA, an acronym for "Lost Landscapes," reflects a fascination with adventurous fringes, poetic leftover spaces, and spontaneous nature. His office has designed projects such as Hongqiao Park in Shenzhen, Park Vijversburg in Tytsjerk, and the Adidas HQ Campus in Herzogenaurach. Through research by design, workshops, and exhibitions, Veenstra explores topics that warrant greater attention in landscape architecture, including post-disaster landscapes, carbon-positive land use, automated afforestation, and climate adaptation in urban environments. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded the Rotterdam Maaskant Prize for Young Architects in 2013 and the TOPOS landscape award in 2014. In 2022, he co-curated the 10th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, It’s About Time.