Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies, Jon Goodbun
Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies: arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 29, no. 1. Jon Goodbun.
Ecologies of Production and the Production of Ecologies is a guest-edited issue of arq: Architectural Research Quarterly curated by Jon Goodbun and Liam Ross. The issue extends architectural Production Studies by asking how the building site might be rethought as an expanded socio-ecological field: one that includes labour, extraction, material flows, supply chains, energy systems, territorial conflicts, nonhuman life and planetary metabolisms.
Building on Sérgio Ferro’s Marxist account of the construction site as a key locus of surplus value extraction, the issue asks how architecture can confront the dual crisis of capitalism and ecology. Contributions by Jon Goodbun, Liam Ross, Peggy Deamer, Raíssa Pereira Cintra de Oliveira, Rita de Cássia Pereira Saramago, João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, Alina Paias, Elliott Sturtevant, Anna Tweeddale, Cecília Corrêa Lenzi, Charlotte Taylor, George Ridgway, Julia Heslop and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes examine climate justice, construction labour, extractive materials, circular economies, timber, traditional communities, bio-based architecture, interspecies relations, volume housing, ecological value and cultural value.
Goodbun’s introductory perspective, written with Ross, frames the issue through the concept of the “extended building site”. It brings Ferro into dialogue with Marxian metabolism and Batesonian ecology, arguing that architectural production must be understood across both thermodynamic and semiotic registers: through material and energy flows, but also through stories, rituals, perception, ecological knowledge and collective forms of planning. The issue proposes that to ecologise Production Studies is to understand production not merely as a human activity, but as a process that shapes and is shaped by wider webs of life.
