Scarcity, Jon Goodbun w/ Jeremy Till, Deljana Iossifova
Scarcity: Architecture in an age of Depleting Resources. Jon Goodbun w/ Jeremy Till, Deljana Iossifova.
Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources was a special issue of Architectural Design edited by Jon Goodbun, Jeremy Till and Deljana Iossifova as part of the wider EU HERA-funded Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment research project. Published in 2012, the issue intervened in architectural discourse at a moment when the converging pressures of financial crisis, austerity, resource depletion, climate change and urban inequality were becoming impossible to separate. Its central proposition was that scarcity should not be treated as a technical problem to be solved through efficiency alone, but as a political, ecological, economic and spatial condition that architecture helps to produce, mediate and contest.
The issue brought together a wide range of contributors: Jon Goodbun; Jeremy Till; Deljana Iossifova; André Viljoen; Katrin Bohn; Maria Kaika; Erik Swyngedouw; Karin Jaschke; Jody Boehnert; Tatjana Schneider; Ulysses Sengupta; Ezio Manzini; Clare Brass; Flora Bowden; Kate McGeevor; Benedict Singleton; Rob Hopkins; Timothy Morton; Douglas Spencer; Andreas Rumpfhuber; Michael Klein; Georg Kolmayr; Arna Mathiesen; Kate Soper; Michael Sorkin; Alejandro Zaera-Polo; Daliana Suryawinata; Winy Maas; Liza Fior; Edward Robbins; Christian Hermansen Cordua; Barbara E. Ascher; Steve Parnell; and Hattie Hartman.
The editorial framing by Goodbun, Till and Iossifova, “Themes of Scarcity,” established scarcity as a concept that cuts across material depletion, ecological limits, economic distribution, social inequality and architectural production. Rather than accepting scarcity as an inevitable condition of lack, the introduction asked how scarcities are constructed, where they are located, who benefits from them, and how design might intervene in their production. This gave the issue its distinctive critical edge: it moved the discussion beyond sustainability as resource management and towards a more political ecology of the built environment.
Jon Goodbun’s own contributions were central to this framing. As lead guest editor and primary authorial presence, he helped position scarcity as a socio-ecological and epistemological problem for architecture. His article “Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism” introduced a cybernetic and ecological model of planning, arguing that cities and environments cannot be adequately addressed through linear control, efficiency or fixed prediction. Drawing on Bateson, it proposed flexibility, learning, feedback and ecological aesthetics as necessary capacities for design under conditions of uncertainty.
His co-authored article with Karin Jaschke, “Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice,” extended this argument by shifting attention from isolated materials or objects to relations, processes and resource ecologies. Together, these contributions anticipated later concerns in Goodbun’s work: ecological literacy, extended mind, cybernetics, world-systems ecology, environmental semiotics and the need to rethink architectural agency within wider socio-material systems.
As a whole, the AD issue staged scarcity as a productive and contested field for architectural thought. Its contributors moved across urban agriculture, political ecology, ecological literacy, waste, transition towns, hyperobjects, social housing, austerity, alternative hedonism, urban self-sufficiency, cheapness, mapping, Norwegian welfare, 1960s expendability and sustainability discourse. The result was not a single doctrine of scarce design, but a plural critical framework for understanding how architecture participates in the making, masking and possible transformation of scarcity.
