RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

The Design of Scarcity, published by Strelka in 2014, and translated and republished in German in 2018, and Greek in 2021, was written as part of the wider EU HERA-funded Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment research project. The book argues that scarcity is not simply a natural condition of diminishing resources, nor a neutral economic fact, but something actively produced, distributed, represented and designed. Written in the wake of the financial crisis, austerity politics and renewed anxieties around planetary limits, it challenges the familiar Malthusian image of scarcity as a simple gap between population growth and finite supply. Instead, it shows how scarcity emerges through political economy, enclosure, market logics, urban development, ecological extraction, inequality and the cultural production of desire.

For architecture and design, this reframing is crucial. If scarcity is treated only as lack, then design becomes either a managerial technique of reduction or a technocratic form of damage control. But if scarcity is understood as constructed, relational and historically situated, then design can begin to work more critically with the systems that produce scarcity in the first place. The essay therefore shifts scarcity from the language of limit to the language of constraint, ecology and possibility. Constraint is not simply a negative condition: it is also the ground through which form, practice, social relations and new values can emerge.

The text links economy and ecology through their shared root in oikos: the household as a system of care, maintenance, distribution, storage and renewal. Against the abstract models of economics, it argues for a broader ecological understanding of resource relations, one attentive to cycles, feedbacks, inequalities and forms of life. Architecture is positioned not only as a consumer of scarce resources, but as a practice that shapes the very conditions through which scarcity is perceived and organised.

The central contribution of The Design of Scarcity is therefore to open scarcity as a design question without depoliticising it. It refuses both growth-driven abundance and moralistic austerity, proposing instead that architects and designers learn to read scarcity as a socio-material process. In doing so, the essay asks design to move beyond sustainability as efficiency and towards a more critical, inventive and politically aware practice: one capable of exposing constructed scarcities, working productively with constraints, and imagining forms of collective life beyond the economies of endless growth.