Making a built environment that works for everyone will require the end of profit- and ownership-obsession in the industry, argues New York-based architect and researcher Emanuel Admassu in this interview.
Admassu is a co-founder of art and architecture practice AD-WO and an assistant professor at Columbia University, where his research focuses on the entangled relationship between spatial justice and land ownership and value.
He believes that in order to deliver more equitable buildings and public spaces, a complete rethink of the economic and legal structure surrounding architecture is needed.
"I think we can centre spatial justice within the practice of architecture by finding a set of concepts and ideas that help us think about space-making differently," Admassu told Dezeen. "We have to really confront the legal formations that foreclose any other way of making space or sharing space."
"Dismantling that value system is going to take a lot of work"
Admassu, who works in New York, Addis Ababa and Melbourne, acknowledges the scale of the task he is proposing.
"Whether you go to Addis Ababa, or Dar Salaam or New York, the assumption is: you buy that lot, you build on that lot, and you continue to generate some capital, right""
"So redirecting that or dismantling that value system is going to take a lot of work."
As a starting point, he believes in experimenting with new mechanisms for delivering buildings that challenge...