Designing the Just Transition

Reviews / Votes

This fascinating book treats the transition ahead with the nuance and complexity it deserves, but also the brio and confidence it demands. Read it and then go make it real. * Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Here Comes the Sun * Our societies need massive and rapid transitions. White and Pevsner provide three badly missing things to that challenge. They bring labour politics to the practice of transition design, design to talk of just transitions, and critical histories to visioning more sustainable future societies. Designing the Just Transition will remind systems change oriented designers that their agency lies in acknowledging that they also are labourers who must act in solidarity across scales. * Cameron Tonkinwise, University of Technology Sydney, Australia * As it has entered the mainstream, the strategy of just transition has been separated from its roots in labour environmentalism and political agency and often seen as the equivalent of energy justice. Designing the Just Transition applies the theoretical and practical promise of the strategy to the political economy of design while keeping it grounded, intentionally and creatively, in the world of work and workers. * Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University * White and Pevsner's Designing the Just Transition is a rare gift of a book: at once richly historical and yet compellingly pertinent to today's predicaments. It offers comprehensive reassessment of design and architecture's diverse and problematic relationship to environmental politics. More than this, the book also presents a visionary position on where to go from here: how design might effectively re-engage with progressive political agendas that genuinely enable environmental responsibility and decarbonisation, while simultaneously ensuring solidarity with of all forms of labour. It is path-breaking and deeply relevant across many disciplines, continents and political subject positions, and should inspire designers, scholars, environmental advocates and policy-makers to delve confidently into designing just forms of systems change. * Jesse Adams Stein, University of Technology Sydney * From the moment I first read Damian White's 2019 essay entitled "Just Transitions/Design for Transitions: Preliminary Notes on a Design Politics for a Green New Deal," which turned my head and made clear that any approach architects might take toward climate justice must engage workers of all classes - professional designers, construction workers, labor unions, fabricators, local officials - I have waited for this book. Pulling together as it does the particulars of labor/ecology relations, it outlines, as the authors say, "the need [for climate struggles] to be enfolded in broader struggles for meaningful work and good jobs, affordable housing and livable communities." While taking to task the design professions' historical complicity with neo-liberalism, it uniquely offers a set of tactics for building a worker-forward transition to a healthy life on this planet. * Peggy Deamer, Yale University * Designing the Just Transition is a major intervention into contemporary debates on climate politics, political ecology, and post-carbon futures. With extraordinary historical breadth and conceptual precision, White and Pevzner demonstrate that ecological transition cannot be understood simply as a question of policy reform, technological substitution, or carbon management, but must be grasped as a struggle over labor, infrastructure, design, territory, and the material organization of collective life itself. Bringing critical design studies into sustained dialogue with labor environmentalism, democratic planning, urban theory, and radical ecological thought, this book fundamentally expands the terrain upon which contemporary debates on socio-ecological transformation must proceed. This is a major intervention-one that will reshape debates across political ecology, urbanism, environmental humanities, architecture, planning, and critical design theory. * Neil Brenner, University of Chicago * Pevzner and White make an urgent and timely argument for the design disciplines, stating a strong case for how and why decarbonization is in and of itself a design problem while showing that these fields have both the tools and responsibility to meet it. The book refuses the easy separations between policy and design, between ecological and social justice, between trained designers and the broader labor of making the built environment - and in so doing genuinely opens new ground for the discipline. * Elisa Iturbe, Harvard University *