Organised by Sahir Patel, AA 5th Year

This is a call to the AA community to come together to discuss what it is that we collectively value and to determine our institution’s role in engaging with climate change.  

At present, we are faced with the prospect of ecological crisis and mass extinction. These threats stem from complex phenomena that can be difficult to comprehend immediately, which acts as weapon to pacify anyone who might wish to confront them individually.

It is clear that the climate crisis and social justice no longer remain separate. In fact they are one and the same.

Therefore, any attempt to stave off imminent disaster and rectify the gross imbalances of global power must be done collectively.

Yet the AA has become complacent and has not responded with a vision it can embrace and pursue for the sake of our future.

If our school is truly international, with the interests of many different peoples and cultures at stake, it must undergo a radical transformation that renders it adaptable, resilient and capable of engaging with the realities outlined above.

As such, we invite you all to engage in a series of discussions from which a set of demands can be collectively determined and implemented by our association.

This will go beyond the now clichéd tropes of recycling and energy usage, and instead pressure the pedagogical structure of the school to adopt an intersectional analysis of climate change.

Only when we begin to understand that climate change is fundamentally a matter of social justice - one that concerns power, class, race, gender, nationality – will the school be able to respond with the type of visionary architecture it has done to crises in the past.

This is not a bid for revolution but a wager on a long transformative trajectory. 

We hope to see you and hear your thoughts on the matter soon.