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THIS YEAR'S
ABC SCHOOL
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F-U-T-U-R-E   B-E-L-O-N-G-I-N-G

ORGANISING FOR GLOBAL CHANGE

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We called for participants and contributors to join together with the ABC School 2023 to answer the complex problem of how to capture, share, redeploy, and evolve liberatory practices across different scales, contexts and cultures from around the world. 

We don’t know what, but we do know how. Or, maybe we know what, but we don’t know how. Whatever it is—finished or not, polished or messy—we know we gathered to figure it out together, we embraced works in progress. The 2023 online gathering of the Architecture Beyond Capitalism ABC School invited ideas for building connections and making positive change in architecture practice and education.

The school was hosted at: https://lu.ma/abcschool2023

Participants were also invited to join the ABC team to help with the organising process. Interested now? Contact us at abc@architecture-lobby.org or find us on instagram at @arch_lobby_awg

ABC School 2023 embraced dreamers and pragmatists alike. We welcomed those with interests in and ideas for—however small, however fantastical—working out what it means to learn and practice architecture more collectively, more ethically and more sustainably through a lens of Future Belonging, a concept that emphasizes collective action and speculative futurism.

Future Belonging holds space to:

  • find global allies for change-making projects and movements.
  • test frameworks, formats and strategies for building better and lasting collective momentum;
  • layout visions for architecture beyond capitalism—including alternatives and improvements to the status quo;
  • develop disciplinary language and practices that are more open and inclusive;
  • humanize the expectations and outcomes of design processes;
  • explore and develop together in a messy process

This space was free, inclusive, supportive and open to all: students, educators, practitioners, constructors, and anyone interested in or passionate about affecting change. We invited individuals and collectives working to affect change in spatial production; individuals and collectives working with people, groups, communities or organisations to bring about an equitable tomorrow; individuals or collectives working with new organizational techniques for leveraging influence. We hoped to learn from the experiences of others meeting this challenge, and foster a space to support those just starting out.

This year’s conference aimed to radically diversify the forms of participation and contribution. We invited concepts and proposals for poster/paper presentations, discussion groups, forums, workshops, activities, collective action, tutorials, open mics etc. deliverable online, in the format of your choice. Zoom sessions should be 30 to 120 minutes in length. Participants are also invited to join the ABC team to help organise the conference over the coming months and/or build the repository. The ABC organising team helped participants produce and administer their content, and identified and encourage collaborative opportunities between contributors.

ABC School is the annual gathering of the Architecture Lobby’s Academia Working Group. In the 2021 session, we worked to understand the terrain in which we are operating, the contemporary ecological and social crises and of architecture’s roles and responsibilities within. In the 2022 session, we homed in on the architecture studio as the locus of architecture culture, the scale at which first differences might be made. In 2023, we sought to stitch the daunting and huge with the nuts and bolts of the immediate and comprehensible. We hoped to be open about our insecurities in working in this space, embrace our naivety, accept that we can’t solve all problems, but that we can try, together, to imagine what Future Belonging might mean.

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Important Dates

September 16-30 2023— ABC 2023 is live on lu.ma

Participant registration was open and available right up to and during the School.

Schedule

All events were held during the weeks of 16-30 of September. These were be catalogued on an online community platform, and conducted via zoom. The sessions took place across a spread of timezones to accommodate as much of the world as possible. The official schedule was released prior to the start of the School.

Location

Virtual. Hosted on Zoom through an online platform. An invitation to the platform was sent to all registered participants.

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The course

What does all of this mean to you? The curriculum and format was nimble and was developed around the contributions of those who register - we built the framework and saw what came. We welcomed proposals for unexpected and imaginative session types.  

Participation in this year’s workshop required the selection between one or more of these roles:

  • Participant: As a participant you will have the option to engage in discussions, sessions and workshops of your choosing when the schedule is released. Registrations may be limited due to technical capacity so participants can also watch streamed versions of each session.
  • Contributor: As a contributor, you can pose a concept for leading a discussion, workshop, activity, forum, tutorial, open mic, etc. in an online format of your choice, during a 30 to 120 minute Zoom session, or contribute a posting to the repository. ABC Lobby organizers will help contributors organize and administer their session or their post to the repository, and we may identify and encourage collaborative opportunities between participants. 
  • Case Study Poster: We invite contributions of an A3 size poster that explains a concept, the work of a collective, or a visual statement, and an associated method, related to the theme of Future Belonging, collective action and speculative futurism. Posters will become posts within the repository. 
  • Organizer: ABC School 2023 will be free, open to anyone, and organized by volunteer labour. As an organizer, you may be asked to attend up to three 90 minute Zoom meetings per month to coordinate structure and logistics. We are a fun group! Come join us!

ABC School is a conference reimagined - we seek to explore the school as a participatory world - meaning collaboration between facilitators, participants and organizers will be encouraged and enabled.

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ABC 2023 aimed to create a cohort committed to shaping the present and future of design education and practice, exploring the role of architecture and design in reimagining our relationship with the world. 

Part of this effort is using the content of ABC 2023 (and 2021 and 2022) to generate an online network and repository of collectives, content, tools, resources, tactics and applications for reimagining architecture practice and pedagogy. This repository aims to generate a connected, active community of change-makers in architecture, and provide a space to share the tools and support needed to continue actioning this work.  

Our real goal in all of this is to build a community with legs, a place to keep the action and the energy alive.

A-B-O-U-T T-A-L

The ABC School is organized by the Academia Working Group AWG of The Architecture Lobby.  

The Architecture Lobby T-A-L is an international organization of architectural workers, planners, and designers advocating for the value of architecture in the general public and for architectural work within the discipline. The Architecture Lobby believes that power in a society should be democratic and widely distributed and that changes to a humanitarian built environment must be sited in organizing labor. It believes that the work architects do and the capitalist society in which we work need structural change to properly serve spatial justice. 

To subscrive to the ABC 2023 calendar click here.

To join The Architecture Lobby click here.

To donate click here

And if you have any questions or want to be more involved you can also contact us at abc@architecture-lobby.org or find us on instagram at @arch_lobby_awg 

S-I-G-N—U-P

Join an online school that involves both discussions and shared imaginaries (salons). Fill out the form below and click the submit button.

If you are having any issue filling out the embedded form, click here to access it in a separate tab.


S-I-G-N—U-P

Join an online school that involves both discussions and shared imaginaries (salons). Fill out the form below and click the submit button.

If you are having any issue filling out the embedded form, click here to access it in a separate tab.


S-I-G-N—U-P

Join an online school that involves both discussions and shared imaginaries (salons). Fill out the form below and click the submit button.

If you are having any issue filling out the embedded form, click here to access it in a separate tab.


S-I-G-N—U-P

Join an online school that involves both discussions and shared imaginaries (salons). Fill out the form below and click the submit button.

If you are having any issue filling out the embedded form, click here to access it in a separate tab.