F-U-T-U-R-E   B-E-L-O-N-G-I-N-G

ORGANISING FOR GLOBAL CHANGE

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A-B-O-U-T

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.

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

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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

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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.

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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
• …

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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.

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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.

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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.