This article is part of the FA special series The Climate Changed.   

In 1996, French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal were approached by developers with a pretty standard request. That year, their office was tasked with creating a development scheme for a small empty lot outside Bordeaux’s city center that locals were using as an ad hoc park. What followed was revolutionary: Nothing. Zilch. Instead of proposing a new building destined for speculative rental purposes, Lacaton & Vassal argued that the park should stay empty for people to enjoy as a public space lined with trees and benches, which is what eventually happened. Such an outcome may seem anticlimactic but in the 1990s, when starchitects like Gehry and Nouvel and their bombastic creations were dominating headlines, humble statements like this were way ahead of their time.

What if architects stopped nourishing capital’s insatiable appetite for growth, like seraphs feeding Bacchus grapes in paintings from antiquity? Architecture under capitalism has always been about growth. Growing communities, growing cities, growing economies; green growth in modern parlance says people like Foster and Boeri, a phenomena many today call greenwashing. What would happen if we pulled the emergency cord and simply ceased growing? Instead, what if architects stopped consuming gigatons of raw materials to make buildings and cities from scratch and more efficiently used the building stock we have around us? What if we only built new buildings when it’s really necessary, like for social housing, schools, hospitals, et al? What if architecture prioritized repair, care, and maintenance; cut ties with fossil fuels; and did the necessary work to truly decarbonize, and decolonize the building industry? What would that look like?

Architecture under something called degrowth communism is what you might get, something that takes center stage in Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. In his new book—which has since made the University of Tokyo philosophy professor famous in Japan—Saito criticizes Promethean and accelerationist tendencies in both the political left and right. He polemically reframes the 19th century political-economist Karl Marx’s vision of post-capitalism, arguing that degrowth communism—a society of freely associated producers not dominating nature but in balance with it—was Marx’s true emancipatory vision.

Saito unearths precious scholarship from the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), a collection of notebooks Marx kept towards the end of his life where he drew empirical connections between industrialization and ecological degradation. MEGA, otherwise known as “Marx’s ecological notebooks,” reveals the philosopher’s profound interest not just in labor but also the natural sciences, but also animal welfare, and the devastating toll industrial capitalism inflicts on the planet. Or, as Saito puts it: “the scope of Marx’s ecological interests proves to be much more extensive than previously assumed.” This revision, Saito explains, is necessary for the “reds” and “greens” to unite under a common banner against global warming.

The fossil fuel industry’s carbon offsetting programs and sequestration technology won’t save us, degrowth communism contends. Or, as degrowth proponent Jason Hickel puts it: “We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth,” Hickel said. “Green growth is not a thing. It has no empirical support.” Instead, we need a new economic system entirely—one that recognizes planet Earth’s finite resources; and eschews ecological collapse, colonialism, and wage theft. Akin to the arguments laid out by Schneider, Vetter, and Vansintjan in The Future is Degrowth; Gavin Mueller in Breaking Things at Work; or Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century; by connecting ecological collapse to class struggle, Saito shows the hollow nature of neoliberal paradigms like “sustainable development,” “clean capitalism,” or “green growth” instead concluding that what’s needed to save the planet is good old-fashioned internationalist class struggle.

As degrowth enters architectural discourse, Saito’s concept of degrowth communism—as opposed to plain old degrowth—offers new, important ideas worth considering for stewards of the built world: It pushes degrowth thinking even further to the left and invites a non-western, utopian perspective to the discussion. Saito’s thesis, and ultimate defense of utopia, is surprising given that most approaches to thwarting the climate crisis today have to do with short-term strategies, a pathology that Saito addresses outright. Without being overly prescriptive, Marx in the Anthropocene effectively functions as a reminder of the important role utopia may play today in reinvigorating architecture’s political imaginary in a moment of crisis, and the extent to which we let petit bourgeois electoralism circumscribe our own political, ecological, abolitionist project.

For some architects, degrowth has meant calling for a “global moratorium” on new construction, an idea that the most ethical thing an architect can do in 2025 is simply to stop building new buildings, instead thinking more strategically about how to make best use of the stock we have around us. In other circles, it’s meant cutting ties with the fossil fuel industry; building buildings with timber instead of concrete; and sourcing construction materials from local or regional manufacturers rather than global supply chains. In Designing for Degrowth: Architecture Against Climate Apartheid, Sasha Plotnikova offers a more succinct understanding:

“A degrowth program starts with local and global reforms. Globally, developed countries would engage in a coordinated effort to strictly cap their own carbon emissions and provide aid to the Global South. Locally, there would be changes to financial institutions, a moratorium on luxury development; reduced working hours, and universal basic income paired with an increased social safety net. In the meantime, there would be investment in community-controlled institutions: co-ops, eco-villages, community farms, and retrofits to vacant buildings to provide low-income or public housing.”

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes also offers helpful insight into the matter. In a 2022 competition hosted by New York Review of Architecture to conceive a new, 100 percent affordable residential skyscraper in Manhattan, Barthes deviated from other submittals by arguing that a more ethical approach would be to not build a new tower at all. Instead, Barthes proposed that the hypothetical budget set aside for the tower’s construction be repurposed by using it to purchase unoccupied dwelling units throughout the city currently used as vacant investment properties. This degrowth approach would achieve the brief’s programmatic requirements for new housing without any new ground-up construction or embodied carbon released into the atmosphere, while leaving the site open to a new public park, much like Lacaton & Vassal’s proposal decades earlier.

Certainly, visions like those ideated by Lacaton & Vassal, Plotnikova, and Barthes proffer a radical deviation from standard architectural practice. They represent an enticing glimpse into what degrowth architecture may look like, an architecture that’s been liberated from the shackles of the “free market” that intelligently responds to our time’s most pressing issues. Saito, I think, would argue that these are the kinds of ideas we need today, not those championed by the rich and famous like Foster, Boeri, et al.

In years past, degrowth solutions have been written off. Skeptics like Andrew McAfee, Paul Krugman, Daniel Susskind, and Hannah Ritchie still cling to the idea that technical progress is the solution to climate change, and that finance capitalism has nothing to do with the equation. These critics deride degrowth proponents for their alleged naïveté. In turn, Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene addresses this nihilist pathology outright, and steadfastly affirms that a new world is indeed possible. All in all, Saito’s call for degrowth communism has much in common with his contemporaries, but he does make some polemics, however. Perhaps Saito’s greatest deviation from normative thinking in contemporary degrowth discourse is his belief that utopian socialism should re-emerge in the left’s political imaginary at this critical juncture in history.

“What is more, anthropocentrism also affects the vision of a post-capitalist society,” Saito writes. “Marx valued ‘utopian socialists’ such as Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon more highly than ‘bourgeois socialists’ like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who accepted the market and wage-labour as the basis of socialism. That was because these utopians enriched the radical imaginary for an alternative post-capitalist society instead of idealizing and naturalizing particular elements of the existing society,” Saito continued. “Similarly, late-capitalist utopians provide powerful inspiration for emancipatory post-capitalist potentials. These political imaginaries are in dire need in the moment, when the legitimacy of the capitalist system is increasingly in question.”