Making (A)mends

In October 2022, the 14th ATUT symposium Making (A)mends was held at the Tampere School of Architecture. Making (A)mends plays on the word ‘mend’ and to ‘amend’; to mend in the sense of repairing or restoring something, but also in the sense of redeveloping and putting something back together. ‘Amending’ is about improving, changing, adapting, and putting ourselves on a new path. At the time of the conference, we had just come out of a two-year COVID pandemic of lockdowns and little face to face contact. It made visible the positive impact we have on each other and that we need each other as fellow human beings, but it also became visible – when we slowed down and gave back the city to nature – how nature and non-humans were able to take up that space. For a short time, we could glimpse a different kind of planet. Yet climate records continue to be broken around the world: hottest temperatures, longest heatwaves, worst droughts ever recorded; extreme and record flooding and rainfall. And we are guilty of contributing to this: architecture and built environment projects continue to exploit, disrupt and damage the planet. We also witnessed war and conflict, and this showed how we are deeply interconnected as humans to each other but also to our environment. It shows that a better, more sustainable, inclusive and restorative world is not possible without peace. Fixing the climate, biodiversity and security crises we face as a society are extraordinarily complex and challenging tasks. Research has shown that radical transformations of our physical, political, organisational, social and value structures are needed to respond to – and prepare for – these crises and to restore the past damage that our activities and (in)activities in the built environment have inflicted. Architecture and urban planning have a fundamental role to play in this, given the long ‘lock-in’ of the urban plans and spaces and places we are part of designing and their potential (negative and positive) impacts over time with the associated local and global (in)justices they create. This special issue provides several different perspectives on ‘Making (A)mends’ to address how we can and must be part of the solution and raises at times uncomfortable questions about our own role, responsibility and values as architects and urban planners, how we got here, and how we can make (a)mends, urgently.