Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures

“This fascinating book treats the transition ahead with the nuance and complexity it deserves, but also the brio and confidence it demands. Read it and then go make it real.” ―Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Here Comes the Sun

“Our societies need massive and rapid transitions. White and Pevsner provide three badly missing things to that challenge. They bring labour politics to the practice of transition design, design to talk of just transitions, and critical histories to visioning more sustainable future societies. Designing the Just Transition will remind systems change oriented designers that their agency lies in acknowledging that they also are labourers who must act in solidarity across scales.” ―Cameron Tonkinwise, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

“As it has entered the mainstream, the strategy of just transition has been separated from its roots in labour environmentalism and political agency and often seen as the equivalent of energy justice. Designing the Just Transition applies the theoretical and practical promise of the strategy to the political economy of design while keeping it grounded, intentionally and creatively, in the world of work and workers.” ―Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University

“White and Pevsner’s Designing the Just Transition is a rare gift of a book: at once richly historical and yet compellingly pertinent to today’s predicaments. It offers comprehensive reassessment of design and architecture’s diverse and problematic relationship to environmental politics. More than this, the book also presents a visionary position on where to go from here: how design might effectively re-engage with progressive political agendas that genuinely enable environmental responsibility and decarbonisation, while simultaneously ensuring solidarity with of all forms of labour. It is path-breaking and deeply relevant across many disciplines, continents and political subject positions, and should inspire designers, scholars, environmental advocates and policy-makers to delve confidently into designing just forms of systems change.” ―Jesse Adams Stein, University of Technology Sydney

“From the moment I first read Damian White’s 2019 essay entitled “Just Transitions/Design for Transitions: Preliminary Notes on a Design Politics for a Green New Deal,” which turned my head and made clear that any approach architects might take toward climate justice must engage workers of all classes – professional designers, construction workers, labor unions, fabricators, local officials – I have waited for this book. Pulling together as it does the particulars of labor/ecology relations, it outlines, as the authors say, “the need [for climate struggles] to be enfolded in broader struggles for meaningful work and good jobs, affordable housing and livable communities.” While taking to task the design professions’ historical complicity with neo-liberalism, it uniquely offers a set of tactics for building a worker-forward transition to a healthy life on this planet.” ―Peggy Deamer, Yale University

Damian White is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of History, Philosophy and Social Science at The Rhode Island School of Design, USA. Before that he held teaching and research positions at James Madison University, Virginia; Goldsmiths College, University of London; and the Department of Innovation Studies at the University of East London.

Damian White is Head of the Department of History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA.

Nicholas Pevzner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and a Faculty Fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at Penn. He is the co-editor of Scenario Journal, a digital open-access publication focused on design and ecology. His research focuses on the socio-spatial impact of energy infrastructure, including spatial planning for the renewable energy transition.

Julian Agyeman is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate at Tufts University, USA. He is the originator of the increasingly influential concept of just sustainabilities, which explores the intersecting goals of social justice and environmental sustainability. With over 150 publications, he is the author, co-author or co-editor of 13 books, including Introducing Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice (Zed Books, 2013).