As the urgency of the climate crisis becomes more apparent, many have been advocating for policy alternatives to the business as usual approach. Using the ongoing planetary crisis as a moment for all out transformation, all over the world, variants of the Green New Deal have emerged – drawing together policy actions to combat the climate crisis in addition to tackling economic inequality.

Part of an ongoing collaboration with Dutch platform DeDependance, and for a special collaboration with International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), we invited Max Ajl to speak about his book A People’s Green New Deal to discuss how various green transition movements can not only tell us about where we are, but what we need to do in order to bring about actionable policy change. Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he therefore argues, requires nothing less than infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. 

Max was joined by Rosemarie van Ham, who is currently working with for the municipality of Rotterdam and is the founder of Inclusive Climate Action Rotterdam (ICAR), with a mission to advocate climate justice and equality, and Ken de Cooman, co-founder of BC Architects, a hybrid practice that is designing and undertaking “acts of building” towards systemic change in the architecture and construction sector. 

For this event, I curated and moderated the discussion in collaboration with DeDependance and IABR.