Notes from the AIA Brooklyn General Meeting 11/20/2024 and panel discussion. Convening two weeks after the 2024 election, the subject of labor, collectivism and the architectural profession felt timely, poignant, and very distant. The three panelists were:
Dr. Benjamin Shepard
City Tech Professor of Human Services.
He is the author/editor of over ten books including White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (Cassell, 1997) and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (co-edited with Ron Hayduck) (Verso, 2002). The latter work was a non-fiction finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2002. Recent works include Play, Creativity, and the New Community Organizing (Routledge, 2011), Queer Political Performance and Protest (Routledge, 2009) and The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces (co-written with Greg Smithsimon) (SUNY Press, 2011), and Community Projects as Social Activism (Sage, 2014, Rebel Friendships, “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements (2015, Palgrave), Brooklyn Tides(Transcript, 2018), Narrating Perspectives on Childhood and Adolescence (Columbia University Press, 2019), Illuminations on Market Street(a story about sex and estrangement, AIDS and loss, and other preoccupations in San Francisco) (Ibidem Press, 2019), and Sustainable Urbanism: Case Studies in Dialectical Activism (Roman and Littlefield, 2020).
- reference to Hull House/Jane Addams as an example of activism and lobbying for legislative change
- look up Smith College climate protests (1999?) and subsequent change in campus policy
Valerie Lechene
New School Urban System Lab
I discover, develop, and implement blueprints for transitions centered on resilience, decarbonization, regeneration, and repair.
- New School (look up ‘Climate IQ’ tool) and The Architecture Lobby
- Lawyers control their own profession. Architects don’t – this is why they feel underpaid
- Beyond Unions: Worker Cooperatives (look up Practice Practice – book on examples of worker cooperatives); mutual aid societies; community-labor alliances
- Organizing: “Social practice for systems-change” (organizing is not activism)
- The Organizer’s Guide to Architectural Education (The Architecture Lobby)
- Green New Deal, mapping power, and “a just transition”
- ABIC – Alternative Building Industry Collective
- Look up Sunrise Movement and Design as Protest
Lee Kuhn
Sage and Coombe Architects Union
Member of the bargaining committee at Sage and Coombe Architects, currently working to negotiate the union’s first contract.
Adam Achrati 
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