In the International Living Future Institute’s recently released book, The Regenerative Materials Movement: Dispatches from Practitioners, Researchers, and Advocates, a diverse range of thought leaders share their real-world stories, research, revelations, and insights about their bolds visions for overcoming the drawbacks of the current materials economy. Sharon Prince, CEO and Founder of Grace Farms, and who leads Design for Freedom, a global movement to eliminate forced labor from the build environment, shares her own bold and ambitious vision of designing a more humane future in her essay Embodied Suffering in Our Building Materials.
Prince has mobilized more than 100 leaders of the built environment to come alongside her in this work as a part of the Design for Freedom Working Group. She is also a social entrepreneur who co-founded Grace Farms Foods, a premium tea and coffee certified B Corp that educates the public about the work of Grace Farms and demonstrates what the Foundation advocates for: ethical and sustainable supply chains.
Prince is featured alongside leaders in their fields from organizations such as Google, JPB Foundation, MASS Design, Harvard University, Buro Happold, and mindful Materials. Below is Prince’s thought-provoking essay Embodied Suffering in Our Building Materials. (feature image, Sarin Soman via Getty Images)
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Embodied Suffering in Our Building Materials
“Would we consider awarding a project that may have materials made with forced or child labor?” I asked, when I was on the AIA National Jury in 2017. We were evaluating a design for a girls’ school in a country that is a global hotspot for child labor, and therefore had a very high likelihood of exploiting young children to make the bricks used in its very walls.
The question was met with silence.
What we know now is that nearly every project has exposure to exploitation baked into their building materials.
Nearly 28 million people around the world suffer under forced labor conditions, working in hazardous and inhumane environments to make and extract building materials. There are 160 million children in child labor conditions globally. Although modern slavery, which encompasses human trafficking and forced labor, is illegal in every country, these practices continue with impunity.
Despite the horrendous conditions faced by so many people around the world, there is no way of knowing the human cost of the materials we specify because there is no inspection process.
A country of origin and fair labor label is very often missing on the thousands of selected building materials that go into one project. Understanding the provenance of and who makes the materials such as bricks, timber, iron, and concrete that are used to build our homes, offices, schools, and stores is rarely, if ever, considered today. And yet, once we know about the issue of forced labor in our supply chains, we are obligated to ask these questions and take action.
The largest industrialized sector with the highest risk of modern slavery is getting a labor transparency pass. It is stunning that today there is no ethical labor inspection of the building materials supply chain, which accounts for roughly 50 percent of the building’s cost. In addition, the construction sector is the single highest contributor to climate change, with the highest embodied carbon, and is also the industrial sector with the highest embodied suffering.
We at Grace Farms are working to change that. First food, then clothing was brought to the table to account for fair labor in its material supply chain. Next will be shelter.
Design for Freedom
Grace Farms is a humanitarian and cultural center whose mission is to end modern slavery and create more grace and peace in our local and global communities. With our open architecture, Grace Farms breaks down barriers between people and sectors and invites conversation, curiosity, and proximities. Our advocacy to end modern slavery met our investment in architecture when we launched Design for Freedom, an initiative to create a radical paradigm shift to remove forced and child labor from the building materials supply chain. The Design for Freedom movement has brought together more than 80 global industry leaders to eliminate forced labor in the built environment. By taking a top-down approach, we can create true market transformation and build a more equitable future.
A question at the core of Design for Freedom is: Is your building ethically sourced and forced-labor free, as well as sustainably designed?
Particularly at a time when ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing has been prioritized and the green building movement has been integrated in the construction sector, the industry is primed to adopt Design for Freedom Principles – a new mandate to ensure ethical procurement and a more transparent building materials supply chain. Incorporating ESG’s social responsibility standards in the built environment could better safeguard workers and create a more humane future for all. A question at the core of Design for Freedom is: Is your building ethically sourced and forced-labor free, as well as sustainably designed? The answer is, we do not know. Without inspection of the thousands of raw and composite materials, there is no accountability, and the most egregious social equity violation of forced and child labor proliferates.
We developed Design for Freedom with the understanding that there is a startling blind spot in terms of the entropic brutality forced upon the workers who are critical to the production of the very materials we source, even those selected using a sustainability lens. Their suffering should not be incorporated into our construction.
After two years of developing a committed working group of leaders from the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, we launched Design for Freedom in 2020 with the Design for Freedom Report, establishing the basis for this new architectural justice movement. There was no list of at-risk materials, so we researched and developed a list of 12 raw and composite materials with longstanding histories of human rights violations right in front of us. Among these are such ubiquitous building materials as steel, glass, minerals, bricks, stone, copper, and textiles. Timber, for example, is one of the world’s most widely used construction materials; it is also one of the most fraught with problems. According to the United States International Trade Commission, 38 percent of wood products globally are used for construction and up to 50 percent of global illegal logging is dependent on forced labor. Imagine the difference that could be made if project teams examined the provenance of timber on its projects and took labor inputs into account. It would be transformative.
To do this work and mobilize the industry, we have brought together progressive leaders within the ecosystem of the built environment — CEOs, deans, architects, construction managers, lawyers, and government agencies.
To do this work and mobilize the industry, we have brought together progressive leaders within the ecosystem of the built environment — CEOs, deans, architects, construction managers, lawyers, and government agencies. Design for Freedom is prompting architects, engineers, designers, owners, specifiers — essentially all of us, as we all influence the supply chain and are a part of the built environment — to add human rights as a fundamental criterion in building material specification and procurement. We need to envision our buildings being built without forced labor, without slavery embedded in our foundations, curtain walls, interiors, and landscapes.
Forced Labor Is Never Sustainable
It is important to note that environmental sustainability does not hold up with forced labor. Solar panels are dependent on cheap polysilicon, and 45 percent of the global supply is sourced from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where millions are held in forced labor conditions and detained in camps. The recently enacted Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA), which took effect on June 21, 2022, is a bold new type of American legislation that will have long-term impacts on how we source materials, increase supply chain transparency, and hold violators to account. This legislation prohibits importation into the United States of any goods and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. And it is already making a difference. Between June 21 and October 25, 2022, more than 1,000 containers of solar panels worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been detained at United States ports of entry. This kind of enforcement is critical to making the long-term change to remove forced labor from the products that are used in construction.
Towards Architectural Justice
Practices that harm the natural environment and prioritize consumption and low-cost production are the same practices that fuel the injustices of forced and child labor. In other words, there is an inverse relationship between lower material costs — driven lower with speed and other “efficiencies” — and increased human suffering. As Dr. Harriet Harris of the Royal College of Art has noted, “More recently the term sustainability is firmly understood to encompass the ecological meaning that social sustainability is an ‘ecological domain’ — in other words, a form of human embeddedness in the environment. You cannot consider the environment without the people that live within it.”
Social equity which prioritizes ethical material procurement is the next step in architectural justice.
Social equity which prioritizes ethical material procurement is the next step in architectural justice. Minimizing the risk of embodied suffering can be achieved in parallel to the movement to minimize embodied carbon. The Design for Freedom Toolkit notes relevant sustainability certifications and standards that also include third-party fair labor audits. We also affirm that material circularity truncates the material supply chain at the extraction level, which operates at the highest risk of forced and child labor. Digital platforms that aggregate certifications and standards like mindful MATERIALS are working with us to incorporate a Design for Freedom Principles filter. Turner Construction, which represents 10 percent of the United States marketplace for construction, is going beyond the first Design for Freedom Pilot Project transparency work and aims to add Design for Freedom Principles more broadly. The United States Department of State’s Overseas Building Operations, which oversees more than $13 billion in projects, has also made a trajectory shifting commitment to Design for Freedom, which will create a cascading effect in material transparency means and methods.
Our hope is this dialogue will catalyze improvements in manufacturing processes to lower their environmental impact while simultaneously opening the door for an examination of the human rights impact, stimulating an ethical supply chain.
Embodied carbon is refreshing the conversations with manufacturing partners about their full material supply chain. Our hope is this dialogue will catalyze improvements in manufacturing processes to lower their environmental impact while simultaneously opening the door for an examination of the human rights impact, stimulating an ethical supply chain. To this end, Buro Happold engineers are leading a team within our Design for Freedom Working Group to research and add labor inputs into their BIM + embodied carbon project.
According to the United Nations, almost one in ten of all children globally are subjected to child labor. In the least developed countries, slightly more than one in four children, ages 5 to 17, are engaged in labor that is considered detrimental to their health and development. These children work in deplorable conditions, often extracting and harvesting the very materials that go into the buildings in which we live and work. There is clearly a grave human cost when there is no supply chain inspection.
Advocating for change is not enough. We must meet this moment with action to generate real change.
This grave cost is even more urgent to address in light of a warming planet, extreme weather, and climate change, as the impacts of these crises are felt disproportionately by the most vulnerable. Climate change is forcing mass migration as crops, water sources, and farming opportunities continue to dwindle. As we note in our Design for Freedom Report, a migrant workforce is one of the top key risk factors for modern slavery. In June of 2022, the United Nations announced an “intolerable tide” of people displaced by climate change, noting that more than 59 million people were internally displaced in 2021, most by climate related disasters. They also added that this figure is “far higher” than those displaced by armed conflict.
We need to bring all that we can to confront these greatest of humanitarian issues. Advocating for change is not enough. We must meet this moment with action to generate real change.
Design for Freedom Pilot Projects are helping us to do just that, by providing material transparency and prioritizing ethical procurement. As of December 2022, there are five Design for Freedom Pilot Projects in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India, including the 21st Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel, by Theaster Gates, Shadow of a Face, a monument to Harriet Tubman by Nina Cooke John, and a new center for arts and culture by Serendipity Arts in New Delhi, India. These projects are adding to the body of knowledge while also creating tangible examples of a more humane built environment. These projects have already catalyzed positive action. We are gathering new research, testing new means and methods, and convening ethical action meetings to educate practitioners and communities about forced labor in our building materials supply chain and the agency that each of us has to address it.
“All good revolutions start like this.”
Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, former United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, opened the first Design for Freedom Summit at Grace Farms with me and noted that “All good revolutions start like this.”
This is revolutionary work and everyone has a role to play. Everyone has the wherewithal to inspect at least one material end to end, even one chair.
Fair labor building materials can and will be a central driver for solving a timeless humanitarian challenge and yes, for creating a more humane future. This is a rare and promising moment to initialize transparency in an opaque, weighty marketplace. We can and must investigate the materials that we build with to create market transformation and end embedded suffering in our buildings.
About Grace Farms
Grace Farms is a center for culture and collaboration in New Canaan, Connecticut. We bring together people across sectors to explore nature, arts, justice, community, and faith at the SANAA-designed River building on 80 acres of publicly accessible, preserved natural landscape. Our humanitarian work to end modern slavery and foster more grace and peace in our local and global community includes leading the global Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced labor in building materials supply chain.
The SANAA-designed River building is embedded in 80 acres of natural landscape. Grace Farms is free and open to the public six days a week, other than Monday. Photo by Kyle Norton
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