Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) Selected to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2023!

With this distinction, Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) will launch Not for Sale! an architectural activist campaign for non-alienated housing. AAHA is an architectural curatorial collective including Adrian Blackwell (University of Waterloo), David Fortin (University of Waterloo, Architect), Matthew Soules (University of British Columbia, Architect), Sara Stevens (University of British Columbia), luugigyoo Patrick Stewart (Architect, McEwen School of Architecture), and Tijana Vujosevic (University of British Columbia).

Canada is in the midst of a severe and protracted housing crisis, with issues ranging from widespread unaffordability to under-housing, precarious housing, and homelessness. This modern reality, shaped by the extractive logic of speculative real estate, is founded on the simultaneous colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands and the modern invention of fee-simple property. Real estate speculation is a form of extortion. It converts homes into spatio-financial assets, changing the form, function, and aesthetics of housing to better serve the logics of wealth storage and speculation. The process is violent, resulting in an urban environment that is racist, sexist, and classist at a systemic level. This global phenomenon is nowhere more visible than in Canada, a country whose economy is now dominated by real estate.

Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) will transform the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini into a campaign headquarters for equitable housing that rejects this concept of property and the financialized form of architecture that it implies. To address these issues, they will work with interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed teams comprised of activist organizations, advocates for non-alienated housing, and architects. They will collaborate to develop demands and create architectural projects to address housing alienation, presenting bold visions for equitable and deeply affordable housing in Canada. The AAHA goal is to mobilize all Canadians to join the call for safer, healthier, and more equitable housing.


https://canadacouncil.ca/initiatives/venice-biennale