Favourite books: 50 years on, Schumacher’s call for small is as pertinent as ever

I first came across this book, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E F Schumacher, back when I was doing my master’s 20 years ago. The book, first published in 1973, really resonated with me in a big way because it talks about everything around ecology but relates it back to the economy, which is quite rare.

It’s something that’s sat with me ever since. It’s always the book that I come back to whenever I’m looking at buildings and thinking about how much can be renovated, and how many of the materials can be retained rather than taken out and sent to landfill.

While we are moving towards a more sustainability-focused way of thinking in architecture, we don’t really relate that back to our markets and economy. This book shows that everything comes back to these, and we need to have a super holistic way of looking at the world, from our economy and our money to the environment and our social value.

At the moment, everything is so focused on GDP (gross domestic product) and the markets and our finances. When we relate that back to architecture, it’s about the exponential extraction of materials and how that feeds into the construction industry, and how bad that is for people, the environment and our planet – and that’s where the book really got to me.

The title Small is Beautiful is so fascinating. If we are to rethink the scale at which we work, it’s not just about the quantity and scale these buildings really need to be, it’s also about ‘small’ in terms of closeness of location to where we are retrieving materials when we’re extracting. It comes back to miles travelled and our carbon footprint.

Schumacher was incredibly ahead of his time as an economist and ecologist all in one. Schumacher College in Dartington, which sadly has just closed, has been very influential globally on those who studied there over the last 20 years and has been a real advocate for saving the planet. Some of the greatest thinkers there in terms of lecturers and academics have become close friends and mentors of mine. They include Helena Norberg-Hodge, who wrote Local Futures, which looks at the environmental impact of big capitalism and trade deals.

Stephan Harding, who sadly died recently, was also both an ecologist and economist and taught at Schumacher College. I recently took students of mine from Cardiff University to visit one of the biggest redevelopment sites in Bristol – which I’m involved in masterplanning – and listen to his Deep Time Walk podcast all at the same time. This takes you through an expansive timeline of 4.6 billion years of history from before the dawn of time to now, and really gives you a sense of place and how interconnected we all are.

I think Small is Beautiful also has a more spiritual approach – the idea that we are inherently all interconnected, from the plants, to the animals, to the water and to everything. That feeds into our choice of materials and the scale at which we design and build.

While architects are having more conversations at the dawn of a new-build design about how to really minimise energy use, if the project had started as a retrofit instead, they’d avoid knocking it down and sending materials to landfill, while using even more energy to recreate the materials needed to rebuild.

We should be focused on reclaiming materials and going as local as possible when we chose to extract materials or even buy materials. And that comes down to labour as well – local labour, rather than big international corporations, can make all the difference. The money you pay them for their fees or supplies can be spent locally and go back into the community rather than off to some tax haven.

The book talks about how our sense of progression for so many years has been around monetary growth, but that there isn’t room for exponential growth. If we’re constantly extracting from the earth, there won’t be anything left. The body of the conversation is about how we need to do less, how we need to take less, how we need to look at our supplies, and how we can be more resilient in how we use them. It talks about the steps we can take to move us out of that realm, although a lot of it does come down to politics and economic structural issues.

The book also reference Gandhi a lot. My grandfather worked with Gandhi in the mid-1940s to give tea plantation workers in the hill countries of Sri Lanka fair rights, wages and land to dwell. His ethos lives on generations later within this seminal book.

This is a really important book for architects to read – and I don’t suppose that many have. In architecture, we’ve only really been talking about extraction and retrofit-first in the last five years, but that’s something that Schumacher had been talking about for a very long time.

Shankari (Shanks) Raj is founder of Nudge. She was speaking to Pamela Buxton

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, by E F Schumacher, Vintage classics,1973

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