When we celebrate the best, is it for the best? Language met its limitations with COVID-19; the word ‘unprecedented’ was used initially in 2020 by politicians without cynicism but, by the end of the year, the word was used by most with a sense of fatigue and irony: ‘unprecedented’.

Making sense of last year was made more challenging because words did not seem up to the task. The political and virus outcomes of last year have picked up new intensities in 2021 and, if last year was unprecedented, how, then, to make sense of this year? And when and how will we do it? We in Aotearoa New Zealand have had the hard-won privilege of returning to a new normal and, for the most part, of rediscovering old routines, with some new habits. We go out to meet friends on a buttery summer evening and there are a few differences from the last time we were this warm; we check in at a restaurant using the COVID App, someone produces sanitiser from their bag and some put out their hands instinctively and conversation resumes while we perform one of our new Covid-19 rituals.

Still, world events can feel disorientating as we enjoy the surreal benefits of last year’s public health achievement: an accomplishment to which we, as a collective, contributed without guarantees that we would reap the benefits. Yet, here we are, living with the material proof of what had the air of a social experiment: what do you achieve when you place the health of people before the health of the economy? No words feel quite right to describe the achievement but there are words for what has happened elsewhere – ‘toughening restrictions’ and ‘daily toll’. As the pōhutukawa trees bloom, there is much tragedy. As I write this, a Northland case makes it clear that uncertainty persists. 

Questions remain about the future, destabilised by this global pandemic, the consequential inequality soaring worldwide and climate change still desperately urgent, we will meet this quandary again and it will look different every time: people versus price, climate change or global monopolies, property or homes? As blissful, warm rays find their way onto our mask-free faces for now, the business of making sense of last year in order to know how to face forwards remains, and the trickiness of finding a common language to describe our collective experience gives clues as to what is at stake.

Words construct meaning, and meaning constructs what matters, and what matters becomes the collective’s moral agenda, and the collective’s moral agenda can be the difference between life and death – in other words, the common good. But it is more than that; COVID-19 connected us to the moral value in a dignified death for humanity. If this was what we were forcefully made to reckon with in 2020, the future would be well spent investing in thinking again about the dignified life. For such a task, we need renewed and substantive public discussion on the moral imperatives in establishing the common good for us in Aotearoa New Zealand.

What then is the moral agenda for the country’s architecture community? How is the architecture community thinking about its own common good? Are we inspired by the country’s collective leadership in showing the world what can happen when people are placed before price? I believe this is one way the profession behind the country’s built realm might conceptualise its moral imperatives. What is the best for the future of our built realm and how will we work towards it?

One way is to revisit what we think of as the profession’s best, and the recognition we bestow upon it when we do. American political philosopher and Harvard University law professor Michael Sandel links the collective good to the question of what it is about work that is determined to be meaningful – our ‘best’, thus:

“One such question is what kinds of work are worthy of recognition and esteem. Another is what we owe one another as citizens. These questions are connected. For we cannot determine what counts as a contribution worth affirming without reasoning together about the purposes and ends of the common life we share. And we cannot deliberate about common purposes and ends without a sense of belonging, without seeing ourselves as members of a community to which we are indebted. Only insofar as we depend on others, and recognize our dependence, do we have reason to appreciate their contributions to our collective well-being. This requires a sense of community sufficiently robust to enable citizens to say, and to believe, that ‘we are all in this together’ – not as a ritual incantation in times of crisis, but as a plausible description of our everyday lives.”¹

It is useful to think concretely so I will use some real-world examples as means to bring his and my argument to bear on how the architecture community considers its own common good. I caution from reading this as a critique of the system and a proposal to dismantle the foundations we currently have. This essay is about robust public discussion towards building on those foundations, for a future worthy of the efforts made in this pandemic.

Looking across the major awarding institutions, there is much focus on high-end design; I believe this is well justified for the profession. Nonetheless, we as practitioners and our representative institutions would do well to expand on the current categories and consider with depth other contributions to our common life worth celebrating. Categories might include architects or practitioners working to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) or to mitigate climate change.

It is time to recognise the usually gendered emotional labour women do, too, in the industry. In doing so, we would likely see a shift in the homogeneity in the winners of the profession and, in doing so, create a new, more socially imaginative type of ‘best’ that puts people and the common good at its centre. Because that is us at our best.

^{More on top image: This illustration explores, through drawing, a decentralised network of democracy, which harnesses the imagination of each individual. In order to combat increasing feelings of disenfranchisement in our political system, voting is replaced with a process of ‘cloud-gazing’ that facilitates the upload of dreams to ‘The Cloud’. Here, they develop with others into dream constructions to be downloaded into the real world.}