The legacy of industrial offshoring

The audio documentary ‘Off:Re:Onshore’ engages the effects of industrial offshoring through a series of interviews with eight leaders, activitists, architects, and cultural producers. Presented by Víctor Muñoz Sanz (Urbansim), the 2015 Emerging Curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), contemporary opportunities to build sustainable futures beyond offshore production are being discussed. 

Inadequate wages, dangerous work conditions, and sexual exploitation are by-products of the offshore production and labour-intensive industrialization of the economies of the Global South. Increasing South-to-South competition, economic protectionism, automation, relocalization, and the loose framing of corporate responsibility are catalysts for the further deterioration of the working and living conditions in and around those factories. The central question in the audio documentary: where do we go from here?

In interviews with experts from different fields possible answers are explored: Keller Easterling (writer, architect and professor at Yale School of Architecture), Rosey Hurst (consultant in ethical global trade and founder Impactt), Sarah Labowitz (business and human rights researcher and advocate), Rahul Mehrota (architect and professor at Harvard GSD), Anne Elizabeth Moore (writer, researcher, cultural critic), Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay (social anthropologist and senior advisor at KIT), Raúl Cárdenas Osuna (architect and artist), and Wouter Vanstiphout (architectural historian and professor at the Faculty of Architecture TU Delft). 

Listen to the audio documentary here.

Photo: Road sign in Batanagar, India, 2012. Photograph by Nouman Malik