Sustainability

Being a genuinely sustainable citizen is, in most practical respects, impossible. The world is structured to make it so. Every act of consumption, every journey, every investment involves a chain of consequences that extends far beyond what is visible at the point of decision. To pretend otherwise is to engage in the easy-fitting fiction that most corporate sustainability statements rely on.

Secret Agent does not deal in comfortable fictions.

The most straightforward position begins with acknowledging the contradiction, not papering over it. Property is among the more ecologically costly of human activities. Land is manipulated, materials are extracted, energy is consumed. Even the most conscientiously designed development takes something from the environment. The question we ask is not whether something is taken — it always is — but whether anything is returned.

Most development returns nothing. It extracts, builds, sells, and moves on. The surrounding ecology is not part of the calculation. Most acquisitions give no thought to what a building will demand of its occupants in twenty years, or whether it is built for the conditions to come rather than the conditions now gone. These are questions that should be asked at the point of acquisition. Secret Agent asks them.

Commercial viability and environmental responsibility must be held in productive tension rather than resolved in favour of whichever is more convenient at the time. We work with clients and collaborators who understand this, and we are drawn to projects and practitioners at the leading edge of adapting their practice to what the environment now requires.

The short-sightedness of the human mind is well documented and easy to observe. We discount the future aggressively, particularly when the present is comfortable. Future generations will inhabit an environment shaped by decisions being made now — decisions in which property plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged.