House of Annetta in collaboration with the New School of the Anthropocene

Built environment ecologies diploma 
(Bee.Diploma)

A course for understanding the systems through which we make our environments and how they make us in turn. Taught by people taking action to change them.

Introduction

House of Annetta is a space for learning about the ways in which ownership of land shapes our lives and the world around us. We are a home for building movement infrastructure and radical imagination. For over 15 years the Stewards of House of Annetta have been building and visiting projects for community infrastructure. This course is a continuation of that journey. 

Our current education system is intertwined with many of the systems we want to dismantle. We want a future for education untied from global debt finance and the military industrial complex, and instead nurture its role as a common good. We are offering a different path that points to ways of living and working for the repair of the planet and our communities. This course has been set up to provide inspiration and practical knowledge so you can take another step into the global struggle for change.

The Built Environment Ecologies Diploma (BEE.Diploma) offers ways into learning about the different layers of systems in our lives, to understanding our own positions within them and discussing potentials for transformation.

The Diploma is being made by those taking action and rebuilding the world to serve the flourishing of life rather than profit or extraction: community organisers, landworkers, beekeepers, architects, artists, healthworkers, geographers and historians. The course has been made possible by the imagination and comradeship of New School of the Anthropocene.

The knowledge we are producing is not for gatekeeping. All resources, lectures and content produced will be later made freely accessible online. To make this possible we depend on contributions from those who can, paying to participate in the program in person. We are independent partners without state funding, striving to keep costs as low as possible. All of our teachers are paid equitably and the course coordinators are also in charge of our own administration.

We are trialing this course on a solidarity based, Pay What you Can Afford structure - more details can be found below.


Why Built Environment Ecologies?

This course sheds light on the interconnections between Land, Property, Education, Materiality, Labour, Housing, Food, Health, Voice and Community Power. A broad overview of the historic and current state of these systems will be interwoven with focused learning from live projects and movements.

House of Annetta is a space for learning about the ways in which ownership of land shapes our lives and the world around us. Through Annetta Pedretti’s cybernetic life work archived in the house, we have come to understand how stacked layers of systems produce our environment, and us in turn. This course is an opportunity to learn from those interconnections, building capacity to organise and imagine them otherwise.

Who is it for?

This is an interdisciplinary process that is rooted within social movements, explicitly decolonial and pro-degrowth. This course is for all those who seek learning spaces that resist financial logics.

You do not need to have any particular educational background or professional experience to join the Diploma. All over 18 are welcome to apply — both those who have been a part of House of Annetta over the years and those who are new to it. Mums, tradespeople, students, researchers, union organisers, unwaged people are all welcome.

New School of The Anthropocene has a cohort spanning 18-80 years of age across all seven continents. We have developed the format for this diploma learning from NSOTA’s tiered payment scheme, and aim to foster a similarly intergenerational context for dialogue.

We are offering two ways of accessing the Diplomas —in-person, and later online via a digital resource library with occasional structured facilitation — to enable broader participation than the physical capacity, accessibility or location of the house allows. One of our priorities for the future development of House of Annetta is to ensure it is fully accessible. For more information, please check our accessibility document here.

Structure:

An 8 day course at House of Annetta, going deep into systems and their presence in the building/neighbourhood at 25 Princelet St. Each system will be introduced and explored with 2 multimedia lectures / workshops. We will use popular education methods to anchor the conversations in how they apply to and are reproduced in our immediate surroundings. The daily structure will include reflections, cooking, walks, somatic practices, trips and discussions. Lectures will be recorded and workshop resources collected to create the content for a freely accessible on-line version of the course to be made available later in 2026.

1. Systems of Relation: Learning how to learn
Saturday 9th May

The course starts with an introductory day building relationships, common ground, and understanding who is in the room. We will spend the day together at House of Annetta, being introduced to the house, cybernetics, sharing our roots and establishing a learning culture. We will work with Learning Contracts, resource mapping and popular education methods to create a pedagogy for autonomous and interdependent learners. We will distribute an info pack and reader for everyone. Everyone will be added to a group chat for exchange and conversation over the course of the diploma.

Led by: Aska Welford, Fran Edgerley

2. Systems of Resource: Materials & Labour
Saturday 23rd May

Exploring bio-based materials and extractive supply chains we will understand the relationships between landscape and the built environment. Thinking through how design shapes labour shapes our bodies we will learn how to use our hands with heart. In the afternoon a competitive labour roleplay game will show us how the design of wage structures reproduce certain social dynamics.

Led by: River Jean Nash, George Massoud
3. Systems of Health: Body and Planetary Healing
Saturday 6th June

Looping from the impact of our housing environments on our health through a radical cobuild project in south london, we will spin out to planetary health and transnational strategies for mobilising community health. We will share and practice basic somatic practices to build resilience and strength in ourselves.

Led by: Rita Issa, Tim Oshodi
4. Systems of shelter: Housing
 Saturday 20th June
Tracing the socio-political formation of housing and the production of homelessness. We will hear from those mobilising workers and working in councils to address urban struggle. Learn from campaigns, ties to the economy, typologies produced by capitalism and community technical aid.

Led by: Biz Turner, Jake Arnfield
5. Systems of Land: Property Ownership
Saturday 11th July

“What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man's institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors” — Karl Polanyi

Enclosure, colonisation, rentier property forms: systems of ownership are fundamental to the extraction of value. What other forms of relation could be fostered for a radically different world? How do flows of capital, as well as state decision making, facilitate or produce ownership property relations? We will do a memory sketch mapping workshop to explore our own personal relationships to land.

Led by: Isabella Pojuner, Calvin Po
6. Systems of Voice: Community Power
Saturday 25th July
Together we will think through the way society is organised. What is the logic and what are our organising principles? How do we build institutions that support cultures for life? How do we come together and make community? What are the carnival of forms we might use? How might we use our voice?

Led by: Hannah Catherine Jones, Mira Hall
7. Systems of reproduction: Food
Saturday 15th August

A day looking at the food system as a vessel for organising. Learning from urban solutions, the global movement for agroecology, food sovereignty as an advocacy tool for human dignity mobilising alternatives to mass migration. The afternoon will include a Systems Audio walk around Tesco.

Led by: Jyoti Fernandes, Shiri Shalmy
8. What’s next?
Saturday 22nd August

Application and process. A day of discussion, cybernetics and witnessing each other review learning contracts. What did you learn, what do you want to share? What are you going to do with it? Public sharing and celebration.

Lead by: Aska Welford, Fran Edgerley

Who’s Involved?

George Massoud George is an architect, educator and cultural worker. He is director at Material Cultures, a design and research organisation based in London. He is interested in how we can build futures of interdependence with the various ecologies that shape our built environment. This underlying philosophy is explored in the spaces he occupies as a practitioner: in the studio, in the classroom and in the community. 
River Jean Nash is a carpenter, joiner and project manager with twenty years experience. He teaches at the Centre of Alternative technology as an architectural build consultant, and cofounded Holdfast to skill share building and tool knowledge to those with minority experience in trade.
River is building electric guitars and pedals for an ambient doom music project. He uses sculptural making to explore the trans experience.
Dr. Rita Issa is a primary care physician and planetary health practitioner, exploring themes of loss and hope in the contexts of climate change and environmental degradation. She holds positions in the WHO’s Climate Change and Health Unit, and as co-convener of Planet.Health, an imagination lab. She has previously worked at MSF, Primary Care International, Lancet Migration, and aboard Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Refugee Health, and the forthcoming Resistance, Activism and Health.
Tim Oshodi was a founding member of the Downham Dividend Society CLT, which was established to continue the neighbourhood regeneration work of Fusions Jameen’s Black-led community self-build schemes. The trust promotes an asset-based approach to maximize the public health and community wealth-building impact of 800 acres of publicly owned green space in and around Downham. 


Biz Turner is a housing organiser and bodyworker committed to health in its widest sense — across our homes, community spaces, individual and collective bodies. They have worked with tenants’ groups and networks on issues including damp and mould, fuel poverty, estate regeneration, disrepair, fire safety and community infrastructure. They are currently specialising in building pathology, damp and mould remediation and retrofit, strengthening their technical expertise in response to the rising mould epidemic to help ensure a just transition to healthy, sustainable homes.
Jake Arnfield is an Architect and public sector worker. Currently, he leads a variety of new council housing projects within a London Local Authority development team. He served as an elected Workplace Organiser with the architectural trade union UNITE-SAW. Currently his union activity centres on connecting union members with tenants’ unions and community campaigns, supporting efforts to improve housing conditions and fight against gentrification.
Calvin Po is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs, where he co-leads the Radicle Civics Arc. He has led projects with the Scottish Government’s Land Commission on land governance reform, the Taiwanese Government on decentralised web3 civic infrastructure, is developing multi-actor governance approaches for river ecosystems, and in FreeHouse, a commons housing model based on ‘self-owning’ houses. His teaching focuses on, ‘Universal Free Housing’ Calvin is also a writer.
Isabella Pojuner is a researcher focused on collective memory of the English enclosure movement in relation to the British Empire and ongoing forms of dispossession. They are working towards a PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia, examining how land registration affects customary practices. They are also a member of the Museum of Enclosure, a political education project working to cultivate a memory culture around dispossession in England.
Dr. Hannah Catherine Jones (aka foxymoron) is an artist, researcher, multi-instrumentalist, broadcaster and DJ (BBC Radio/TV, NTS – The Opera Show), composer, conductor, founder of Peckham Chamber Orchestra – a community project and founder of Chiron Choir. Jones’ praxis is connected by a central spine of decolonisation seeking to ask: how can we destabilise, disrupt and dismantle the status quo? How can voices who have been historically excluded from discourses be placed at the centre? How can diasporic folx utilise vibrations-frequencies-sound-music as part of individual and collective healing practices? How can these practices be sustained – with regularity and longevity -within late-capitalism?Mira Hall is a childcare worker and an organiser with Nanny Solidarity Network and IWGB. She works on building the collective power of carers (paid and unpaid) to resist the commodification and criminalisation of care under capitalism. She has led projects setting up a cooperative nursery and a participatory budgeting pilot and has worked in movement-building for the UK Worker Cooperative Federation and New Economics Foundation. She is interested in kids' political agency and voice at a moment when the far right are weaponizing their ‘safety’ and speaking for them. She is part of Tottenham Family Fightback, reclaiming a centre threatened with demolition where she used to run playgroups.
Jyoti Fernandes Co-founder of the Landworkers’ Alliance, Jyoti is an agroecological smallholder farmer based in Dorset, UK where she runs a micro dairy and produces a wide range of products from cheese and meats to cider, juice and preserves. The farm is part of a local smallholders cooperative that shares collective processing facilities and markets the products of the members’ smallholdings collectively. She coordinates the Policy, Lobbying and Campaigning work of the Landworkers’ Alliance and is spokesperson for La Via Campesina, which represents over 200 milliion people in more than 180 countries.
Shiri Shalmy is a community and political organiser. She is a founding member and co-director of Cooperation Town, a movement of community food co-ops, and a housing co-op organiser. She was a founding member of the Sex Workers Union and helped set up the Design and Culture Workers union branch. She was one of the founders of Women's Strike UK, Feminist Antifascist Assembly and Antiuniversity. She co-edited and wrote the preface for the anthology Why Work? (Freedom Press) and co-edited Doorways: Women, Homelessness, Trauma and Resistance (House Sparrow Press). She is a mother and lives in London. 

Fran Edgerley is a steward of House of Annetta + Co-founder of architectural design collective Assemble. Learning through the delivery of projects they came to understand the power in access to land: from setting up child-led Baltic Street Adventure Playground, and working alongside the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust on neighbourhood repair. They co-founded House of Annetta to build infrastructure for learning and resources for organising around land justice.
Aska Welford is a steward of House of Annetta. They grew up in Tower Hamlets and went to nursery on Brick Lane. After training in architecture and working in social housing they were part of a workers enquiry, which lead to the formation of the first trade union in architecture since the 1980s.. Aska works with archives, walking tours, food, and the community press at House of Annetta to support political education.

Application Process:

To make an application to the BEE.Diploma, please complete the form linked below.
Please note: In-person numbers are limited to 25 people. 

The form will ask you the following questions:
  1. Name
  2. Why do you want to be part of BEE.D? Minimum 200 words (you can submit a 5 min voice note, 5 min video or pdf up to 2 A4 pages - you can tell us about yourself, past experiences, future dreams).
  3. Where will you be based during the course? (Neighbourhood/city)
  4. What is your relationship to systems of education?
  5. How much are you able to contribute for the course?
  6. Email address
  7. Phone number

Apply here
We will review all applications submitted on a rolling basis until capacity is reached. Final deadline for submission will be 5pm 27th March. If your application is accepted we will be in touch with more questions regarding access needs and care responsibilities.

Accessibility:

Email info@houseofannetta.org if you have any questions. Find out more about the space in our how-to-guide + Accessibility Statement. The building dates from 1705, and has several major limitations to wheelchair accessibility: the step up into the building from the street, the lack of lift to access the upper floors, and the non-accessible toilet. We believe that access to space is a key part of spatial justice, and the future repair project we are fundraising for will make the building more physically accessible.

Why choose independent education?

After 15 years developing infrastructures for learning and ‘alternative’ education projects — within and outside academic and cultural institutions — we understand how ill-suited the dominant education system is to foster transformative societal change. Financialised institutions of academia hollow out the culture of learning, in the worst cases transforming education into a transaction for credentialised social capital. A learning culture able to respond to current and coming challenges needs decentralised interdependent spaces for learning embedded within community organising.

House of Annetta has been building towards this for the past three years, testing out modes of peer-to-peer learning and building resources for agency. As a building site in process that has housed families and workers across 300 years it enables us to reimagine the very ordinary constructions of home, care, and the material world.

House of Annetta is already home to multiple strands of free learning activities:
✎𓂃Systems RIP: a peer-to-peer learning program for groups to take action on the systems that shape their lives.
✎𓂃Shining A Light On The Back End: a series of discussion evenings focused on the invisible operational, legal or administrative processes that make community projects possible.
✎𓂃Incubator: a mentoring and support program for emergent projects.
✎𓂃Perpetual Stew: a week long series of talks, skillshare and food focused on urgent struggles for spatial justice.
✎𓂃2nd Floor Press: a community press with monthly inductions run by slow+dirty feminist publishing collective.

BEE.Diploma offers a different opportunity for zooming out, to look at the world through multiple different lenses, to explore theory and hear from a range of possibilities and projects for change. House of Annetta is about to embark on a unique construction project - repairing the building to become fully accessible and usable all year round through an education and training centred process. We plan for the BEE Diploma to accompany us on this journey in the years moving forward. The programme will evolve each year through live research, material testing, community organising, and construction, responding live to emergent projects and themes.

Pay What You Can Afford scheme:

We all experience different relationships to money: impacted by systems of class, migration status, disability, race, gender and age. In order to support this learning programme and make it more accessible across economic circumstances, Pay What you Can Afford. Income from course fees is supplemented by financial support from the New School of The Anthropocene and its network.

✔ Free: limited number: if you are fleeing from conflict, have experience of the care system, incarceration, or street homelessness, get in touch via email.
✔ Sliding Scale: £50-£1850: Use the tables for guidance on how much to contribute, based on your personal circumstances
✔ Supporter: £1850+ (in person) If you have the financial means, then donating more than the full tuition course will help us to extend the PWYCA scheme for other learners in future years.
✔ Access, Childcare and Travel Bursary: if you have access, childcare, or travel costs (from within London), please get in touch via email. We are not able to support accommodation costs.

All personal information will remain confidential.

In-person fees: 8 full days program with 3-4 facilitators throughout. Cost covers travel, printed materials, and lunch everyday of attendance.

£50-£300 £300-£850 £850 - £1850
• I am frequently concerned about meeting needs, such as food, transport, housing and clothing or often fall short.
• I have debt and it sometimes prohibits me from meeting my basic needs.
• I am unemployed or underemployed.
• I have caring responsibilities that significantly restrict my income.
• I have no access to savings and/or very limited expendable income to buy coffee at a shop, attend the cinema or concert, and buy clothes and books.
• I cannot afford a holiday or do not have the ability to take time off without financial burden.
• I might be concerned about meeting my basic needs but still regularly achieve them.
• I might have some debt, but it does not prohibit attainment of basic needs.
• I can afford public transport; if I have access to a car, I can afford petrol.
• I am employed.
• I have access to health care.
• I might have access to financial savings and have some expendable income.
• I am able to buy some new items.
• I can take a holiday annually or every few years without financial burden.
• I am comfortably able to meet all my basic needs.
• I might have some debt, but it does not prohibit attainment of basic needs.
• I own my home or property, or I rent a higher-end property.
• I can afford public and private transport. If I have access to a car I can afford petrol.
• I have regular access to healthcare.
• I have access to financial savings and have an expendable income.
• I can always buy new items.
• I can afford an annual holiday and can take time off work



INFO

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