1) The human rights ecology.

Right now, humans use half of the world to live, to grow their crops and their timber, and to use as pasturelands for their animals. If you added up all the human beings, we would weigh ten times as much as all the wild mammals put together. We face over the next two decades a fundamental transformation that will determine whether the next 100 years will be the best of centuries or the worst: fifty percent of us now live in urban areas; that’s going to increase to 70 percent by 2050.

Urbanization, the dominant demographic event of our time is putting a big squeeze on planet Earth. All people need living space and eco-cultural systems in which they can thrive. Urbanization is bringing people into ever greater contact, where collectively they act as a giant physical, biological, and cultural force.

The majority of earthlings aspire toward development; yet such a large-scale aspiration means that we are aspiring toward an unsustainable lifestyle. Our present course is not sustainable, and therefore cannot be maintained. We still do not understand, and haven’t reconciled our lives to the conditions needed for a stable society, an inclusive economy, and a long-term peace.

Will it improve our lives to promote inclusive and sustainable architecture on a global scale? This is not just about numbers or statistics, it is an equity issue as well. A transformative change can deprive humanity of its heart and soul or it could lift humanity to a new collective and moral responsibility based on a shared sense of destiny and dignity.

In the case of architectural design, that means balancing human rights with technical feasibility, environmental sustainability, and economic viability. We can stretch that balance to the absolute limit. And it is better so, because either we will resolve the problem of non-sustainability in smart, strategic ways by taking innovative actions or else conflicts are going to get settled in other ways, largely outside our control, namely by war, disease, or starvation.

Obviously, ecological urbanism without ecological architecture is impossible. Architecture has also real human, behavioral consequences even if we are just beginning to learn what they are. This makes us the first generation of architects to be aware that the chronic human-rights challenges associated with urban development may undermine the stability of the planet and the ability of the humankind to support its own long-term development.

We are all connected and it is our relationships with each other and with the environment that makes us part of a healthy ecosystem. We now need to restore these connections to a healthy state. Inequality can affect the stability of society because its inherent stresses can spread through the urban system like an epidemic. In the 21st century, the most effective way to improve these relationships is by rethinking and redesigning our urban habitats.

The planetary risks we are facing are so serious that building as usual is no longer an option. Architects now must become system thinkers, who can help to reinvent the world. That happens through the application of their design to the new, 21st century challenges of global warming mitigation, genocide prevention, increasing security, providing clean water, guaranteeing freedom of expression, resolving gender issues, and practicing sustainable agriculture. The looming problem of climate change is a measure of humankind’s vulnerable present position; the challenge of eco-sustainability is now foremost when talking about architecture.

Without human rights, our societies will be nastier, our future bleaker, and all our great technologies wasted. Human-rights standards can help us establish modern architectural requirements of availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality. And that means that the old idea of architecture acting in isolation, unconnected with people, and not serving to connect us as a society, is no longer a viable proposition.

So how can we best design new human settlements as catalysts for people-centered and environmentally friendly cities? One of the most practical ways is by compiling more accurate information on social sustainability issues. We can also scrutinize closer the impacts of buildings on people and communities. Then we can begin to address the underlying pressures of most serious human-rights risks and problems. Architects must identify these problems and search for unusual design alternatives to solve them. In this way, architects can use structural methods of thinking, apply them to real-world problems, and develop a new architecture that is both informed and driven by a universal recognition of human rights. Such a human-rights-centered architecture may integrate technology, biology, engineering, anthropology, psychology, oceanography, economy, while always keeping human dignity as its guiding light.

The chronic human rights challenges inherent in development undermine sustainable growth. They incorporate the most complex of all current architectural challenges: architects must prevent and confront violations that overwhelmingly affect those who have the least; they must advance existing rights of the disenfranchised; they must help them adapt new rights; they must facilitate the strengthening of the production and the management capacity of those seeking to implement these rights; and they must promote equity and environmental sustainability in the building of new habitats. So the task of modern-day architecture is to envision alternative ways to develop cities and other human settlements, to evolve a bottom-up perspective on development while, supporting and nurturing the livelihoods, assets, and settlements of the poor, and facilitating their integration into the city.

In other words, we need to think more creatively and subtly, about when and how we can shape, rather than control, unpredictable and complex human situations. Those with a tragic or historical vision of the world think that while progress is possible, justice is not. Others feel that any progress has benign consequences, as well as inherent dangers. We must accept such risks.

In fact, architecture is now at a remarkable moment. Sustainability demands the evolution of innovative solutions and never before has architectural creative thinking been in such demand.

The good news is that such difficulties and obstacles can actually improve our design. We already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter. Facing the challenges of climate change, architects were able to break down large-scale problems into smaller fragments and design houses accordingly. On a wider scale, they have grappled successfully with problems such as nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, and land degradation, working with experts in the field of ecology who provided vital insight as to how design could adapt to these challenges. Architects, like their ecologist colleagues, have learned to no longer look at individual species separately, but rather they now see the bigger picture of the relationships between living beings and their environment. They look at how all the diverse parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, to see how this balance, this web of life, can best sustain life in the long term.

Just as in the natural world every life form needs its own habitat and a wider ecosystem to survive and flourish, so it is for people. On our interdependent planet, urban communities and global human rights are co-extensive. When this relationship is disrupted, development becomes unsustainable. But architecture is the key. Witness the impact that architectural solutions have on climate change and on the production of energy: the solar panel concept, for example, was a true innovative. The likelihood of failure was massive. It was the scheme of dreamers and innovators, and it worked.