12) The future tense of architects.

Buildings naturally resist change, especially when they are built solidly. But architecture can make change even harder for people than it needs to be. First of all, planners often wait too long to act. As a result, planning and design then happens in crisis mode. We seem unable to marshal an appropriate design response to the dangers that lie ahead. Dealing with present stresses and social traumas can cloud visions of what lies ahead. We’re just cleaning up our messes over and over again. Alternatively, architecture can be less reactive to present circumstances and more focused on meeting our future needs. We are always going to create and repair and rebuild. But design can go much further than that. With imaginative and innovative design, we imagine things that don’t yet exist. This is a visionary step beyond simply making a building. The future is more of a verb than a noun. The future requires action. If we don’t act on the future, we’re only working in a profession that’s about remediation. The world is changing so fast that we need to steer away from the worst of global climate and social inequality. There is a risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run and insulate themselves from its consequences by living in gated compounds.

We build as if we were only 20 billion in population. That’s why people migrate to cities and slums and shanty towns. Data on economic inequality shows the things that go wrong when poor and rich are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust, collaboration, self-determination, and respect. Designing for “some” and letting the others adjust to this new reality isn’t smart, because we will be left with results that will make the vast majority of the global population unhappy.

Our global problems are so vast that we need to open ourselves up to change and changes in our way of thinking. Human culture and sustainability are only possible if we can anticipate our future. Bees build dwellings because they are genetically designed to do so, not because they agree on a blueprint.

Projecting the future enables architecture to become knowledgeable not just from our own experiences, but also from those of our fellow humans. Most architects are ready for this challenge. We see why it’s necessary.

Discrimination through architecture, urban planning, and landscape design amounts to a bleak view of our immediate future.

This future is not far-off. It is fast approaching and will soon be with us; the effects of discrimination are already happening and are already affecting us.

Inequality is nothing new. What is new is that the narratives and data that make inequality intelligible as rendered tangible through architecture. Inequality begins when a line is drawn that separates inside from outside and ultimately one house from another.

It is easy to understand why people want to be better off than they are, especially if their current situation is very bad. But why, apart from this, should architects be concerned with the difference? 

If architecture contributes to socioeconomic disparities, it can also do the opposite. It can generate positive design solutions to rectify specific human rights offenses, based on an understanding of the design decisions taken by offenders. The challenge facing the design sector now is to analyze our accumulated know-how and use it to reverse poverty, injustice, violence, inequality, and discrimination.

And, given the urgency, what we can do is to ask architects to envision more positive outcomes. Equality doesn’t emerge magically from a womb; it is built. The architecture of our future cities is going to depend on the capacity to ‘invent’ the future of the people who shape it now. Looking into the future is a central function of social change for the reasonable logic that what makes humans thrive is considering their prospects. The people who plan our futures need to consider how architecture can help us all prosper: After all, planning a new building is much simpler than solving problems of poverty, starving, unemployment, and crime.