16) The bias in architecture.

When we first enter an urban space, we tend to label people living there in certain ways. “A poor neighborhood” we might think, or “a dangerous street.” This common experience suggests that there are some categorizations that spring faster to mind. So fast, in fact, that they can be automatic, or reflexive. The income of people living in that area is an example: we tend to notice whether someone is poor or rich. You can see this in the way people talk about places: squalid buildings, oppressive masses, drab streets, anonymous blocks, human dust-bins …

This is unfortunate, because if perceiving poverty is automatic, then it lays a foundation for racism, and appears to put a limit on efforts to educate people and architects to be income-blind or to put aside prejudices in other ways. Do we need to fix their housing? They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative. The aggregate numbers now suggest that it is really squatters, all one billion of them, who are building the modern urban world, which means they’re building the world—personally, one by one, family by family, neighborhood by neighborhood. Of course, cities are hardly homogeneous entities.

We break them up into our city versus their city, residential versus slum, downtown versus uptown, in-group community versus out-group community, and sometimes when we do this, we know we’re doing something wrong. Architecture always entails an active taking of sides and it makes this almost inevitable because of its physical connectedness and inclusivity.

The ability to architecturally stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the architect’s mind; rather it’s a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we experience economies and people within a world that categorizes: so we use these categories to make generalizations and groupings when we meet new instances of these categories. Our stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and important. Stereotypes can go awry. So often they’re irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences.

We can start with the two most common misconceptions. Misconception number one: this is not our responsibility, not an architectural issue. Misconception number two: the most pressing humanitarian issues on our Earth are located in the south. We have all heard this and might even have thought it ourselves. An alternative way to think is: all architecture matters, north, south, east, and west.

An alternative way to think is: most ingenious and effective solutions stem from resolving intractable problems. So now that we know about this, how do we combat bias? One avenue is to appeal to our ethical responses, to appeal to people’s empathy, and we often do that through stories. The preservation not only of buildings but of communities makes cities viable, makes cities livable, makes cities equitable. We need not just talent but also profound respect for all people and recognition of the importance of our contribution to counter an unethical and immoral view of the world. Conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights are all of contemporary relevance for architecture. Segregation and zoning enables one group to treat another as inferior and deny that group fundamental human rights. Another approach is to evolve new forms of creativity and creative thinking and to be aware of the responsibilities of architecture as a framework for social action.