2) The survival of each of us is tied to the survival of everyone else.

We all aspire to a place we call home and being as valuable as all others. But what is interesting is the unique way we bring our village and our distinctive lifestyle to the city. Some have called this cultural web of life the ethnosphere; the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, mythos and ideas brought into the global space by the human imagination. All this diversity teaches us that there are other ways of living, other ways of orienting ourselves in the world. Human culture is as vital to the wellbeing of the planet as the biological web of life that we know as biosphere.

As the volume of strangers and acquaintances in our cities rises, so do opportunities to improve their rights. Human rights are tremendously important to the way we build, yet their consideration seems extremely remote to much of today’s urban planning. Understanding human rights must begin with a deep understanding of why people of a different culture do some things different from the way we do them. This process ends with us coming to appreciate their humanity. Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it. In our globalized world, the fact that we are now locked together like never before means that we now must share a common destiny. The future of our cities is practically the future of humanity. Massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity is now putting all of us at risk. It is not change that threatens identity and culture. It is domination.

Aspirations for human rights are rising as never before all over the world. With this rise, the fundamental question becomes whether we are heading toward a situation in which aspirations are linked to opportunities? Are there new ways of thinking about how we might meet these aspirations? Human rights are based on everything we do and everything we feel as individuals and as an entire race. It is when the other’s freedom is conducive to our freedom that we decide we are all in favor of his/her freedom and we witness the development of tolerance. It is also when the other’s welfare is conducive to ours that we see the development of justice. Simply put, these challenges may be conducive to good architecture.

Social sustainability is about identifying and managing architectural impacts, both positive and negative, on people. If equality is the issue of our century, let’s evaluate and criticize our architecture by how it treats the poor. If we truly want to move beyond the dominant urban narrative of “us versus them,” we must begin by listening, identifying common ground, and speaking to shared values. We can see world-changing values in something as humble as building a house. Human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to every person in the world, from birth until death. They apply regardless of where you are from, what you believe, or how you choose to live your life. These basic rights are based on values such as dignity, fairness, equality, respect, and independence. Architecture is a way of talking about human rights in concrete physical terms that everybody can see. If we reframe architecture into a more rights-empowering practice, and thus engage in more critical reflection, we can set ourselves on a course toward a more just model of global development. Humans can adopt physically to the environmental and to social changes through architecture. The cost of disregarding human rights and the cost of disregarding nature both extend to our quality of life and to the quality of our future. Architecture stays at the crucial point between human population and the natural world, because it is so engaged with the planetary process of environmental and social progress. Exactly how architecture meets the need to reduce climate change and inequality could significantly affect how much space we have at our disposal. The possibility of improving people’s lives and the lives of the many who are now discriminated against is a powerful reason to become an architect.