20) How can we build without destroying the planet and without trampling over human rights?

When it comes to the current transformation of our cities, you can’t help but get a sense of excitement. Urban transformation is empowering and energizing. Growth in the economy and in the population, on the other hand, is putting increasing pressure on our land, on our water, and on our forests. Billions of people perhaps might soon have to move, and if we’ve learned anything from history, that will probably mean severe and extended conflict. 

This is a completely unsustainable pattern. We still seem to lack the depth of understanding of the immense risks of human rights violations. When people’s rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they’re oppressed and humiliated, people need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. But we’re not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong.

As stakeholders and active creators of this transformation, architects need to have a vision, a clear road map with agreed-upon milestones, and then they need to hold people accountable for results. In other words, architects need to be directive, committed, and creative. But in order to capture the hearts and minds of people, their architecture also needs to be inclusive.

Inclusive architecture is critical to putting people and their rights first. Too often, our first impulse is to make decisions on other’s behalf. Instead, we must offer a tool that’s at least as powerful and as effective as violence. The imperative for putting people first is to empower people with the capabilities and the rights that they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond. The classic view is that architects and those who live in their buildings can do their dwelling on one side, while policy does the rest, keeping “social sustainability” as a distinct subject from architecture.

In reality, architecture is never a stand-alone discipline. It is embedded in the larger organization of humanity, and it can work in complete harmony with humanity’s social and natural environment, to create an unprecedented level of human-rights protection. To achieve this however, multi-dimensional thinking is needed.

Architecture is primarily concerned with a body in space. But a person’s body and a person’s rights cannot be separated like subject and object. We must be physically respected to fully experience rights, freedoms, and equality.

The structural quality of architecture emanates from the human body but the sustainability of architecture emanates from human rights. How can we find a way to design that is contemporary, contextual, humble, participative, and descriptive of these expanded roles for architecture?

Gandhi’s oft-quoted advice goes: “How do you know if your next act will be the right one or the wrong one?” He said “Consider the face of the poorest, most vulnerable human beings that you ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person. And if it will be, it is the right thing to do, and if not, rethink it.” This is why any reflection on the future of architecture should start by analyzing architectural responses to the poor.

If not, I’m afraid to say, the social divide is going to keep getting worse, faster than we imagine. The implementation of human rights is a profoundly complex, nonlinear challenge, full of elusive demands, hidden thresholds, and irrevocable tipping points. Human rights are specific and problem-oriented.