3) Where people go, architecture follows.

Theoretically, there are 51.7 million square miles on the planet where people could live.

The rule of history is that where people go, architecture must follow. Given that a dominant phenomenon of our age is the globalization of architecture, it follows that one of the great challenges of our age is to honor diversity as we bring architecture to the global space.

I believe that the turbulence of the decades ahead will depend on how we pursue that aim: Can we bring architecture to the global space without marginalizing the heritage and culture of people? The loss of cultural diversity, including architecture, is intricately linked to the loss of human rights. The urge for diversity has always been a part of mankind. Human life is expressed in a multitude of diverse peoples created by geographical and social adaption over the course of millennia. All the tribes of the planet—all 15,000 tribes—are today in touch with each other. They each have a right to preserve their own unique expression of humanity, the right to maintain and enrich their unique culture. They have the right to live in a harmonious habitat created in their own image, true to their own values and spirit.

Today we understand that reduced diversity poses a threat to global stability. Conflicts emerge not because people are different, but because they are not allowed to be different. Architecture must commit to the preservation of building diversity, because all people have the human urge to express their essence in the form of their places, art, music, culture, religion, traditions, and societal structure.

How can architecture support diversity? Diversity is a source of innovation, creativity, and exchange. It is never defined as a pure preservation; it is a setting for continuous, unifying dialogue between all expressions of identity. This is the process that forges diverse people into a common place that becomes familiar to us all. It leads to the discovery of street corners, where we encounter an irreplaceable sense of ourselves in the other.

If we have come to occupy every corner of the earth, and in the process generated all of this diversity, these different ways of life, these different appearances, why is that nowadays cities all over the world look the same? Why are so many shiny towers of concrete and steel covered with glass mushrooming up like a toxic species everywhere we go? The sustainability of the global space and the global city depends on the capacity to bind architecture to plausible and specific world visions. Sustainable building requires that the vision of human beings be harnessed in harmony with local cultural aspirations wherever possible. Architectural diversity provides an enabling environment for this.