4) We are a city planet.

How can universal human rights exist? The most obvious way in which human rights exist is as norms of national and international law created by the enactment of judicial decisions. The second is architecture.

When we think of human rights, we don’t automatically think “architect.”  That’s because most people think architects design buildings and cities. But what they really design are relationships. Tightly-knit houses, interwoven alleys and streets mean that villagers’ lives are constantly intersecting. Cities are defined by how people interact with each other. They’re places where people come together for all kinds of exchange. Cities are complex natural and human realities. Defense and social cohesion has long since defined their design. Today climate change, together with political and economic troubles, are adding stress to cities and to the relations among city dwellers. We are faced with cataclysmic food, fuel, and water shortages. We are bogged down in a morass of multicultural conflict, and people everywhere find themselves caught up in the tangled web of the global marketplace.

Still something universal is going on here. Every week, at least until 2050, will bring an increase of more than a million people to our cities. This will significantly affect the urban architecture of the future. What’s the value of architecture if our cities become unlivable? On an urbanized planet, we may soon reach a point where, for the first time, social equality becomes architectural equality. Architecture can be the slow variable, the creative strategy that regulates and buffers our capacity for human rights. We live in a world in which collaboration and interaction will become far more important than maintaining divisions. Through architecture, will we be able to use these changing conditions as a driver of social change?

A city is more than the sum of its buildings. It is a system that shows a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the aggregation of its buildings and streets. Networks are but representations of complex systems. Architects intuitively know how to break down complex things and then bring them back together again. Through architecture, we produce and reproduce identities and social practices, continuously generating links between people and places. Architecture gives us the tools to imagine or to fear the future.

And this is where architecture and human rights are a necessity. We now live in a world churning with human migrations, proliferating technological connections, global trade, and policy shifts. Forward-looking realities are often overshadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, and marginalization.

Universality defines us now, through our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. This is one reason why we might, in the not too distant future, see the creation of the most equal or most unequal societies that ever existed in human history.

The largest questions of human life are also questions of city life. So, what do we know about the complexity of systems that drive our cities? Well, it might turn out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interactions. A city has a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all players. Who are the key players? Are they interconnected? What is the overall distribution of control?

We live in communal times, where all of us must choose to take an active role in the running of our cities. We must participate and take responsibility. We must choose to be city developers, we must choose to make our city sustainable. These are choices that shouldn’t be made by just one part of society. This may sound wildly idealistic. You many think “That’s never going to happen.” Yet this was the same response to the ideas of the architects who decided they would end apartheid. It began with a small group of committed people. Human rights initiated through architecture has already worked for a group of forerunners in the global movement of cities. Architecture is about more than clever plumbing. It’s about using imagination in form, giving scale, giving order, giving rhythm, giving a living space in which people can exercise their human rights.

Architecture, at its most imaginative, somehow transforms the lives of dwellers and can relate to individuals and communities in a very profound way. How do we come together and why do we stay apart? In addition to individual narratives, every space represents a collective narrative about sharing. We are interdependent on a global scale. We share the planet and we share the cities.