44) The right footprint.

A sustainable environment is a vital necessity for every woman and man; the right of a collective group in which individuals participate (where collective rights are short-hand for the rights of each of us embodied in the rights of all). If human rights are the basic rights and freedoms that belong to everyone and, as such, are the sum total of every aspect of an individual’s everyday human life, then an all-pervasive discipline such as architecture should lay the foundation for a culture of respect through its commitment, compassion, and creativity.

That’s why we have to make this second transformation, the architecture transformation: and move to a human-rights approach to architecture in order to experience a more explicit vision of urban life and to understand what kind of future we may have. The first of these transformations, living in a city, is going to happen anyway. We have to decide whether we will do it well or badly, and this will determine the architecture transformation. One of the central tenets determining our success or failure will be the inclusion of human rights as a powerful guideline for future design, giving architectural objects a social and moral underpinning.

Architecture naturally thinks and acts with human rights on its core. Why? Because if so we lack the resources to shape the environment through brute force. We lack the scale to buffer change, and we constantly think about the tough odds for our survival in a new place. We all can do things to make the human-rights footprint bigger in our man-made habitat.

Although worldwide acceptance of human rights has been increasing rapidly in recent decades, the field of architecture is not in unanimous accord about the need for the universal acceptance of human rights. To say that there is a human right against torture is mainly to assert that there are strong reasons for believing that it is always wrong to engage in the design of torture chambers and that architects should refrain against this practice. Our duties in this regard always require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. This view is attractive but has serious difficulties.

So, how do we solve a really complex problem? We cannot solve it all in one go, we can solve it step by step. People are our point of departure; universal values and the rights of our fellow human beings are the basis of which all that we do and all that we think.

Disregarding the importance of the need for human rights in a society has always been costly and dangerous. How come that we have so much trouble trying to to solve the problems that hinder the realization of human rights? Could it be that we are trying to solve the problems of human rights while not really understanding who the humans behind these problems are?