5) Housing a world of 9 billion people.

Right now, we are 7 billion people, soon to become 9 billion people. With 83 million more people appearing on the earth every year, there are no demographic voids on the earth; people are everywhere.

Sooner or later, architecture will follow them. Each of these people will need somewhere to live, and fertile land to provide them with food. And if it is therefore the case that one of the major phenomena of our time is the urgent globalized need for housing, then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to build houses in the global space. 

The projection suggested by architect Alejandro Aravena is that we will have to build a one-million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years. Yes! That fast!

The only thing that it is not becoming faster is our ability to respond to this demographic explosion. Neither have we come up with any radical reinvention of social housing models: A little bit of roof, a little bit of green, a little bit of heating and shading? The clock is ticking. If we have that many people, there will obviously be a much greater demand for food.

We need buildings designed to take hunger out the equation. What we eat, how we grow it, and how we eat it will all become part of the challenges of housing. Such challenges might provide design advancements with wide-ranging repercussions on how a building might be used to mitigate against starving. A house is a powerful engine for making sustainable choices.

A house will become both an architectural act and a human-rights issue if we are to start looking at housing from a broader perspective and addressing the challenges of food production, food consumption, income generation, and social relations.

Besides not having much time, we do not have much land, nor much money to tackle these issues. The way we now use land and grow crops is extremely inefficient.

So, what are the human and natural boundaries within which architecture can safely operate? A hundred million people are homeless; how we solve this problem seems to propel us toward a head-on collision. It is misguided to just focus on population numbers and where we will find enough space on the planet to fit us all.

Put simply, cities that do not house people efficiently are not sustainable. Houses which not feed people efficiently are not sustainable. Tackling the problems of housing on a global scale won’t happen through the creation of condominiums. I’m guessing it will actually happen by the powerful coming together to initiate the design of new building systems that will eventually govern the global space. Empowering locals has proven to be a very successful strategy, as it allows local knowledge to be gleaned and used, and thus enables inhabitants to imagine and implement the housing programs themselves. The design of housing offers contemporary architects an occasion to encounter the urgency of these issues, and to solve them with designs that incorporate greater social-environmental justice.

Access to safe, decent, and affordable housing is a basic human right that should be available to everyone. Architects must now address a growing list of global challenges in their long-term work: rising oceans, dying farm fields, starvation, a rise in poverty levels, the threat to human rights, killer storms. Changing weather patterns has already influenced building design, as we’ve seen in the “floating city” designs coming out of the Netherlands.

A crisis can be a good catalyst. Right now, major demographic transformations are happening. But our response to those transformations, how we approach future housing and design challenges, is up to us. While housing is a human right, that doesn’t mean it’s free. It will only become a universal human right if we’re all willing to help each other get access.