6) The implosion of human rights and the making of cities.

On a global level 1:7 million people live in unplanned settlements, favelas, refugee camps, or camps for the internally displaced. The kind of turbulent and authoritarian urban planning of Addis Ababa is typical of the accelerated urbanization taking place in Africa. This process gives thousands of households no choice but to abide by the rules and move elsewhere. The massive influx of people into cities takes place against a backdrop of geopolitical, economic, social, technological, and architectural changes. These changes pose new challenges for the disenfranchised masses, but also opportunities for the introduction of human rights in people’s daily lives.

Rapid urban transformation accompanied by disregard for human rights enhance poverty and widen the gap between the city’s poor and rich, in terms of income as well as in social, cultural, spatial, and political terms. Land can be sub-divided and owned. Space is a commodity. Entitlement to occupational use means that space can be sold and traded. Inequality, architecture, and real estate development are intimately connected, each unable to exist without the other. Terms such as ‘informal,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘squatters,’ and ‘unplanned’ separate most of the low-income urban population from state services and civic rights. These labels also allow the poor to be manipulated to the benefit of influential groups along the formal/regulated–informal/irregular continuum.

In more than 5,000 years of urban settlements there has rarely been a truly equalitarian culture without a privileged class controlling all others. We learn social behavior and attitudes from the physical patterns of cities. We have an elaborated code of behavior, cued by the buildings and streets. These spatial practices inform our daily use. Furthermore, narratives of cities change over time to suit the needs of society, certain groups, or individuals. Social sustainability is about identifying and managing architecture impacts on people, both positive and negative. Is home a physical place? In many parts of our cities, the opposite of a favela is not wealth. In too many places the opposite of poverty is architecture. Architecture will ultimately be judged not by technology and design, but by how it treats the poor. While GDP only accounts for a country’s economic performance, architecture accounts for the dignity, freedom of choice, freedom of discrimination, and access to opportunities of citizens, visitors, occupiers, and users.

The urbanization we are witnessing on a global scale is a striking reflection of the urge for freedom and for recognition of the fundamental and inalienable rights of all people. The numbers are considerable. A billion live in squatter cities now. Another billion are expected. That’s more than a sixth of humanity living in a state of disenfranchisement. And that will determine a lot how we function as a future society. People living in resource-constrained areas aren’t less than, and they aren’t other. They do not need an architecture which will merely help them, they need an architecture which will ultimately empower them.