9) Going to the root of the matter.

I don’t think we account enough for the effect of architecture on human history. A major turning point in human history came when tribal/village organization developed with the advent of agriculture. That is where private property began, division of labor began, issues of power and economics began. Architecture began. And soon architecture became our main interface with the earth; it became the dimension through which we interact with each other and organize and are organized by larger systems of political, legal, and economic class structuring.

The real break in future human history will be a planetary urbanization; we are already evolving into a global network civilization. Cities are the infrastructure that most define us now. This is a new way of human living which has never quite happened in the way it is happening now. The world’s urban population currently stands at around 3.5 billion. It will almost double to more than six billion by 2050. Under the effect of this boom, cities and towns across the globe will grow rapidly and re-develop. Instead of thinking about what to build, we are now building in ways that reflect how we think.

What’s happening today is that architectural interventions have now migrated in very large measures onto the global stage, which is largely unregulated and not subject to considerations of human rights. In this global structure, those who hold power may act largely free of constraint.

At this stage, there is no property-defining status at all for many urban dwellers except their very existence in unauthorized spaces. Only their presence in such spaces gives them any effective right to be there.

Who are the poor? The logical explanation links the rich directly in opposition to the poor and by doing so casts the poor as responsible for their own lack of empowerment and the resulting inequities and alienation. Yet the poor are not a mass of people with abject lives who are owed something better. These people are valuable as a group. They have perspective, experience, priorities, aspiration, and their own realities. They are communities currently denied the political, civil, economic, and cultural rights that they should have according to internationally recognized principles human rights. These are not simply people crushed by poverty. These are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can.

The poor are helping each other in their efforts to escape their poverty. They’re doing it by transcending the laws, by becoming outlaws in effect, by operating in the informal economy. Most of all they use their social organization, a complex system of friendship, kinship, acquaintanceship networks, and associational ties rooted in family and social lives. They engage in neighboring activities with one another—including borrowing tools or food, having lunch or dinner, or helping each other with problems. It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity; they help create prosperity. Where everybody is connected to everybody else, the most important thing is that everything a person can do they can do with others. We don’t understand yet how it works, but architects will need to learn this lesson soon.