It is very tempting to seduce ourselves, as architects or as anybody keen on architecture or otherwise involved in the design process that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Do you actually believe you can separate buildings out from the infrastructure of cities and mobility of transit and the expectations and incentives of people?
It is undeniable that architecture has a certain contribution to the problems that we face today. Architecture creates a sense of place of a city. We can recognize a city by just looking at the architecture. It is an intimate relationship between human and architecture. We travel from one building to another and eventually the one that we call a ‘home’ to reside. It is a sense of belonging that supports the expectations and incentives of the inhabitants. The way the buildings are designed and placed in a city can project a potentially huge impact on the society. As the logics of ‘Emergence’ indicates, how people use the infrastructure and various elements in the city (which is affected by the buildings around) and produce ‘swarm behaviour’ is the base of a successful metropolitan. The result is doomed to be slow and almost impossible to discern in a short term. Unfortunately with the development of technology in most of the urban cities nowadays, we get so much of ‘advancement’ that we skip a lot of connections that form the basis of a healthy
society. I genuinely believe that architecture plays a crucial role in incorporating with the infrastructure of cities and mobility of transit, to bring back the lost connections between humans, in order to create a potentially powerful strategy to solve the problems of the society especially in the city.
Why do people tend to believe that what is financially profitable (for developers) is not actually equivalent to economically feasible (positive impacts on social welfare)? How would you show that this does not necessarily have to be like this (but rather the opposite)?
From an immediate impression, financial profit is an instant result of an input from the developer, whereas for economic feasibility, the input takes a long time to show its result in the society. Perhaps that is why most people don’t put a ‘=’ sign between the two terms. Unfortunately it is very often that people do not believe in things that they cannot see within their lifespan. They refuse to believe in the far-future result and refuse to contribute in it. Why do we build architecture at the first place? For financial profit? Or for economic feasibility? If it is just for financial profit, it would be just a superficial relationship between human and architecture. In my opinion, if we build it for the concern of the society, that means that we are sure that it has a high economic feasibility, it will generate financial profit, also in a long term perspective. I would like to link this to the discovery of swarm logics by Deborah Gordon from spending 15 years observing ants behavior. If it wasn’t the ants that obviously have a shorter lifespan than human and we can discover our pattern from them, we would never realize the pattern of ourselves (if we want to see a result of a real city, it would take centuries). If we realize the time proportion of the result to take place, it is not at all hard to realize that financial profit lies upon economic feasibility, and they co-exist.
Reference:
1.J. Jacobs, ‘Death and Life’, 1961.
2. S. Johnson, ‘Emergence’ 2001.