The 21st century is asked for a necessary rethink of how the design process is affecting the human habitat. Architecture, in its multifaceted concern and as discipline, has to reconsider the urban environment through its infrastructures, landscapes and buildings, and their many interdependencies within the context of natural and social ecologies. Buildings, infrastructures and the landscapes are not separated entities connected through fleble filaments, rather complex patterns composing the tridimensional, endless and dispersive urban environment where energy sources, materials, water and land are all consumed in the purpose of its developement and operation. While in the contoured and small social organism the direct information exchange was able to transform rapidly the need in the architectural and social-recognized object, in the contemporary urban environment the society doesn’t play a central role in the shaping process. Skyscrapers, well-done or not buildings rise indipendently without any effort in integration and common recognition, asserting their autonomy but affecting invisibly and deeply the pre-established connections. The design has to be a partecipated and systematic process calling urban users to push towards their needs in order to make the building an occasion to fill the gaps in the fragmentary network and discover again the humanistic value Architecture shares with Economy as much as the two disciplines use to learn and propose starting from the human behaviour preferences.
The financial project implyes profitability in the shortest term. The urban environment for the most of developers represents the perfect marketplace for the financial investment. Short time, money and competitive unsensitive minds, craving for richness, lead the urban growth towards disconnected configurations and unsustainable scenarios. Politics should be the protagonist in the urban formation, but more than often it becomes a serie of costraints that limits the private mindset. Politics should regulate the urban developement and call people directly interested in the trasformation for partecipating in the decisional process. As architects and as Yona Friedman would say, we should be less architects and more interpreters, trying to read and canalize users needs into collective formal proposals. We should consider the humanity as the only self-designer and us as technical advisors, availing ourself of several experts driving the Architecture to the final aim of sustainability.