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 off course naive to state that solving “buildings” can solve the economic problems that we face today. Nonetheless, buildings(or built environments) are to a city what particles are to matter. They make up the city and therefore cannot be isolated from the urban fabric. The life of a city lies in the activities that takes place in it and buildings harbor a large percentage of them. While designing a building we need to look at its context within the complex urban scenario. It is no new knowledge that a pedestrian friendly city is more livable but to do so, one must perform thoughtful design interventions within the existing urban conditions from the basic level ie; at building scale instead of just starting a whole new development from scratch in total isolation.