Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
Architecture schools and practises need
to accept the challenge and pick up the
sustainability gauntlet. Education in particular
has an enormous responsibility as the next
generation of architects, designers, thinkers
and doers needs to be prepared. “Until a
realization of the relationship between humans
and their environment has become part of
our education and a principle basis of its
orientation, a long range improvement of land
use is improbable” (Hall, Hebbert and Lusser
2000).
The architecture and planning profession is
searching for new ethics and understanding,
an ethics that espouse attitudes and behavior
for individuals and societies which are
consonant with humanity’s place within the
biosphere; an ethics which recognizes and
sensitively responds to the complex and everchanging
relationships between humanity and
nature and between people. The professions
are articulating new visions and attitudes in its
search for new kinds of planning.
The built environment disciplines, thus, are
forever evolving and being challenged to adopt
new visions, reaffirm and reinterpret their
core values to meet changing circumstances
and new challenges. Never before has
the pace of change - social, technological,
economic, environmental and political been
so fast nor on such a large scale. There are
new forces driving spatial organization and
change and professionals need to engage
with the complexity of socio-spatial dynamics
which requires deep and critical thinking.
Managing the spatial dimensions of this
change depends on working with a growing
variety of organizations and individuals and
these relationships are becoming increasingly
complex.
The new visions that are emerging sees
architecture and planning as being about
people and places, the natural and the built
environment and long-term stewardship.
Focus on people and relationship is key
rather than the material things and images.
In the past planning focused largely on land
use management and physical development
and sometimes quite abstracted design
approaches. Past planning has been criticised
as primarily reactive, short-term, partial, and
as an opportunity driven activity. Planning is
becoming less technocratic than in the past,
not as slender and narrow. Planning is seen to
be more of a thoughtful reflective and creative
activity. Traditionally ecology and society have
been approached separately – it is increasingly
clear that we need to include the presence of
humans and human experience.
Today principles of sustainability, inclusion and
equity are at the centre of built environment
profession’s concerns. Increasingly and
more than ever before have sustainability
and the environment been recognized as
key underlying elements and concerns of
the disciplines. In addition more and more
solutions must not only reduce our impacts
on the environment but also help to restore
and regenerate it. There is a need for a new
design methodology for regenerative human
settlement.
This is what Peter Buchanan (2008) describes
as the big choice we face: the move from ego
to the eco (egosystems to ecosystem), from
acting on the world to acting with it (128).
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