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Architects Aren't Ready for an Urbanized Planet
August 20, 2007
By Amelia Gentleman
International Herald Tribune: LETTER FROM INDIA
Summary/excerpts
This past July, in Bellagio, Italy, the Rockefeller Foundation convened a comprehensive, multi-tracked series of conferences focusing on urban sustainability; the onrushing, crisis issues facing the world's explosively growing cities.. This is another article from among the many covering the various core issues the conferences brought to the fore of the international community of urban thinkers and visionaries, professionals and futurists in all fields:
NEW DELHI: The world is racing to the city, and the one group of professionals capable of housing and sheltering the massive human influx to the urban centers - the architects and the planners - freely acknowledge that they are ill-equipped to cope...
As the demands on the world's planners grow, academics from around the world gathered at a recent conference and expressed great unease about their ability to prepare the next generation of architects to build for this urban future...'Seventy percent of architects come from the developed world but 70 percent of the work is in the developing word. There is a total mismatch,' said Gaétan Siew, president of the International Union of Architects, at the conference on issues of urbanization organized by the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy last month.... 'We need to highlight that architecture is not just Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano,' Siew added. 'It's not just about beautiful houses. It is all about everyday people's lives.' Academics from the United States said many faculties were still using outmoded curriculums ill-suited to the current environment. 'We have to reboot dramatically," said Harrison Fraker, dean of the environmental design department of the University of California, Berkeley. 'We cannot afford to have two billion people living lives in conditions worse than animals.' Their words were echoed by counterparts from Asia. K.T. Ravindran, the dean of Delhi's School of Planning and Architecture, said urban planning as a profession in India had 'fossilized.' 'Sixty percent of our cities have no sanitation systems,' he said. 'We are clearly failing.'
...In Asia, architects would have to fight hard to combat the force of the private developers. "Projects have replaced planning," he said. Solutions, conference delegates said, may lie in revising academic curricula to ensure that planning and architecture students are forced to embrace the needs of the poorest in their thinking. Or in the creation of a Hippocratic oath for planners, obliging them to include the marginalized in every stage of their work. Or even in building a global team of para-architects, made up of professionals willing to devote their retirement to coping with the billions of human beings drifting to the cities.
Solutions, conference delegates said, may lie in revising academic curricula to ensure that planning and architecture students are forced to embrace the needs of the poorest in their thinking. Or in the creation of a Hippocratic oath for planners, obliging them to include the marginalized in every stage of their work...
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