Opinion: Justice in the Built Environment
Fall 2015
CRP 3011: Ethics, Development + Globalization
Faculty: Kieran Donaghy
Cornell University | College of Architecture, Art + Planning
The movement of development and globalization lie in cities and their citizens, yet it is the built environment that directly mediates the linkages between the cities’ citizens and the productivity of developmental changes. The built environment is everything created, maintained and arranged by humans to furnish human purposes – our wants, needs, and values - to mediate the universal environment with results that affect environmental frameworks. In other words, the built environment houses the foundations of moral justices and a righteous development and globalization.
Triggered by the prolific onset of social, environmental and economical changes, the built environment is currently being reconceptualized to tailor to the demands of today and tomorrow’s generations. The designs of such convoluted environments affect many different facets of life that due to their inherent ability to tangle and interweave with each other inevitably ascertain complex problems, which oblige moral and ethical principles to then help guide designers in finding resilient solutions. However, the modern dilemma exists that not every designer uses these moral and ethical obligations in their strategies. There are social, economical and environmental responsibilities a designer must consider in their building designs that directly impact the built environment, but also the veiled recipients of all consequential effects. This requires designers to operate beyond their general disciplines and hold themselves accountable to moral and ethical obligations that will positively influence development and the deontological nature of inter-human and environmental relationships.
The push for sustainable building practices can be attributed to the effort to protect global citizens from the severe effects of climate change. Build more sustainable, and there will be less consequences. Yet, even the best sustainable building derived from the most responsible social, economical, and environmental sources can still pose a threat to the security of human and environmental health. This phenomenon can be attributed to the ignorance that design is a holistic process and requires a system of ethical consideration that not every designer practices. Such a system observes how the built environment mediates moral obligations and ethical principles between people-to-people relationships, people-to-built environment relationships and environmental impacts.
In order to establish everlasting and beneficial relationships between all entities impacted by the built environment, I will first attempt to answer at what manner should humans live – what is good, what is excellence and virtuous, and what is just? This is a rather cumbersome question to approach due to the complexity of human rights and virtues, and then applying those ethical arguments to a consistent building environment that drowns in cultural magnitudes. However, there are fundamental rights and virtues that are applicable to every human regardless of cultural identities that could then be translated into a simple building model. This leads into the second quest of defining what is good architecture. Architecture’s robust, maintainable, useful, scalable and responsive characteristics are presumable measures of good design; however, it is how these characteristics relate to each other holistically to preserve good practice. My last endeavor will connect the goodness of architecture to the greater social good, providing ethical solutions to which the well designed built environments can give opportunities to live virtuously.
No matter the soundness of solutions, the built environment’s architects will still face a series of challenges that limit resilient efforts and drive detrimental development. It then becomes a question of who is responsible when facing these challenges to fight and rise above ethical trials of design to create a model of modern designers and promote a truly, ethical and sustainable future.
...
Who are the Responsible Agents?
Martha Nussbaum articulates an allocation of duties to promote human capabilities in a globalized society that contains nations, corporations, NGOs, political movements, transnational and international agreements and agencies, and individual peoples to institutions. She argues that this is a fair allocation of duties because within institutions there is a collective action problem, issues of fairness, cognitively and casual powers to influence, and the facilitation of assigning responsibility for promoting others’ well-being while imposing on all the duties to support the capabilities of all. However, in the context of the built environment, the magnitude of institutions to assign these duties is a questionable approach because it is clear that a world state controlling design would not be desirable and could potentially be dangerous, thus a decentralized and smaller institutional structure at a global level would be more appropriate.
Nussbaum continues her argument with a series of principles for global structure that can be directly applied to leading design institutions. She explains that domestic structures are never excused from international assistances, where prosperous nationals have responsibilities to help poorer national and multinational corporations have responsibilities for promoting human capabilities in the regions in which they operate. Nations should focus on the disadvantage, providing care for the vulnerable ill, elderly, children and disabled first, and they should not avoid concern for individuals. Her last principle states that all institutions and individuals are responsible to support education as a key to the empowerment of currently disadvantaged people.
Although it is imperative that every design institution should be held accountable for promoting human capabilities within the built environment, I want to concentrate on the role educational institutions play within this development. John Strain, Robert Barnett and Peter Jarvis, masters of education and ethics, quoted that “it is about the struggle between universities and professional bodies over who are the appropriate guardians of ethics in public life and the professions.” Universities have been forced into thinking and acting as corporations and thus de-emphasizing their civic missions of higher, holistic educations. The roles of universities to enact ethical missions, especially in the context of the built environment, is to engage in the democratic steering of public deliberation, providing expert knowledge, and engendering a holistic range of opinions from multidisciplinary constituencies. This in turn would construct a functioning design professional that would promote human capabilities and environmental quality, and thus justice through design.
I would like to conclude by reiterating Martha Nussbaum’s conceptualization that human beings are better thinkers about human functioning that we are as assigners of moral duties. The morality and ethics in the design of the built environment is nonetheless complex; however, buildings and other structures can promote social, economical, and environmental justices by requiring designers to observe the nature of human beings functionality and then combine it with principles of good design. This combination of analysis, human functionality and ethical design, is a necessary call for action required to build a resilient future.
+ for full opinion piece, please contact me directly