HUMAN SCALE REMEASURED
New Spatial Requirements, Societal Demands and Economic Values in Architecture
This theme explores new visions for the built environment concerned with a better socio-economic coherence in our human habitat.
Concept
HUMAN SCALE REMEASURED investigates new visions for the built environment concerned with a better socio-economic coherence. Our way of life is losing its measure in overwhelming expansions and short-sighted decision-making. There is a growing sense of responsibility among architects, urbanists, researchers and economists worldwide to use their knowledge to develop designs and models for new spatial requirements, societal demands and economic vaulues: measured to the human scale. Worldwide emergencies, such as climate change, pandemics, but also rapid growth, social and global inequalities and migration waves, demonstrate the urgent need to reduce the impact of urban life resources, from the scale of the individual to an international approach. The momentum of the current crisis also leads, besides hardship and struggle, to constructive reflections on new concepts and typologies for living, learning, working and leisure beyond short-term economic profit in order to instigate social, infrastructural and ecological change.
Crisis evoke fears in the public about visible and invisible threats and have an impact on the physical appearance of our cities. Responses developed and implemented now might help mitigate an even more dangerous crisis predicted by science: climate disaster and a global battle for living environment. A shift in policies and planning objectives is essential to keep the consumption of natural resources within the regenerative capacity of ecosystems and planetary boundaries. Environmental policies will need to be linked to an employment policy to improve qualifications and generate new jobs, creating the opportunity for new spaces for knowledge and production in the city as well as flexible workspace typologies to emerge. Re-thinking supply chains and travel habits can lead to new concepts for mobility and infrastructures.
”We need new ideas and visions of how we want to live, how we want to work and how we could deal with the multifaceted problems of this world. How do we use our personal and institutional knowledge to balance human needs, living places, the economy and the environment? When we walk through our living areas, maybe now is the time to think more than before about creating a sense of how the human scale can be remeasured.
Sascha SuhrkeDirector, Head of Politics and Society, ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, Hamburg
