Since the time of our inception as informed and conscious species, we as ‘civilised’ human-beings have evolved through a series of critical coincidences guided with a motive of sustenance and curiosity. This motive could be precisely attributed for all the technological advancements we’ve seen so far, which are primarily based upon empirical knowledge and experimentation. This has led us to an epoch called the Anthropocene, which is, as we know and also mentioned by Bjarke Ingels, is happening for the first time throughout the known history of our planet that humans, as a species, are producing the most substantial global impacts, influencing uncountable natural processes, involving millions of other coexisting species. This includes everything from oil spills in the Persian Gulf to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

I always prefer to rely on pragmatic facts more than abstract theories and on implying the praxis of action-reaction law to a collective whole. Every second in the present tense, we’re reciprocating the actions of yesterday and vaguely constructing the tomorrow. Bjarke Ingels goes on further explaining the fundamental importance of architecture to society, now more than ever, and the immense responsibility the profession possesses in literally designing a better tomorrow.

This isn’t the first time that a person has realized the importance of the built environment to society. In the last couple of centuries, we’ve seen an emergence of great minds, which were then classified as unrealistic utopians and were mostly ignored. One of the first to intervene in the neo-technic era was Patrick Geddes, who proposed coherent theories juxtaposing human settlements with nature, acknowledging the human ecology. Geddes was a biologist, sociologist, geographer and a pioneer town planner, and his theories reflected holistic life forms, their emergence and development through the interaction between organisms and the environment, which is a fundamental paradigm in understanding the evolution and collective sustenance. He further gave the graphical notation of life, structuring the human ecology through the intersection of contemporary psychology, sociology, politics, and so on.

Geddes states that “Town-planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish.” Contradictory to the theory, most of the cities in the 19thcentury were under an enormous influence of industrialization, with capitalistic intentions. Ruled by the elite, most of the population was working class, earning just enough to survive. “Victorian Britain was the first modern society to experience on a grand scale the process of industrialisation and the establishment of modern capitalism.”