Architecture and sustainability in the age of planetary limits

This week, while listening on the radio to Dans un spoutnik—a beautiful song written by Daniel Bélanger some 20 years ago—the chorus gave me pause.
“…6 billion, 6 billion solitudes, 6 billion is a lot…”. With the recent announcement that the world’s population will surpass 8 billion people on November 15, those words take on an entirely new meaning.

It means that in just 20 years, the global population has increased by 33%. That’s staggering. It’s as if three people had been sitting for hours at a small bistro table designed for two, and a fourth guest suddenly arrived. What would we do? We’d share portions, avoid waste, squeeze in a little closer, skip oversized plates, maybe open a window to keep things comfortable—in short, we’d adapt, making sure the experience remains pleasant, comfortable, and fair for everyone.

The Earth, like that bistro table, is a finite and limited space. To continue living on it with a reasonable level of comfort, adaptation is no longer a choice—it is an imperative. As a society, many actions are within our reach: encouraging large-scale public and active transportation, promoting recycling and reuse, designing and operating buildings with high-performance energy envelopes using local resources and clean energy, renovating, recycling, and repurposing existing infrastructure, using wood as much as possible in construction, and ensuring smarter land use by increasing density and fostering the development of living environments close to services and transit networks (TOD—Transit-Oriented Development). These are all strategies we must adopt to secure a better future.

As architects, we have the opportunity to work daily on projects that have the potential to improve how we use land and resources. Even if, overall—here and elsewhere—the majority of projects do not yet fully contribute to more responsible land development or a more equitable and respectful use of resources, the urgency of the situation should compel us to collectively accelerate the pace and improve our practices and ways of working.

Until we set foot on Mars, Earth remains the only table available. With nearly eight billion guests soon seated, let’s make sure it remains a pleasant place to live for a long time to come.