Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the people

Like a fox." Don't reinvent the wheel every time. Take what already works and adapt it to meet your own needs. Unlike almost everything you can learn in

architecture

school, copying is okay. Which is appropriate, because Actually, This approach is not innovative. It is actually the way we built buildings for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution in this type of community buildings The only difference between the traditional type of vernacular

architecture

and code architecture. open may be network connectivity, but it's very, very big difference. We Share Wikihouse "It's all under a Creative Commons license, and now what's starting to happen is that groups around the world are starting to take it, use it. , hack it and alter it, and it's really Awesome.

There is a wonderful group at Christ Church in New Zealand looking at housing development after the earthquake, and thank you for the city award. At TED, we are working with an excellent team in one of Rio's favelas to establish a species. community factory and mini-university. These are very, very small beginnings and in fact there are more

people

in the last week who have contacted us than are not even on this map. And I hope the next time you look, you do. I won't even be able to see the map. We realize that Wikihouse is a very, very small answer, but it is a small answer to a really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest growing cities are not the cities with skyscrapers.

They are self-made cities in one way or another. If we talk about the city of the 21st century, these are the men who will achieve it. You know, whether you like it or not, welcome to the largest design team in the world. So if we take problems like climate change, urbanization and health seriously, in reality our existing development models will not achieve it. As I believe Robert Neuwirth said, no bank, no company, no government, and no NGO will be able to do this if we treat citizens only as consumers. How extraordinary it would be, however, if we collectively developed solutions not only to the structural problem we've been working on, but also to infrastructure problems like solar air conditioning, off-grid power, off-grid sanitation... low-cost. cost, high-performance, open source solutions that anyone can build very, very easily and put it all in one common place where it's owned by everyone and accessible to everyone?

A kind of Wikipedia of things? Once something is in the commons, it will always be there. How much would this change the laws? I think technology is on our side. If the great design project of the 20th century was the democratization of consumption (it was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA), I believe that the great design project of the 21st century is the democratization of production. And when it comes to urban architecture, that really matters. Thank you so much. (applause)