Initiated by Bauhaus Earth, Towards Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth offers guiding principles for the healthy re-entanglement of human activity with the Earth’s natural systems and the transformation of the construction industry from a driver of the climate crisis, into a regenerative force. Today’s unprecedented crises are an opportunity to restore the well-being of our planet through the making and maintenance of buildings.
50 years after the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth Report, the city of Rome is once again the backdrop for a radical reconsideration of humankind’s relationship to the planet. The earth has reached an existential tipping point and the ecological and social impacts of the construction industry have been devastating. Only a complete systemic overhaul of the built environment will prevent a global climate catastrophe. This transformation must happen now.
The charter demands that we: Invest in nature; Expand the system boundaries of design and governance and the temporal and spatial scales of our agency; Enhance rather than deplete biodiversity; Sink carbon by construction; Capture natural energy rather than extracting fossil fuels; Question why we build and what we build with and prioritize the reuse of existing buildings and material; Build dense and polycentric cities to restore urban community and regional wildlands; Provide secure and dignified homes for all people to build social equity, economic livelihood, and shared respect for our common resources; Make public space the essential infrastructure of cities and the site of socio-political discourse and innovation; Empower rural communities; Welcome new urban citizens; and Redefine beauty by building with love and compassion for humans and non-humans alike.
The charter has already been signed by: Lesley Lokko, Founder & Director African Futures Institute and Curator of the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture; Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President, The Club of Rome; Mamphela Ramphele, Co-President, The Club of Rome, Co-Founder of ReimagineSA; Amanda Sturgeon, CEO of Built by Nature; Amanda Yates, Director He Puna ORA: Regenerative Action Lab; Aromar Revi, Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network; Cecil Konijnendijk, Director or the Nature-based Solutions Institute; Daniel Ibañez, CEO at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia; Margaret Lowman, Executive Director, TREE Foundation; Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities; Ravi Naidoo, Founder of Interactive Africa and Design Indaba; Rukka Sombolinggi, Secretary General of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago.
Towards Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth was initiated by Bauhaus Earth and authored by 18 scientists, architects, spatial planners, and policy makers from around the world including: Marlène de Saussure, Cade Diehm, Rocío Armillas Tiseyra, James Drinkwater, Ana María Durán Calisto, Andrea Gebhard, Vicente Guallart, Nathalie Jean-Baptiste, Philipp Misselwitz, Alan Organschi, Marc Palahí, Edgar Pieterse, Tilmann Prinz, Giuseppe Scarascia Mugnozza, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Franziska Schreiber, Monica Tanuhandaru, Rao Vyjayanthi.
The charter was introduced today at the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome. The charter launch will be followed by Bauhaus Earth’s Reconstructing the Future for People and Planet Conference, hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on June 9 ‒ 10, 2022.
Reconstructing the Future is available to the public via livestream. Please follow this link to register and join online.
About Bauhaus Earth
Bauhaus Earth is a nonprofit organization, based in Berlin and Potsdam, dedicated to the transformation of the construction sector and building policies into creative forces for environmental preservation and systemic regeneration. Founded in 2019, Bauhaus Earth brings together experts from the fields of architecture and planning, the arts, science, governance, and industry. Through deep-research, demonstration projects and political advocacy, Bauhaus Earth is helping to create buildings, cities, and landscapes that serve our planet and its inhabitants. The Laudes Foundation is a financial supporter and partner of Bauhaus Earth.
For further information, please contact: Annie Schneider, [email protected] or [email protected]
