Our All-Electric Future (collected short essays from 1990s)

Ian Ritchie’s approach to sustainability is fundamentally about limiting the consumption of resources by anticipating the future. We are not afraid to ask ourselves awkward questions about the future, to speculate on scenarios and to draw ideas that may help us determine what future we want, and how we go about creating it.

A Philosophical Background
(from an essay © Ian Ritchie, London, 1995)

In the first chapter of his first book, (well) Connected Architecture (Academy 1994), Ian Ritchie wrote: “In western society there is a sense that the private life of the individual is now far more important than the public responsibility, which is a reversal of attitudes held only a few decades ago.”

This was an observation on our society as a whole, and this same trait was identified and remains today too dominant in the approach to, and the activities surrounding architecture.
Reflecting now upon the wider question of freedom, it is even more evident that the pendulum has swung even further toward the individual, his freedoms at the expense of both our sense of community and perhaps our planet. We have fought against other nations and other religions to promote and defend our sense of freedom. This historic idea of freedom has served us well, but for the past three decades it has tended towards the extreme limits of social acceptance and tolerance. It is now a handicap to progress.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité  (essay 2008) actually finds its origins in a May 1791 proposition by the Club de Cordeliers following a speech on the Army by the Marquis de Guichardin.
Liberty before equality has been the mantra of capitalism. The order of the words of the motto is not hierarchical, other than the fact that fraternity came after the 1789 declaration. To promote one at the expense of another is the curse of our modern society. This is not to say that within some nations all have been promoted as fairly as possible, but in our global age, the scale of impact is significant if they are not promoted equally both within and without.

We have witnessed a dominant economic theory that has placed liberty before equality; given markets more power than nations, promoted deregulation instead of regulation, and produced a culture of individual greed without conscience. There has been little opportunity for other economic ideologies or models to be given much air. The present ‘western’ ideology is based upon physical collateral, not humanity. The presumption “one system fits all” is not valid as it enables some and disables others.
The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a unique financial institution developed the important factors needed to help the poor and replaced physical collateral requirements with group responsibility. It showed that a viable and self-reliant credit programme for the poor, proving that financial intermediation is a workable device to fight all poverty, and an excellent vehicle for development.

It should now be evident to everyone that all humanity shares this one planet – the poor and the rich, the young and old, firm and the infirm – with bounteous nature– its visible water, its polluted air, its hidden resources, its plants and animals. But are we able to think about nurturing this planet and life on it, collectively and more intelligently. Or are we, the rich, going to continue to encourage our political and economic advisors to consider first and foremost recovering our national independence and wealth, and as individuals, to carry on promoting our personal freedoms in the hope we will recover and accumulate even more collateral.

What role the economist? In (Well) Connected Architecture I wrote that their role is ‘surely to help us better manage our world’. Every individual, institution and nation, should ask whether they have the right balance between self and un-self, taker and giver, independence and dependence.
As we think about ourselves, we must also invest time and effort in determining what sort of world we want and can offer to ourselves and future generations.

This is the most wonderful challenge that faces us today, in our interconnected and interdependent world.

The world that we want to see has to be imagined and constructed; otherwise, it simply will not happen. The mathematician invents rules from the world of abstract thought; the physicist derives and uses those from nature. These are our two worlds as one – mind and nature. We have now a global society, somewhat insecure, and with economic instruments that are a hindrance to progress.