Charter
HURRY UP!
The alarm is ringing from all sides. The different crises that Ukraine is undergoing are all to be faced by European countries soon : energetic, social, environmental, geopolitical of course, demographic… Beyond the tragedy of war, we need to anticipate the victory and the time of reconstruction to avoid all the counter-examples that history has given us. We need to collectively enhance a greener, more contextual and local, a more inclusive and sustainable process to generate adapted solutions for Ukraine and Europe.
Indeed, the urge to act and transform our impact on the natural environment is clear, as more than 15,000 scientists say: it “will soon be too late to deviate from our doomed trajectory, and time is running out.” The UN deplores that greenhouse gas emissions are stagnating at 52 Gt annually, whereas they should be limited to 36, or even 24, to stay below the 2°C which would allow a peaceful future. But let's remain optimistic, there is still room for action, and action is now.
Beyond environmental contamination, mining and climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, threats are accumulating: accelerated decline in biodiversity; scarcity of exhaustible resources; increased pollution of air, land and seas; growing social inequalities... Merely controlling energy needs will not be enough.
Globally, governments announce initiatives that they end up postponing. Thus, the need for resilience is not an ideology, it is a matter of survival in this state of war and aggression on our infrastructure. And it is a matter of preparing the future. We need to make every law and proposal compatible with the new green deal. Our commitments, on energy, social housing or low carbon building techniques are facing legislative challenges that need to be lifted.
But the world and Ukraine are changing and seeds of possibilities are growing all over the planet. Agriculture that cares about humans and nature is emerging from marginality and short circuits are developing. A cooperative, social and solidarity economy is emerging outside the commercial sectors. In people's minds, shared use takes precedence over ownership, mutualization over privatization, sobriety over waste. A new world is born.
Professionals cannot flee from their responsibility. Their areas of action produces at least 40% of world greenhouse gases, and much more with mobility that is generated by urban planning choices, such as new construction rather than rehabilitation. Choices which consumes every year huge amounts of agricultural and natural land.
The world of construction is also changing. Across Ukraine, renewable, local and collaborative energy production projects are being developed. At the building level, we construct buildings that are healthy and pleasant to live in without mechanical ventilation or air conditioning, or even without heating. Thanks to natural ventilation, passive cooling, recovery of free heat input and thermal inertia, bioclimatic design makes it possible to reduce energy consumption to the strict minimum, while ensuring increased comfort. We know how to do it and it doesn't cost more. Why shouldn’t we widespread these practices?
We know how to do without wasting resources. Wooden construction, long limited to individual houses, should now being implemented for large-scale public facilities and collective housing. Biosourced insulation, marginal until recently, is cheap and efficient. Rammed earth, with wood, the material of our common heritage, is emerging from the purgatory into which the 20th century had plunged it. All of these advances consolidate the development of local sectors and know-how on a regional scale.
Frugality in energy, materials, and maintenance leads to low-tech approaches. This does not mean an absence of technology, but the priority use of relevant, adapted, non-polluting or waste-less techniques, such as devices that are easy to repair, recycle and reuse. In both production and design, frugality requires innovation, invention and collective intelligence. We know that further groundbreaking technologies will be found, and this will help our fight for a more resilient world. But we also promote a low tech resilience over a technical vision of the building, challenging the involvement of the people living in. It is not the building that is intelligent nor smart, it is its inhabitants.
Whether located in an urban or rural environment, the frugal building cares about its context. It recognizes cultures, places and draws its inspiration from them. It carefully uses land and local resources; it respects the air, soil, water, biodiversity, etc. It is generous towards its surroundings and attentive to its people. Through its brief and its constructive techniques, it promotes everything that reduces its ecological footprint, and everything that makes it equitable and pleasant to live in.
The period of war is by itself an ecocide and the destruction of heritage, culture and social base of the society. The period of mass reconstruction is a threat to cultural, social and natural fields. But if we commit to gathering our efforts to prepare this time of rush, we can turn this tragedy into something that is both meaningful and positive for the future of Ukraine and its people.
Maintaining yesterday's urban planning and technical architectural solutions, as well as current ways of getting around, is incompatible with the task facing our generations: containing and then eradicating global crises.
Frugal building and frugal territory – urban and rural – are the answers we have chosen. We share them in our teachings, our interventions and our publications. We implement them in our achievements to support the establishment of a happy and eco-responsible society.