The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, embodies a shared vision of society and sets out the principles that guide human aspirations. Today, humanity faces new dangers that threaten both its existence and the sanctity of the Earth. Alongside the challenges foreseen in 1948, the spectre of climate change looms large. The scientific consensus unequivocally underlines its current reality, which calls for immediate and concerted action to mitigate its effects. A new observation emerges: population growth and the rapid depletion of the Earth's heritage. In this context, the nexus between urban sustainability and human rights becomes clear. Transforming the 21st century city requires radical change. Inherited patterns, past events and past mistakes call for new perspectives to foster habitats that harmonise with the natural environment. The overriding question is: how should we proceed? In today's context, the world operates within a dynamic interplay of two realms: the physical and the virtual. This distinctive landscape presents opportunities and innovations unparalleled in comparison to previous eras. Harnessing virtual augmentation holds the promise of substantial gains in energy efficiency, emissions reduction and time optimisation through the minimisation of built spaces with physical infrastructures and communication pathways. At the heart of this transformation is the imperative to prioritise Nature in urban interventions. This requires the integration of nature into the urban fabric and the cultivation of an ethical relationship with the environment. As humanity faces the confluence of climate crisis and urban sprawl, embracing this paradigm shift looms as a blueprint for moving towards a future that is not only sustainable, but also equitable and just.

 

 

Human rights, sustainable city, natural environment, climate crisis, urban risks

 

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On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly, meeting in Paris, proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This document, prepared by representatives of the world's regions, gathers the ideology to which our society should aspire. However, whether due to the approach that different civilizations make of the issue due to their beliefs and tradition, or due to the different degree of development of the countries, or due to pressing priorities or needs, human rights have different interpretations. And this is sometimes a source of conflict between countries or between world blocs. For this reason, coordinated work and permanent dialogue must strengthen that common denominator in which we all agree as human rights and, from there, expand the concept as much as possible until the goals of the UDHR are universally achieved.

 

Today, new threats are looming over mankind and his home, the Earth. In addition to the problems that were so clearly foreseen in 1948, there are those arising from climate change. There is full agreement in the scientific community that climate change is now a present reality and that it is time to act and to strive to activate actions that can mitigate and halt it. The realisation that humanity is throwing away at breakneck speed the heritage that the Earth took millions of years to accumulate is new. It was not until the 1960s that a sense emerged that the environment was being degraded by population explosion and economic development. In fact, the trigger for the current ecological disaster was the growing welfare state after the Second World War, when the economic and human means for building a prosperous and free society produced a model of happy living that once initiated has proved unstoppable.

 

The barbaric assault on the environment has been constant: Phosphates from washing media and fertilisers; quicksilver from fuels and lead from the oil industry polluted marine waters; the two carbon oxides, CO2 and CO, from vehicle exhausts, heating stacks and oil refineries have been distributed in the atmosphere, with dangerous unforeseeable effects; oil spilled at sea damaged marine plankton; gases from spry tubes and freezers damaged the ozone layer; nuclear radiation and waste from the nuclear industry and the effects of nuclear explosions added new challenges for the environment. Global warming has only just begun.

 

However, all that was welcome, as advanced society, in exchange, reached previously unknown degrees of comfort and welfare. As soon as the cinema screens exported a prosperous and happy life model, the whole planet wanted to copy these achievements, starting thus a very large-scale attack on the earth resources.

 

The first space travels, the first times that human beings were able to move away from Earth, made us aware of the limited size of the planet and its fragility in the Universe, promoting the first motions to protect certain regions of great natural value or certain living species in danger of extinction.  It is now, in the early years of the 21st century, that ecological attention is spreading to all scales, making us aware that the city is one of the great focal points of energy consumption, land use and one of the greatest sources of polluting emissions. And this is why I am going to focus my intervention on the city's responsibility in Climate Change and on addressing the sustainable city as a human rights issue.

 

In just one century the human population has increased approximately fivefold. In the same period, the growth of the population living in cities has increased from 25% to 50% of the total human population. It is estimated that by 2030 the global average urban population will reach up to 60%, which would equate, on current expectations, to approximately 4.9 billion people living in cities, a situation that we could never have remotely dreamed of in the long history of mankind. In addition, cities are responsible for 60% of total energy consumption and 70% of pollutant emissions. Due to these greenhouse gas emissions, cities contribute negatively to the process of Climate Change that will have so many consequences for the human population. Therefore, to talk about sustainability in the city is to talk about human rights. A large part of the population will suffer from floods, droughts, lack of food, lack of land for cultivation, lack of work due to the processes of deindustrialisation and isolation. All of this will be caused by global warming.

 

The extreme situation of many cities exposes the limit state of their reality, yesterday's data is of no use to us today, we do not have understandable, measurable, predictable parameters that allow us to anticipate and plan. Excessive growth of the population and specifically of the urban population, economic cycles and imbalances that displace workers from one place to another, from one country to another and from one continent to another, natural disasters that affect repeatedly or unexpectedly and perhaps unpredictable to urban environments, war conflicts that force us to live differently, cities that decrease generating desolate landscapes... All of this is altering or causing unusual, atypical situations that require a new look.

 

If we compare contemporary data with the growth rates that cities have experienced throughout history, and not only with these, but with the much faster rates we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution, we realise that we are facing a process of gigantic spatial scale, and of such a small temporal scale that it is a totally new phenomenon for humanity.  Brutal changes in record time. Hence the new concept of Instant City. Cities, or large neighbourhoods or urban spaces that are not built by the accumulation of chronological, historical, cultural or epic layers, but are of instantaneous temporal making. The concept of historical memory, with its almost genetic collection of socio-cultural heritage, is no longer valid. They are cities and urban entities built "at once". The astonishing growth of urban settlements runs parallel to the astonishing waste of our resources and energy demanded by them, thus generating an imbalance between the availability of production in Nature and the capacity of human beings to plunder the environment.

 

The concept of the ecological footprint has given us the image that the city extends beyond its physical limits if we take into account the amount of energy and other resources that its extension requires. Although this should not be the case, nowadays the ecological footprint is all the greater the more developed and powerful the society, thus generating scandalous differences in consumption between developed and developing countries. In the same way we can see that megacities, by using the scalable model of the historic city, useful for a moderate population, exponentially increase their use of land, energy and resources in general. It is evident, due to the non-linear structure of complex systems such as cities, that a city n times larger than another uses far more resources than n times the smaller one.

 

We need a profound change of position to consider the city of the 21st century. The inherited models that have proved to be inadequate, the speed of events and the consequences of past behaviour, which we can now contemplate, force us to take a new approach to the situation that allows us to generate habitats in dynamic equilibrium with the natural environment. To do this, we must first consolidate a new theoretical support or, in other words, build a new philosophy that will provide us with a new scale of priorities on which to base the future of humanity. Without a thorough understanding of the current conditions and the consequent conviction of the need for decisive and necessary action, we run the risk that the solution found will be either modal or superficial and inadequate.

 

Raised like this, it seems urgent to approach the city from new parameters and to take into account as a priority issues such as: control of urban sprawl, efficient planning with recovery and reuse of the existing city, air quality, control of energy consumption, green building, economy green, urban mobility and public transport, water supply and quality, waste control and management, natural disaster risks, clean energy production, access to housing, citizen participation, etc. For these reasons we must proceed to review urban theories and practices on the light of the new events to limit the waste of natural resources and the massive pollution of the planet. 

 

The question, then, is what to do?

 

Contemporary world is built on two structures, one of them physical, the other virtual. This is a situation that presents a considerable novelty and a great potential compared to other epochs. We can reduce the number of square meters built, the number of kilometers of the communication routes, the number of kilometers of electrical cables and ducts by increasing the virtual. The savings would be spectacular, as much in energy and emissions as in times.

 

Another key issue is putting Nature at the forefront of any urban intervention. To formulate the city of the 21st century we insist on recovering the equilibrium between Nature and city. Therefore, we must incorporate nature into this city and keep an ethic attitude with respect towards the world we live in.

 

Undoubtedly, one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century is to redefine the city and adapt it to the new conditions that have come about, and in the future, to the enormous changes in demographics, migration, energy, climate, economy, society, etc. The consequences of the rise in the planet's temperature are already more than evident, subjecting many urban settlements to serious disasters. The irregular distribution of wealth, migrations, war, religious and racial conflicts, are other of the many problems that the contemporary world faces.

 

Poor planning, low-quality and substandard housing, insufficient urban infrastructure, poor waste management, lack of energy autonomy, excessive density, location in unsuitable geographical areas, etc. they contribute to the greater risk of cities and have a direct impact on social inequality and human rights. Analyzing and understanding the complexity of the challenges we must face, their climatic, energy or economic implications and the role that cities can play in this regard, seems more necessary today than ever.

 

For the above reasons, human rights must consider sustainable development and the sustainable city as a priority for the future.