Making a difference

by Henning Thomsen, Gehl Architects

What kind of life do you want to lead? Asking a question like that 2-3 generations ago, would hardly have made sense to very many people. Even as late as in the decades after the Second World War, lifestyles were not an individual choice for most people. Lifestyles came with the family, so to speak. Whether it be your career or the food that you ate, your social inheritance and upbringing would almost exclusively be the decisive factors. You became what you came from.

Today, this is very different. You are still very much shaped by your upbringing, of course. But many more choices have become available to most of us as individuals. Your geography has extended tremendously. Today we are talking not just different countries, but even different continents. Today, it is not strange to be active on several continents throughout the span of a lifetime: born on one continent, brought up on another, going through college on a third, meeting a spouse on a fourth, taking a job on a fifth and working on all five of them in a global company.

This fundamental condition makes a huge difference to our thinking about lifestyle. It holds a promise for the generations to come, that we with our individual choices act on the background of global knowledge, when we assess and distinguish between the opportunities offered by different lifestyles. Today we are fully aware that the lifestyles we choose affect the world as a whole.

Continuously keeping people aware of the 'footprint' each individual leaves behind is increasingly important and will have to be part of the sustainable communities we must strive to create in the future. Not to give people a bad conscience, but to keep us all aware, that we all do make a difference, and that we all can take part in making this world more sustainable.

The individual choices make a difference to the whole. And a continuous sense of the meaning of individual choices to the sustainability of the whole could become an integrated design parameter in the development of the sustainable village. Let us show and tell in communality and through this become aware of the very concrete difference we all make.