A paper presented to the Sustainable Societies Caucus at HABITAT II, Istanbul 1996.

The discourse flourishing around the concept “Sustainable Development” in the last years and still in the present context, too, has been warning enough in drawing attention to the harm we have given until now to this old earth of ours. A wide public consent has been formed in regard to these very important issues. It can also be expected that this impact will be multiplying in determining our agenda in the near future. Yet, the well-developed countries today don’t seem to be willing enough to take upon themselves their share in this common remorse of mankind concerning the long era of unforgivable crimes towards nature. Well, who revoked the principle that “the guilty should pay for the detriment”? Nobody should forget that the ones responsible for the negligence and consumption of the natural and cultural heritage in the underdeveloped countries, are actually these wealthy planet-mates of us. They also are the real culprits of the exhaustion of, and alienation from human resources. Actually both the origins and the developmental sequences of capitalism match the history of colonialism. Nobody should forget that the sources of the wealth of both Western Europe and Northern America stem from the “for gratis consumption” of the natural resources and surplus value of labour in the invaded parts of the world. Neither culture nor architecture in the “rest of the world” could flourish in their own terms after being interrupted by the dull mainstream Modernism of Western Rationalism.

In the present world picture, capitalism seems to be a priori in shaping our destiny. There is not a sign of promise for a change of direction neither in the near, or in the far future of mankind. Capitalism is based on the principle of the consumption of the surplus value of individual labour, and it principally results in the getting more rich of the rich, and the getting more poor of the poor. This principle is valid both among the various nations of the world and among the different social classes in each nation-state of the modern world. By definition, the abyss among the rich and the poor will grow wider, as long as the prevalent premises govern our programs. Considering the presently prevailing conditions, it seems that we should take good care of us as anybody else, seek for our own advantage, because we can only overcome our underdeveloped position in the global system through sustaining our industrial and material development. It seems that in this global war among mankind for wealth, development and power; the orientation of the beliefs, the labour and energies of the underdeveloped towards deeper issues than their material welfare, their mobilization for cleaning the mess the well-developed have left behind, and the negligence of the importance of their industrialisation and modernization… they all seem to be various dimensions of a new global strategy.

The agenda for developing countries is to sustain their development programs without hesitation. The present alienation from tradition is the only foothold available for a forthcoming aesthetic. In the meanwhile the well-developed should compensate for the devastation they have caused and left behind everywhere.

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