Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of architecture studio PAU, and board member of The World Around believes that the key to saving the planet is through urbanity. But as the trend towards suburban living around the world continues to grow, he spoke during our Summit 2023 about the need to promote urbanism on all six continents in order to avoid environmental crises.

“If you look at where the population is going to grow versus carbon emissions per capita, you understand that those two graphs are exact opposites of each other; that who uses the resources is very, very different from where the majority of the people are,” Chakrabarti said.

He also discussed how architecture and urbanity can be used as tools to help connect people across their differences and to solve issues around inequity and technology.

“Urbanity is something that is quite specific to us as a species, and it happens regardless of scale. Urbanity is not the same thing as the metropolis or the city. It has to do with this idea that—whether at the scale of the village or at the scale of the metropolis—real urbanity is about the connection of difference, rather than segregation.”