World Habitat Day is Today

Happy World Habitat Day.
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
I didn't even know till today this existed, got the heads up in twitter by @CarlosCamara:

After that, and before writing this post, I went to the UN Habitat website to see what it is about. According the UN Habitat Website "The United Nations has designated the first Monday of October every year as World Habitat Day. This year, it will be celebrated on 7 October 2013. The purpose of World Habitat Day is to reflect on the state of our towns and cities and the basic right of all to adequate shelter. It is also intended to remind the world that we all have responsibility to shape the future of our cities and towns." Sound nice.

Digging a bit more, I was specially surprised when I found out that former Barcelona's Mayor Joan Clos was involved in this in some way. (Executive Director of UN-Habitat on the occasion of World Habitat Day, 1 October 2012). So after that, I wonder if this World Habitat Day is anything useful at all considering its Executive Director credentials. Yes, his official credential look very good, Mayor, Industry Minister and Ambassador in Turkey. The thing is, this guy swore his position as a Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, saying "I swore as Minister of JUSTICE, Trade and Tourism...". Yes, he didn't even know what position he was getting I guess.

So, despite the good intentions that one can feel from the motto of the UN-Habitat website, one wonders if this type of organizations are just elephant cemeteries where our no longer useful politicians (where they ever useful?) can retire with a big paycheck and paid expenses to attend events in different countries.

I am sure there are extremely valid people doing hard work in them, I just can't stop wondering how did we allow all these parasites to be our appointed representatives.

Happy World Habitat Day anyway, at least let's remember that all we do, all we try to improve, all the BIM, and Lean and IPD, efforts that try to increase profitability, improve the industry, reduce waste and all these dogmas we repeat ourselves should or may in a way or another make the built habitat better. Maybe, just maybe, all this transformation of the AEC industry we say we aim to achieve, can one day be put to help those without adequate shelter. Maybe a small percentage of what owners save by implementing BIM or Lean in their Projects, can be put to help those in need. Maybe, or maybe we are all too busy building ourselves a career.



by Marti
Labels:

1 comment:

  1. Paul LeeOct 8, 2013, 7:59:00 AM

    Thanks for this very interesting article Marti. It is true that so many useless people inhabit places of power. There are many reasons for this but two major ones are:

    The tendency to "reward incompetence"- that is, to get rid of someone or keep them at bay, you "promote" them.

    This is a true fact. Just google it.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nearly-25-of-bosses-reward-poor-performance-2013-08-16

    Another major part of the problem is me, you and everyone else- how we tolerate our power being given away to badly managed organisations and moronic, (sometimes psychotic?) individuals.

    BIM as a concept is thwarted by big organisations and companies who often oversell it's benefits and ignore any downsides. I have tried showing how low-cost/ free resources are available to individuals, institutions and government organisations only to find that expensive, inaccessible, and hard-to-learn software is allowed to be used for all purposes whether appropriate or not.

    One crazy example is a local school that teaches interior designers to use Revit.....?? In my country (Ireland), kids first experience of 3D modeling is Solidworks. Again, totally inappropriate as a starting point.

    Let me finish on a happy note: We are promoting the use of good and appropriate technologies for children through DesignerDojo where we play with Minecraft, Wings3D, SketchUp, Blender, Google Earth and 3D printing.

    : )

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...