Sustainable Expansion: The Only Way

Unfortunately, Perfectville does not exist. It's a myth.

It has often been argued that human expansion is the greatest parasite on the environment. Centuries of uncontrolled growth of the human race have taken a heavy toll on our earth.

Some people are, however, working hard to change that. Some architects, natural scientists, and social scientists from around the world formed the International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS). IAPS has been busy for decades promoting sustainable expansion of humans while maintaining the environment and its biodiversity.

At the recent 19th biannual conference of IAPS at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in the coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt, IslamOnline.net caught up with Professor Gabriel Moser. Moser is the director of IAPS as well as the author of several books on sustainable development. He talked about the idea behind IAPS, the challenges it faces, and the state of human expansion in the world.

IOL: Thank you for joining IOL for an interview, professor. Can you first tell us a little about yourself and your background as director of IAPS?

Moser: I am a scientist in environmental psychology. I have done a lot of work on noise and the stress of living in cities. As a scientist, I have been running a research unit on environmental psychology for a long time. I am also a professor at the University of Sorbonne in Paris. I have been involved in a lot of research inside my research unit. We are preoccupied not only with children's environment and with children's behavior in cities, but also by catastrophes and people's displacement and reactions to major events like tsunamis, flooding, and things like that. We have a wide range of problems we address in the world in our unit.

And I'm not only a researcher. I'm also interested in how you can apply research, in how we can use what we are doing. In that sense I am in IAPS because IAPS just brings together people who are concerned with different aspects of the environment. So I learn, I interchange and see how we can implement our knowledge into something which is worth doing for the planet.

IOL: Professor, can you tell us how the idea for IAPS first began?

Moser: IAPS began with problems with architecture. In building dwellings, architects are well aware that they are building for people. In order to build better dwellings, houses, and cities, they had to know what people want in order to satisfy their needs. So the idea was at the beginning that psychologists could help architects to build and to satisfy the needs of the persons in terms of built environments.

Let's say that was the beginning of what was called at that time architectural psychology. This began in the 1970s more or less. The name of IAPS came a little bit later, but since the 1970s we have been preoccupied with bringing together architects, urban designers, interior designers, and psychologists of the social sciences in the wider sense to look at how people relate to their physical environment. By that I mean the interrelationship between physical environment and individual or group behaviors.

So traditionally we are concerned with all these housing problems and urban design problems. However, our concerns shifted slightly to care not only for these problems, but also for the environment with its other aspects such as landscape. For the last two decades our area of concern shifted also a lot into people's relation to the global environment, to preservation, and to the good behaviors to implement to preserve the environment and to go into sustainable development.

IOL: How does preservation of the environment link to architecture?

Moser: It is not environment preservation that links to architecture, but the need of a sustainable development.

People live in cities more and more. More than half of the population of the world will live in cities in the few coming years. Architecture has to do with conservation because living in cities does not mean that you don't have to separate garbage, that you don't have to be careful with water, or that you don't have to care to not pollute because cities are the main source of pollution. They are spreading into agricultural land and are impeding agriculture. You have that in Egypt, for example. The fact is that more and more cities are taking over land. So the interrelationship is always here anyway. For example, we can see that we have to build low energy consumption buildings and things like that. Everything is tied together anyway, and more and more we see that we have to integrate all the aspects of the relationship of man with our environment in order to get into a certain sustainability.

So it has to do with architecture.

IOL: As a researcher and away from IAPS, how do you perceive science awareness in the developing world?

Moser: Well, I think that science awareness is very concentrated on natural sciences. I think you have been this morning to the GEF [Global Environment Facility] session in the IAPS conference and you have seen that finally, people are finding that natural science is very important, but not enough. People have to not only be aware of the problems, but they have to be aware of the willingness of politicians to act. They have to be aware of the possibility of natural sciences to respond to the problems we have. So I think that natural sciences, such as engineering for example, are very important but they can't do anything unless we have the social sciences which tell us how we can implement this knowledge.

That is the important thing. So again it's a global matter. We all have to join together. Right now we are in the process in which we acknowledge that first there is some natural science. But we also have to recognize that social science can help that natural science. We are confident in that.

IOL: Is IAPS just interested in academic studies or is it doing any field work worldwide?

Moser: IAPS has, I think, about 40 percent researchers and 60 percent practitioners. Well, in a certain way, architects are always practitioners. But on the other hand, most of the social scientists we have are responding to real world problems. In addition, our experts are taken as experts in various fields. So anyway, you have this aspect in IAPS a lot and that is its richness in my opinion.

Many of us are, in our countries, part of government commissions that are establishing guidelines and things like that. I have participated in France in establishing guidelines for noise levels, and in air pollution committees with natural scientists.

So we know what happens, and we help both as experts and practitioners. We also hope we can do more and have more roles in the policy-making process.

IOL: I really hope so, too, professor. Thanks for your time and I wish the best of luck for you and for IAPS.

Moser: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this interview.

Mohammed Yahia is an editor in the Health & Science section at IslamOnline.net. He has a degree in pharmacology from Cairo University, Egypt. You can contact him by sending an e-mail to ScienceTech@islam-online.net