Two Lives, Same Person

1. Mara in the Current City

Mara wakes up during a heat wave.

Her mid-sized apartment in a multistore building traps heat from yesterday. At night, the walls released it slowly, like a stored fever. The air inside is stale. She checks the weather app before opening the window — not for rain, but for pollution levels. Opening the window helps with heat, but worsens her breathing – she also has asthma.

Outside, the street radiates heat. Asphalt and concrete amplify the temperature by several degrees. The wind is chaotic — funnelled by rigid building edges, useless in summer, brutal in winter.

Water arrives from far away, treated, pumped, pressurized. When it rains heavily, drains overflow. The building sheds water as fast as possible, treating it as a problem, not a resource. The ground never sees it.

Food arrives wrapped in plastic, transported across regions. Organic waste leaves the building in black bags, becoming someone else’s problem. Heat, water, nutrients — all exported as waste.

There are no birds nesting here. No insects except the ones considered pests. The building is clean, sealed, inert. It does not participate in life.

Mara feels tired more often. She spends more money on cooling, medication, food. The city works against her body, and she spends her income compensating for that friction.

This is normal. No one calls it a failure — but it requires constant external energy to keep Mara functional.

2. Mara in a City of Ecosystem-Generating Buildings

Mara wakes up to a different kind of morning.

The building stayed cool overnight. Its layered façade slowed heat exchange, shaded itself, and released stored warmth into planted surfaces instead of the air. Inside, the temperature is stable — not perfect, but comfortable without constant mechanical correction.

She opens the window. The air smells different — damp, green. The building’s exterior vegetation and porous materials filtered dust and cooled the surrounding air. Wind moves gently, guided instead of deflected.

Rain from last night didn’t disappear. It was slowed, filtered through soils and roots integrated into the building, stored for reuse, feeding plants and cooling surfaces. Flooding is rare here — water is treated as a collaborator.

On her way downstairs, she passes shared growing spaces: fruiting vines, herbs, small-scale food systems woven into the structure. Not enough to replace agriculture — but enough to shorten supply chains, provide resilience, and reconnect people with seasonality.

Waste doesn’t vanish. It cycles. Organic matter feeds soil systems. Materials are chosen to be disassembled, repaired, reused. The building remembers its past and plans for its future.

There are birds. Pollinators. Microhabitats. The building is not just shelter — it is terrain.

Mara’s asthma is quieter here. She walks more. She spends less on energy, less on medication, less on food shipped from far away. Her building quietly performs ecosystem services that the old city outsourced to distant landscapes and future generations.

This city does not just reduce harm. It actively supports life.

The Urgency We Emphasize

Current buildings are metabolically broken: They consume energy, water, and materials but do not regenerate any of them.
Cities are now the dominant human habitat: If buildings don’t perform ecosystem functions, there is nowhere else for those functions to happen.
Human health is inseparable from building design: Air quality, thermal comfort, mental health, and immune systems are shaped by architecture.
Non-human life is not optional: Without habitats integrated into cities, ecosystems collapse — and cities become fragile, expensive, and hostile to life.
This is not a future vision: The technologies and design principles already exist. What’s missing is the decision to treat buildings as living infrastructure.

In the current city, buildings protect us from nature. In the sustainable city, buildings become part of nature — and keep us alive because of it.