The editorial I wrote for AT two years ago, on 23 March 2020, in the grip of the pandemic and concerned with other dark omens, revealed all the worries raised by the beginning of the new millennium. Today, I shiver when reading it: the dangers outlined in that same article are still present and without remedy. Although we made a lot of progress with anti-COVID vaccination, the skepticism of many  contributed to keeping the virus alive Moreover, against the global backdrop, imbued with concern on many levels, the economy has taken on a central role in our lives. There is still a long way to go before recovery, adversely affecting our work, growth, activities, reconstruction, and social life. It has been two years since I called for architects to take responsibility. We are now asking leaders everywhere to act quickly and consciously. Risk is the ultimate limit.  

Honestly, I am among those who believe that once this sanitary emergency is over (will it ever really end?) we will all be more vulnerable and in danger. We have understood that it is not only the third World War, we've been close to several times, that threatens us.
Nor is the Islamic and international terrorism that frightens us.
Nor is the delinquency that they tell us is decreasing but that, when it touches you, it is still terrifying.
Nor are masses invasions of the poor from everywhere who flee from impossible countries.
Nor the "climate change", with all its dark and real risks, brought back to our consciences by Greta Thunberg.
Nor is the coronavirus that an ignored Bill Gates had predicted four years ago and that only now is on the network.
Nor is the unstoppable drought that burns lives, the devastating Australian fires, the tsunamis that wipes out everything under a wave as high as a mountain, the earthquakes that disrupt the earth and swallow people.
Nor a hypothetical global blackout that would destroy all our certainties of evolved, hyper-connected, and globalized travellers
We will all be more and more in ever greater danger because these threats can materialize one at a time or perhaps together. Along with other calamities, known or unknown.
We need new heroes, visionaries, future seers who can build a safer world, as far as possible. We don't need fake news or social charlatans. We need architects, designers, engineers, urban planners, scientists, researchers, computer scientists, doctors, sociologists and others who hold power knowledge and experience to work together to build, and protect, cities and nature. We also need competent and prudent politicians to regulate everything - but here we know it's difficult -, visionary and reliable leaders. We need not-collapsing skyscrapers, houses that protect, ultra-efficient hospitals, unpolluting means of transport, bridges that don't collapse, omniscient control systems, vegetable gardens, woods, forests that guarantee us. And so much more.
Shall we start from the architects, who are holding our cities and turning them into science fiction scenarios. Even now buildings caress the clouds, their walls are waves of glass and steel that defy the rules of statics, roofs and facades are parametric laces, air-conditioned transparent domes are the sky of parks, houses, transport and public spaces that coexist in this artificial environment as in a real Truman Show. Architecture has become a mission, art, and science.
What about design? We will ask design to be less frivolous and more substantial, less ego-centric, without sacrificing beauty, emotions, the stories it can tell, the functions it can invent. We will ask design to respond to everyone's desires and needs, to be both exclusive and democratic, so that none feels excluded.
I wish the third millennium, that has so dramatically begun, could learn from this cruel lesson of an unknown virus that is killing, to behave better, wiser and more forward-looking. Being able to listen to the Cassandras who foresee imminent dangers to which nobody, so preoccupied with our own lives, wants to believe.
Who better than the architects and their futuristic teams, can take on the responsibility for the kind of safer world that we would like to leave to our children?