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What Are the Most Pressing Issues Affecting Contemporary Life and Future Generations?

Undoubtedly, there are many, from climate change to artificial intelligence. Here we present a comprehensive list of some of the most significant challenges, accompanied by related news and articles.

This list is an attempt to visualise the diverse and complex conditions that architects, artists, and society at large must engage with through their practices, or at least acknowledge and find ways to address. These are the roots of the dialogues we aim to foster with the practices featured in PFAALL.

Climate Change

Natural Catastrophes

Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem collapse

Ocean Acidification and marine degradation

Water Scarcity and Pollution

Soil Contamination

Soil Exploitation

Resource extraction and depletion

Waste management and overproduction

Cities deterioration

Informal settlements

Urban segregation and gentrification

Housing precarity

Homelessness

Poverty

Economic instability and speculative economies

Automation and technological dependency

Artificial intelligence and labor displacement

Supply chain fragility and global interdependence

Inequalities

Gender inequality and discrimination

Food insecurity

Aging population, demographic shifts

Mental health and social isolation

Education crisis and digital divide

Forced Displacement

Migration

Geopolitical conflicts 

Wars and militarisation

Political polarisation, populism and neoliberalism

Surveillance and erosion of privacy

Cultural homogenisation and loss of local identities

Esra Akcan

Architecture and the Right to Heal, Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster


ea369@cornell.edu
253 E. Sibley Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850

This book explores architecture’s role in healing after conflicts and disasters by discussing buildings and spaces in relation to transitional justice and energy transition. It locates spaces of political and ecological harm, and makes a call to repurpose them as healing places where violence and violations are confronted and accountability and reparations are instituted.

Esra Akcan is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture, and a board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York. She taught at UI-Chicago, Humboldt University in Berlin, Columbia University, New School, and Pratt Institute in New York, and METU in Ankara.

Purchase the book with a 30% using the code: E25AKCRN
link: Duke University Press

© 2025 Duke University Press. All rights reserved

#forced displacement


Designing for endless fire   
Christopher Hawthorne in discussion with Joseph G. Allen, Dana Cuff, Frank Frievalt, Michael Maltzan, Margot McDonald, and Arthi Varma
Photo © Pacific Palisades, June 2025. Photo Iwan Baan.


Harvard Design Magazine
48 Quincy Street
Gund Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138

Read the full text:
link: Harvard Design Magazine

© 2025 President and Fellows of Harvard College.

#climate change




Ecological Aesthetics and Architectural Autonomy: Oswald Mathias Ungers’s Designs for Solar Housing 


Cornelia Escher and Lars Fischer

Photo Oswald Mathias Ungers, Hotel Berlin, Berlin/ Berlijn, axonometric drawing/ axonometrie (1977)


Read the full text:
link: OASE, Journal for Architecture

© 2025 OASE

#ecology&spaces






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2025 PFAALL MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED