Norman Foster is in San Marino this week to present what he says is a new set of sustainable urban design principles to the 83rd meeting of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s Committee on Urban Development, Housing, and Land Management.

The so-called San Marino Declaration appears as a sort of guidebook around which architects and urban planners can build cities that are “climate-neutral, safer, more inclusive, and resilient.” In it, a set of eleven interrelated principles are floated for universal adaptation based on past actions and directives taken by the UN Secretary-General that carry broad and direct implications to the built environment and ascending migration of populations into urban centers across the globe.

Speaking to Dezeen recently, Foster compared the plan to the Hippocratic Oath Western medical professionals typically sign, adding that, in his estimation, it offers practitioners in effect a condensation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals before calling on “politicians, developers, builders, [and] everyone’s who’s involved” in the development of cities to consider adding their signatures to the document.

Foster is presenting the Declaration along with a selection of his firm’s more salient and applicable designs, including the reused Reichstag parliamentary building, Trafalgar Square master plan, and continually-criticized Stirling Prize Bloomberg London HQ, which, fairly or not, has been promoted as one of the most sustainable office buildings in the world.

The proposal seems to be a bit at odds with the architect’s initial engagement with (and later withdrawal from) the group Architects Declare, which, in the process of being co-founded by Foster, issued its own 12-point plan that had more specific directives and suggestions. Online critics have been quick to pan the new proposal, stating that it lacks key acknowledgments of heat, the need to place affordable housing in the center of cities, and other more nuanced approaches to addressing the litany of core issues contained within the document. 

“As an architect who teaches sustainable design at the university level, I find the declaration to be a wishy-washy muddle,” Toronto Metropolitan University professor Lloyd Alter wrote in a response published by Treehugger. “It's a grab bag of thoughts without a coherent focus on immediately reducing carbon emissions, both upfront and operating, and eliminating the use of fossil fuels, which are the most critical steps that any architect or engineer must aspire to.”

“You could build anything and pin the San Marino Declaration to the door,” he closed derisively. “No wonder Foster likes it.”

Its criticism notwithstanding, the Foster-backed proposal does serve as a timely reaffirmation of the architect’s intentions toward sustainability and the building trade. Next month’s COP27 summit in Egypt will provide a further stage for the suggestions to be vetted by an international cohort of world leaders. Foster and his team are hoping its acceptance by the Orders of Architects of San Marino, Rimini and Pesaro in Italy will trigger more widespread governmental adaptation outside of Europe. Developments since last year's summit, including the latest IPCC report on building emissions, will most likely make that desire a formality.

“In this time of crisis, we can find great hope in the bold action being taken to make cities worldwide climate-neutral, safer, more inclusive, and resilient,” Foster said at the presentation. “Yet, with the magnitude and urgency of the challenges before us, urbanists, architects, engineers, and designers — along with other key shapers of our cities such as civic leaders, managers, and developers — have a unique duty to drive forward transformational changes at the scale required.”