F.A.S.T. Planning and Human Rights

# To develop projects that have the potential to stimulate alternative planning solutions for people and communities who suffer from the destruction of their environment (physical, cultural, economical and social) through polarized planning systems.

# To focus on the actual and urgent cases of destruction, transforming them into pilot projects in other places around the world.

# To conjure up the designation ‘activist architecture’ and turning the attention to urgent questions of human rights violation through planning systems.

# To bring together different disciplines in order to undertake more in depth research into issues of social, economical, ideological and territorial segregation and develop alternative strategies.

# To generate a new practice that will stimulate a new theoretical and critical discourse on the hidden dimensions of planning and at the same time developing practical instruments for sustainable planning alternatives.

FAST, the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, aims to make visible the reality of segregation and human right violation through top down architecture and planning.

FAST's projects expose cultural assumptions about the way our and other people's life-world is being planed and designed, focusing on cases of real urgency where people's living environment is being factually destroyed and reconstructed.

VISION

FAST wants to contribute to a world where national territory is not being scattered into ethnic and socio-economical enclaves, where architects and planners are not abusing their professional knowledge in order to commit violations of human rights and where governments are not abusing architecture and planning tools in order to promote agendas of segregation.

FAST wants to contribute to a seamless world, where the populations of territorial entity (State), the different ethnic, religious and socio-economics groups, profit from just planning solutions and thus equal living conditions; a world where designers, architects and planners who translate national, ideological and political agendas into physical shapes and built environments are engaged in generating better plans for all.

FAST wants to do this by bringing together:

ARCHITECTURE

FAST contributes to the formation of a new practice, activist architecture that will approach the practices of human rights and civil society. FAST contributes to professional awareness, defining the role of architects and planners toward professional social responsibility. Fast demonstrates how the tools of architecture and planning can be reclaimed in order to create just living environments for all its users.

HUMAN RIGHTS

FAST contributes to, and strengthen the practice of human rights and civil society by giving them the tools to make visible their arguments, showing how human rights violations are implemented through top down mechanisms of segregation, through architecture and planning, and therefore affect people's living environments.

LOCAL PEOPLE

FAST helps and empower local populations that suffer from human rights violations, raising awareness towards their situation and thinking together with them on how to improve their living conditions, and translating these ambitions and possibilities into alternative plans and master plans.

DECISION MAKERS

FAST exposes unjust political, ideological, social and economical decisions, which are affecting living environments and people's lives, linking political decisions with their implementation on the ground. Therefore, developing tools to uncover the hidden decisions on one hand and showing the possible alternatives to that decision. Through exposing the connections between plans and the agendas that initiated them, FAST aims to affect governmental organizations and other decision-makers.