SUMMARY: The host Rumana Kabir (RK) of My MARS mantra podcast, launches their first podcast series, "Disasters as Agents of Change," and their first guest is Professor Ian Davis (ID), a visiting professor in several universities worldwide. Ian shares his motivations for studying post-disaster housing and recovery, including his personal experiences of his childhood during World War II and his involvement with Tear Fund, a Christian relief agency. Ian also discusses how he got involved in researching shelter and architecture following earthquakes.
TRANSCRIPT: Ian Davis Interview, with Rumana Kabir,
11th August, 2023, Oxford Brookes University.
RK: Today, I launch my first podcast series, Disasters as Agents of Change. My first guest is Professor Ian Davis, who is a visiting professor in several universities around the world. I came to know Ian when I read his book, Shelter After Disaster, as a student of architecture in Bangladesh. Ian also wrote many other books on disaster risk capturing lessons from many post-disaster recovery and my favourite book is his most recent one titled Experiencing Oxford. It has nothing to do with disasters, but it is all about appreciating the architecture of Oxford and where Ian has drawn beautifully illustrated watercolour paintings of all the buildings of Oxford.
Hello, Ian.
ID: Hi.
RK: Welcome to My Mars Mantra podcast. I'm delighted to have you here today and start our first interview. I would love to hear your stories. I know that you have so many stories to tell. You've been one of the first architects and authors to write about post-disaster housing and recovery. You also mentioned that you accidentally came into this career, but it will be good to understand what motivated you and you've been in this sector for 50 years.
ID: Well, thank you very much, Rumana. It's a great pleasure to be taking part in this podcast. It's quite complicated trying to think about your motivations, particularly since it's a long time ago. But I suppose it's complex and it's a mixture of external factors and internal factors. I got involved through various routes. One was through Tear Fund, which is a Christian relief agency, which was formed in about 1967. It was formed by a friend of mine in a nearby church as a Christian organization and I used to do some volunteering work with them, producing film strips, which were just simply slides put in film form with sound commentary.
Church groups would take these and use them. This fledgling organization, Tear Fund, which was run by about four people, would send these around and churches would get involved, or youth groups, or sometimes school groups, and they would show them and they would become informed about relief and development. I found that very absorbing. One of the routes was when I made one of these recordings, which we called Just Another Disaster. We made it about the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh, which you know all about.
At that time, they thought 500,000 people were killed. They lowered the rate later to about a quarter of a million, but even that was terrible. Tear Fund had a partner organization working in Bangladesh. I simply put together slides and commentary about this, and this was the first time I think I'd ever really thought about a modern disaster.
I had as a kid been evacuated when our house was bombed in Barrow-in-Furness, a shipbuilding town in the north of England, and that was a very vivid experience, particularly observing my parents and all the stress of living in somebody else's house.
So whenever I see these Ukrainians and think about people who are living here in Wheatley where I live, or Oxford, I think about the problems we had as a family, because I can remember some of the stresses and pressures that happened then. So I had a personal experience of a disaster when I was a very small child.
RK: How old were you?
ID: Five. Four or five.
RK: So what can you remember?
ID: Well, I remember our house being bombed. We were all under the kitchen table because we didn't have a shelter of any kind. My father and mother and myself, plus an aunt who'd come from London and her little baby, and two very large aunts who'd come from London. They left London to go to Barrow because they thought they'd be safe from German bombing. They were quite wrong. The Germans were well able to target Barrow in the north of England, near the Lake District, and also Ireland, and Barrow was a prime target because that's where all the submarines were made.
My father worked in the shipyard as a mechanical engineer working on submarine design, and we were bombed in 1941, and it blew the top of our house off. My sister had just come downstairs from the bedroom, they brought her down, and a few seconds later a landmine landed in the road outside our house, and it blew up a huge chunk of concrete from the road, which went through our roof and through my sister's bed, and the whole house was just a spluttering face of dust.
I remember then something happened. Somebody arrived at the door who was a neighbour. He had a shelter in his garden, and he said, you must come to our shelter and get protection, but my dad said, no, Gordon, it's better for us to stay here now because we could be exposed in the road. So off Gordon went back to his shelter, but a few minutes later this major explosion happened, and we all left for the shelter. It was quite exciting, actually, for me as a child.
I went on my father's shoulders, and I can vividly remember seeing searchlights and aircraft in the air. And we went to the shelter, and they gave us hot soup, and I remember asking my mother why they were giving us hot soup in the middle of the night, you know, we don't normally get hot soup at two o'clock in the morning, and she said, shut up and be grateful. So I had my hot soup, and I later on realised that hot soup goes with disasters.
People get hot soup whenever there's some kind of trauma, and we had it. The next day, we got on the back of a lorry, and we went to the Lake District, and we left. I don't know what my parents did with the ruined house, and we stayed away for about nine months and then came back. Where did you stay? We stayed just near a place called Arad Foot, which is in the Lake District. My father went in every day to work.
RK: So did you rent the house?
ID: No, I don't think so. I think every house had to be available to make rooms available. Maybe there was rent given by the government or something, but the person who owned the house didn't want us there, and she made life very difficult for my mother, and they didn't like us digging up the garden to grow vegetables and things like that, which we had to do because we were short of money.
But it was a very vivid experience, and I suppose that the war for a small child is quite interesting and very unusual, what happens.
RK: That is really interesting, because you always talk about all the things you have seen, all the experiences of disasters when you're doing the work, but it's great to know your personal story on how you felt as a little child.
Thank you.
ID: When we came back, something happened which really brought home to me the terror of disasters and war. I was out in the garden, and there was a tremendous explosion, and I ran into the house and asked my mother what it was, and she said, I don't know, we'll wait until Dad comes back from the shipyard. Dad came back and said that two young boys had chased their dog onto a minefield by the sea. They climbed over the barbed wire to get their dog, and they'd been blown up. And the next day at school, the headmaster, the headmistress got us all together and said, two boys from our school died yesterday, and it was, it suddenly brought home to me, because I knew these boys, and it was, that was the big awareness of just what it is to lose friends and to have something pretty terrible happen.
So that was shortly after we came back to Barrow. That is very sad, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate how they are feeling when there are lots of wars going on around. So Ian, that's very good to know that you had this first-hand experience of disasters, and also you mentioned about the Bangladesh cyclone, and that is quite similar, because I didn't experience any disasters personally, but my granddad took me to his village, and he was telling me stories about his dad, my great granddad, being wiped off by the cyclone in the 70s, and that story stayed with me, and that also motivates me to do what I do now.
I also just explained that I, what happened was, I was teaching in the School of Architecture, and I was offered to do research, and they wanted to build up the research capacity of the school, and I wanted to know what subject to research, and they said anything, as long as it relates to architecture. And I chose shelter following earthquakes, simply because I thought I might get some help from Tier Fund in undertaking this work, and that's how it came to be.
It was like a, just putting up a wet finger into the wind, to be honest, I didn't know much about shelter, and then I had to find a supervisor, and find a good university to do it in, and that's how it all began in 1972, that's when it started.
RK: That's when I was born. So that's a long history to discuss today. When you got involved in this research, you said that it has to do with architecture, housing and shelter is architecture.
How did you relate it with architecture?
ID: Well with a lot of difficulty I think, because I first of all assumed I would be designing some kind of shelter. So I ended up in University College London, meeting a professor, Rainer Bannum, who's a historian, and I said, if I do a PhD here, would it involve design work? He said, no it won't. He said that's a misconception, students from architecture or from fine art or industrial design, you might study the subject, but you won't be designing anything, that isn't the nature of research.
Well that was a bit of a blow, because I kind of wanted to design, I think all architects do, it's a reflex, it's like a child having milk. I then met Otto Koenigsberger, who was a German Jewish professor, who was a professor of urban planning in University College, he'd advised an area on housing, he'd set up a school of tropical architecture in Britain in the development planning unit, and he was, all the arrows pointed to the need to have Otto as a supervisor, he was probably the best person in the world for that.
And he was quite blunt about it, he said, you're coming with baggage to this subject, the baggage is that you've been working for 12 years as an architect, and you studied architecture and your instinct is to take control and design. Well there is a design issue, but it's maybe not your issue, maybe it's the survivor's issue, and your job is to research that and find out what meets their needs. There's always a design issue, but in this case, you're going to reflect on other people's design issues.
And he says, so the rules are this, these are the rules for you, you will go to the next big disaster, whatever it is, you will keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you'll listen very, very hard to people, I thought that was not going to be easy if I only speak English, but never mind, I kept that to myself. And you will promise not to design anything, he said, your job is to find out what they are, the sheltering processes.
He made that point very quickly, and I picked it up. What is a sheltering process? He didn't say what they are designing in the way of shelter, he wanted to look at the process whereby people found accommodation, he wanted me to consider that. Well I reluctantly agreed to all these terms, I didn't have a clue how I'd get to this place, but I assumed I'd find a way, and 12 weeks later there was a huge earthquake in Nicaragua, where the capital city was devastated, and off I had to go.
That wasn't easy, because it was during term time, and I had to get cover, somebody took over from me in the school of architecture, and that was it, I went there and that was my first bit of research, and my goodness it was illuminating, I found it breathtakingly interesting and captivating in a way, and many of the lessons were negative, but it was still, I was writing it all down and taking photographs and acting like a sponge.
RK: And Nicaragua, I guess you didn't know any Spanish, and how many days did you stay there and how did you collect the information?
ID: Well, I was there for about three weeks, and I first went to the British Embassy and explained why I was there, and asked if they could help me with translation and with a vehicle to get around, and bookings to meet the ministers of housing and recovery, all the rest of it. I knew I needed help badly, and I was very surprised when they generously offered to help in every way possible.
I had their support, which was fantastic. There were strings attached to the support, they wanted me to help sponsor prefabricated British hospitals for reconstruction, and that came out later in a funny lunch with the ambassador, and he thought it was my job to help promote British trade in the recovery, and I didn't think that was at all my job, particularly since I found out that these prefabricated hospitals weren't even earthquake-resistant. And so, I told him bluntly that I wouldn't be telling the minister how good these hospitals were, and that rather severed the relationship, to say the least.
So, I was learning about self-interest, self-interest of governments, and of course I had my own self-interest. I was very strongly motivated by my Christian faith, and I felt that God was guiding me, and I wanted to work for justice, and work for mercy and compassion, and work locally with local Christians, there's a Christian network everywhere, and I was introduced to them and found them very, very supportive as well. So it was a fantastic learning experience.
RK: So did they build those prefabricated hospitals in the end?
ID: I've no idea, I doubt it. I think the engineer who came to try and sell them, I think he went away with his tail between his legs, I don't think so. But all sorts of things like that happen in disasters. You meet in airport lounges, sales people, I used to get used to the idea that when I'm going out to a disaster, I'd meet all manner of people on the aeroplane, in the departure lounge, in the baggage hall, many of them architects seeking work, many of them contractors bringing in schemes, relief agency people bringing in money or bringing in contacts wanting to.
I even met a man once who had his, he handcuffed his briefcase to his wrist and sat beside me on the aeroplane going to Guatemala six days after an earthquake, and in it he had $50,000 in cash, and every time he went to the toilet he took his briefcase with him. And I asked him why, and he said, well it's my experience that the most useful thing after a disaster is cash. And I learned later he was spot on, but he was trying to evade customs.
You meet extraordinary people, and there's a spectrum, some of them doing wonderfully noble work, others you feel are in it for the ride, and I began to think perhaps I was in it for the ride too, I was quite self-critical. And I had people telling me things like, how dare you go to this disaster when people are suffering just to gather information, how dare you do that, it's shocking. I had to try and find answers to all those questions.
RK: This is so true because disaster has become a big industry now, the disaster tourism or development tourism. How did you internalise and manage to carry on doing the work for so long?
ID: Well, I think I was helped greatly by colleagues, and I got to know many, many people through this work. And of course, in working in many countries where English was spoken, like India, Pakistan, it was, you know, you're immediately in touch with local people, and I could see their suffering.
They often wanted me to give them money or support, and I really hadn't got money to give them, so it wasn't easy to sort of relate to them. Sometimes our agenda was totally different from their agenda. I led an expedition to Pakistan in 1980 from the Royal Geographical Society. It was called Housing and Hazards, and we were part of a much wider team of 80 researchers for the 150th expedition of the RGS. We were in the Karakoram area of northern Pakistan, and our job was to try and find out about the way local families responded to hazards.
We found them very perplexed about us. We had engineers on our team, planners, anthropologists, we had architects. We were a real mixture, but we all were concerned about the built environment and about building safety. But many of the local people felt, why are you bothering us with this? We can sort that out. So, we'd say, well, how do you sort it out? They said, well, if it's raining, we put one of our teenagers out in the fields, and he sleeps under a tree, and if he hears a rumbling on the mountain, we all run like hell from our house, because we know there could be a landslide or a rockfall.
Or when we're working on the river, the silt, the river ends us nearby, we tie strings across the river, ropes, with bells attached, and they are upstream, and they break, and a wall of water comes down, and we've got about 20 or 30 seconds to get up the bank and get out of the way. So we knew how to deal with floods. They developed all manner of interesting responses, what we call coping mechanisms. And they said, why don't you help us with real problems? Like what, we'd say.
They said, well, like there's no schools for our girls, and people don't want to marry uneducated women. Across the river is an Ismaili area, run by the Aga Khan, and they have girls' schools, and we don't have girls' schools, and we need them. We need bridges across the river to get our goods to market, because when we get our goods to market, our vegetables, they're out of date, and they're going bad, and nobody buys them. So we need better access to, and we need fertiliser for our fields.
Population's growing, lots of local things. And I think it taught us that disasters and development are interwoven and that we were extracting an issue from its context, and really the felt needs of people are what matters. And so I think we were learning a terrific lot from that about listening, and observing, and not setting the agendas. That became the key part of my PhD, as a matter of fact, and the key part of a UN shelter finding, which said simply that the key resource in the provision of shelter comes from the local community themselves.
Other people can help, but they must avoid duplicating what the local surviving community can undertake. We use the word survivors, not victims. We didn't like the word victims. We wanted to emphasise that these people are not passive, sitting around on their bottoms waiting for help. They're energetically involved in the process. We need to follow that. We need to take the lead from it. So that statement summed up my growing approach, and of course it ran against many conventional wisdom that the world in the West could solve all the problems.
RK: These days we might not use the word survivors, but we do use the word beneficiaries. Yes. And that's another new...
ID: That's probably better,
RK: Yeah. But I mean it still sounds like we are benefiting people.
ID: Yes, yes. The word survivors implies action. More positive. Yes, and it's better. But the media still use the word victims all the time, and they talk about disaster victims in every... I had it on the news this morning, talking about disasters in the US, in Hawaii, they use the word disaster victims.
So the media are way behind what is needed in these situations.
RK: Yes, that's so true. And in terms of you mentioning that you've seen a lot of negative things, and your colleagues helped you through going through those negativities. And I remember when we worked together in one project, me collecting stories on disaster recovery, you also warned me that, you know, watch out, because you write one thing, and they'll turn it into something else. Yeah. So there is a lot of self-interest, which is part of this disaster industry.
But one positive thing is that you can be a professional person. You don't go and do charity work. It is something, a sector, which needs to be specialised, and you need the training. And that leads me to the story of how you started this degree in Oxford Brookes Centre for Development and Emergency Practice. Can you go through the experience of how you ended up becoming the father or grandfather of Centre?
ID: Well, it was all very extraordinary, really, because when I began the research, I was quite nervous about it, to be honest, because I had quite a lot of sniping from colleagues, in particular somebody I worked with, and he didn't understand why I was doing it.
And he felt probably he was being put upon with it, doing extra work because of it. I therefore was unsure whether this would ever work, being in full-time employment, running the third year of an architecture course, as well as undertaking research when I could. But I also became aware of something else that was happening, and that is that the head of planning, the dean of the faculty, and the head of architecture were both very, very supportive.
I didn't know quite why they were supportive. I thought it was generosity to me, but I think they realised that the way departments grow is through fledgling offshoots, and if you water these offshoots, they might turn into something beneficial. There was self-interest on their part, and before long, I had been at it, I suppose about four or five years, when I was encouraged to form something called the Disasters and Settlements Unit, DSU. A lady had come from Turkey, called Yasemin Aysan, to do a PhD, and she was part of it, and we now had an associate head of school, Paul Oliver, who was a renowned expert in anthropology of shelter, and I had tremendous support.
So, we formed DSU, and then we formed the Disasters and Settlements Unit. We started courses in 1982 for international courses, and so I spent my time running these awfully long courses, 12 weeks of it, 12 weeks of having students with you, maybe initially about 8, later on about 10, 12, 15, and people were very supportive. The American government was particularly supportive. They even sent a co-tutor along, because they probably realised I was pretty incompetent, and they sent along people to help me.
Slowly, what was happening is we were institutionalising disaster risk management, shelter, housing, low-cost housing, development planning, into the fabric of our courses, with a view to attracting overseas students to our courses, but also building a reputation. Shortly afterwards, the publishing department came along and said, ‘We know about your work, and we wonder if you’d like to write a book.’ I said, ‘On what? They said, ‘On what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m in the middle of a PhD, and it’s taking far too long, and I don’t want to be side-tracked.’ They said, ‘Oh, come on. You could help us, and we can help you.’ So, they came along, and they helped me write my first book, called Shelter After Disaster, which was published in í78. It cost £3.75. We produced 500 copies, and I looked on Amazon last week, and they are selling them for £1,485. I couldn't believe it. I thought, if I could buy a few of those, and sell a few of those, I could be rich. But I don't know what happened.
The book took off, in a way, partly because I gave away all the royalties to get photographs. I said, I'd rather have good illustrations, and if you're having to pay for them, why don't you cancel all my royalties, and use it to buy agency pictures, so we have pictures on every page, which is what happened? The book became a big success, and I was very surprised at that because I thought nobody would be interested. But they were, and then it got translated into Farsi, in Iran, and in Spanish.
Suddenly I had letters coming to me in other languages, and I didn’t know how to deal with it, and how to cope. One in particular came from Colombia, saying, ‘My cousin found the Spanish version of your book in a bookshop, and he helped me with it. He sent it to me. I’m in charge of reconstruction after an earthquake in 1983, in a place called Papayan, and we’re using your book as a textbook. So can you come out and help convert your book into operational programs for us?’ Which I did, and I just felt a remarkable series of events were happening, and I wasn’t doing much. It just was happening around me.
RK: That is fascinating, Ian. Yes, I was also looking to get the book out of the library. There is only one print, and they don’t let it out. Oh, you can get it out on the web. So, Ian, that’s really a great story to know about the history of how you started getting into teaching, and this will bring me to the next part. After you started all this work, you got awarded by the United Nations.
Can you tell us about that experience?
ID: In 1992, the governments of the world started on something called IDMDR, the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, and the British government formed a national committee, and they invited me to be part of it. So I was part of the UK committee, and I think they must have nominated me for this award, and it was largely on the basis of some books we were writing called Building for Safety, and we worked with Intermediate Technology Development Group to produce books on how do you reconstruct safely vernacular buildings.
There were four books. One was on earthquake. Well, they were different, and how do you set up programs, and how do you communicate with people who might not be literate. That helped a lot to focus their minds that maybe I could be given some kind of award for helping reduce disaster risks. So, I was nominated by the British government for this award, and I got the surprise of my life, to be honest, and it opened up all sorts of doors.
It got me a job in Cranfield as their first professor of disaster risk reduction, and people attached a lot of importance to it. I was the first British person to get it. Since then, I've been busy nominating people. I've nominated about six people, and they've all got the award since, so new people for it. And people I have great respect for, people who helped me, I've sort of signalled about it, would you like me to nominate you for this award, and that's what I keep doing.
One of the joys of getting older, to be frank, is building up other people's careers, because my career was built up by other people. I was standing on the shoulders of giants, and they helped me at every point, and so I owe a huge debt to Otto Konigsberger, Paul Oliver, Yasmin Aysan, and all sorts of people. And so therefore, I just keep that process going. It gives me enormous satisfaction, just to see how I can perhaps give a person a bit of support here, a bit of support there, and they do the same for me, and other things.
And I think it's partly that I no longer need any money. I don't need money from any of this, and I don't need any plaudits or anything. I just get on with it, really, and that's exciting.
It's very interesting for me, Rumana, just to sort of see how your own path has developed, and how that you have moved from Bangladesh to here, and here you are working in CENDEP, which is exciting.
My son, who's an architect, was watching a cricket match in Kew in London, and he met this man from India called Rippin, and Rippin said to him – they found out they were both architects – and Simon said to him, what are you doing here in England? He said, well, actually, I came to Oxford Polytechnic, Brookes, to study, because I wanted to meet somebody called Ian Davis, because he was why I came. But I found out when I got there, he'd gone, he'd left. So he said, so the reason I'm in England is Ian Davis. And Simon said, well, the reason I'm in England is also Ian Davis.
RK: Can you tell us about your mum, how that all influenced you?
ID: Well, she was the daughter of missionaries in Ooty, down in the Nilgiri Hills, and she lived in India until she was 15. She was a music teacher, and went to school in India, and apart from a trip to New Zealand, had never left India until she was 15 years old.
They were very, very poor people, had hardly any money, but they loved India, in a slightly colonial way, I think. So I grew up in a house with curries all the time, and wonderful Indian food. And my father had grown up in Spain, and his parents were also missionaries. And so we had Spanish tortillas one day, and Indian curries the next day. It was very international. And mum had wonderful stories to tell about India, about growing up there, and about her father, who was a pastor of a church.
And I suppose because they were so poor, they didn't have servants or anything like that, and they just had to make do. I felt it was in my blood a bit. So it was a great joy to go back to Ooty and Coonoor, and to see where they lived, and to find some of the memories of where they'd been all that time ago. Now I'm working in Kerala, and Kerala's not far from where mum was, and so I hope to go back to Kerala perhaps next year.
And it has been quite a challenge to get rid of the colonial associations, which are there, and people remind me of it. And you have to try and deal with this. And I feel thoroughly ashamed of what we did. When I was working for the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we travelled to many parts of the world for our meetings. And we had one meeting, I remember, in Panama, and there was a man from the Maldives who really started to rant about the...
He said, our country suffered first from your countries by colonialism, and now we're suffering from your carbon. Why? And why do you treat us so shockingly badly? And we all felt ashamed, in a sense, of what we've done. So to some extent, it's been great to feel you can give back a bit, and also drop all this kind of superiority, because I was learning so much from Otto, who learnt it in India, and from my mother and father, I suppose, and also from colleagues.
One of the blessings of my life was sharing an office with Yasmin from Turkey. For 14 years we shared an office. And she just kept on checking me and saying, you can't say that, that's a horrible attitude. Don't you realise how we feel about that in other countries? So she and others were just challenging me all the time. And then when we started running courses, you were blasted every day, every single day. And because we started having them all present their work, it was just a mutual learning, and I felt I was part of a web, like a spider's web of knowledge.
And there was no hierarchy, the model was not hierarchical, the model was a web, and everyone's linking to it. And we're all learning, and we're all giving. We might be giving money, but we might be giving expertise. But it was a fabric of mutual respect and understanding, which I found, with occasional exceptions, there were people who challenged it. One Indian minister wanted to know why on earth I was in the country. And he asked me why I'd come.
And I said, because you invited me. And he said, don't we have enough expertise in our country without you? I said, yes, you do. But you asked me to come here, and so that flawed him a bit. But he basically was very fed up with what he called ‘Western opportunism’.
RK: You know, Ian, this reminds me of my experience. Because like India, Bangladesh also has enough experts and enough people who can solve the problem of our own country.
But the thing is that we still have that colonial mindset, both in the West and in the East. So it's not that it's gone, it's still there. And these days, you know, we talk about decolonization. But it's just that it is really difficult to overcome those mindsets we have within ourselves. In the disaster sector, in the beginning, you mentioned that it is so full of a lot of chaos, and self-interest governs a lot of the whole sector.
So it is important for the listeners to be aware of that. And also, I would like you to summarise about all these amazing things you've done.
What have you learned?
What messages do you have for the future generation?
ID: I think, first of all, the world now, in 2023, is radically different than it was in 1972. The population is vastly bigger, towns are much larger, some disasters are much bigger, but casualties have undoubtedly reduced. And that is because form has followed failure.
And we've seen some really positive progress there. So this isn't a gloom and doom subject. I feel very encouraged by many things. After the dreadful tsunami of 2004, warning systems were given a terrific boost. Right through the Indian Ocean, they set up warning systems, but warning generally was getting a boost, and it was getting it partly because of the internet, and partly because of mobile phone technology. And we've watched casualties drop dramatically in Bangladesh, in India, all over the world.
These casualties have dropped because of warnings, better warnings, better temporary relocation of people, sheltering away from the hazardous area. And that's one huge, huge benefit. Another one has been mobile phone technology, because that is, people get warnings even sent into their home, or into their pocket, and things like that. And that's been great. And I think in climate change, we've reached a tipping point in many ways. Maybe there's a tipping point in that it's now going to move forward and cause further chaos.
But another tipping point is that everyone knows by now the need to adapt. And probably every school of architecture in the world is already teaching students about what is sustainable architecture. This is a form following a failure. And we're seeing wooden skyscrapers, we're seeing sequestering issues. Just two weeks ago in England, a huge thing happened where the minister banned the demolition of a large building in London because of the carbon that had been absorbed in that building.
And it was very interesting to never come across that happening before. So many encouragement, I think. But some of the things I think, one is listening. I think listening very, very hard to people, listening to colleagues, listening to news broadcasts, listening to wherever you can hear about what's going on. So I think our ears are crucial. I think, for me, keeping in perspective. And this is where I paint a lot. And painting for me is partly just enjoyment.
I like doing it. But it's also a therapy. I think we mustn't take ourselves too seriously. We've got to actually have other things in mind. We've got to stay active in other areas. I think writing is very crucial. And I look back on my life, and I've worked in many teams, UN teams producing documents, huge projects of the World Bank. At the end of the day, the writings that matter are probably by individuals. The most important environmental book ever written is Rachel Carson's book about the Silent Spring, 1965 transformed a generation.
I think that my most influential books have been either written by myself or with a small group. Shelter, and then the book At Risk, which I wrote with Terry Cannon and Ben Wisner and Piers Blakey. And Recovery from Disaster with David Alexander. And these books are ones that I think carry on. They have a life of their own. They generate momentum. I keep contact with individuals. They write to me, I write to them. I phone them, I talk to them, and I'm part of several networks where we do WhatsApp links.
And that's crucial. But the last thing I think is, for me, is prayer. When I meet people of Christian faith or other faiths, or of no faith, I think just to have trust in an external force to help us through this crisis and to guide our lives and to help us is quite crucial. So I really like working with people of faith. And that faith might not be a Christian faith. I don't want arrogance in this.
But for me, that's been the mainstream in my life. And I feel immensely encouraged to, as it were, have that kind of focus. Thank you, Ian. I hope you enjoy talking about your stories. If there is any question you have, or you want to add anything. I just want to just emphasise that these podcasts, people's reflections and everyone's reflections are slightly different from everybody else's. But it's always useful to get people to talk and people love to talk about their experiences.
So if there's one thing I think I really would treasure, and that is the idea that people are hearing this, will ask other people about their work. What is their Mars mantra? What motivates them? It's lovely to get the enthusiasm of people to talk about themselves. I've learned so much from talking to people, particularly people who suffered in disasters. And those disasters might be the loss of a child in a motor accident. It doesn't have to be a global crisis.
How do people cope under extreme pressure? And it unites society. So just the more we can talk to others, the more we can inquire, the more we can build relationships with people who've been suffering, the stronger we're going to be in this work, and the more positive. And the other thing is not to allow the subject to make you feel helpless. You need strength for each day. And we just need strength to get through from 7 o'clock in the morning to when we go to bed.
We need to break it down, and we need to break it down and actually not think too hard about the problems of the future. But what are we doing on this coming day? A little more in the present, in the moment. That's what mindfulness is teaching us. And I think I would just really encourage everyone not to get depressed, not get worried. When we see these dreadful news broadcasts, how can we convert that into positive action? Thank you very much, Rumana, for a lovely opportunity.
RK: Thank you, Ian.
