The inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial theme, Rights of Future Generations, seeks to question how inheritance, legacy, and the state of the environment are passed from one generation to the next, how present decisions have long-term intergenerational consequences, and how other expressions of co-existence might challenge dominant perspectives.

Using Sharjah as its primary field of research, the Triennial invites members of an emerging generation of architects, urban designers, planners, scholars and artists from across the Middle East, North and South Africa, South and South East Asia, and their diaspora to respond to the unique challenges and opportunities faced by our generation. Turning to alternative concepts of architecture and the environment, Rights of Future Generations asks us to focus on moments when experimentation generates other possible modes of co-existence.

In advance of the opening which took place in November 2019, research was being conducted in three areas: housing, education and environment. Building on two previous fora on Housing & Domesticity and Education & Schooling, which respectively addressed how private and public spaces form subjects and inform collective aspirations, this final forum that took place in March 2019 brought us to the question of Environment & Ecology.

With an expanded definition of environment that goes beyond conventional association with the natural world, Adrian Lahoud, curator of the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial invited the following speakers to address how particular contexts in the Global South open the possibility of non-extractive and non-domesticating relationships between inhabitants and their ecologies:

Dalal Alsayer (PhD Candidate, History and Theory of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania)
Samia Henni (Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University)
Marina Tabassum (Founder of Marina Tabassum Architects and 2016 winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture