Cities today have been doing
the same thing
that they've done for
three, four, five thousand years.
They've been the place where
the flows of people,
the flows of money,
the flows of goods have coalesced.
Cities are always
the physical manifestation
of the big forces at play.
Economic forces,
social forces,
environmental forces.
The thing that attracts us to the city
is the chance encounter,
it's the knowledge that you'll
be able to start here,
end up there, go back there,
but that something unexpected
will happen along the way,
that you'll make a discovery.
That, in a way, is the magic of cities.
Urban design is really
the language of the city.
When you walk down a street,
everything you see has been designed.
The width of the sidewalk,
where trees are planted,
the scale of the trees,
how the street furniture interacts.
How many stores you have per block,
the height of the buildings,
where they set back.
Each one of these things
has been thought about.
The thing about urban design
is that unlike it being
a solitary enterprise of an
artist sitting in her or his studio,
what you really have is
a multi-disciplinary group of people
coming together working
on the same project
but coming from very different
perspectives,
having different agendas,
and different roles.
So you've got the architect.
You've got the developer
or group of developers.
You have state and federal
and city agencies.
You have the public,
which is a major component.
You have landmarks or other
historically minded groups.
And they all come together
to work against and with each other
in order to bring the project
to fruition.
These can range from small,
temporary interventions
to massive large-scale
infrastructural projects.
Forces of change are happening
on every level.
Technological change, new forms and
modes of transportation.
The eventualities of man-made
and natural disasters.
These are all things that are going
to be addressed by urban design.
The world today is changing
pretty dramatically,
shifting toward more and more
people living in cities.
Cities accelerated relatively slowly
from pre-Greek, pre-Roman times.
It took centuries
to reach those numbers which might
be something like a million.
By the 20th Century
10% of the population
of the world was living in cities.
Only two years ago it was 50%.
And if we continue at the pace
we are, which we will,
it will be something like 75%
in forty years' time.
The pace now is putting an enormous
amount of pressure and strain
on any system
which has limited resources.
33%, roughly,
of new urban dwellers today
live in slums.
That's a third of the world's
population...
without the most basic amenities,
without sewers,
without water, without sanitation.
Today Mumbai has the same number
of people as the whole of London
living in slum conditions.
And Mumbai is set to become
the biggest city in the world in 2050,
therefore bigger than Tokyo.
That means the slum population,
if it were to be the same
or roughly like it,
would be New York and London
put together.
What you have in this city
is a situation where...
the real estate developers
on the one hand
and the slum dwellers on the other
are actually carving out
the design of the city.
The poor people are doing it because
the plan has no space for them.
The construction industry produced
a huge housing boom for the top 10%
and then increasing crisis
for everyone else.
The big downside
of informal settlements
which needs
to be urgently resolved
is the question of health
and hygiene.
How do you bring sanitation and
how do you bring water supply, etc.
That is I think what makes
them inhuman, unlivable,
and I think a complete reflection
of the failure of this society
to create human habitat.
The city says that if there is
one toilet for fifty people,
that is 10 families
have one toilet seat,
it means they have
is adequate sanitation.
But in 1989
the ratio of people to a toilet seat
was 900 people to a toilet seat.
Today it's come down to 600.
Our local politicians say,
"Oh, we don't want to build
toilets in slums,
because it will encourage people
to come."
As if people come to shit.
You have a situation in which
an informal settlement
gets ignored for a very long time.
And because there is no space
for growth
it gets denser and denser and denser.
The issue is that you've got all
this growth over the next 20, 30 years,
basically a doubling
of the urban population.
At the same time, you haven't dealt
with the people who are already there.
You know, it's very easy to get
incredibly pessimistic
and dark about the prospects
looking forward,
because if you just look at the
numbers and the trend lines,
it is profoundly depressing, I mean,
you just want to slit
your wrists basically,
so this is not a healthy area of
research and engagement.
But that said, at the same time,
we know from history
is that you really need a small group
of innovators, a small group of people
that can demonstrate
how to do things differently,
and once that gets mainstreamed,
change happens really quickly.
If we do not take care
how the process of migration
towards cities is going to happen,
the process of urbanization is going
to happen in the form of slums.
So we're in an urgency to
generate the conditions
so that the flow
of people into cities
happens in a good way.
With the Lo Barnechea project the main
priority was location.
Behind me you see the group
of families in the situation before,
meaning they live in a slum.
What we are trying to do
is that knowing
that the location is so important,
because schools, transportation,
jobs are in this part of the city,
which is actually
the richest part of the city.
What we were looking for was to find
a design that was able to pay
for very expensive land, but keep
all those networks.
So much more important then an extra
square meter of house,
was a better located square meter
of land, which tends to be expensive.
With a subsidy that is about $10,000
that is given to a poor family
that will then become
an owner of the house,
we had to buy the land,
provide the infrastructure,
and build the houses.
Instead of producing tiny units,
we asked ourselves
"Why don't we think of it
as half of a good house?"
And we thought it was efficient
to make the half
that a family could never achieve
on their own.
And then allow families to do
the other half, on their own,
with their own timing,
according to their own needs.
We call it participatory design.
To have a participatory design means
to have families sitting at the table
to help us decide what are we going
to deliver from day one
and what can be left so that families
themselves take care of that.
We asked families
what was more important:
a water heater or a bathtub.
There was not enough money for both.
Decision makers, or politicians,
or professionals
they normally tend to answer
the water heater.
And in 100% of the cases
when we asked the families
they preferred the bathtub
over the water heater.
You have to understand
that they are coming
from no water, no sewage.
A shower meant to have a can with
water in the courtyard.
So they are going to have privacy.
More important than that,
when they move in,
they do not have money to pay
the gas bill to heat the water.
So knowing that in their priorities,
bathtub is much higher
than water heater,
let's do the bathtub,
and allow them over time
to buy the water heater.
Think about the final stage
and how design
can facilitate families' lives
to achieve that middle income
standard in the future.
That's how quality
should be measured.
And that is definitely not the way
social housing was
being measured, not the way
it was being designed.
Historically cities have come into
being for many different reasons.
Cities grow up around
logistical issues,
for example, on a port.
Or somewhere that is advantageous
specifically for trade.
It's almost always
an economic question.
By the mid-1800's industrialization
had been a reality
for a couple of decades already in the
major cities of Western Europe,
and the congestion,
the insalubrity,
the un-livability of those cities
made it such that there needed to be
some sort of a solution.
In Paris, Baron Haussmann comes in
and radically demolishes the city
eliminating all
of its medieval streets,
its slums, and rebuilds the city
with the roundabouts and the other
iconic elements of Paris.
Unlike Europe,
America's cities didn't have
a really strong architectural legacy.
City Beautiful was a movement
to bring the grand boulevards
and large civic arenas
of classical architecture
into American cities.
To encourage a kind of civic pride.
The next major shift would be
the Garden City movement,
which is happening right
at the end of the 19th century.
The idea would be to separate out the
different functions of the city
with concentric roadways
and greenbelts.
The Garden City proved
to be incredibly influential
on the Modernist movement.
Modern city/urban planning
is very similar
to modern graphic design
or modern industrial design.
It's minimalist,
very ordered, very rational,
separate everything out.
Modernistic city,
built on all the ideas of
the Modernistic manifests.
It looks fantastic from the airplane,
but if you are down at eye level
on your feet and going
from one place to another,
Every distance is too wide,
things are not connected.
You have to trample
for endless miles and miles
along completely straight paths.
Nobody ever started to think about
in between all these monuments.
Of course it makes a certain logic
to separate things out.
You don't want cars and pedestrians in
the same place, it's not safe.
But as we've certainly
come to experience,
if you design the city
so that every single trip
has to made by car,
suddenly you aren't zipping
around anymore,
you're stuck
in enormous traffic jams.
The 1950's is when the automobile
starts to have a real impact
on cities, especially American cities,
and a largely a detrimental effect.
Not only do you have increased means
of access to the city,
bringing more cars, and creating
congestion, and noise,
but also radically changing the way
cities are designed.
And this is becoming increasingly
a global issue,
especially in developing countries.
Many things about cities are very
counterintuitive, for example
it seems to us that making bigger
roads, or flyovers,
or elevated highways
will solve traffic jams.
And clearly it has never been the case.
Because what creates traffic is
not the number of cars,
but the number of trips
and the length of trips.
So the more road infrastructure
you do,
the traffic will become even worse.
The only way to solve traffic jams
is to restrict car use.
And the most obvious way to restrict
car use is restricting parking.
People seem to imagine
that parking is...
a right, almost a fundamental right
to be included
in the United Nations Charter.
In our Constitution,
there are many rights:
the right to housing,
the right to education, to health,
but I don't find the right to park.
I don't see any Constitution which
includes the right to park.
So if you ask me where you should park,
the Mayor can tell them,
it's almost if you're asking me
where should put
your food or your clothes,
This is not a government problem.
Before I was Mayor,
I have never been in a city
which hated itself more than Bogota.
There was a total lack of self-esteem
and lack of hope.
So when I was elected mayor we
started investing in people.
In sidewalks, in parks,
in great schools, in libraries.
And also we created a bus-based
public transport system.
We copied a system from Curitiba,
a small city in Brazil.
We called it TransMilenio,
we gave it a name.
Because buses in most places have a...
stigma, a bad image of being
for the poor,
so we had to raise the bus's status.
TransMilenio bus system
actually works more like a subway
on wheels than a traditional bus.
Buses go on exclusive lanes.
People pay when they enter the station.
When the buses arrive,
the station doors open
simultaneously with the bus doors.
You can get a hundred people out
and hundred people
onto the bus in seconds.
And now they can go from one extreme
to the other very fast.
For the same cost that we could do
a 25km subway,
we do 400km of TransMilineo.
These systems are also more flexible.
Younger cities don't have such
a defined center
and the center is shifting.
So if you put a hugely expensive
infrastructure like a subway line,
you might find that the
new center in a matter
of twenty or thirty years
is somewhere else where
the subway line doesn't go.
This system is very powerful
symbol of democracy.
The first article in every Constitution
says that...
The first article in every Constitution
says that all citizens
are equal before the law.
This is not just poetry.
It means for example
that a bus with 100 passengers
has a right to 100 times more
road space than a car with one.
It's democracy at work.
You can really see that public good
prevails over private interest.
Okay, here we are on part
of the Porvenir Promenade.
This is a 24km,
pedestrian and bicycle-only street,
which networks
very low income neighborhoods
to the richest area of the city.
I think it's a revolution
in the way urban life works.
This kind of high quality
infrastructure for bicycles
increases the social status
of cyclists.
Before we had bicycle ways,
low-income people
were ashamed of using bicycles.
Now a high-quality protected bicycle
way shows that
a citizen on a $30 bicycle
is equally important to one
in a $30,000 dollar car.
And here is something interesting,
you can see how the pedestrians
and bicycles have pavement,
and the cars are in the mud.
So it's a priority for the pedestrians
and the bicycles
and then later sometime
we will pay for the cars.
But first the pedestrians.
So this completely shows respect
for human dignity, for everybody,
not just those who have cars
who normally think to be the important
ones in developing country cities.
Again, this democracy at work.
In Copenhagen we have,
for 30 or 40 years,
had this very distinctive policy
to invite people to bicycle
as much as possible.
There is a complete network
of bicycle lanes citywide.
In what we call Copenhagen-style
bicycle lane.
We always have the bicycle lanes
next to the sidewalk.
The sidewalks are the slow traffic,
the bike lanes are a little bit faster,
and then there would be parked cars,
and then there would be the traffic.
In this way you have the parked cars
to protect the bicyclists,
instead of the bicyclists
to protect the parked cars.
It helps invite a lot of people
who would be too afraid to bicycle
to get the idea, "I can actually do it,
because now it is much safer."
In ten years we have seen
the bicycling doubling.
We have seen that now we have 37%
of everyone commuting to work
arriving on his bicycle.
It keeps people fit, it doesn't pollute
and it doesn't take up much space.
It's a really smart way
of getting around the city.
I think a good city
is like a good party.
If you ask a guy that was
at a good party on Friday,
he says "Oh my dear, I was only home
by 5;30 in the morning."
If people get involved in social
activities
they will forget place and time
and just enjoy.
That is why I would say, do not look at
how many people
are walking in the city,
but look at how many people
have stopped walking
to stay and enjoy what is there.
The challenge is how
do we make sure
that public open spaces
are inviting and well used.
And in these spaces, design detail
makes all the difference.
There should be multiple kinds
of seating,
many different reasons for people
to come into a space.
For instance, movable chairs.
People, when they sit in a chair
that's moveable,
they just move it so much.
So it's kind of their chair
and it's their place.
Movable chairs also let you socialize,
they let you be by yourself,
they let you be part of the city,
or away from the city.
Knowing about Homo sapiens and
the kind of creature he is
has been a very important key
to understanding why some places
work and some places don't.
Much of it is bound to our senses,
how long you can see
and how long you can hear.
How your eye is horizontal,
you see very little upward,
you see much more downward,
and you see much,
much more out to either side.
That is leftover
from the evolutionary process,
when the walking animal was out
walking on the plains,
the enemies were out there
and in front of you,
but they were not up there.
But you should look out for snakes and
scorpions and boulders.
The eye can't command an area
more than about 100 meters
by 100 meters.
That is the distance where you can see
other people and movements.
But if it gets bigger, the eye can't
see what's going on.
Then you feel less comfortable.
That's why nearly all the squares
in all the old cities
will be smaller than this 100 meters.
We are really talking about the urban
habitat of Homo sapiens.
It's the same Homo sapiens
all over the world.
Cultural circumstances differ
economic circumstances differ,
climatic circumstances differ,
but basically we are
the same little walking animal.
The rise of post-industrial sites in
cities around the world,
have come about only
in the last 30 or 40 years,
and people don't know
what to do with them.
They think should be removed
and erased.
What we've found over the
past 10 years is that you can
actually take these post-industrial
conditions and through creative design
actually produce something
that people love.
It's not erasure
and it's not preservation.
It's really transformation.
I lived about a block away from
the High Line for over 15 years,
and never paid it any attention at all.
Trains ran on the High Line
until about 1980
and then they stopped entirely.
It was the realization
that this thing was actually
this monumental structure
that ran 22 blocks,
three neighborhoods.
It just seemed like
this amazing opportunity
to experience the city
in a whole new way.
I'd read on the agenda
of a community board meeting
that it was going to be demolished.
And sat next to Josh, and we didn't
know each other,
and he was sort of interested
in it in the same way I was.
And no one else in the meeting
was interested.
There was one person who spoke
who I think was literally
frothing at the mouth about how
terrible the High Line was.
So after the meeting,
we exchanged business cards
and said, you know, "Why don't
we do something together?"
When we came up here we realized
there was something magical
up here already.
The High Line was this
extraordinary artifact,
rusting steel where grasses and flowers
had taken seed naturally.
As a landscape architect,
a question I always ask is what
will design actually mess up here.
What through design
will you anaesthetize?
Will you destroy?
Because a lot of these sites have
a sort of charm to them
that really I'm always looking to try
to capture and actually amplify.
It's much more about
a symbiotic relationship
between nature and civilization.
Because a city's a messy place.
And so there are lots of places
for nature to move in
and not take over
but form a relationship
with the urban infrastructure
in a really interesting way.
Having the grasses and flowers
come up through the paving
was a big part of the design.
It really is about showcasing Manhattan
in a way that is authentic.
It's not overly manicured,
or overly scripted.
And the noises, I guess,
are part of it.
The fact that the High Line
was driven by, at the very start,
Robert and me, but very quickly a
large group of neighbors,
community members, New Yorkers
and ultimately people
from all over the country,
I think has imbued the park
with a communal sensibility
that very much effects
the environment that is up here.
Underneath the design,
a lot of what we see today
is the result of the care and attention
that went into the zoning.
We were just passionate
about saving the High Line.
Zoning was just one piece of it, I only
played a role in the zoning,
and being obsessive I think I said,
if I didn't think about
the High Line every single day,
it was going to come down,
that was my mindset.
These are the two blocks we wanted
to talk to you about.
The Department of City Planning is
responsible for shaping
its neighborhoods, its waterfronts,
its industrial lands,
and its business districts.
Really shaping the form of the city
and where it's going grow, where
it's going to develop.
This is a double problem,
because not only have you lost
holding the street wall here,
you now have a building that is
very out of scale
with the Brooklyn Academy of Music
historical building.
We can't actually design
the architecture,
we can't design the storefront,
but at least we can set up
these basic parameters
that give you the best possibility
that this will be a great street.
Our plans have really redrawn
the entire land use blueprint
of the city.
Because we have to grow by
over a million people.
And our plans have therefore been
as ambitious as those of Robert Moses.
But we really judge ourselves by
Jane Jacobs' standards.
Robert Moses was
"the master builder."
He planned looking at the
city from above
and his highway building destroyed
entire neighborhoods.
He cutoff our entire island
of Manhattan
from the waterfront by building
highways down the edges.
His impact was profound
and his insensitivity was legendary
to the texture of the city.
His downfall came at the same time as
the rise of Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs was a journalist,
she was not trained as a professional
architect or planner.
In the early '60s, there was a plan
to put through some major highways that
would have knocked down
most of Greenwich Village, which
was her neighborhood.
And she began to write about what
she thought the planners
really weren't seeing
and understanding.
They were looking at problems
from the 30,000 feet height,
and she was really looking at it
from the perspective of someone
living there on the street.
She was really the first voice
who came out and argued that
these aren't just these old,
overcrowded,
small, chopped up little spaces.
Instead, there is an incredibly rich
social structure here
that actually works incredibly well.
Communities had a mix of uses.
You had people living there,
working there, you had shops.
She talked about the importance
of having "eyes on the street".
Of people who know each other
and make the street a more safer
and comfortable place.
What Jane Jacobs was able to describe,
I think incredibly accurately,
is there's something about the DNA
of cities and the relationship between
physical space and social fabric.
She recognized that the minute
you put people into a housing block
you lose the fundamental social
infrastructure
which makes community possible.
So schools,
where people meet informally.
They weren't necessarily close
to where people were living.
So much effort and interest went into
creating the house unit,
that little attention went into,
well what happens on the outside?
Where do kids play? Where do mothers
look at their kids playing?
Jane Jacobs recognized the difference
between people
and different activities
pushed together is what a city
is about at its best.
She attributed most of these problems
to the loss of the heart of the city.
That as people move out of the city,
the sense of the civic center
is really being lost.
From the beginning of recorded time,
there's been this vacillation
between the desirability of living
in the periphery of the city,
and living in the center.
After WWII, suddenly we began
a pattern of development that was
absolutely based on suburbanization.
Getting out into the suburbs,
with a car,
was considered
a tremendous step up
from what at the time was perceived
as overcrowding in the cities.
The American Dream
was home ownership
and one's own little piece of dirt.
Defining sprawl is a little bit
like defining pornography.
You know it when you see it.
There is no consensus on any one
single definition of sprawl.
But as the basic process of
suburbanization has been continuing,
we've been getting more and more
of these massive developments,
by large home builders,
where every house is the cookie cutter
looking exactly the same.
Multiply that by having chain
store retail
where every single big box store
looks exactly the same.
More and more cars,
that require us to drive
much longer distances.
That's when people really start
saying, "This is now sprawl.
This is not just suburbia."
The main negative of sprawl,
as it is used
as a pejorative term to me,
is it spreads everyone out over
a larger area of land,
and eats up the bucolic,
rural villages of Vermont,
by overrunning them with subdivisions
and that...
that would be a better lifestyle
to preserve.
So there's a perception, if you
listen to NPR, that...
sprawl is always bad, and Phoenix is a
poster child for bad sprawl.
But Phoenix is not a city where we're
taking a high-density population
and redistributing it at a low density.
We're building at the same density
we've always lived at.
Nor are we overrunning rural,
pastoral landscapes.
Now, we are eating up desert.
And the desert is really beautiful
here and really important.
And we've tried to learn a better
way to develop in the desert.
But I don't think this is a poster
child for sprawl.
This is a poster child
for an automobile oriented,
post-war urban fabric.
This is what you get.
You're not buying "sprawl
is always bad
and density is always good"?
No, you know, here's the deal.
Let's be honest.
I live on a 3/4 acre lot
and I like my backyard
and I like my swimming pool.
And I think living in a condo
would be cute and interesting,
and I'd like to do it about
two months out of the year,
but I like the way I live.
That's really what it's all about,
at the end of the day.
While I have my preferences
of where I want to live,
I certainly would never tell anybody
mine is right choice and everyone else
has made the wrong choice.
But I do think especially
with the environmental crisis
and issues of climate change,
that we do as a society
have to begin to decide
whether some of these choices
come with additional costs.
It's certainly not about eliminating
the suburbs.
But we need a different vision,
with walkable, compact,
connected communities.
Cities are extremely dynamic organisms.
Throughout the history of the world
we've watched cities that bloomed
and then collapsed.
And similarly we see now amongst our
cities and our suburbs,
some of them are growing
and still booming
and more and more people
want to live there,
and others are shrinking.
Detroit was once two million people.
And a metropolitan area that really was
the center of industrial production,
not just in the United States,
but in the world.
The city has shrunk back
to about 700,000 people.
It's a city of 138 square miles.
You could fit Boston, San Francisco,
and Atlanta inside the boundaries
of the city of Detroit.
It's that big.
So when you have 700,000 people as
opposed to two million people,
you've got to scale back to your
neighborhoods and your areas
where there is concentration,
where there is this livability
and urbanity.
My grandmother bought the
house we're in in 1969.
When I was a kid it was like
a village, you know?
We had car dealerships,
clothing stores, bars, lounges,
theaters, restaurants.
Everything you could imagine.
You didn't have
to leave the neighborhood.
You just had everything here.
And people just picked
up and moved away.
And now, we got a bunch of vacant lots
in our neighborhood.
In 2008, I came outside
and saw a bunch of garbage
on the curbs and in the lots.
That's something I never saw
in the neighborhood
and I wanted to do something
about it.
Being out here cleaning up, we were
able to talk to neighbors,
people were coming up to see
what we were doing.
And we found out that
some people were choosing food
over medicine or medicine over food.
So we started a community
garden project.
It kind of turned into
healthy food choices,
cheap food, because we were
giving it away for free.
We got hot peppers,
two beds of okra,
in the back corner's two beds
of mustard and turnip greens.
We have 31 raised beds for vegetables.
And across the street,
there's two vacant lots
where we did an orchard
and across the street from that
is our community center.
And down the street we have two
more community gardens.
The guy that just walked past.
His brother is 22 or 23 years old now.
The first time he saw me picking
carrots out of the garden.
- He said, "Are those carrots?"
- "Yeah."
"I didn't know carrots came out
of the ground!"
I was like, "Where you think they
came from?" - "Out of the bag!"
You're kidding me?
You didn't watch Bugs Bunny?
We don't own the lots.
The city owns them.
But other than letting us do it,
that's really the only thing
the city's done.
It's our blood sweat and tears
that've done it.
I definitely don't expect everyone
to do what I do, but...
I'm trying to say this nicely;
you need to get off your butt and
take care your own.
If you take care of your own,
everything else will fall into place.
There's a lot of parts of the city
where stuff like this is happening.
There are a lot of community
gardens going on.
Maybe not on this big of scale,
but all of us want to do
something like this.
I would almost use the term
"self-organized urbanism"
to describe what's going on there.
In the sense that there is
a kind of possibility,
a sort of DIY aesthetic that does
in fact exist in the city
that is allowing for a lot
of individual initiatives to happen.
And you see that in the urban
agricultural movement
not only with community gardens,
but also with these large-scale
commercial gardens.
There are all sorts of different
retrofitting practices,
not only on an urban scale
but also on an architectural
micro-scale happening in the city.
If we think creatively,
if we think as entrepreneurs,
there is no reason
why in 15, 25, 35 years
we shouldn't be looking
at a very different Detroit.
But we have to change our mental state.
We should be innovating
on how to crack the code
on low carbon and climate change.
And we should be doing that in places
like Southeast Michigan,
given the legacy of production,
and innovation,
and science, and engineering.
That's what we should be doing.
Because at the end of the day,
cities are competing for people,
they're competing for investment.
And so how they develop,
whether they're livable,
whether they're sustainable,
whether they're economically
focused,
whether they're easy places
to do business in,
will affect their prosperity now
and over time.
Today's Beijing, when I go through it,
I see a city I don't recognize.
It's a new Beijing,
but I'm not sure if I like it.
When I was growing up,
my family,
we would take a walk,
after dinner,
summertime, typically.
And then we'd meet people,
friends and relatives, and then
you stop and greet them.
That kind of a feeling of living in a
city is not here anymore.
It's gone.
In the past 30 years, cities were
conceived and designed
to be part of the economical
development, which is okay
but I think livability has really been
ignored until very recently.
So it's not convenient.
It's not comfortable.
Those mistakes,
they didn't have to happen,
even if you build a city fast.
The Chinese are basically struggling
with of course with the same issues,
struggling with traffic,
struggling with public space,
struggling with density,
struggling with how big
a city should be,
should it have history,
should it not have history.
So I think all the issues
are essentially the same.
Every major building
really demands
its own specific scenario
in terms of what you are trying
to achieve with it.
The first consideration
is how could you create place
in a collection of high rise towers.
Because towers basically consume place,
but very few towers manage to create
a larger then itself moment.
And that really explains its shape.
For me one of the more
interesting parts of it
is that it's a building
that doesn't have a single identity,
and that the slightest movement
in the city
actually changes
the building completely.
It has an almost unlimited amount
of different identities.
There is an incredible amount of wasted
effort in the industry.
A fair amount of it is
generated through
the procedure of competitions.
Which is really a complete drain
of intelligence.
I don't know any other profession
that would tolerate this.
At the same time you are important,
we invite your thinking,
but we also announce
that there is an 80% chance
that we will through away
your thinking
and make sure
that it is completely wasted.
I think that very few cities these
days are really designed.
And there's been very little rethinking
of what cities can be.
Particularly...
since we have entrusted in the
market economy so much power.
Since we're still right in the middle
of a very fast urbanization,
cities will be built fast,
but I hope,
I really hope that collectively
we can correct some of the mistakes
made in the past 30 years.
As China builds its cities,
as India builds its cities,
it can't just take the recipe
from 20th century America
and apply it to 21st century China
or 21 st century India.
That would be horrendous for them
and it would be horrendous
frankly for all of us.
Cities today consume 75%
of the world's energy
and therefore contribute
to 75% of CO2 emissions.
Added to that,
40 years from now FA of the world's
population will be living in cities
and they will consume
more and more energy.
So a small reduction of the
environmental footprint
and energy footprint of a city has a
massive impact on the planet.
We're interested in making people
more aware
of their patterns of behavior
so that potentially
they can change them.
In this project we were interested
in electricity usage.
We actually went for a very low-tech
method of recording electricity usage.
So rather than using smart sensors,
each day we got participants
on Tidy Street
to go down
to their electricity meter,
note down the reading
and then they went to our website
and put that number in.
We were interested in doing
a public display,
so we turned the street essentially
into a big graph.
On the street, we show
how the average usage
of the participants compares
to the Brighton average.
It's 500 feet long,
we recorded for three weeks,
and each day we show
how they compare.
So if you're looking down the street,
you can see how their electricity
usage has changed over time.
It's woken us up.
I'm not very technological, is it?
So I did my best.
And I try to unplug things and so on,
but it has made us very conscious
of what we use, and what we waste.
It wasn't really so much
about the numbers as
where your wiggly line was going
in relation
to the street's Wiggly line.
Seeing the information graphically
really focused you into
thinking about things you leave
on that you don't need to.
Mine was quite high,
so I needed to in the community spirit
try to get that down
rather than bring the street average
up and above.
So I started changing the way
I did things.
One of the pieces of technology
we gave the participants
was an appliance meter.
I think that was really important,
because once they got an idea
about how their overall electricity
usage was changing,
they then wanted to identify
which particular appliances were
were using more electricity.
We'd see just how greedy
some of the devices
we had in the house were.
Halogen lighting,
very very greedy.
The television, not so bad.
The kettle...
We have to ration how many cups
of tea we have everyday
because it uses up so much electricity.
But it does make you very aware
of what you're using.
Everybody that walked by,
you could see them examining
the street art,
trying to understand what it was.
There was a lot of conversation
that went on in the street.
You were always talking
about the project.
When people were walking down
on Saturday,
they wanted to talk about the project.
So I think it genuinely raised
the profile,
having this thing in the road.
Over the first three weeks
of the project,
the average electricity usage
of the participants came down by 15%.
So it's promising.
And we're hoping that
that change will be sustained.
I'd thought about energy use
in general,
but I hadn't thought about how
I would change my behavior,
I didn't do anything about it.
By participating in the project,
what it did was just make me act on it
as opposed to think nice thoughts
about perhaps doing something.
The main lessons we can learn about
sustainability from this project
is that although it starts
with individuals,
a really important factor in people's
behavior is their community.
People are influenced by what
other people are doing around them.
So if you can engage them
as a community,
they seem to be more motivated
and more likely
to change their behavior.
Maybe out of these extreme
energy pressures,
the positive aspects of human nature,
the quest for innovation,
for inquiry, will lead to something
which is
more exciting, more sustainable.
As an architect,
if you are not an optimist
you're not going to be able
to survive professionally.
So you have a belief in the future.
The big transformation of the city
happened through technology.
For example, in the past,
technology that would take away
the open sewers
and create the networks of roads.
What is the equivalent now
of those new technologies?
Rio is like your wife
or your mother-in-law.
I mean, you can say bad things
about them,
but you never let people say
bad things about Rio.
You can use technology not only
for preventing disaster,
not only for security.
What we try to do here
is how can we take care of
the everyday life of the people
using technology.
This operations center that we built,
you've got all the departments
of the city there.
You've got a big screen with the
garbage company of the city,
civil defense which is taking care
of disasters,
there's the social assistance there,
there's the subway,
there's the trains,
there's the power company,
there's the gas company,
you've got the school system,
the health system.
I mean you have it all there
on a big screen.
Bigger than NASA, that's what I like.
It's something that you can use
to really make the departments
work together.
Let me give you an example. If you
see in the power grid,
there is a lack of energy in a
certain area of the city,
you can connect straight
to all the hospitals
and schools there
and get the city ready.
With the information you can get,
and all the changes you can make,
you can really change
the everyday life of the city.
When you go to the favelas,
the big problem that we face
is taking care of this security issue.
They don't have big roads
inside the favelas.
They are always narrow streets,
dark spaces,
and obviously that's bad for security.
So when you put good lights
on streets,
open big spaces for squares
where people can meet.
You change completely the security
aspect of the place.
Khayelitsha's a very interesting story.
It's one of the youngest
townships in South Africa.
It was built in the 1980s.
It offered the latest example
of the then local authority
trying to concentrate the growing
African black population in the city,
at the periphery of the city.
It was specifically developed
as a dormitory residential area
with no economic base,
no real industry, economy,
nothing like that.
People were required to travel out
of the area to gain access to jobs.
And it was characterized
by very poor health conditions
and very high violent crime rates.
What's interesting about Khayelitsha
is the storm water systems, that were
designed by engineering standards,
which create large,
vast tracts of open,
underutilized land,
which become crime hotspots.
The idea was to transform
the very unsafe areas that form
part of the storm water system
into something that is more positive.
Those spaces were used by gangsters
to attack the community
when they go to work,
when they pass by.
People were robbed,
they were mugged,
people's stuff was taken by the thugs.
And when VPUU was introduced
into the community
by the KDF and the city,
that made a big change.
VPUU is Violence Prevention
through Urban Upgrading.
The project looks at those problems
and creates interventions,
and it might not just be buildings,
it could be occupying space
but it could be something
as simple as lighting or paving.
The first one we started working on
was the pedestrian walkway
that extended from Khayelitsha
railway station,
across the suburb of Harare, towards
the informal settlement.
Historically the way urban design
has happened
in South Africa is along what
are seen as major routes,
and that's where all the
infrastructure happens.
The different tack that VPUU took is
they actually spoke with the community.
Which meant that the decision
as to where pedestrian routes went
wasn't the normative position,
but more where people were walking,
which were those desire lines,
which cut their way
through the settlement.
Your communities, you empower them.
It's not imposition,
but it's engagement.
It's what we call
negotiated development.
It's not top down, it's bottom up.
The community said they wanted
safe pedestrian routes.
What makes spaces unsafe,
in Kayelitsha or anywhere at night,
is when there's not good lighting,
and where the surface isn't smooth
and easy to walk on.
You can easily trip
or someone can easily hide.
The idea is that you have really
good lighting in space.
At night, when they go on,
there's this cover
that makes the space safer.
Another idea of this linkage,
in this route,
was every 500 meters you would have
a lookout point, or lookout tower.
Part of the whole strategy plan
was to create a series
of these active boxes,
specifically along the pedestrian
walkway, to provide places of safety.
So if for instance you're walking along
that pedestrian route
and you feel unsafe for any reason,
you can always see
where the next active box is
and you know that you can go there
and be safe.
They're designed in such a way
to provide
an identity and also to provide
a vertical element that one could see
as one was walking along.
We've used red in this case so they're
very clearly visible during the day,
and then they're down lit at nighttime,
so they're light boxes at night.
They're occupied 24/7
so there's always a caretaker,
somebody always involved.
And they form little points where
you can also have economic activity
and just coming together of community.
What's also very lacking in the area is
a place for children to play,
so that was another aspect that we
worked in the urban design.
Because people are moving through it,
it's constantly observed,
so it's fairly safe.
With all this upgrading,
people now have pride in it
and they want to be part of it.
The murder rate has come down
by approximately 40%
since VPUU started in this area.
It's like a sun lighting
in a dark place.
And even though
there's still a lot of things
VPUU needs to put in Khayelitsha,
the stride that they've taken gives
the Khayelitsha people a hope of life.
Parents now are starting
to see that their kids
are safer now because there's a place
for them where they come and play.
The kids are playing
and the kids are safe.
When you have extreme conditions
like that,
the answer's not for government
to sort of float in
and to say what the solution is
and to, in a way,
impose it on people.
But that paradoxically even though
the needs are obvious,
it then becomes even more important
to systematically involve people
who live these realities
in trying to figure out what's
the most strategic way to respond.
In New Orleans, the devastation
was so widespread.
It was a tragic horror.
And the problem
with the Lower 9th Ward is,
there was no recovery plan.
It's like a bunch of architects
from the West Coast
coming in
and doing all these buildings.
To do something like that
without a plan,
without a landscape plan,
without a landscape architect,
is just against every
simple little rule.
It's something where architects
had a lot of fun,
at some great expense.
I mean I'm thrilled
that they're doing it,
because the notoriety
for the city has been fantastic,
and the movie star lives
like a block away from me.
I can't remember his name.
Whatever his name is.
- Brad Pitt?
- Brad Pitt!
My wife saw Brad Pitt this morning!
What Mr. Pitt and his foundation
is doing is wonderful,
and now, everyone wants to go
to the Lower 9th Ward.
And the minute they get there,
they go,
"Oh my gosh, what is this?"
I mean it looks like you're
in California somewhere,
by the beach, in Malibu.
That's what it looks like to me.
It looks like my best friend's
mother's beach house.
Just because the architects are
so divinely wonderful,
isn't going to make a place wonderful.
In New Orleans people talk
about planning fatigue.
After Katrina, lots of people went
to lots of community meetings
and put lots of stickers
on lots of maps.
Oftentimes they didn't really see any
noticeable change. So I thought, well,
what if local residents
had better tools
to shape the future businesses
in their neighborhood and beyond?
And so I thought, well there are
a lot of vacant storefronts,
where better to ask for civic input
than on the very space that
we are trying to improve.
I put grids of stickers on neglected
buildings around the city,
and a little sharpie pen,
for people who are walking by
to write what they wish was there.
They're made of vinyl,
so they're very sticky
but future business owners can remove
them without damaging property.
I've been blown away by
the range of responses.
It leads to bigger questions,
like what if residents
had better tools
to shape and develop
their neighborhoods.
We're the ones who know what business
we need, what things need fixing.
It's like a love child of urban
planning and street art.
There are so many things, living
in the same neighborhood,
that we could actually share
with each other
that would help us understand
what's going on.
You know, share local information.
Now it's kind of funny that it's easier
to reach out to the entire world,
than it is to reach out
to your neighborhood.
If you look at the messages
in public space,
you might think all we care about are
sexy beers and fruity shampoos
and the latest Hollywood movies, right?
And you think, does that really
reflect what's important to us?
I think we really need to consider
whether our public spaces
can be better designed
so they are not necessarily
going to the highest bidder,
instead they're reflecting what's
important to our neighborhoods
and to our personal well being.
Cities and their form will always
be the terrain of struggle
as different interests contest
for power, for position,
and influence
in the shaping of the city.
Democracy itself is always showing
the sort of strains
and stresses from time to time.
And in a way the city is an expression
of that, in many ways, in microcosm.
Some of those societies which are now
being torn by inner strife
and tensions,
and ambitions, and repressions.
It is the public spaces which
become the symbols.
There's an optimism about cities
in this century.
There's a sense we're creating
something that is truly global.
And we're creating networks of people,
not experts,
people of all strata of society
who are involved in the building
of something special.
I'm city obsessed.
I always been city obsessed,
grew up in New York,
so who would not be.
But this is the century
for city lovers.
This is where it happens.
The challenge in the future will be how
do you manage demography.
I think in the physical part
of the city
will not be able to determine
the success of the city.
Architecture will not be
the only spectacle.
And how you intersect architecture
with mobility
with creating a humane environment
through design
is going to be the critical challenge.
I'm assuming that the broad outlines
of Kyoto will be achieved by 2050.
What that means for
how everything is organized,
from how you get about,
what you consume,
how things are packaged, everything.
It will be completely different
in just forty years time.
That's the one side.
On the other side,
in Asia and Africa you're going
to have complete new cities
that capitalize on all the new thinking
about how we can reorganize cities.
That will function completely different
to everything we think
and know about cities.
So that prospect of dramatic,
disruptive change
within one generation.
I mean, to be able to get that,
like we're in the middle, on the cusp
of this unbelievably dramatic set of
forces coming together.
Fundamentally as a species
we need things that can
power our imaginations,
that can get our passions going,
that can give us sort of
a sense of meaning.
And that is not a brick,
it is not a pipe, it is an idea.
That's what drives cities forward.