Founding Partner, Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd.
Future Cities Conference 2023 | Pierre de Meuron | common commons commoning
The conference "Future Cities: Through Science. By Design. In Place. Over Time." brings together renowned experts from architecture, urban planning, politics, and society in an international dialogue and presents the current state of the research programme.
The conference clarifies how scientific progress and innovation can contribute to sustainable urban development and emphasizes its implementation. This includes sustainable practices, tools, and scenarios to mitigate the impacts of climate change and the growing world population on urban regions.
Future Cities Laboratory Global
Singapore-...
About Pierre De meuron
At a 2014 event at the Swiss Pavilion during the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Pierre de Meuron participated in a discussion on preservation alongside Jacques Herzog, Chris Dercon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. De Meuron described renovation as involving "the sheer impossibility to bring time back," noting that in historic rooms originally built with gas lighting, it is not possible to fully recreate the past. He stated that decisions in preservation involve destroying some layers to reveal others, such as choosing to expose early Renaissance features over later styles, and that the goal is to create a good space for contemporary use rather than adhering to a single ideology. De Meuron also contrasted this approach with what he described as an American tendency to treat history as something concrete that must be simulated. He referenced the ecological perspective of Joseph Beuys, a co-founder of the Green Party, suggesting that preservation contains an ecological dimension. De Meuron remarked that the shared approach with Rem Koolhaas on the House of the Kunst project involves a tension between preserving value and not blocking paths for the future, emphasizing that the past should be understood in social rather than formal terms.
Transcript (50 segments)
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Pierre De Meuron0:19
I have to admit I will change scale again and try to speak a little bit not only as an architect but also as an inhabitant of this planet. This is somehow the title — I changed it many, many times, and this is ongoing of course as most of our thinking.
In the course of our research work for the Swiss Portraits — for Switzerland from 1999 to 2004 in Studio Basel — and on one of our various field trips in the Alpine region of Switzerland, I discovered those strange and odious constructions. And through this I came across the work of Elinor Ostrom in the '90s.
Törbel, which is a mountain village in the Swiss Alps, a remote village, is the subject of scientific research — first by the anthropologist Robert Netting, and later Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. I mentioned already Netting was one of the first to analyze a municipality in terms of human ecology.
The village community was studied as an ecosystem that regulates itself through economic practices, demographics, and local governance. Ostrom investigates the use of the Törbel commons, which was regulated by statutes of the 15th century. In particular, she is intrigued by the rules for sustainable land use, such as pastures, forests, etc., as well as the communal maintenance of paths and bisses — as they are called, suonen also in German in the Valais — those are irrigation systems.
After her studies in Törbel in Switzerland, in the Swiss mountains, she studied a lot of different places across the globe — in California, like groundwater systems, in the Philippines, etc. And at the end she brought this all together in her book Governing the Commons.
In this book she shows what sustainable management of community assets — such as fisheries, pastures, etc. — could look like. She comes to the conclusion that the exploitation of natural resources takes place sustainably under certain conditions, when organized independently of the influence of the free market and the state.
Ostrom receives the Nobel Prize for the fact that a large part of her research work aims to demonstrate the high quality of environmental resilience of common spaces and common goods managed in a common mode.
So here you see Törbel, and this shows the view of the commune of Törbel, which has a village and of course pastures, forests, etc. — so that's the managing of this piece of land by the community of Törbel.
Is there contemporary relevance about that? Yes. Today the downturn of agriculture in the Alps means that in many cases consortes are no longer directly involved in the management of the land use and of the irrigation systems. Nevertheless, consortes have to deal with new players and new issues such as tourism, hydroelectric companies, associations for the protection of the environment and landscape.
The members of the consortes are also the holders of know-how, skills, and competencies as well as the governance of commons. The latter are not fixed in the past but are still evolving. However, the original purpose of a confrérie remains the same: to ensure optimal exploitation of the natural resources while sustaining them in the long term.
Ostrom-Hardin debate — that's the book I forgot to show. So that's her book, Governing the Commons. And then in the '70s there was this debate between Hardin — Garrett Hardin — and Elinor Ostrom. And Ostrom somehow frees the commons from the curse of Hardin that had weighed on the commons in his 1968 essay you see here on the right, in the journal Science, entitled 'The Tragedy of the Commons?'
The microbiologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin formulates the explicit parable of the egoistic shepherd who drives more and more animals onto a common pasture until the latter is ruined by overuse. According to Hardin, the tragedy of the commons is that rational and selfish people plunder and overuse natural resources and thus ultimately destroy them.
Ostrom, on the other hand, was able to show that commons develop collectively accepted rules that effectively prevent overuse of natural resources. Ostrom drew for the first time the attention of science to structural elements and patterns of action and governance with which commons are successfully managed by communities all over the globe, as I said.
Then, the market-state duopoly — she also spoke about this — that dualisms such as public versus private, state versus market, are generally taken for granted. We see them as opposites. These two are lexical legacies that obscure the relational fact that one is inextricably linked to the other.
These dualisms are still entrenched in our thinking, and when we consider the range of solutions that are generally considered plausible, 'either or' — they say 'all or nothing.' Thus the language of our time blunts its purpose and power relations and seals our thinking with a board that is difficult to pierce.
The political debate in the Western world is still proceeding along those lines of the market-state duopoly — more state and less market, or the other way around: less state and more market. This simplistic market-state duopoly takes hold of our policies. Conventional political discourses are not able to adequately name our problems, to formulate alternatives, much less to sketch visions.
The pitfalls of the current dominant political language are tightly drawn at the price of growing socioeconomic and political polarization. Now, beyond market and state: the commons, a third way. Ostrom emphasizes this, that a common is not only a thing but an act — not only an adjective and not only a thing, but is also a verb.
But what do we mean by commons? There is some ambiguity, I agree, in how the term 'commons' is being used. It is close to what is called an umbrella term covering a wide-ranging subject. It is common to use umbrella terms mainly in casual or layman situations. Why is this so? Because on the one hand we speak of 'a commons,' which is a very precise concept of economic theory and political sciences, and on the other hand we speak of 'the commons,' which is much more generic.
It is truly impressive how in 10 years the vocabulary related to the commons has spread among people from very diverse social, geographical spaces, and intellectual backgrounds. Just to name a few that come to my mind now: the common ground at the Venice Biennale, Emanuele Coccia's 'The Soul of the World,' and also we heard it today — the urban-rural commons of Atelier Bow-Wow in Japan.
So it is an objective, it is a noun, it is a verb, and it is an activity — sharing by a community of commoners, a commune, a shared piece of land for instance. It reinforces the notion that the commons is a process, is a path, a path in constant movement. Furthermore, we do not possess a common; we are part of a common, insofar as we are part of an ecosystem, of a set of relations in urban and rural environments, and therefore the subject is part of the object.
There can be a very clear formula for what a common is: a common is a resource plus a community plus a set of social protocols.
So now that was one. And of course the digital world will not be possible without this thinking about that — I won't go into more detail. But of course the digital world gives us huge, huge possibilities in sharing things, in sharing knowledge, and so on. So I'm coming back now to Switzerland, to the more real. This is a photo of the Valais.
I would like with my contribution also today to come back to Switzerland and to show and speak about two concrete projects of Herzog & de Meuron, where we live and experience this notion of the commons, like you do in Japan.
So in the Valais, which you see, that the territory, the landscape is being built — it is not anymore a natural state, but it is a human state. It is hugely architectural. So this first project is in Sierre, in the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. The second one is in Natal in Brazil. The one is quite close to us, the other one is much farther, but as much dear and close as this one. I will speak in a second about the Natal project.
So you have Sierre in the Canton of Valais, and this is one of our analyses of the Swiss Portraits, where we have been developing those different typologies. But this is again not the subject today. What I would like to see here with Sierre is that Sierre and the whole Canton of Valais is built up of so-called 'dèmes' — districts — where you have perpendicular to the valley, the Rhône, which is running from the east to the southwest, and every town, every township in Valais was a district.
What is interesting with that is that the towns, they were on their own in the valley and they had their back land, they had the hinterland. So what is quite important for us and for our approach is that a city is not just to be understood as a city but as a city plus its territory. So it is about the urban and about the rural, and this is a very old way to understand what a territory is. This was certainly something very interesting to develop further in this project.
So it is a territorial planning — city planning is not urban planning, but we always have to consider it in a larger scale, understanding that the rural and the urban are tightly linked together; they are dependent on each other. So doing this project, of course, first we looked at the territory at large. I show the dôme car because I think the dôme shows very well the spaces and the nature of the mountains, with the valley in the center — the white valley — and then the higher mountains around it.
So that would be like the larger territory around Sierre. When we are on the site of our project, we want to integrate this territory into the project. And then in the valley itself, the area is an industrial area that is now to be transformed into a city. We start with the Rhône and with ecology — what is the page, what is the landscape, how is it then the green.
I don't want to go too much into detail, but you have on the right and on the left of the Rhône the agricultural fields, and with this project we would like now to bring those two areas together in the city itself, which is now very mineral, a city which is very hot because there are not many green spaces. What we also see here in comparison, Ronco is almost one-sixth of the whole area of Sierre — so quite a big project for this small city.
We had to define a vision for that — there was a political vision first, and then there was an architectural vision, with this idea of a green park in the center of the area. Of course it has to do with a lot of what we have been discussing — it's about mobility, it's about climate, etc. This green space allows the winds to make the climate better. The activities are mixed-use, of course, but now it's monofunctional, it's industrial. The neighborhood should transform into a piece of the city.
Those are the main targets of this project, and of course also remaining and retaining existing buildings. The Rhône, which is very close, is also to make access to the river possible. But I would rather show this as a how to implement such a large project for a city like Sierre. We introduced the notion of a 'Plan Directeur' and not of a master plan. The Plan Directeur has some guidelines, and then it can be developed in sectors and in phases.
So this is Ronco as it may look in a few years. The way to develop projects in cities like Barcelona or Paris was a very top-down model — someone who decides and then you have a result, which is a master plan. I think 'master plan' is not the right name anymore. That's why we call it Plan Directeur, because a 'master' is somehow who knows — 'I know how a city looks like' — and then on the right you have many individuals. So it's a given how to do it, and the other leaves it open with all the different individuals within a society.
We have been thinking: is there not also a third model now to develop a city? And so we have the Plan Directeur, and the stakeholders — the territory, as I said, plus the city and the landowners — to develop a convention, like for the confrérie, so that you know what are your duties and what are your rights when you are an owner and we want to develop your parcel. Of course, as it is a new piece of a city for 10,000 inhabitants, you need technical and social infrastructures.
There are 187 parcels, and what we did was analyze every parcel — what it is worth, what's the price according to the economic models. We then went to the landowners and told them: look, if you develop your land now according to the Plan Directeur, then this is what it means to you. We tried to find the balance between the city and the landowners. So that's the current zoning. The Plan Directeur allows for more height, for more density.
Speaking of the infrastructures I mentioned before — these are additional charges for whom? For the government, for the city, for the state, and an added value for the landowners. So that was quite a disbalance. What we proposed is that the landowners — according to 'May,' as we call it in German — they give something to the city if they develop their plot of land according to the Plan Directeur.
When I made this presentation in front of the Grand Conseil, the legislative authority, I showed this, but then also I showed that one — from 10 years before, when we did the study on the Swiss Portraits. We discovered these commoners, and I thought this was quite telling to show me as an urban planner coming from Basel, showing this to the Valais people. They at once understood what it is about: it is about the wide landscape, it is about the commoners, and it is about the architectural product.
It was really interesting when we presented it to all 187 landowners — how they at once started to discuss and to exchange ideas with their neighbors, and not fight against them.
The second project I already mentioned: it is an urban vision for Marluísa in Natal in Brazil. It is on the coast, on the northeast coast of Brazil. Marluísa is an informal settlement in Natal. It's also a threat of development — you mentioned the development of the economics of promoters and developers who on the coastline want to develop the valuable land. In Bogotá, in Africa, and here — if you look at that one, the informal settlement is very close to the shore, which at the same time is very attractive for development, like the one you see here. And there is a clash between those two worlds: between the informal settlement and the high-rise building.
Also there we had a lot of exchange and a lot of discussions with the people there, with the community, and tried to engage them in the development of their settlement. What we proposed is a kind of guideline for the development of the settlement, where you have on the left the protected dunes and the Atlantic Ocean, and to propose a perpendicular to the main street — a kind of pasarela, as we call it — which brings different public facilities together, which are of course lacking in this area. You can imagine, we know what it means.
So this was the urban idea of the whole project. To also — the informal, you mentioned that — with this green street, which is also one of the main axes through the settlement. Then we were commissioned. So the Arena, the Arena is a pioneering architectural project. I will speak a little bit also as an architect now. So the Arena is a big white roof containing different activities, with this also curving Vinar wall which has the wardrobes etc. for more privacy. And it has mainly this big roof which is built out of steel and that covers and creates now a symbolic place also for the whole neighborhood. It gives an identity to the whole thing.
As also you described it for Japan, we tried to do it with the means and with the possibilities which are there and not to import any knowledge, but to work with what they know and what they can do on the site. And as you see, that was also something the people there built up themselves — this curved linear wall. At night it has this lantern-like quality because it's translucent, it has openings for ventilation, for the hot winds, etc., and at night it shows like a lantern into the urban landscape.
Now I have some final notes, and perhaps what makes this term, 'the commons,' so popular, so interesting, and so appealing is the evidence that there is no one and only answer to the social problems such as migration, inequalities, discriminations of all kinds, and many others that we are fully facing now and will be increasingly facing in the next future.
The state's response to social problems is called into question, in my opinion, first of all because the state seems to be less and less able to respond effectively to the ongoing challenges. The dynamics of economic globalization strongly destabilize state institutions that have per se a well-defined territorial foundation. Moreover, the prevailing feeling is that the way the state responds is a bureaucratic logic, and by that, on the mode of delegation — to decide and to do on behalf of others. By its own nature, this ends up discouraging people from getting involved in the subject matters which are their own.
What predominates in this attitude is the mode of admitting — admitting how things are going — and that personal involvement is no longer in demand. Which is exactly the opposite of what is urgently needed today, namely to find something that expresses the collective, that brings us closer to an idea of public affairs that does not necessarily have to identify with an institutional system.
The commons would therefore represent the need to rebuild this kind of space of links, of human relations, of relationships, and basics that constitute the collective. I think that this is a plausible explanation of why we are now talking about a notion that undoubtedly has a lot of accounts and a narrative behind it, and which reappears today with force, albeit with other readings and other meanings.
We are all part of the system, and as acting suspects, we are just as much part of the problem. Astonishingly, economy understood as an overall system doesn't handle production, investments, consumption, and resources in the same, literally economical way. When planning, designing, constructing, and manufacturing, the minimum requirement must be to seek, find, and produce climate- and socially compatible answers across disciplinary boundaries and in the creative play between knowledge as a collective heritage, united imagination, and collaborative activity.
Not only ecological stability but also social cohesion are at stake. In this context, the model of Alpine labor and property collectives could take a new significance. Commons should not be understood nostalgically but existentially, through the human ability and willingness to look ahead, to take precautions, and to manage the Earth's sustainability. The focus is on society, economy, and territory, which form a binding whole.
Innovative, novel thinking models give a new impetus to design and planning, just like the lemon and the light bulb in the Capri Battery. By the way, it's almost the same color as your color on the poster. Clever ideas and things are created that require less energy and less material. Carefully processed and cleverly handled, they are given a rich meaning with a particular aesthetic expression. Here, two everyday objects are linked together and thus gain in mental acuity and sensory quality.
Free of bias, because solutions are to be questioned — when you believe, we have to question, and question, and question again. The two components of the Capri Battery are the same size, shape, and color, and they express this explicit equilibrium. Boys not only addresses a necessary balance between nature and technology, but also refers to the important role of natural resources. He conveys to the viewer through the usual manual that he himself — the viewer — must become active in order to keep alive the flow of energy through which change is made possible.
In the manual it is written: 'Replace the battery after 1,000 hours.' So thank you, and thank you for doing so.