Patrik Schumacher on the Future of Cities- Power, Politics & Density

I think there's a definite tension between inclusiveness and place. Why? Because I believe that places, it's about differentiating one place versus another. The more generic, the more undifferentiated, the less kind of focused and actually meaningful.

The most urgently required product is a better place to live, but there's nothing on the market. They have carpets of two-story housing. It's a waste. Spreading out London. This could be densified massively. So people don't have to commute. People kind of be much more quick shuttling between their home and work. And you could double and triple. And you could also be easily a 30 million city. There's all a lot of international funds, a lot of money. We should be, you know, happy receiving and letting flow in here to deliver the product. If you look at the city of London, that skyline, this menace and interestingly changing skyline, if they can do it, why can't all other bosses do it?

Welcome to our office.

I might just mention that I just got the European Architecture Award.

And yeah, there's been a few highlights. I mean, a very long career. Maybe I mean I love opening buildings. Yeah, when you can see the buildings filled, particular public buildings which are meant to be filled with people. And so like there's been quite a few, but the opening of Maxi, oh the first one Vitra was very nice. You know, a lot of nice interesting guests and it had rain so the concrete was wet and the concrete floor was wet and mirror effects and then the kind of Philippe Starck chairs in all colors reflecting on the building and Philip Johnson showed up and at the time relatively unknown Jacques. etc. So, yeah, these are the moments I like and we had quite a few, for instance, Galaxy Soho in Beijing. That was a wonderful huge project and on and on and on. Dashing airport, the Leiser tower. So yeah, these are nice moments you work for. But also I just remember receiving the Pritzker, talking about prizes.

And that was quite a do in St. Petersburg. Yeah. And she loved Russia all her life and we they made a huge effort for the whole Pritzker kind of family and circus, let's say, where we went from the Winter Palace to the Summer Palace. And as if magic, whole of St. Petersburg traffic was switched off. So the motorcade kind of swooped through and you can see that all incoming traffic was held.

Well, I mean there's a tension. I mean, Zaha said, we have nothing to do with place. We're into space. Okay. Obviously there was this kind of thing where you all brought up on you know modern architecture is about space and the fluid flow of space inside outside and then place came along and was associated with postmodernism, right, yes, genius loci and place and so on so forth. That was people like Rob Krier would talk about it and so. But I'm not into these kind of camps and I also respect, by the way, a lot of the advances of that postmodernism which then kind of shifted also into deconstructivism and into. So I believe in the progress of the field. So I understand place and we usually say creating architecture which is unique for a specific place and purpose. But I also have to say that placemaking, I mean I'm not sure if you saw, a good friend of mine I'm talking a lot to is Isa de Graaf. And actually I was involved in two conversations about his books. The last book was called Architect, Comma, Verb and he's carving into a lot of vogue phrases. Placemaking is one of them. And he makes fun of all of this notion. He has no idea what placemaking is. And he describes clients wanting him to engage in placemaking and he thinks I don't know what placemaking is. And it's a very smart book. I can recommend it. Right. All the things we usually kind of need to focus on. And he's talking about newspeak, which is, or let's say profspeak, which is a version of Orwellian newspeak, where everything gets kind of euphemized. Anyway, so I do have my issues. One of the issues I had and I was responding to this and this is a concept he didn't fully take on, but for instance, inclusiveness. Yes, yes. I think there's a definite tension between inclusiveness and place, right? Okay. Why? Because I believe that places, it's about differentiating one place versus another, right? And making them determinate with respect to purpose and context, right? And purpose also involves audiences. The more generic, the more undifferentiated, the less kind of focused and actually meaningful. So, and I find I connect that with the kind of the blandness of public spaces. Or places which are run by the public authorities, the government. This not only this, the sense of inclusiveness for me it's often also boils down to no offense, nothing out of the expectation, everything is as you expected it, the lack of stimulation. And maybe public authorities have to treat things like this and it becomes a kind of small kind of mean voter that is being addressed. And so the protocols of interaction are kind of stereotypical. That's why I think if you want true places as differentiated offerings which should be selective, should be particular, it can't be for everybody in the same way and equally. Not everybody will be equally welcome, otherwise it becomes kind of nobody is really particularly addressed. And that's why I also love the privatization of public space. They're still public. I still think everybody can come. Obviously, it's not about deliberately explicitly excluding, right? It's not like having a bouncer there at the door. Although, you know, the security visible security guards. I mean there's also something else, bouncers kind of trying to curate an audience. I don't like it, but I understand it. And so it's more of a kind of self-selection and catering for particular tastes and making some feel more welcome than others simply because that's saying you have threshold anxiety. I've been thinking a lot about, you know, if you want to do something like a community, a residential community or community sense, you need to kind of craft it with particular tools. You can't just throw things on the market. Of course, to some extent, a certain price point, a certain stylistic flavor can sometimes gather like-minded. So in our buildings, we find it attracts a type of office buildings like in Moscow, a certain type of firm and industry. And it's only this kind of strange. I think this hip and cool sexy buildings, you end up people getting attracted to which match up. So this can sometimes work but this is because with this is so different but most of these more generic places you end up with a random sample and it leads to this thing where it is sort of too random and therefore not fruitful. So we've developed these tools of really community forging through participatory design but also the kind of sales and gathering of the community is like a dating site. Yeah, you should register. I mean you haven't implemented, we have implemented parts of it where you register, you have to of course be truthful to some extent and show what you're looking for and then you can choose and then somebody else can say I want to be part of it. It works very well also with offices or mixed use for instance Second Home. This guy who's been getting the best tech firms who want to be close to each other and then value is created, synergy value over and above the sheer square meter. And occasion well it's also good it's next to Google campus and it's within the fintech kind of cluster but then more specifically in that building there are all these firms which are eager to be next to each other to learn from each other and so on and so forth and that then generates value and you can monetize it but it's literally use value and generates productivity. But this is something you have to kind of particularly curate and you have to be quite exclusive about who you're bringing on and some anchor tenants and so on and you can't just sell it to the first through the door. And I noticed from the Shard they're also curating, they don't just any insurance company take the whole building. They want something and that means we have to be excluding a lot of options and we have to be quite narrowly in who we invite in because we want to generate something which has surplus value. So here inclusiveness is a false ideology and placemaking needs to be decoupled from this mix. So you have an element of exclusivity to be actually a place.

Well, I mean London is definitely my favorite, right? Okay. Okay. Is really, it's going to be, I would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. The second with a bit of distance is New York. Right. Physically, culturally New York could be a good match, right? And but I don't like the noise levels, right? And the kind of asphalt jungle, right? I mean, I like it sometimes, but it's too relentless. Not enough relief space. So, here you can find, you go around the corner and you hear the birds sing or a quiet place and then you get more sunshine because if you have all the towers, the sunshine is not hitting. I love sun. So, for that reason, and it's better connected. I mean, I like Europe, you're faster to the Middle East. And back to New York is not so far. So I do find London was clearly number one and within London, East London.

I've kind of left West London behind.

That's what we're here for.

That's what also brings everybody from around. We couldn't find this kind of crowd in anywhere in Germany, not even in Berlin. It's just not the same. So a company like this couldn't exist in any other city in Europe.

But also the other great firms, Foster and Rogers and can share and big and they can share stuff.

Shuttling all the time. I mean, as you know, we got the CEO of Fosters.

Well there you go, another couple of plus points for London. So I'm very interested in what the future looks like and as a city lover not just as a traveler, as an urban dweller. I've lived in cities all my life. I've lived in Mumbai, in Hong Kong, in London, big metropolitan cities. And I understand you have a lot of views of what the future city looks like. So from your perspective, how should cities and places be evolving to meet the needs of the future? London could, is so many people want to come because it's a super synergy hub for many industries academically, the learning, but it's the media or architecture, engineering, filmmaking, fashion, finance, legal, the law is a super hub of the legal profession for many years. And so I think it could and these things also synergize so you can have the finance people need the great lawyers and the developers need the finance and we need the developers to have funds too. So it connects up and the media and filmmaking, news media and photography, these are feeding into our work. So these need large cities and of course they need to remain liveable. But as somebody said yesterday, London has 600 stations within its connectivity compared to Mumbai which maybe has 50 stations. You know so that's and you have cycling and you have lovely spaces and I can walk everywhere I want to go. You know, I'm no longer, what keeps me fit is walking or cycling. So everything is accessible. It could be much more dense. It could be more. So, you know, always looking with my students at this whole area between the City of London, the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, that whole kind of way of Waring and totally non-dense or right behind in that Liverpool Street into north, I mean Shoreditch and beyond and Wood Green and Finsbury Park. I mean, they have carpets of two-story housing. It's a waste spreading out London. This could be densified massively so people don't have to commute. People kind of be much more quick shuttling between their home and work and you could double and triple and you could also be easily a 30 million city. That means you can empty out half of the UK or all of the UK or all of England into London, Greater London. Let's call it Grand London. And that's what it should be. So I think I love this idea, you know, of the Randstad for instance in Holland, all of Holland could, so the whole of England could go in here, let's Scotland could be separate, could be a separate country, and that would be very healthy I think, very dynamic. But it needs that supply needs to be set free, these political barriers need to be kind of torn down. It would be good for everybody. You know, some of these new developments, the density levels are kind of 10x relative to the carpet of two-story houses and they're still high quality places with lots of amenities directly down at the foot of your building or at least go from two stories to kind of six stories and a Georgian kind of density and then you have it can attract amenities. So these are the visions of the YIMBY guys. Anti-NIMBY. It's a tragedy because the unavailability of proper living and work spaces and also socializing spaces because of the scarcity of space in case we have planned spaces, not the space itself, planned land with planning, that scarcity is just tragic. It makes all of us poorer. Not only with the effects of the life could kind of take off productivity wise but also every day when you're stuck in traffic for two hours or an hour or you're living in a too small place. The most urgently required product is a better place to live but there's nothing on the market. You can't just measure GDP if you can't buy the things you need for with your income or you're wasting it on an exorbitant priced house then this is a very distorted view of your income.

Yeah.

Greater region. I mean look and of course it is these things will cluster and you will have, as I said, you know you have the West London you have media, you have the different industry clusters a little bit self-organized. And it's important because I believe in pedestrianized and non-mechanized and closeness and shifting between many places. So it's not that you only from home to one place, you have to go over to meet the consultants or the consultants coming over and you're going to the pub and you're going to the opening and so you have to go to many places and they need to be all in walking distance. And that's why you need to be sitting more dense. So you have to be able to accept height, taller buildings, closer buildings.

Really?

Wow, oh okay. That's amazing. But of course Korea is a populous nation and Seoul is a large city, but they're doing very well in terms of playing the spaces. So, I do believe in that and I do like the kind of the buzz of Tate Modern for instance or as I said South Bank and just roaming around there and looking what's up and maybe looking at an exhibition or going to a movie and so on. I do like cities like this and you need places whether the architecture should be iconic or not, I don't know. I mean it needs to have this kind of porosity and generosity of exterior and interior spaces which hosts then where you can have buskers coming out of stalls and activation, you know, the book selling and all of that. So I do find that quite important. And we're doing a new culture center in which also has a diversity, you know, opera house, theater, a museum of the science of the future and we also have a lot of exterior spaces and to have double height so you overlook, you have a plateau and platform and lower garden, upper garden so you can do a little bit on level so you can see people staggered in space and can overlook something or look up something, that's quite nice. So it's only flat. If it's totally flat then it obscures itself. Yes. So like the three-dimensionality. So also in the Royal Festival Hall you have that, the terraces or you have the atrium and you can go up and look down and you use relief and you have transparency, you can roam through it. This is the kind of thing we also done with our spaces right with Baku. So we can learn also from the places we encounter and use. And I love the canal. I'm living close to Regent's Canal. I've lived a few times. I've lived Camden end. I'm now living on the Shoreditch and the canal is wonderful because it's so fast because you can walk because you don't have to stop at traffic. You don't have to swallow all this dust and because you can kind of channel through and you still get nice little distractions of some people hanging around. I mean it's very populated. In the summer particularly people just camp there but sit on the floor and picnic there but you still have a few kind of coffee shops and this and that and you can just literally kind of zoom, teleport to Paddington. I love the South Bank. I mean the whole river bank you should be able to walk. There's one line and then the Regent's Canal and then I proposed another line which was Oxford Street. Which they don't manage to pedestrianize into New Oxford.

Well, they did a little bit partially into the City of London and on. So these lines. And it would be wonderful and I don't know why they can just do it.

And then I had a few lines crossing up. So kind of grid and then having in this grid totally pedestrianized a series of lines. For instance, you can come up the Millennium Bridge and go up next to the Barbican, go up Goswell Road and go up to Islington and Finsbury Park. I've identified all these lines. It should be fully, for instance Upper Street should be totally on that line. And then throw out all the cars and buses. That's extremely important. The other thing is you need to be central line. So I would often walk but I don't want to walk then on the walls. Why? Because it's too much, all this is actually the buses, the first should be electrified because the amount is so toxic what you swallow. So then you have to go a second layer but the second layer is two times as long. So it needs to be the primary lines and then you can have nuggets of total pedestrianization in that. So for like the West End and maybe a few other spots like the City of London. Like for instance I'm very used to in Germany you have the city center is fully pedestrianized. Any major city has a large chunk of the inner city. We don't have that in so we have it in Cologne, Munich, any city, Frankfurt. And it generates a lot of opportunity. Of course, there's also, you know, the more popular. And then it kind of but there's many other lines we have. So I think that would be another one where we should have a kind of a certain contiguous network pedestrianized plus these lines.