I have been so impressed by the courage of mayors, their ability to change a city, improve the quality of life of the citizens, invest in future generations, often with great courage. Cities don't happen by accident. They are designed. They've been described as our greatest invention. Cities are not static; they change, evolve, shrink, grow. Those changes involve decisions. Will those decisions be based on prejudice, on fashion, or on data and evidence? Cities are the key to climate change; they can move faster than governments. The infrastructure of connectivity creates two kinds of cities: the compact, walkable, dense city and the car-born, sprawling, low-density city. The walkable city has half the carbon footprint of the sprawling one. We should encourage high-quality public transport over the car, getting the balance correct. The walkable city is healthier. The compact city encourages biodiversity. Over my 65 years of practice, I have engaged with mayors on many projects. I selected nine examples. In London, we transformed Trafalgar Square from a traffic roundabout into a living room for London, using space syntax. It led to economic benefits and inspired the bicycle revolution. In Marseille, we reconnected the old port with the old town, creating a pedestrian-friendly space with a mirrored pavilion. The economic impact was significant. In London, the Millennium Bridge balanced inequality between north and south, using a new suspension bridge design. In Bilbao, we designed a metro system that exploited the natural form of tunnels, contributing to the city's transformation, including the Guggenheim. In Duisburg, over 40 years, we transformed a stagnant industrial area into a thriving community with clean industry, bike paths, and 110 kilometers of waterfront. In Nimes, a small building opposite a Roman temple created a ripple effect that transformed the city. In Barcelona, we designed a communication tower that consolidated multiple antennas into one iconic structure. In Odisha, we worked with the Tata Foundation to regenerate an informal settlement through community-led planning, providing sanitation, waste recycling, and public spaces. In China, I witnessed an amazing civic transformation with high-speed rail connecting 97% of cities, 90% electric cars, and extensive green spaces. The Norman Foster Institute has developed tools for evidence-based urban design: City Pulse, City Compass, City Next, and City Foreign. These tools allow mayors to analyze, simulate, and communicate urban changes.
Cities are complex systems and to design them well we need to understand them as a whole and not in fragments. Here at the Norman Foster Institute, the Center for City Science brings this together through four different apps. City Pulse measures a city, evaluating performance across 10 key dimensions of urban life. These metrics are combined into a unified model that describes how a city functions. They can be analyzed at multiple scales from the metropolitan level to neighborhoods to individual streets. City Compass enables rapid design exploration. Using plain language, users describe spatial intentions, and these inputs are translated into visual scenarios instantly. Multiple options can be generated, compared, and refined in real time. City Next simulates behavior, modeling how people move through space, tracking flows, counting arrivals and departures, and measuring dwell time. This allows proposals to be evaluated before they are built. City Foreign makes the city accessible through natural language interactions. Users can ask questions and receive spatial visual responses that explain underlying data and relationships. Together, these tools form a continuous workflow from diagnosis to design to simulation to communication. This is a shift from intuition-based planning to evidence-based urban design, designed for the complexity of cities but built for the people who shape them.
Finally, I would just like to say thank you. Finally, I'd just like to say and perhaps state the obvious, but something really important. All of this gathering, everything that we're all doing together has been made possible by Mike Bloomberg, by Bloomberg Philanthropies, by Patty, by Jim, by the extraordinary team. I'd just like to pay tribute to that. Thank you so much.
So, Lord Foster has graciously allowed some time for questions. So, would love to hear mayor's questions from the audience. We have a couple mics on either side.
Well, thank you. Um, Barbara Buffalo, mayor of Columbia, Missouri, and Lord Foster, last night at the reception, you talked about some of the infill development in Costa Rica and about the conversation around people being against infill development. And I'm wondering what advice you have for mayors and our staff for trying to encourage the opportunity for more housing for all and how we as designers can help with that.
I think the whole question of infill housing. If you take San Francisco and look at residential areas, the grain of a residential area will have pocket sites which should be developed, but they are small and the codes mandate all kinds of requirements in terms of number of staircases, parking. If you relax that, you take away the incentive for a developer to try to put together enough parcels of land to create a large, largely antisocial development. There is a link between recycling those sites with infills which are sympathetic in scale and socially. Often the codes are outdated because circumstances have moved on. The Costa Rica example was where a workshop in the foundation questioned the nature of refugee housing. Why would a family have to live for 17 years in a tent? Couldn't we build something permanent and durable very quickly? The foundation demonstrated with a pavilion at the Venice Biennale that it was achievable at $20,000 for a family of four. The government of Costa Rica approached us to work within their budget of $16,500 and deliver an affordable home. We are on course to do that at scale right now.
Uh thank you. So that was impressive. Andy Shore, Lancing, Michigan, United States. Two quick questions. One, you just talked about some of the relaxing of codes and things like that. Once that's done, do you have thoughts on working with folks on financing because we've done a lot of that, we just haven't been able to finance. Second, those incredible tools that were up on the board. Is there a way for us to utilize those tools on the internet or is there a way for cities to utilize those tools to be able to use them in practice?
Absolutely. We are able to work with mayors, with administrations, with communities to set up such a facility. The spirit of that is very much about sharing. So yes, by all means see firsthand. We choose three cities in different parts of the world every year. We are opening that technology up to cities around the world.
Hi, Lord Foster. Barry Verbanovic, mayor of Kitchener, Canada. First of all, thank you to you and Lady Foster for opening up your foundation to us yesterday. But my question to you is this. Many of the cities that you've worked in are some of the world's larger, great cities, but many of us in the room come from more midsize communities. I'm wondering if you can give us some advice about how to take the principles and ideas you've talked about today and put them into practice in midsize communities.
Well, I would say that Odisha is a very small community and a city like Nimes was in absolute despair. The area that I showed as the heart of the waterway at Duisburg almost literally didn't exist. I think the messages and the examples are in many ways more relevant to a smaller city than arguably the larger city. The larger city is by its very nature more likely to have interests which can be tapped. But the smaller city without question can benefit from that thinking.
