#ega-talks

Fighting indifference with architecture

Real Dania is a member based organization that works philanthropically. We constantly examine how the physical framework in planning or in architecture can somehow increase the livability among the people who are there.

We also deal with social challenges and social questions. Just like this theme about the inclusive and integrated city also touches. One way we start out is to ask: What is the problem that we will try to solve in a certain project or in a certain context?

I will give you an example, which is also our point of view when it comes to the integrated city. Within this question we often try to work with the meeting. We focus on the people who have their everyday in a certain place. Either in a building or in the community around a certain building with all kind of functions. How can the framework in such a place be as supportive as possible? We think of the target group and the people who are working there. If there is something that is relevant in the context, how can one facilitate that? Or work though the physical means such as a meeting point, meeting points or neighbor-ship?

Right now we focus quite a lot on neighborhoods and neighborship. Becasue our analysis is that as our cities, especially the big cities grow, they seem to make more division than communities. Things become more and more expensive and we become more and more separated from one another.

An example on a project is a place called ”Kofoeds Skole”. It’s an old institution in Denmark and it has a big location in Copenhagen with people who have a long history track of the use of drugs, alcohol and homelessness. They are very vulnerable people. At ”Kofoeds Skole” witch is a school and a place where you can be during the day. You have all kinds of things you can do. You can do sports. You can repair different kind of things. You can produce artistic things. You can repair different technical things, or repair bicycles etc.

We have worked with this place. It has been a little bit like an institution, where if you weren’t a part of the place, then you didn’t have any reason to go in there. People would never meet each other here unless they spend every day here.

This is a big project that we have just finished together with another big foundation. Where we opened up this institution towards the neighborhood. That meant that we had the facades to change from bricks into glass. That we re imagined and changed meeting rooms into shops. Social-economic shops. With the products of the things that were actually produced in the school, as well as all kind of new products. There was a clear signal that here you are welcome. You can come and and look at the things. Here you can even have your things repaired or leave clothes for reuse. The project also involved developing a cafe. Where the people that spend their every day at this school can be part of making the coffee, and take care of the customers. It was a project that had the purpose of opening up.

What is important for us while doing a project like that, is to have an understanding from the perception of the neighbors. To involve the neighbors as well. Because as Copenhagen has develop into a very expensive city to live in, it makes the neighboring area into a quite expensive place to live in. This can sometimes give people a feeling of unsecured, when we talk of people who are vulnerable and the meeting that that creates.

The way we try to work with it, is by involvement from the beginning. Because we want opens up a school and also invite the surroundings to be half of the project. What we experience doing this is that the fear can be turned into engagement and projects that you do together. When it goes both ways, then it is an example of inclusiveness and how to integrate different functions and places with different people living there, very close to each other.

How can you work with creating relations? Which is from a social point of view important to do. Because if you are vulnerable, a quick thing that happens is that you’ll get isolated. How can we through the physical places and their functions try to open up and connect these separated lives that never interact. This interaction could create a lot of value. It’s not just people who are vulnerable who can have a big joy of showing themselves from some more positive sides. Even though you have different challenges, we can all show that we interact. Also the other way around. People who have all kind of resources. They can have a more meaningful every day having this very local neighbor.

Planning with nature

My experience includes walkable and bikable coastal planning. The coastal line is a landscape with salt, water and winds. I work with it by watching it a lot. The site always has the answer. If you watch a beach for an example, you’ll see how the sand moves with the waves. What size of rocks can be moved by the sea and how the movement and formation of the sand is impacted in relation to what you put in the sand.

If you want to keep trees on the beach, you’ll need to make the sand move into the right kinds of formations, this can be done with very simple measurements and it’s interesting to see how nature in this way is ”creating itself” Putting benches through the ground for an example can catch the sand as it is coming back with the large swell waves towards the sea. This collected sand can in turn protect a planted tree.

I think we have forgotten a way of planning where we respect nature and the given conditions. I think we have to be humble and use material and plants from the site. Because they preserve and strengthen the identity of the site. So, does the volumetric relations of a place and the way of living there. This together is the identity of the ”terroir” and the place.

In my projects I try to use the plants from the site. Some are endemic (unique to the site), some are autochthonous (indigenous plants) and some have come from other places, but they can all support salt and wind. This makes them more sustainable because you don’t have to water them, you don’t have to cut them and you don’t have to fight against them. They support every condition on the site.

When we plan a part of a town or area, then we plan a piece of landscape. A good answer of how to plan is to be humble. We don’t need to change the landscape just because it’s possible. I think we just have to manage it. To make it invisible 10 years after our intervention.

In the French west indies, the climate is hot and everything is growing very fast. The following thing after planning is then the maintenance. Here you are often forced to work with nature, because you don’t want to fight nature.

I also care for pieces of coastal landscapes where mangrove are being respected and protected. I want to give the young generation understanding of coastal forests.

So, I am now making a mangrove rehabilitation together with children. With a simple idea that I proposed: - One tree with one child - One tree per day - For 3,5 years

A city for our senses compliments digital knowledge

I think we’re looking into a quite interesting future. Regarding knowledge and how we perceive knowledge. Where the importance of the physical space will increase even more than today.

I’m thinking a lot about the new generation growing up. It’s the first global, digital and networked generation that is growing up. Where knowledge is not only something that you can find in books or read about. You can use your global networking, when you solve a problem in a video game. Or when you solve a mathematics problem. Or a relationship problem.

It’s just as easy having friends in Mexico City, as it is going to the neighbor knocking on the door and see if they want to play. You can play now 24/7 with your global friends.

We can see how the new generations uses the city and the space is a bit differently than we did. I really don’t have that much knowledge about it. So, if there’s anyone out there having any study looking at the new generation. How they use the city. That would be quite interesting!

But in a totally non-academic observation. They use physical spaces less than we do. When we were younger we explored the city. Because we didn’t know where people were. So, we had to explore. To see and explore the spaces we didn’t knew existed.

Today they hang around in different locations but together in the digital world. If we then try to see what that means in the in the physical environment. Then we need to figure out, what does the physical world have as a unique selling point? Compared to the digital.

I read a few weeks ago an article from “The Institute for the Future” Where they looked at 2030. To see and what skills would be highly regarded and what skills would be not as valuable.

They were talking a lot about the emotional intelligence. I think that’s there’s something in there that’s interesting. To be kind of going back to the real basics of human beings. In regards to our nature. Where our senses will probably be even more valuable.

Because if you look at the smell and the textures and our inner emotions. That will be hard, at least in the future 20 years. How that will be solved in the digital world. So that would be probably quite unique for the physical world.

I therefore think that the physical spaces and how we design our cities. Will be quite interesting. That the qualities of the room. Where you can use your senses.

In smelling.

The sounds.

The textures.

Just looking people in their eyes.

That would be the unique attribute. Compared to the digital spaces. Therefore, I think that, what we work with quite hard with today, to create a tempo. An atmosphere. An inclusive city and spaces. We were on the right track!

I think we need to squeeze it up a little bit more. We still have the functionality of the city quite high in our in our agendas. Where the traffic system and other functional ways of approaching the cities, is still quite dominating.

That’s quite opposite to create a city where the senses can be explored.

I would like to see:

A greener City.

A more sitable City.

A walkable City.

These will be even more important, for the future cities to be competitive. To be attractive. Because if you can learn mostly anything at home or in a digital university. Why should you visit a space or a place? Then it needs to have some unique attributes. Compared to the other ones.

If you choose from a city where the senses will be able to get you that treat, compared to other ones that is more functionalistic. I would say the cities including our senses will be even more interesting.

Environments enabling everyone’s creativity

The most important thing to me, in terms of knowledge. Is realizing that every human, no matter which role you have. Needs to be creative. I think making sure to train every single person who are working with a project. To enable their creativity.

I’m not talking about like the visual aesthetics creativity, but the problem-solving aspect of creativity. This very fundamental ability we have to create new things.

So the reason why I am drinking cup coffee or wearing t-shirt, is because we have so many thousands of years of creativity behind us. The challenging thing to me is, how can we build environments to enable that type of thinking.

I think unfortunately there’s very little knowledge about how our physical environment can support creative thinking. It’s a lot of myths and a lot of tradition. So we have a tradition for colorful rooms with a lot of different and unusual furniture. That is suppose to be a creative space. But there is no real evidence backing up that that’s good.

I definitely think that our physical environment will change. It’s really hard to protect how it will change. Because we don’t really know what is needed to make it good creative environment.

I think there will definitely be increased focus on enabling creativity in buildings. I’m convinced. This whole idea that, this is our creative room and this is your office. That will break up somehow. That’s a task I am really looking forward to see someone solve well.

In creative theory we talk about divergence and convergence. So the process of opening up or closing down. A lot of studies supports that when you open up. So when you work divergently. You should actually do it individually. So you should never try to do a group brainstorm, that’s ridiculous from a cognitive perspective. There’s no reason why two or more people should try to brainstorm or open up together. Because the second you say something, you already shared my way of thinking.

But vice versa, we know that in our conversion processes you need the opposite. You need to be a group. You need to have a lot of different points of view to make sure that your filtering of ideas is better.

So when we facilitate creative processes, we always shift back and forth. So it’s individual work. We are all the way down to three minutes individual. Then five minutes in group. Three minutes individual and then five minutes in groups. That’s the shortest periods we work with.

This is another thing that definitely has a physical manifestation. So when we do workshops like that. We have our own workstations. Where we can do our individual work and then very close by, we have the group context. So you more or less just turn around. You bring what you want to show to the group context and then you go back to your individual work.

This is a very interesting thing. That you don’t want people to be together talking all the time. Because that’s counter productive for creativity. This is another physical aspects of creativity.

Another interesting thing when we talk about the creative work environment. Is the social aspect. I think that you can design the best physical space possible. But if you cannot control how it’s being used or who are actually there, then it might not work. This place where we are now for an example ”Repubikken” It is by far the best co-working space I’ve ever been to. I’ve been working in a lot of different ones globally. I’ve been here for one year now. The main reason is the community management team.

It’s quite simple. The community managers here they know everyone a little bit and they speak to you. So if I go out for a coffee afterwards. Evelina, one of them, might come up to me and say: Did you meet this other guy? Because he’s currently working on a project that has this small overlap of yours. I don’t have to make sure to speak with everyone, because I know that the community managers they speak with me once in a while and they speak with everyone else. They see those opportunities.

So if we scale from the physical environments. To the thought environments. I think the most interesting thing to me right now, is human skills versus AI. Because there’s no doubt that AI is already capable of and will be capable of doing even more human jobs, in a very near future. The question is of course. What will humans be doing when AI is doing most of the jobs we do right now?

In my point of view, that’s creativity. What humans will have to be better and better at. Is doing what the computers cannot. We have all these things we know that AI won’t be able to do. Still there are very few forces in society that push creativity as an agenda. That’s to me very paradoxical.

What we’ve been looking more and more at is how to facilitate creativity in remote work. What we see more and more is that people are not working in the same location. They meet rarely.We have people here in Copenhagen. That we see very rarely. They are calling into Copenhagen.

What we have been looking at is how we can facilitate creative processes, where you actually collaborate with someone in the same way that you would, if you and I would to design something right here.

One of the things, that I think we will see, very soon. Is a merger of physical architecture and virtual reality. So I go to the door I might put on some gear. I open the door and then I enter another office somewhere else in the world and they will say ”Hey Balder!” when I enter.

The globalized mobile student

When I went abroad in 2009. I studied in Singapore. I had to find an accommodation there in Singapore. In the hotel industry it is already very common that you can just go online and book something and you go.

Then I discovered that in the student housing it was not at all that case. I went looking for a room and it was very hard. Therefore I decided to set up my own platform, where people can just search for a room, book it and go abroad. Since 2009 I have been doing that, to support the mobile student.

What you see is that internationalization becomes more and more widespread in the universities. It is not only because it is fun, because I had an amazing time in Singapore.

It is also simply because the world economy goes really into the global direction. You see it in the businesses, every business operates internationally. You see it in the NGOs. NGOs are international. The art scene is very international. Everywhere where you go things gets more and more international.

It starts now at university. In the future it will go from kindergarten, to schools, to universities, to workplaces, to lifelong learning and everything is really involved in being international.

In a knowledge environment, international people will be attracted by that. In a knowledge environment I see a hub and I see a city where international people like to go to.

You will see that dutch cities will not become only for dutch people and American cities will not only be for Americans. Cities, especially big cities will be for international people. Not specifically for refugees or so, but just for people that like to live and work abroad. Those cities will become hubs.

People like to live in the city center witch is not possible, because there is a limited capacity in the city center. What I see is that people will also move to the suburbs of big cities. Suburbs will become mini-hubs in the big hub.

Suburbs will function as a hub but also universities, workplaces, airports, museum districts, bar areas. All those mini-hubs will be connected to each other. Transport is going to be very important to support knowledge environments that are attracted by international people.

What I also see is that those hubs should also facilitate a good combination between working, learning, leisure and transport. Especially the metro is very popular among international workers.

In conclusion where I see where future knowledge environments will go. I think knowledge environments should have an international mindset to attract the international worker.

Livable streets for people

The idea of a sustainable and resilient city is nothing new. I think it is as old as cities themselves. They have always been resilient. That’s why they are still here. That’s a pretty good indicator, right?

Really we have been resilient. We have been sustainable. Trying to figure out how to package that better. Something that is transferable. Where you can take this great thing that Copenhagen does and put it into Toronto, or that amazing thing that Medline in Colombia does and put that directly into Stockholm.

I like to boil everything down to it’s simplest form and be incredible pragmatic. Just boiling it down to something simple. It makes it easier and more effective. The cities or the clients will have a really quick result.

I just want to do away with this tech based over complication of everything in our lives. We need to look at the streets of our cities. We need to look at the people who live in our cities.  They are the resilient ones. They are the ones that have to struggle with daily challenges.

The people are the ones that can give us the sustainability that we need. So really, if you want to create a resilient city. It is engaging your already resilient citizens, asking them for their ideas, not being so arrogant as we have been for so long. Thinking, the urban planners they can take care of that. The architects they know what to do. It is this elitist approach. Witch doesn’t really match the desires of the desires of the citizens.

I should just be able to walk out on any street in any city of the world and say, yes I belong here.

There is no incredibly arrogant swathe of asphalt. With cars and an intersection and I’m just the guy trying to cross the street and the buildings are out of scale and there are no public space in front of it. I am suppose to look up and say: Ooh! Architecture! And then, where do I sit outside this building?

Everything should be street level. You can have a sky rise city. So it’s not always about architectural scale. For me, everything is about the streets.

The streets for a millennia, has been the most democratic spaces in the history of homo sapiens. They belong to us!

We have had many decades of transport ”dictatorship” Where we have only put our efforts into providing space for more cars. Narrowing our sidewalks. If you look at photos of New York in 1920ies. The sidewalks where massive, because of the volume.

Historically, these democratic spaces. We did everything in the streets. We had small apartments, but we went out into our ”living room”, The streets. We bought and sold our goods. We transported ourselves. We flirted. We gossiped with our neighbors. Our kids played in the streets. Everything happened there. In the public arena.

Now we are different in our cities. We have nice apartments, big or small, doesn’t matter. So we spend a lot of time, in front of Netflix or whatever we do. So we use the streets less. But it is in our urban DNA. To go out onto the streets. Because we are humans. We want to interact. So understanding the psycological urban needs of our citizens is incredibly important.

When they pedestrianized the main through fare through Copenhagen in the 1960ies. Strøget. The worlds largest pedestrian street. The Danes, where allegedly where complaining.

”No, we don’t want that! We are not Italians, we don’t want to walk! That’s what Italians do. They are going for their walks in their piazzas and stuff.”

And then the next day. After they just went ahead and did it anyway. The next day I guess the Danes realized that they were ”Italians”. Or that Italians are ”Danes”. Or that we are just homo sapiens.

We need to get back on the streets. We need to encourage people to use them. We need to make it an enjoyable space.

Just me walking down to my shop. In any neighborhood in the world. I don’t need to enjoy it. I don’t need to go:

OH MY GOOD! THIS IS AMAZING! JUST WALKING TO MY SHOP!

I should have it in my head that: This is enjoyable, oh there is a neighbor. Just looking around doing all the things that we do. That really is the goal. Putting democracy back onto the asphalt. And limiting the destructive capabilities of automobiles.

Sustainability and resilience is for many people one term on the top of the other. In my opinion, it’s a story of an evolution.

For approximately 50 years we have had an ideology of sustainability. Sustainability was designed at a time when the economy was growing linear and the resources were the balancing between the growth of the economy and the use of resources.

But since then we have started to see different shocks and crises happening in the economy as well as in our society. We saw the economy changing from a linear economy to a economy that was going more up and down.

That required at the global scale and even at the city level an upgrade from the sustainability approach into the resilience approach.

Because now, with the timing of the planet boundaries. One of the main response of the cities is to be capable to anticipate as much as possible. To manage in case of crisis.

Crisis in different terms, not only in terms of natural resources. But also in terms of, for an example, cybersecurity and cyber attacks. Crisis such as social crisis due to the lack of affordable housing or due to the high unemployment rate, that has happened over the last few years in the south of Europe. For an example in Italy, Greece and Spain.

Sustainability is much focus on on natural resources. Resilience is broader approach to the city and on the city level.

We don’t need to develop specific solutions to make a city more resilient. We need to augment the capability of the city. To be ready to anticipate or to manage the crisis.

I’m highlighting this point, coming from the sustainability and the climate change background. So I still believe that sustainability is essential for balancing the use of Natural Resources.We need to be more sustainable and reduce the use of resources. We need to make as much as possible of the existing reserves circularly. In order to have a more sustainable economy and  to reduce the risks.

Ten years ago, I worked in Estonia in Tallinn. My director was Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm environment institute. I had no idea of what resilience was at that time.

I got a couple of meeting with Johan. He was based in Stockholm and I got inspired by his perspective that you don’t have to solve problems. You have to manage problems with an integrated approach. Because the risks and crisis will come back

It’s like in life. One day you fine and the day after you have the fever and then you are fine again. Maybe after a couple of years the fevers comes back. We need to be capable to manage this. What is inspiring me is this capability. That you have to solve problems looking more at the process and the capability of coping with problems.

At the same time resilience it’s a concept. A world that is used in different domains. They use it in engineering, material engineering. They use it in biology. They use it in ICT. They use resilience in infrastructure. Urban planners love resilience.

So it’s a common word. Normally every kind of profession has their own words and they try to protect themselves from the other. With resilience they find a common ground. So that makes me inspired. When trying to make my colleagues, but also the community.The private and the public, working together in design in a better future for the city of Milan.

I always remember when my grandfather told me that after the Second World War. All of the communities they got close to each other. To rebuild the country after the world war. That shows the resilience perception that we have. It’s a feeling of resilience when you decide all together. That even if we got the biggest crisis ever in the country. Now it’s time to put together our capacity and move forward.

After a tragedy, everybody say we should start from the beginning. Just delete the past and start from the beginning. I disagree with this. Because in every tragedy there is always a flower. That is capable to survive. That flower is the initial point. This way of thinking is resilience to me.

In the city we have now the capability to start from some of our capabilities. We had in the south part of the city. Until few months ago a big park where people who were drug addicted would come. This become a problem. Also a problem in terms of accessibility of a green park and a green area for us.

Together with an environmental Association the municipality started to clean up. What happened was that due to the lack of presence in the area the nature was growing naturally. They realized that this had become something unbelievable and unique. Because nature was growing on it’s own without any kind of limitation. So we decided to clean up the whole area with our hands and not with Machines. Because we wanted to preserve what is the ”chaos” in the nature.

It is something that it’s also important to understand that sometimes you don’t have to clean or to design a better environment because the nature itself is capable to manage itself. The city is quite the same sometimes. Should we always have a strategy or vision or a grand design? Or should it be a ”chaotic” or a ”chaos” approach in a proper way? That builds the future of the city. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have rules for safety or for health issues etc.

Why should we always define the limits of something? Can we try to make this flow of innovation and capabilities going on their own?

A lot of people define city in terms of either places or spaces or a collection of infrastructure. Whether it’s our infrastructure or soft infrastructure. But the way I look at a city is that the city is a collection of different human subjectivities.

I think when we look at a city. We to often look at the city as something of an externality. When we look at something as an externality, we don’t see it as part of our ownership and stakeholdership framework. We think that the city is external to us.

If you really think this through and really start questioning it. You see that there is no reason for us to think of the city as an externality or as an external structure.

It is something that is established by our own consciousness. By our own mindfulness. By our thoughtfulness. So it is as much of a of an infrastructural construct. As much as it is a construct, that is of political, social and economic nature. It’s a cultural construct.

It’s an anthropological construct. It is, as an anthropological construct going to be populated by several stories. Several ethnographies. It is in those ethnographies which are located within within different kinds of urban spaces and places, that you define a city as an organism. In some way or the other, you are able to feel the city, just as the city is able to feel you.

When someone asks you, in a very honest manner. ”What do you think about your favorite city?” You don’t talk about the train system or the bus system or or the kind of high-rises that you live in or the kind of large house that you live in.

You don’t even talk about the city in terms of large open spaces. You talk about the city like a warm friend.

So if a Stockholm is a city that is functional and works hard and fast. That is a cultural feeling that you get. If Malmö is an open city and an inclusive city and its friendly for kids. That’s also a cultural morning.

So in some way or the other, in the end of the day. A city becomes a human subjectivity. It is a reflection of the human subjectivity and it also becomes a repository of human subjectivity. In some way or the other it shapes you, just as much as you shape a city.

When you define a city in that manner and you define the city in human terms. It has to be an organism. It has to be organic. The term organism comes from the fact that it is organic. If it is organic then you have to see it as a  living body. If you’re going to see it as a living body. You can’t say that I’m going to develop only the ”arms” and the ”legs”. Just like the human body you have to treat the city in an holistic manner.

It is in holistic that framework, that you have to start looking at urban planning, thinking and urbanism. From the point of view of creating an organic whole. Rather than as a set of different modules.

We could look at planning as something that cannot be defined in a manner that is standalone. You can’t say that I’m going to do traffic planning and not take into account that traffic planning is connected to mobility and mobility is connected to people staying in a particular place and people staying in a particular place is completely dependent on a whole host of factors.

Depending on their purchasing power, depending on how equal or unequal that city is. Depending on what kind of access do you have to the different kinds of city spaces? What kind of opportunity cost you have to pay in order to access this space?

So a city that is extremely unequal will have extremely well developed parts of the city and extremely underdeveloped and undeveloped parts of the city.

When you try and ask an organic hole or an organism or a body. To start interacting with very well-developed parts with underdeveloped parts. You’re going to have a problem. That’s what happens in several cities where inequalities and inequities creates a first-world part at one level and third-world parts in other parts of the city.  

That that’s something that contributes to vulnerabilities. That’s something that contributes to lack of sustainability and resilience. If you reduce those vulnerabilities and if you try and say that vulnerability is essentially about two points.

It is about access and it’s about equity. If you put access and equity together in saying that everything has to have an equitable access. Whether it’s equitable access to energy. Equitable access to spaces. Equitable access to social capital. Equitable access to economic and physical capital.

Then you’re going to increase sustainability and resilience of a city. Because in making everything equitable and accessible, you’re going to create a more inclusive City. And in creating an inclusive City, you’re going to create a community of people who will stand for each other. Who will understand each other’s problems better. Who will have a better communication with each other.

Simply because of the fact, that there is openness. There’s transparency.There’s accountability. Each one is able to interact and engage with each other. There are countless number of spaces and places where people can know their problems. People can come together. People can debate different kinds of issues. That is, in that sense, true urbanism for me.

Today sustainability and resilience are both seen as questions of ecology and environment. I see them not as much as a question of ecology, environment or of nature. As a question of the human condition.