Hi everybody. Hi, I'm Diane Davis. I'm the chair of the Department
of Urban Planning and Design, and I'm going to get us started
because we are actually- this event is going to go
until 1:30 and not 2:00. And I don't want to take
away too much time from us-- this collective group to be
able to have the great pleasure to listen to Richard Sennett
speak to us today about-- possibly about his
new book, but also a series of projects that he's
been working on for a while. The title of his lecture
is called "The Open City" and we'll hear more
about that in a second. Again, I don't want to
take up too much time to-- well actually I could not
possibly begin to, kind of, reiterate everything
that you need to know about Richard Sennett. His bio, the number of
awards that he's had, the kind of esteem
that he's held in many different
disciplines related to design, sociology, history. You name it, he's kind of one of
the leading intellectual voices of contemporary, I can't
even say American, academia, but also globally
working now in and living in London part of his time. I do want to say that
he's a professor at both-- a professor of the
humanities at NYU as well as a professor of
sociology at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. And the chair of
[? theater mundy, ?] an organization
we might actually hear a little more about. He's been a visiting-- distinguished
visitor and recipient of awards at multiple major
universities around the world, including Cambridge
University, universities in Germany, Italy, et cetera. But the other
thing that I wanted to mention a little bit
about Richard Sennett's extraordinarily deep and
important published work. If you take a look at
his CV and the number-- he's basically published a
book like every other year from maybe 1970 or
something like that. On a personal note,
I want to mention that when I was in
college in Chicago I remember reading one
of his first books, it was not the first one,
"Families Against The City." An amazing book about, kind
of, migration, culture, equity, inequality, and, kind of,
collective consciousness that blew my mind as an
urban sociology major. Probably had something
to do with continuing to study sociology myself. And he's written a
series of major books that you all have heard about. "The Uses Of
Disorder," "The Fall Of Public Man," a book on
authority, "Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in
Western Civilization," "The Conscience of the Eye." And these last two
are really oriented towards the design
professions in ways that maybe the
earlier books were oriented towards
historical urban sociology. A book called, "Respect
in a World of Inequality," "The Culture of New Capitalism." I'm going to ask
you about capitalism later actually because
that's kind of dropped out. It's come and gone
in your [? ove. ?] More recently in
2008 "The Craftsman" which also a really
well received book. And recently in 2012 Yale
University Press, "Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and
Politics of Cooperation." I'm wondering whether in that
especially that last issue of how people work
together, or live together, is a theme that has gone
way back to families against a city. It's threaded through
most of your work, and I think it's
going to be part of what you're talking about
in your lecture on "The Open City." So without further ado, my-- I'm so pleased to
introduce Richard Sennett. [applause] Thank you. You know that I
was a student here. I was a architectural
dropout, so I went into Arts and
Sciences, because I couldn't hack architecture. But I've taught here
off and on all my life, and I'm teaching Elements now. And it's really such
a pleasure for me. This is really home
for me, the GSD. So I'm really glad to be here. What I thought I would do
today, is describe to you some ideas that
oriented me and others who have worked on a project
for the UN called Habitat. Habitat is a project of
human habitat UNESCO. And please do not ask me why
the Americans have dropped out of UNESCO. I'm so sick about
talking about this. UN-Habitat, UNESCO, the
World Bank and the IMF. And it takes a look at the
state of the global environment once every 20 years. Now I'm so old that I attended
the first of this in 1976. And this was my third
Habitat meeting, and I was one of
the chairs of it. I don't think I'll
make it to Habitat IV, but I want to describe to you
what we were trying to do. Basically, in the
intellectual part of Habitat-- which concluded a
year ago in Quito, and whose scientific papers--
that is academic papers-- are published next
week by Elsevier-- a huge pile of these papers. What we were trying to do is
put together an idea of planning and an idea of design. That is a very GSD-like project. But we were trying to
do this in a context where, more and
more, particularly in the developing world, they're
separated to the detriment of both. So I'm going to just
talk a little about how we try to see the physical and
the social parts of the city together. I haven't talked
about this before. So tell me if something
doesn't resonate. You tell me. But the idea about
this is to understand what a city should
be in its physical, and its socioeconomic
and political economy. How do you put
those two together? In my own view, what
a city should be is a place which
enriches experience. And that means,
practically, a question of opening up
opportunities economically. But socially and
psychologically, it means managing complexity. That an open city is one
in which people become-- thanks to the way
the city operates, and the way it's designed-- becomes a place in
which people are more and more
skilled in managing complex conditions of
life, and taking advantage of opportunities which are
unforeseen, accidental, et cetera. Now I would say that cities
today are not enabling either. They're becoming particularly--
under the aegis of global capitalism-- ever more rigid,
crude, and closed. Jacob Burckhardt, the
19th century historian, talked about the age
of brutal simplifiers. He meant nationalism. He looked forward to Trump. But I think in urbanism today,
we are in a different way, under the shadow of this
age of brutal simplifiers. And in Habitat III,
I and my group-- which is Ricky Burdett
and Saskia Sassen-- asked what we might do to
open the city physically up, so that people's experience
in it could be more complex, and their ability to manage
difficulty and complexity could expand. And before I go on
to describe this, I want to thank Clay, who
was one of our researchers on this project. The UN is not, I must say, a
very efficient organization. And Clay managed to deal with
her inefficiencies beautifully. One thing we tried to
do in looking as concept of the open city,
was to take it not so much as a kind of
planning instrument, but as a set of
propositions that people would bounce off of, and
react to either positively or negatively. But it's an idea that tries
to see the city whole. So let me start by saying,
what does complexity mean? For Aristotle, it
meant synoikismos. That is, a coming together
of oikai, which are like extended family groups. And famously, you may know,
that he wrote in the Politics, that a city cannot come
into being by people who are the same. It has to come into being-- the gathering
together the synergy-- of people who are different-- These different oikai. Practically, that meant-- in
terms of combining people-- for the sake of defense,
or for the sake of trade. But it also means
something politically, which is, people learning
how to account points of view unlike one's own. That is, to acquire
the skills to deal with people unlike oneself. So this notion of
synoikismos contains in it an idea that there is a
kind of craft required to be able to identify,
understand, combat, and work with people who
are different than oneself. It's a fundamental,
it seems to me, principle of urbanism ethically. When we started out confronted
by masses of planning statistics about growth patterns
in various parts of Central Africa and Southeast Asia,
we looked at this large body of reports and so on. And Saskia Sassen said, let's
just junk it for the moment, and let's ask ourselves
what it means ethically for a person to develop the
skill for dealing with people to practice synoikismos. The UN officials, they
blanched a bit, but we did it. And here is my own
take on how this works. The ethical
framework for dealing with people who
are unlike oneself, is exemplified in a classic
conflict between two Jewish theologians-- Martin Buber and
Emmanuel Levinas. For Buber-- as those of you,
whether you are Jewish or not, may know-- the idea of the ethical
relationship between people is expressed as an
I-thou relationship. That is, that the more that
you know about somebody else, or interact with them,
the more intimate and closer you come to them. It's hard to render in English,
but it's the difference between you and thou. You is impersonal. Thou is a more personal-- [? ich ?] und Du in
German, and so on. The idea for Buber,
therefore, was that if you mix people together
the more they interact, the more they'll
understand each other. Whereas for Levinas,
the important thing was the dash that
separates I and thou. That is to say that there is
an unbridgeable difference between people when
they come together. They don't integrate,
they don't unite, they don't form a community. Instead, they become
neighbors to each other. And the concept of
neighbor, for Levinas, is somebody who is aware
of another intensely, but is separated by that dash
from ever fully becoming one with them. And this, to me-- and you'll see in these
massive statistical reports-- is a kind of insight that
we've tried to apply-- this Levinasian notion
of the neighbor-- to the urban condition. It requires skill to
be intensely aware of somebody else, to
interact with them, and yet not to try and abolish
the boundaries between self and other. It's a particularly
urban concept because the Levinasian
version of the neighbor, is something that allows
strangers to remain stranger in some sense, to each other. Which doesn't suppose the
local community is ultimately the ethical
foundation of a city-- it's moral foundation. That people can remain
apart, and yet mutually aware and interactive. So this notion of
the neighbor is a peculiarly urban condition. So the question was, it's not
just a matter of a good heart. It's a skill in dealing
with that hyphen. And the question for
us was, how do we translate this into the every
day experience of people in cities? I took a step long
ago, in my own mind, towards answering this
question, when I worked at MIT. You know that place
that's down the river? I taught planning
there for a while. And my office was
next to the Media Lab. And a lot of the people--
this is in the 90s-- in the Media Lab at that time,
were interested in Open Systems Theory. And for me, I began to fill
in this kind of ethical vision early in my own thinking,
by thinking about the city as an open system-- that the more open
it is, the more this peculiar urban condition
of neighborliness can develop. What do we mean
by an open system? What I remember
from that time is that the Media Lab
was filled with people reinventing the world. They made a contrast
between open and closed via a a contrast
between Microsoft-- which was a donor
to the Media Lab-- and themselves. They thought of a Microsoft
experiment as closed, and a Media Lab
experiment as open. What does this mean? First of all, it
meant exploration-- open-- versus
hypothesis testing-- which is closed. Second, it meant a non-linear
process of research-- as in a rolling experiment-- versus a predictable
path of outcomes. It's the difference,
in mathematical terms, between Boolean logic-- which is yes-no logic-- and Bayesian logic--
which is a more open-- in which the word
may be, or it's probable, but not certain-- comes in. That introduces an
element of nonlinearity. And finally, it
introduced the notion of-- very proud of-- the
ability to fail, and to learn from failure. Whereas, the economics
of a closed system are such that failure
is not an option. That you always have
to produce a result rather than abort a problem. All of these-- as I saw from
the work that these Media Lab people were doing-- had a kind of ethical
dimension which many of them didn't know about. Because they were
celebrating the open-- openness to the unknown. They were celebrating the
other in Levinasian terms, rather than familiar
interactions with which people became more and more familiar. So I began to think then,
how would a city model itself on this kind of an open system? And that's-- as I said--
this was long before I worked for the UN, I've worked for
the UN for 40 years off and on. But I didn't put this together
with the planning work I was doing for the UN at the time. But I began to think, even
before practical things which I'm going to show you, that the
translation of an open system into a city has three aspects. First, that socially, an
open city is dialogical-- that economically, an
open city is synchronous-- and that politically,
an open city is always to the left
of its nation state. These have become
guiding principles for me in thinking about
the city as open, and I'd like to explain them. The term dialogical,
as you probably know, is derived from Mikhail
Bakhtin, the literary critic, but also social critic, put to
death by Stalin in the 1930s. It focuses on the
process of exchange and the unlikely
processes of exchange-- first of all, in
literature-- but secondly, in ordinary language
communication, rather than looking at
discourse as a means to the end of taking a decision. I don't know of any of you
study decision-making theory. It's fundamentally
hostile to the notion that discourse is a means
to an end, which puts an end to discourse itself. The idea about this, as it
becomes something in the city, is the unified action, or the
decision to act together-- that kind of coming together
in that Martin Buber way-- is something that is replaced
by a notion of a process, which is more important than
the plan that it makes. Very hard for us
to think that way. We think about
planning as you talk, you look at the alternatives,
you make a decision, and then you do it. That's not dialogical. The dialogical thing is always
a rolling self-edit of a plan. A plan is a proposition which
is completely, if you like, subject to feedback. In the World Bank-- to just translate this
into practical terms-- we have come-- or
they, I have to say-- they have come to understand the
dialogical principles are ways to avoid many of the
top-down, rigid, and often disastrous decisions they took
about finance development. People are trained in
listening skills and learning to be silent, using
non-combative language, and most of all,
speaking informally, rather than always to the point. It creates messy and
inefficient meetings, but they're also much
more involving because of their very informality. And this is something
that is, I think, built into any open system. That it's dialogical in
focusing on self-correcting or self-revising processes,
rather than looking at discourse as a
means-to-the-end of action. The second aspect of
an open city to me, economically, is
it's synchronicity-- which simply means that many
things are happening at once. This goes back to Aristotle. When Aristotle thought
about the synoikismos, what he was thinking about is that
all these different oikai, these tribes I guess
you could call them-- in Greek they're called tritis-- anyhow, let's not go there-- that they did different things. So his question was,
how do you put together an economic activity in which
some people are making pots, other people are making spears,
in which some people are banking, and other
people are doing something very
different-- medicine or something like that. The idea of synchronicity
is that there is no coordination
between these activities of a superordinate kind. That is, they interact,
but there's not an overarching principle that
binds them together into one coherent form of activity. And for Aristotle,
the notion was that the cracks that open up
between these uncoordinated, but related and
interacting activities, opens up the sphere of
economic opportunity. So you know I started
thinking about this. This isn't just about
the Ancient Greeks. That the way in which you get
opening up a city economically, is precisely by making
those interstices where new things can be
developed, where people can be entrepreneurial,
rather than doing the kind of-- as the World Bank used to do-- I don't mean to pick
on them, as I worked for them for a long time. But as it used to do. Which is to say
that what you wanted was coherence in
economic planning. That, for Aristotle,
was the death of a city. For us, when we started
thinking about-- Saskia particularly--
about economic activity in modern cities in the
developing world today-- we have to call them emerging
cities by the way, [inaudible] is that how can we
plan those ruptures? That is, how do we create
incoherences economically, that allow those interstices
which open people up? And that goes back
to the issue, Clay, that you and I were working
on, which is informality. But it's economic activity
understood as informal in the sense that
it's synchronous, which means that it's
relatively uncoordinated. OK-- Oh God, I'm
talking too much. The third aspect
of an open city, is that the open city should
be to the left of its nation state. In a way, this is perfectly
and empirically obvious to all of you in the United States,
which is large cities that are complex, and have
many elements are-- like New York and Boston-- much more to the left
than their nation states. We mean this, I think, in a
more structural form, which is, that the work of
legislating a nation state is essentially the work in
most developing nation states, of achieving closure on the
informality of the city. That's the dynamic
we were playing with. So the nation
state is, in a way, it's principles of political
operation-- constitutional, as well as dictator centered-- are things that close down this
self-revising process simply by the formulation of laws that
apply to all the conditions in the nation state. So what we're really arguing
is that every open city is not so much socialist as
anarcho-sydicalist. That that's the opposition. That's the left
we're interested in. That it's out of necessity. The more open it is, the more
it escapes the nation states' desire to create order. I don't want to get lost in the
relationship between Catalonia and Spain, but it's a
perfect example of this. OK well, these were then, some
of the principles how we work. We started backwards. We started with values-- the scientific committee
for this year's Habitat III. Those values are the
values of open city. It's founded on something
that's very fundamental, which the idea of synoikismos. The values are more Levinasian
than they are Buberian. That technically
those values translate into the ideas of
an open system, and that an open
system, such as you can see it in
technical practice, translates into a
city is an open system via the principles of
dialogicalism, synchronicity, and anarcho-syndicalism. That's where we were. Now, I have to say that
there were several people who took smelling salts
when we presented this at various points. Now, I'm going to
start to just show you some slides about what we
were thinking about this. Hello. Go. There we are. This is-- you have
to forgive me-- I started photographing
on iPhone, and I understand
just whenever it gets blown up, the
limits of using it. This is Nehru Place
in Delhi, and this is the Silicon Valley of Delhi. Beneath the platform
over the ground here is a parking garage. The things you see on the
side are startup centers-- little startup centers. This is a place of lots
and lots of different kinds of activities happening
at the same time. Most of these are stolen goods
that people are selling here. You know, iPhones that
dropped off of a truck, and things like that-- intermixed with real things
like saris and so on. So it conforms to a
kind of economic model. But the most important
thing about it to me, as an urbanist looking
at it, is the porosity between the wall
and the platform-- between the enclosed space
and the open public space. The people working in here,
some of them, they shop here. Many of the people who are
selling stolen goods here, are receiving them here. As an innovation
center, Nehru Place is stimulating to people because
it's not just about innovators living together in
a bubble, but it's part of a very complex city. This is in the southeast
part of Nehru Place. The reason we were here
is we want to protect this place against development. And every developer in Delhi
has their eyes on this. You know, get rid
of all these people, rip down this, and
build a high-rise. So the open principle here
is that there's porosity in function and in form, and
that the character of the space is informal. Just so you understand that this
is not something, as it were, Third World. I hate that word. Something similar operates
in McDougle Street. This is stuff going to
a lumber yard over here. These are yuppie spaces
on McDougle Street, and above them are old
Italian tenements mixed in, in this part of McDougle Street,
with light manufacturing. So in my city, this
is a kind of analog, and the parts mix
in with each other. I talked about the
relationship of learning that an open city takes skill. And this is a slum in Dharavi. It's again very mixed. The reason I show
it to you is this. Over here is a school. I don't know if any of you know
anything about Indian trains. But Indian trains
are not what we think of as the most
reliable on time. So the kids who
live here have got to learn a kind of street
smarts about getting here, and in a very basic
way, listening hard to the sound of a train
that may be there. Sometimes, if they
can't escape the train, they have to learn
how to hop onto it. The trains are extremely noisy,
so the lessons in the school are geared to when the
train doesn't wipe out the voices of the
teachers or pupils. That's street smarts
in an open environment. And one of the things that
impressed me in Medellin-- where I also worked
quite a lot-- is how sensorily adept
kids are in dealing with unforeseen or
unchanging conditions here. Much more so, I would hazard,
than kids in a Bourgeois state in a city like
London or New York. They're constantly
having to revise the knowledge they have
of an environment which itself is very unstable. This, unfortunately, has
been at times the scene of Muslim-Hindu conflict. And sometimes quite violent. And the children, again, have to
learn how to navigate around-- there are outbreaks of
violence all the time-- and the children have
to learn to navigate that kind of social
danger, just the way they do physical danger. So that's what I mean by-- and they get better
and better at it-- a rolling kind of
dialogical skill. This is-- just so you
see it in Dharavi-- is another one of these
terrible iPhone photos. But what you see
here is the mixture of, this is a production
site, food-selling site. People live up here, and
they also work up here. And this kind of gradation
means that the space itself is experienced as many things,
rather than monofunctional. And I should say about
monofunctional, spaces, that's one of them in the back. I'm really sorry
about my photograph. It's only a space for residents. This is funded by the
IMF, this project. It's housing. It has flush toilets,
et cetera, et cetera. It's decayed in about
the five or seven years since it's been up. Because, like a monoculture,
only one thing happens there. People don't really take
ownership over it the way they do about this space,
which they have to make work, because it's so complicated. Whereas this space
is just degraded. The stairwells are
full of shit and piss. People don't have a feeling
that they belong here in the way that they do down here. OK. This is a kind of closed city. Well there's a lot
to say about this. But the these spaces are
impermeable, as you can see, and they're very repetitive. And the reason I show
you this is that they're derivative of this. This is the most fundamental
image of modern planning you need to know. This is a proposal of Corbusier
to destroy a complex fabric in the Marais, and to replace
it by a closed system, which is boundaryless and homogeneous. It's additive in
Closed Systems Theory-- That the whole is not greater
than the sum of the parts. And Corbusier-- this
from 1925, wanted to extend it over all
the Marais, and indeed all of Paris. The buildings themselves
are quite beautiful. So this is where I
grew up, right here. This is Robert Taylor
Homes in Chicago. It was applied by
liberal planning as a way of housing
mass numbers of people in similar structures,
which are relationless-- they are just
additive structures. And this is another
version of the plan Voisin. The shelves within the sheaths
of all of these skyscrapers in Tokyo are exactly the same. And much of the skyscraper--
this is a photograph of my friend Thomas Strood-- you look at it you
think this is diversity in the urban environment. In fact, it's exactly the
idea of the plan Voisin, but disguised. And this, I would really
say, is the enemy of-- in thinking about
an open city-- this is the enemy of this, which
is this kind of disguised homogeneity. And that was for us a
very practical thing. I want to go faster. We did a lot of work
on smart cities. And here is another aspect
of any closed system, that there is a tight fit
between form and function. We looked at this in Masdar. This is a docking station
designed for the Masdar car. And this was done by my
friend Bill Mitchell, and Frank Gehry
designed this car. Unfortunately, after
they worked on this car, others came along
and improved it. Which meant that
the cars no longer fit in the docking stations,
which have been torn down. So this is also an issue
about open-ended design in an open system,
which is, that you avoid a tight fit for
form and function, which is always a recipe for
technological obsolescence. Always. Now, I'm going to speak
to you very quickly about what we tried-- Well, just let me say
that I'm so long-winded. You know the
fortunes of high tech offer a key to understanding
how the city is closed. High tech has moved from an
open to a closed condition. Monopoly capitalism,
restriction of participation in actually the formation of a
program's open source, the menu rather than the
kernel dominates. And that's true
in cities as well. There's a loss of synchronicity. There's kind of standardization. There's much less local
experiment economically, and there is an erosion of
the powers of municipalities at the hands of
nation states, which is a really big issue
in the developing world. I'm not going to talk about this
because I've talked too much. So I just wanted to end
this presentation by saying, what can design do
open up the city? That was our
practical problematic. I am not a design determinist. I don't think that anything
you learn in this building will change capitalism. But that's the wrong
way to think about it. that The idea is,
what if you could get to the economic and
political instruments to contest Google
and Microsoft, what would you do in their place? We were talking about
this last week in class. If you believe that design
is a kind of leading edge against capitalism, basically-- well let's not get into it. Anyhow. But that's the idea. What can design do about this? We singled out three
things that you'll see in these technical reports. Edge conditions,
incomplete form, and arbitrary markings
of value, is something that design can do. You know that in
the natural world there's a distinction
on the edge condition, between ecological borders
and ecological boundaries. Very important condition. An ecological border is
something where at the edge there is more intense activity
between different groups. OK. That's true of the way when
the shore hits the land. That's where organisms feed. It's where the speed of
evolution is strongest. Species, and so on. This, which is drawn
by one of my students-- and my favorite image
in this whole thing-- are tiger boundaries
drawn in Asia. And they represent-- you know
how a tiger makes a boundary and poops, and it tells
you don't go across that. And these are pretty
rigid, and pretty solid boundaries between the yellow,
and the red, and so on. But the notion is that at the
boundary there's less activity. So that's the two
edge conditions. One which the edge
intensifies activity, which is like a border,
and the boundary in which the edge condition dispels it. Now, we're interested in
making more borders and less boundaries in the city. And we're inspired by this,
not simply by the present day conditions, but by the
example of Noli's map of Rome. But if you look at the
little things here, they're all about
permeable public spaces. That's what all these
little markings are. This is not a figured ground. This is a much more
sophisticated map in which Noli really tried
to draw what is impermeable and what is permeable. St. Peter's as you know. And we were interested,
were inspired by this to look at this. This is an urban
boundary in Caracas. We're trying to work at it. You can see what the
boundary is made of. It's made of traffic. The only way to cross from here
to here is this one bridge. Maids cross from here
to clean these houses. Nobody from this middle class
thing crosses in to the barrio. This was done under the sainted
socialist regime of Venezuela. This one. This is ubiquitous throughout
the emerging cities. OK. The second thing we
were interested in was incomplete form. You all know Aravena's Iquique,
which is a form made incomplete in order to be filled in. The before and after. And the idea of this-- which is rather persuasive,
although I don't like the actual architecture of it-- The idea of persuasiveness
is it's better to make half of a good house,
than to make a complete cruddy house. So these are economic
and very good houses. I adore him, but I have so
many problems about this. Anyhow. But that's the result. It's
sweat equity, and it works. We were interested in a
different condition, which is incomplete form as something
that's found in the city, rather than made from the start. And the reason for
that is something that you may not know if you
don't know Third World cities. The spread in them
is not built just on empty agricultural land. There are abandoned spaces
that are filled in for housing. There are places which,
as we see a lot in China, in which there are
disused things-- like factories and so on-- which could be recolonized. And the idea that
the development occurs on a kind of blank
slate is really wrong. A lot of development
occurs through colonizing forms that were incomplete. I worked on this project. This has been always
a guide to me. This is the Riverside Viaduct
at 125th street in New York. Do you know it? Well, the West Side
Highway is above it, and this was originally just
left in the [? moses ?] era, this was just left below this. This is the west edge of Harlem. And we put the first
fairway supermarket. We just inserted
below the highway. It was the first time
that blacks and whites had a supermarket in West
Harlem, and they met there. And it was the kind
of racial co-presence which fit into the kind
of social relations I've been describing to you. But the point about
this is everywhere in cities there are
places like this, which are spaces which
are incomplete forms which are found. And our argument
in Habitat III is that these are the spaces
we want to develop. We want to do this
kind of stuff, rather than draw on
blank sheets of paper. And that's a big
issue, I would say, for people doing elements here. The tendency is always
to treat the city as a kind of tabula rasa,
which loses out exactly on the possibilities for
doing this kind of stuff. The third thing
we did is we were very interested in the
ways of arbitrarily marking spatial value-- to make a value where
nobody saw value in space. The prototype for this,
the classic way to do it, is the Piazza del
Popolo, and Sixtus V. You use this obelisk as a
way of saying, come here, this is not just an empty space
at the end of a bunch of roads, it has a value. The issue for us
was the relation between context and non-context
in ways of marking space. This is a very
context-specific marker. The frame here
determines the form of these markers, which mark
this is a place of importance. We were much more
interested in this-- in the use of arbitrary
markers to make value where there is no value. This young boy is tending-- this is in Medellin, where
I work a lot, as I said. It's just he bought a
plant and he planted it. And it's a way of marking that
space as something other than-- it's blasted out because there's
been a lot of drug violence there. I'm just saying,
this is habitable. And what we have been thinking
about is ways of doing this. I'm going to show you
the design issue of this. This, in Berlin, is a
context specific intervention of a bench. It can only be there
because of the steps. Where this is an
arbitrary imposition. These benches are imposed
to one of the most degraded streets in East
Berlin, and they make value. One of the things that we have
been thinking about in the work we have been doing,
particularly in working with decayed
environments, is how to create a system of these
arbitrary markers that mark that this place
matters to someone. These people have
never seen a bench. I don't know if any of you
know, parts of East Berlin are disgusting. They are decaying. People on the street. You can see all of this. But these very simple
kind of interventions are creating value for people. And I have to say, it's part
and parcel of an analytic level of what happens
in an open system, that there are what are called
arbitrary intrusions which change the path of development. That's where you
get task dependency through what are called
arbitrary intrusions. If you use the Linux system-- I can barely program
it-- but if you're good at programming in it,
you can introduce these all the time. This is the urban
analog to changing the path of what something
looks like through an arbitrary thing. So this has translated. We're spending a lot more money
in both the IMF and World Bank, on these things that are
looked at as gewgaws instead of buildings, on
street furniture, on landscaping, on
things that arbitrarily raise the value of places. So I hope this gives you an
idea of what I've been up to. As I say, I don't think
I'll live to Habitat IV. Maybe I'll make to
90, I don't know. I doubt it. But for us, these aren't all
that we're thinking about. But these give you
an eye flavor working to open up edges as borders,
to work with incomplete forms as found opportunities,
and to impose arbitrarily value of transforming the city
by design into an open system. So that's what I have to say. [applause] [interposing voices] Yeah, fine. Open up for questions. Tell me where we went wrong. It's only 20 years of work, so. Well, I'll start
with a question. Yeah? While you guys are getting
your questions together. So I actually have two
maybe related questions. First of all, thank
you very much. I always love hearing you
draw on your great urban sociological [inaudible] Whatever. --trying to understand how
people interact in spaces. Your implicit, if not explicit,
critique of modernism, in thinking about the open city. So I guess, my first
question has to do with-- I mean, the general
question is, how would you get citizens and the state-- and we can talk about
the local state now, not even the
national government-- you made a point about the
left and the national state-- to value the open city
that you are producing. Because I can see, in a roomful
of designers, how we love what you're talking about. And the serendipity, and
the beauty of mixed use, and spontaneity, and
serendipity-- things you've all written about. But as somebody who works
in the developing world, you can imagine a conversation
with bureaucratic officials-- and even some middle-class
citizens-- who do not appreciate the romanticization
of informality, for example, that
you've shown of Mumbai. And that we may hate Corbusier
and these big high-rises, but a lot of people
want to live there, and a lot of real
estate developers want to build those things,
and a lot of local governments are looking for mass-produced
housing for their citizens. So just let me add that I'm
working with students here. I've done some work in Mexico. We're in a city in [inaudible],,
I hope some of you are here. Oh, really? But you get citizens that want
to have single-family homes out in the middle of nowhere. They don't want
to be interacting in places that look like
Mumbai and Dharavi, et cetera. So how do we take
these wonderful ideas that you're talking about, that
we as designers and planners might be thinking about, and
how do we promote and change the way people have come
to think about cities now? Well, that's a
wonderful question. One of the volumes in
the report of Habitat III is about co-production. And our answer to getting people
involved in working this way, is by a whole set-- and
it's in my new book. It's so cheap and it'll come
out April 11th you guys. It has a lot about co-production
as a way of involving people in the process of wanting to
make places more open rather than closed. I'm going to just give
you one example of this that we've been working on. Co-production is not the
same as consultation. Consultation is an expert
getting up and saying, this is what you should do. Isn't it beautiful? And the people say, no,
that's not what I want. We've worked with all
sorts of techniques where skilled designers like
me and ordinary citizens, work on actually generating
alternative forms for a particular project. Some of it may seem
trivial to you. The use of big-scaled
Styrofoam blocks, which people can move
around and experiment with, is really involving to people. We've got a whole
set of techniques. We've made catalogs
of parts that would put Rem Koolhaas to shame. That people sort of
flip through there. Their coffee table objects,
and Rio, and so on. But the point about this--
my experience with this is that the more you involve
expert and citizens together from the beginning
in co-production, the more people are
open to being open, and the less what
they want to do is build a gated-community,
because they're involved in the design
process from the beginning. The one limit on all of this-- and again this is
just my own experience in working with
poor communities-- at a certain point
the expert disappears. If you make three or four-- just the same thing
we do in the GSD-- you make three or four
alternatives of a project, people can look at it. They understand the pluses
and minuses of each. And then the so-called experts
says goodbye and the people themselves have to decide
what they want to do. When I worked in Beirut
in the mid and late '90s on reconstruction
of a part of Beirut, with that horrible
terrorist Hezbollah. Let's not go there. And between Hezbollah and
a lot of the phalanges, parts of South
Beirut were a mess. But if you laid out to
people three or four ways-- worked with them-- ways of
even using a scarce resource like copper wire. And you've got to decide. In conditions like that,
people say well they're gone. I claimed my mother had gotten
ill, or something like that. I had some excuse. And these two groups-- they hated each other,
but they worked together to come to a decision. But much more
broadly, I just think that the answer to
opening the city it's more democracy of design. Not a better design. Do you understand
what I'm saying? It's not the right design that
involves people in the city. It's the notion that they
made whatever is there. Even if it's so simple
as distributing copper tubing for plumbing. So you're calling for
a participatory design, which I think we're
trying to do more here. I'm not going to
start a dialogue here. And I totally agree with you. But then we start
thinking about, what are the
institutions that are available to us to suggest-- and the scale at
which that happens. I guess I'm agreeing
with you in saying that we need to
be working more on not just being
compelled by the idea, but how do we implement
it in practice. This is a part of the
dilemma that we're constantly facing in planning
and design, which is how you get the designers to
take processes and repertoires of action that are in planning? It's not just that we can't
agree that that's important, but then how do you change
larger planning institutions at the scale of a city to
engage participatory design. Breakdown, yeah. We should have some
questions here though. Hi. Thank you for your
wonderful talk. I had the opportunity to work
with one of the communities that you chose. Oh, great. Which one? Caracas. It was the barrio. It was the informal settlements. Oh, Caracas. And in a process of
participatory design, at that opportunity I
had read your theory about borders and boundaries. I really wanted to
improve more connection between different communities. Because, as you know,
these informal settlements is not only one community. Yeah, it is many. Is the sum of many
smaller communities. But at the same time, they
live the good experience of interaction, the
community suffer the problems of lack of rules, of
norms, to work together, to live together. So in that opportunity
I proposed many options. And the community to choose the
ones that promote an enclaves. That's just the
way it should be. They walled in the
community, because they want to protect themselves
from the violence of the environment. So how can we deal if we know
of technicians, that committee is choosing what we think is
not a good option for them? Well, in that community-- that's a very drug-- Am I remembering that right? No, it's not. I think that's
something about talk. That's where this
dialogical thing comes in. The more you can get people
to talk with each other-- but that's just my own
experience with it. If you say, what do
you want to people, they'll say safety, protection,
lock the doors, and so on. If you get people from different
communities talk to each other, the process can open up. And oftentimes talk
is not goal-oriented. That's where the informality
of this comes in. This is not a magic bullet-- open city. I said that in the beginning. I just emphasize that. But it is a way of thinking
about how you want to guide the kind of action you have. If you don't want
people to close up, you have to get them to interact
in ways where they're not focused on the
other as a threat. Do you know what it mean? And that's dialogical. It's non-aggressive,
non-assertive ways of thinking. As I remember, that's from
villages all over Venezuela, isn't it, that barrio? [inaudible] Yeah. Anyhow. Hello. Over here. I don't see you. Raise your hand. Down on the first row. Oh, there you are. Yes. Thanks for your lecture. I was wondering. You mentioned how design
can't change capitalism, but I'm wondering how design can
dismantle it, or transform it. Isn't that the same thing? Well, no. Because it is saying,
we're not changing the principles of capitalism. We're not changing how it works. We're actually just
using a different system. You could do that, but it
would be on a very small scale. I'm giving you serious
answer to this. I think the notion
that you create a protected realm
where you're working with a different set of
assumptions, can be valuable. But you're never going to
achieve scale that way. Politics requires politics. I don't think design,
for instance-- if I wanted to stop
gentrification in New York, I know exactly what I do. I'd Institute commercial
rent controls. It would work a treat. But it has nothing to do
with what any of those stores look like. It's economic power,
against economic power. And I just think for
you, as a designer, if you think, how can I avoid
this system by making a better design? It's too small, and it's
too, in a way, unreal. I mean, what we do as
designers it's very partial, it's very important. It's very important to
think what should be. But the power of what
should be is limited. You understand the
point I'm making. You've got to fight
capitalism with socialism. Period. You're not going to fight it
with lowering the building heights. Do you know what I mean? There is a kind of
way in which you have to enter into the
adult world of dirty power, and recognize that
you're partially going to be imprisoned by
that, and demeaned by it. But not simply to
think that, oh, it's useless to do anything by that. Now, I don't know. I suffered this all my life. I'm a good socialist. But it's in a somewhat
different compartment from me, from my eye [inaudible] -- the way that we
design involves the economic systems and the political
systems in place. So inherently, all design
is political in that way. Absolutely. So I guess I'm wondering like-- What I'm talking about is
the power of what you make. You can get a vision of
something that's different. But as I say, the vision of
something that's different is not going to be
empowering in a way that political or economic
activity is empowering. This is just my
own view of this. And I'll tell you
why I feel this. Because so often-- it's a
discussion I had with Jane Jacobs all the time-- so often we were fighting
power and we lose, we give up, because the things we want to
build are just overwhelmed. And just to say about her-- I mean the thing about
Jane is, after she wrote Economy of
Cities, she sort of lost interest in design. Because she saw it
wasn't going to change-- She could resist Robert Moses,
but she couldn't erase him. And she became
uninterested in urbanism. She had wonderful,
wonderful writings, but it was a kind of defeatism. I don't think that's the
trajectory you want to go in. Can I get in here for a second? And then we have somebody
here had a hand up also-- We have one up in
the balcony, too. OK. Yeah, great. OK. I just want to respond to
this exchange a little bit. And maybe add what I thought
you were going to say, Richard, about the issue
about design and capitalism. I'm going to sit for-- In total agreement that the
building heights and how you-- thinking in a very narrow
sense of physical design, obviously, is not going
to dismantle capitalism. But that doesn't
necessarily mean that one has to say that all
design reinforces capitalism, right? And I think what's missing
in that conversation is the focus on the fact that
to dismantle capitalism is a social and political project,
as Richard has said-- social as well as a political
project, which means people have to be involved
and they have to mobilize and they have to do the work
of fighting against capitalism. And this is where I think
the design comes in. It's quite consistent
of what you were saying about open cities. How do you create cities
that bring people together to mobilize? So there is a design
dimension to it. But there's not a direct
relationship with design and the dismantling
of capitalism. Is how did design create
the urban conditions, the solidarity, the
sense of values, the conversation, the
normative project, that would be necessary in order
to fight against capitalism so I don't think get out of
the picture completely, but it's really important not
just to any direct relationship between design and support for
or dismantling of capitalism. I couldn't have said
it better myself. Should I go? OK. Hi, thank you here. First I want to say, I
am actually from Beijing. And it's actually quite sad
every time people mention about a Chinese
city, they always show those pictures of
high-rise, gated, tower community. Where I actually want to say,
I think, in Chinese culture, if you look at the ground level,
sometimes you built very-- as you would put it-- very
enclosed closed urban space. But people somehow
always try to find a way to permeate that
closed structure, and then figure out a way to-- on the ground level-- to
interact with each other. And as you were showing all
these wonderful examples, I was just wondering, out
of all these countries you've worked with,
do you find this idea of creating a more open
city a universal concept that should be adopted
by every culture? Or is there some exceptions that
you've met, where people do not want this kind of open space? And as planners,
I guess it's also should we prioritize this
as our idea of planning? Or should we--
sometimes there are ideas that we always promote,
like DOT and Shared Bike, and all that. But sometimes that's not the
community's top priority. Right? It's like these little wonderful
designs on a street level to create a more open space. How much should we as
planners prioritize these? Well, you made a comment
and asked me a question. The comment, is you're
absolutely right. I mean, those
buildings can be used by people who want to
have life on the ground. UNDP is involved in trying to
salve as many of the hutong structures in
Beijing as we can-- also the shikomen in Shanghai-- as structures as
places for people to practice that kind of life. I'd say it's just harder
when you're dealing with a 46-story building. It's just harder to hold on to. The question you
asked me, I'm going to answer in a way which
may seem outrageous. I think you should universalize
every value you have. I don't think you should
be culture-specific. Let people argue
with you and say, but that doesn't work here. We don't want that. Don't be nice. Oh, I understand
your way of life. You want to live in
a gated-community, and never see a black person. I understand. You're southern American. I sympathize. No. Not at all. And I think part of the whole
job of planning is to say, this is what you should want. Argue with people. Be dialogical with them
rather than substitute empathy for will. That's my own view of this. And I have to say, I
mean, I'm as a nice guy, but I practice what I preach. When you say to people,
you're all wrong. You want the wrong things. They take that more seriously
than if you say, oh, God, poor you. This is true. It's an experience
in this country with white, working class,
people for instance. If you go, oh,
they're such victims. They're suffering. I understand why
they voted for Trump. No. No, the answer is to say,
you did something wrong. And that is a way of taking
the other person seriously as a person. So I just don't buy this
notion of communal sensitivity. I don't buy it at all. I think you should
be a provocateur. Well, it's really terrific
to hear somebody actually say something firm. So I was formulating a moment
ago a rather rough question. But I wanted to precedent
it with a rather sentimental anecdote, which is, the
125th Street exit off of the West Hudson Parkway. Every time I come in to New
York to visit a friend of mine in Harlem, that Safeway
is an amazing indicator that I am now in a city. Oh, my boy! [laughs] So very, very happy to see it. So now for the more
difficult question. You obliquely
actually-- or actually even directly
confronted this-- but that the procedures and
processes of designs, I think, work in so far as
the powerbrokers, more specifically,
the actors that have agency in this
situation, really even want to entertain
the conversation. And I think that in a
neighborhood like Caracas, you have this density
and overlaying of people, that you almost kind of have a
milieu where you can at least have publicity of your cause. But in, let's say, these white
working class neighborhoods in the United States-- or
I'd say, more specifically, in the underserved neighborhoods
of the caricatured inner cities of the United States,
the powerbrokers who would have the ability
to reshape and provide the services, or to provide
the resources to enable those communities, are
absent, disengaged, and absolutely not looking
to entertain big city liberal coming in to save the day. So I'm absolutely with you
on the design strategy front. And I'm absolutely with
you on the argument that politics is the situation. But how do you actually
engage to make audience the issues of what
you're describing, especially contextual to
the United States I think? Well, that's a
really good question. I'll just give you a couple
answers I've found about this. One of the things
that I've recommended when I've done
community organizing, is that people not go to
community consultations, that they don't play the
game of listening to somebody tell them what's going
to be done for them. And this is a strategy
not unique to me-- it comes from Saul Alinsky-- about the notion of what
power needs is an audience. And if their audience
is absent, there's a lot of delegitimization. That goes on. So when we were working in
Chicago on Cabrini-Green, the notion was that we boycotted
the official workings of this. You need somebody
from the outside who is going to be an
alternative source of power often. And working with emerging
cities, that's a role that UNDP and now UN-Habitat
are trying play. They are, as it were,
at the local level-- that alternative to voice to
this articulation of power. It's a really
complicated issue for us, because the UN is caught in
all these cross currents. But what I know about this is
that the way to start with this is by delegitimating
the settings and institutions in which
power gets itself ratified. And that means a totally
different relationship to a thing like planning boards. When we were working
on Dharavi, we were encouraging people to
vote en [? blanco. ?] You know that is? To turn in blank ballots to
say that the process is not legitimate. It's a whole different
set of tools. Is it successful? Sometimes. And sometimes it isn't. But it is at least understanding
that the point of this is to start by delegitimating
the process by which power ratifiers itself through all
these planning instruments. And do you all know the
name of Saul Alinsky? Is somebody familiar to you all? [inaudible] Citizens Action program. Back of the Yards program. He was once here, by the way,
and stayed for 20 minutes. And just said,
it's not worth it. Well, that's the old GSD. That's the old GSD. Absolutely. We have one more-- Yeah, we have one more
question, and then I-- Yeah. Thank you. I wanted to extend a
little bit the point that Diane brought up, about
institutions who could champion and advocate for the things
you're talking about-- the exchange, the serendipity,
the unplanned encounter, and good things that happen
in open urban environments. If we think about the actual
practice of real estate development, urban
design, and architecture, then the owners of properties
behind private property lines have very clear motives to-- whether it's profit-driven
motives of other self-interested motives-- in championing their cause. The public space,
on the other hand, is generally owned by the
public or by the municipality. I should be, yeah. It should be. Right. And they oftentimes
don't have the same level of advocacy or
interest in advocating for the things you talk about. And if you simply
think to look into, for instance, urban
design practice, all urban designers
know that there's very little money
in urban design-- all the money is
in the buildings. After doing the urban
design, the hope to get commissioned a few buildings out
of it to pay the bill that went [inaudible]. So I guess my question is,
have you encountered, or do you have institutions and cities as
examples, where that has been managed and figured out in
better ways, in which you can really put resources
behind the management and design of public space in
a very serious way to champion the values you're talking about. Examples like-- just
what comes to mind, for instance, Vienna has a
planning department composed of 300 people for
the size of Vienna, and it does a really great work. But what sort of examples-- I'll give you one example
that we're working-- the mayor of Bogota,
Enrique Penalosa-- has he ever spoken here? Yeah, he has. He's also part of this
scientific community. He has pointed out that
the greatest privatization of public space is
parking, and the strategies in his paper for taking back
the public and public space is largely to shrink streets
and eliminate street parking. Very banal in a way. But also very, very profound,
which is the notion that we have to-- and I am
convinced by him on this-- rethink the notion
of motion in the city in order to take back
this public space. And that goes back in the
history of urbanism to [? hausmann, ?] who
was against parking, and what happened with
the automobile, and so on. The larger question-- and
that is an example of trying. He's trying to do it. And he's been very successful
in Bogota, his first two times around as mayor, and
in recapturing public space. There is another issue-- we just don't have
time to talk about it-- which is that there are two
ways in which people invest. Foreign investors invest
in cities at a distance. One is opportunity
investing, where you're focused on a
missed opportunity, or lack of money to
develop a particular site. And the other is
core of investing, which is where you're basically
buying specifications. Materials and so on. And then you're
building a building to suit in some place it's
completely non context dependent. And what's happening in the
economy of a lot of developing cities, is there is this shift
from opportunity investing-- which requires local
knowledge-- to core investing, in which the process
of development is like a voluntary
exchange based on specs. So one of our recommendations is
that core investors, if they're going to do that,
be required to see a building through to
its actual completion. Because a lot of core
investing then flips. I buy a project, then I
sell it on to somebody, or sell a right. Something like that. That's a way of at least
holding private capital responsible for
delivering something. It's minimal. But it is a halfway step. And some countries will do this. I think Great
Britain is actually going to do this,
in which you hold an investor responsible to
the public for actually trying to make a profit out of a
public good, which is land. Anyhow, this has been an
incredibly long discussion. Thank you for being so patient. And before you end tonight. Before we give you a huge
round of applause to you. Because I am so happy, you
gave this lecture, Richard, because this is a very rich
conversation that I hope we can continue-- is this on? No. No. --that we can continue
here at the school. But I just want to pull
up some summary points, and then we're going to have a
huge round of applause for you. One, again, just picking
up on your last comment. I just think that-- this is a super
self-serving comment, but I just think that what we're
starting to talk about here, is the way in which design
and planning are all about politics and power. And how do you make decisions
about how do you engage with that larger project? It's so easy to think about
the discipline of planning, the discipline of urban design
is if they float around. They float around. And that it's
really about if you want to change the physical and
social world in which we live in, for other
objectives, it's really about engaging
those institutions and being strategic
in those arrangements. The second comment that I'd
like to pull up, that I think came through in your answers
to multiple questions, and I'm actually even thinking
about the fellow upstairs with like the United States. I think that one thing that I
learned being in the planning side of our department
from urban designers, is the importance of
thinking strategically about where to intervene. And you brought it up with
the kind of liminal space that you're looking at. But we could take
that framework, not just in different places,
to be exploring and discovering different places in a
neighborhood, or in a city, for intervention. That might have the greatest
capacity to kind of shake up things. But we should be thinking
about cities that way. In particular, we
as students here, should be honing our
analytical skills to understand the
character and the nature, physical and social, of
different types of cities. Large cities versus
small cities. Southern cities of Trump
voters versus New York City. And that in some ways you can
be strategic about intervening in those places, in creating
projects in those places, that will change the
social conversation. And that's what's
going to work up. We tend to focus our
attention, maybe, on the skills that we're
getting-- the design skills and the planning skills. Process and building design. But we're not thinking
about the places that we should be applying
those projects more. If you care about changing
politics, or dismantling capitalism, that's
the analytic you need. Not just the skill set itself. And I guess it's a call
out for focusing more on the specificity of places. Knowing the deep
culture, history, institutions of places,
many different places, and then being
strategic about where you want to apply your skills. Rather than just always--
everybody's always working in New York City. Everybody's always
working in the places that are most close to the project
that we're trying to achieve, as opposed to going
to the tough places to be urban planners
and designers. And I just think all that came
through in both in your talk, and in the engagement
with the students. So thank you so much, Richard. Well, thank you for asking me. [applause]
This is a great book, I'm reading it right now.
Hey it's the GSD that's where my dad went.
Why I see all urbanists posted here look like they're living in the 30's to 50's?