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This episode of the Urbanist is brought to you by arup. Arup, the firm behind some of the world's most iconic public and structural projects, works with leaders to plan and deliver the systems that shape how cities and societies function across transport, energy, water and buildings. Arup's approach to design is how complex decisions get made, seeing the whole picture and creating outcomes that work in the real world. Because the future does not just arrive, it's shaped by the choices we make today. Learn more at@arup.com Next Arup Design for what's next.
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Hello and welcome to the Urbanist Monocles program, all about the cities we live in. I'm your host, Carlotta Rubello. This week we bring you a special episode in collaboration with arup, the global consultancy shaping the future of the built environment.
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On the show ahead, ARUP makes cities. The conveners, the advisors, the designers make each component of a city work and we help join them together to help cities really thrive.
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That's perhaps the most important role of the governance to coordinate between disciplines, between systems, between ideas and implementation. And that is where we need to be.
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In the past, the future was over imagined and under delivered. But we enter a period now where it could be under imagined and over delivered.
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I wanted to use an analogy that might seem strange in the world of architecture, of food, because buildings, as the scientists are showing us, can feed or starve us.
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We drop in on an exceptional gathering to mark Arup's 80th anniversary and hear from leading practitioners on how we can design better futures for our cities. That's all coming up over the next 30 minutes right here on the Urbanist with me, Carlotta Rebelo. Cities are one of the greatest human inventions. It's where ideas collide, cultures come together, and the future can be decided street by street. They are the perfect example of what can be achieved when we work with each other. It was precisely this notion of human collaboration that was at the center of Arup's 80th anniversary, which recently brought together over 200 architects, planners, designers, engineers and consultants. Consultants to think about the future of the built environment. The evening kicked off with Jerome Frost, Arab CEO. Jerome is someone who champions the power of community and the importance of rethinking and adapting as cities continue to grow. As he told the audience while reflecting on his company's 80 year legacy, including Arup's very first project, Busaras, the bus terminus in Dublin.
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A journalist recently asked me, what does a 21st century Arup do? And I thought for a moment and in My mind, I started to sort of trot out the usual patter. You know, we do engineering, we do planning, we do architecture. But then I checked myself and I really thought about what we did and the impact as a company we believe we have. And I said, ARUP makes cities. The conveners, the advisors, the designers make each component of a city work. And we help join them together to help cities really thrive. Now that sounds like a really grand claim for any company to make. An ARUP is nothing without its clients, without its partners, without all of you in this room. You make cities thrive together, hopefully with arup. And so, on reflection, I think probably the answer I should have given was, together, we make cities. And everyone knows the complexity of designing cities. Certainly everyone in this room knows the complexity of designing cities well. And we all know no one can do it alone. And I hope that you and we all will leave tonight with a new sense of ambition, a new sense that, that in working together, we can shape a much stronger future. As we start to look forward, we can design for what's next, which is the theme of tonight. That first project, Busaras in Dublin, it's still operating today, 80 years on, and it plays a really fundamental role for that city. At the time when it was being conceived, back in the 1940s, it marked a massive shift in the mindset of Dubliners and the mindset of Irish people. It marked a shift from a traditional post colonial architectural legacy to one of modernity. That modernity created hope and a confidence in the future. And that idea of hope and confidence is just so relevant in the world in which we all work today. I'm sure we would all agree that collectively our role when we think of ourselves as city makers, is to help create that same sense of hope and confidence for the people that we're working for, the people that live, work, and enjoy the cities that we help to create. And at this moment in time, perhaps we need that sense of hope and confidence more than ever. We have to recognize that cities have changed dramatically. Today's pressures are complex. Climate, demographics, affordability, digital transformation, energy demand. The list goes on and on and on. Seemingly, a new thing comes in front of us every day, and the challenges are greater and more interconnected. Overarup set up this firm 80 years ago with a deep belief that work only had real value if it was striving for something higher, something socially useful, something bigger than just the brief. That belief is still absolutely stitched into the DNA of this firm. It's why people join us. It's why people stay with us. And I'd like to think it's why all of you enjoy working with us. Let's design what's next. Together with all of you in this room.
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To explore placemaking and designing for the future, three speakers were tasked with tackling a key question. Who gets to shape our cities? What is the future we are designing for? And how can we create urban spaces that delight Anna Koenig? Jerlemir is the former mayor of Stockholm and the CEO of the Ardvidsen foundation, an organization which is dedicated to support sustainable urban development. Anna invited the audience to think about cities not as projects, but as living systems. Places that are shaped over time by people, infrastructure, nature, and the decisions we all make every day. Let's have a listen.
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Who shapes our cities? Is it politicians? Urban planners? Engineers? Architects? Or is it all of us through how we live, move and interact every day? Because cities are not static. They are living organisms. They adapt, they respond. So if we think about decades and not projects, one thing becomes clear. Shaping a city is not about a single intervention. It is about how systems evolve over time. And today we know that those systems are under pressure. Energy shocks, accelerating climate change, geopolitical conflicts and technological disruptions. So the real question how can we shape cities that can handle both sudden shocks and long term stress? Part of the answer is designed. Take trees. They cool our cities, they improve air quality, they make our places livable. And at the same time, we know that they reduce stress and support our mental well being. One intervention, multiple effects. And that is how resilience looks like in practice. But resilience is not only what we build. It's all also about what we already have and how we use it better. Because we often design for peak demands, but most of the time that still is unused when it's not peak. So Professor Carlo Ratti and I wrote an article about this that it's not only about building new, it's also about using what you have better and smarter. So take water. In Stockholm, we lose up to a quarter of our drinking water due to leaks because we lack visibility. And with AI and sensors, we can fix that not by rebuilding the system or building new infrastructure, but by understanding it better. And the same applies elsewhere. In Utrecht, electric vehicles is not just transport. They are actually part of the energy system. They store energy and then they feed it back to the grid when demand peaks. One asset, multiple roles. And still solutions like this struggle to scale, not because of technology, but because of organization. So in my experience, in a city, we have all this different expertise. We have transport, we have planning, energy and finance. And they are working well, but not always together. And that is a leadership challenge, not a technical one. So how does that kind of governance look like in practice? It means to bringing all these stakeholders that don't usually work together, not around a single project, but around a shared direction. Because governance is not only about regulation, it is about coordination. So for us in Stockholm, it meant bringing all these stakeholders around electrification and working also with public procurement to signal where the city was heading. And that's perhaps the most important role of the governance. To coordinate between disciplines, between systems, between between ideas and implementation. And there is where we need to be. And resilience is not only about technology, it's also social. In a crisis, it's not just infrastructure that holds us. It's people, it's trust, it's neighborhoods, it's the willingness to step in when a system cannot. And that is capacity too. So who shapes our cities? Yes, experts like you, but also everyone who uses it. People like us by our behaviors every day. And perhaps that is the real test. Not how a city perform on paper, but how it holds up under pressure. Because we are designing for generations. So the most important thing is not what we build, but what it actually can become. And that is the responsibility we carry when we shape our cities. Thank you.
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Thank you. Anna, you stay with me on stage because I want to ask you a few questions. It's not every day that we have a former mayor with us. You talk there about building for generations and this long term vision. And I always wonder about the impact that political cycles can have in a city city. How difficult was it to keep that long term vision when you didn't know if you'd be at City hall to see the projects through?
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Yes, I often say that you should plan for long term, like 10, 20 years or longer, but you should act as it only had four years. So even if we had a vision that were perhaps until 2040, it was very important for us to work with the KPIs and could measure the results on a quarterly basis, together with all the stakeholders, but also for the citizens, because it's difficult to showcase the climate neutrality. But if we can have also visible results, transparent data for them, then they can see progress, even though the goal and the vision are long term.
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Now. Cities have always been places of possibilities. It's where dreams can become reality. But they are also places of pressure. And today, more than ever, of rapid change. Raj Patel is arup's chief innovation Officer and he's working at the intersection of technology, design and engineering. He explored what it really means to design for the future and dare the audience to imagine it.
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I'd like you all to close your eyes for a moment. I know you're not going to want to do it, but I'm going to ask you again to do it anyway. I'd like you to imagine the city in the spring of 2046, 20 years from now. What do you want that city to be? What's changed? How does it feel? Think about how old your children will be, what they will need from that city. Now open your eyes. We're living in someone else's imagined future. From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Mies van der Rohe's Friedrich Strasse concept, from Blade Runner to Buckminster Fuller, we have invested in and delivered futures that belong to someone else. We benchmark change and technology advances to dates in those imagined futures. They shape our expectations and they constrain our imaginations. We have the opportunity to move from inheritance to intention. Surpass the mid 20th century mindset. It limits us from embracing the paradigm shifting implications of change. Move from designing what's next to designing for what is next. Recognize that contexts are changing and conditions emerging that require much broader and deeper collaboration and partnerships to solve. We are in a sustained period of technology driven change. It will accelerate through 2036 within the time frame of many of the projects we are all working on. It requires us to think more holistically and more connectedly to think about it now, not sometime in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. In the past, the future was overimagined and under delivered. But we enter a period now where it could be under imagined and over delivered. We have the opportunity to ignite imagination, rebuild trust and increase agency by addressing three big paradigm shifts that we must make for future betterment. The first is thinking long term and multi generational. Agreeing designs have social and physical impacts well beyond the lifespan. And designing for it. From the outset. Technology might help us plot scenarios and pathways and see more opportunity than in the past. But we must drive design. The second is designing with change. There's no return to a stable ideal state. Change will accelerate over the coming decades and will be ongoing. We need our cities and populations to be adaptable and resilient. We must all embrace and deliver it in our buildings, infrastructure and and cities as systems. Third is technology won't save us. Change will happen at a faster pace than technology can correct for it. At least for the next 20 years. And likely several decades beyond. We can't be passive receivers of technology to deploy. We must collectively work to define, shape it and deliver it. Every ecological landscape needs to move 100 miles north or south to adjust to new new climates. We will need to make it happen at a pace faster than the rate of change. We must simultaneously design for preservation and regeneration of ecologies and common infrastructures and become adept at mitigation and adaptation. What do we do to enable this? It may feel like an impossible task, but by adjusting our ways of working and framing problems and looking beyond the immediate solutions, it is within our grasp. It requires imagination, collaboration and innovation across dynamic interconnected ecosystems to address challenges across multiple arenas, balancing complicated stakeholder goals, taking a holistic adaptive approach, striving for scalable solutions and thought leadership in systemic cross border innovation. Some of the approaches needed are evident when we are working at our best. But that must become the rule, not the exception. Close your eyes again. Think about how the city in 2046 changed and what shaped that change. Think about what you want to do to see it change. Think about what you individually and we collectively aspire to and achieved in that time.
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Thank you very much. Now, you mentioned this idea of rebuilding imagination. We're here in a room with designers, architects, engineers and other practitioners. So how can we protect imagination? How do you protect your imagination?
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It's a really difficult question to answer in many respects, because I think we are all I spent a long time trying to unlearn the things that I believe from watching Sci Fi on the TV or old movies or old, all of that kind of stuff. A few months ago I was here with my family, I live in New York. I took my kids to one of my projects, which was the Jubilee Line extension project in London. And we got out at Canary Wharf Station, which I'm very proud to have worked on with some of the people who were in the room. And my son said, this feels like the future. And I remembered back to the start of that project. And Roland Paoletti, who was chief architect at London Underground at the time, asked all of the architects and the designers and engineers in the room what the project was supposed to be about. And of course we all said exemplary civic architecture, all the sorts of things you might say. And he said, but you're here really to develop and deliver an exemplary public experience. This should be the thing that lifts and elevates people on their way to work. They should feel proud about using the Underground in a way that they hadn't used it before. So it made you think back beyond. And so when my son said that, it made me feel proud of the fact that it still felt like the future and it still feels like the future as a project. There are other projects that have come since, but the fact that it's human and it has a level of detail, they're all different, belong to the same family. They used cutting edge technology to deliver them against standards that are totally changed. After the King's Cross fire, that was all very progressive and delivered change at a high level. And it influenced every other subway system in the world that was built after it. So that was an idea that deliver it here and everybody will follow it. And they did follow it. And I think if you keep on doing that, keep on saying to yourself, how do we make it better? How do we push the envelope? What do we do collectively? It takes really strong clients, brave clients to do that. And it takes designers to be brave and say, not just small incremental change from what happened before, but try and make the big leaps.
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Here's to creating many more projects that feel like the future. Raj, thank you very much. Cities have a deep impact on who we are and how we feel, but they also have this incredible capacity of shaping who we become. So how can we create places that do more than just sustain us? Cities that delight and most importantly, help us thrive. This was a topic tackled by Thomas Heatherwick, the award winning designer who, who founded his practice, Heatherwick Studio to bring together architecture, urban planning, product design and interiors, always with a human centric approach as the unifying thread throughout his work. He started by taking the temperature of our cities today.
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Passersby are most affected by what we build. And the truth is that most new development is soulless and sterile. That's how it's experienced by most people. The blandemic is quite real. The tops of some of these great buildings, they might be famous, but the ground level is often the place with the least investment. Yet that's the place where most passersby experience them the most. We've had a triumph of efficiency over humanity. This is bad for society and bad for the economy. This total absence of complexity, engagingness and fascination at the bottoms of buildings is a real problem. And our understanding of why this matters has changed profoundly. There are now brilliant academics who are revealing the ways that buildings affect our brains and our bodies and our behavior. Cleo Valentine is the neuroimmunologist at Cambridge. Her team has been showing that boring buildings aren't just not that interesting. They cause stress in our brains. Then Colin Ellard the environmental psychologist at the University of Waterloo, has been testing how we behave next to boring and interesting buildings. And him and his team have been showing that the design of buildings, building facades, affects our willingness to help strangers and to trust each other. And Professor Rebecca Magin, the urbanist from Glasgow University who's here today, she's been looking with her team, studying the design of buildings and people's sense of belonging and how people get attached emotionally to a place based on the look and feel of buildings. I wanted to use an analogy that might seem strange in the world of architecture, but it's to use the entire analogy of food and nutrition. Because buildings, as the scientists are showing us, can feed or starve us. Boring buildings are nutritionally poor. Flat, faceless facades make us feel stress. And each of us in this room makes that choice with every building we commission or design. But collectively, we've become desensitized. But everyone here wants change. What aren't we doing? I don't believe that this is first about policy and regulation, which is what we've been, I think, looking for and looking up to politicians to give us what we actually need is a public conversation. People really care. And in research commissioned by the Humanize Campaign, 69% of people agree we need to invest more in how buildings make passersby feel. 76% of people say buildings affect their mental health. And only 4% of people living in the new towns built since the Second World World War can even muster up nice to describe where they live. So what can you do? I've got a really simple challenge. Focus on the 3F's first 40 foot, which is the bottom two to three floors that we experience the most as passersby, as society that is smart and rational. That is where as a passerby, you get the critical information that affects your emotion. We need to insist on a budget for visual complexity on the outsides of buildings, because that's what affects our sense of belonging, identity and value. We need to see this as an act of creative resistance, this joy and togetherness in a desperate age that we all need. Thank you.
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I wanted to pick up on that point of the need for a public conversation about our built environment. Because as you described, normal citizens, passersby, what is the one thing you. You'd like the general public to understand about the importance of design in our daily lives?
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It's so interesting when you speak to people, it does feel like Emperor's new clothes. This public conversation feels so important because even when people think a building is cool or Interesting. You often, when you actually ask them how they feel in places with new buildings, they always use words like sterile. And I think it's sad. And it makes me realize that I thought that we were an industry that was brilliant communicators because we use amazing long words a lot. But actually, it's weird to say. I think we're actually terrible communicators. It shows because we can talk about welfare of chickens and the country talks, and we can talk about the food that's given to prisoners and school children. But it's funny that buildings affect all of us so much every day, and we patronize the public and treat them as if they're ignorant. If you don't like what I do, you're stupid. It's like, no. So I think we need to see ourselves as being in public service more. And the thing is, it will benefit us because the thing that society is going to say is make somewhere engaging and interesting. At the moment, as an industry, we are under the cosh of efficiency, budgets, pressure, and this is just about arguing to pull some of that value, maybe from the top of the tower to where people are, maybe give someone three stories more, but allow that creativity that everyone's dying to have more chances to use to happen. My wish is that we would stick our necks out more and stop writing books for each other and awarding architecture awards to each other and really invite the public to lead. Public love interesting, engaging things. They don't have to be crazy. It's little, tiny things they fall in love with. That's our experience.
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Please join me in thanking Thomas. Thank you. Now, to help us wrap up the evening, I'd like to invite back on stage our host, the CEO of arup, Jerome Frost.
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Oh, my word. How on earth do you follow what we've just experienced? Absolutely phenomenal. I'd really like to start by thanking Anna, who I think reminded us that we need to look around and get a lot more from what already exists and not just assume the solution lies in the new. I'd like to thank Raj. The thing that really stood out for me is that technology won't save us. We have to work with it, embrace it, and help it help us come up with the bigger solutions to the bigger challenges that we face in our urban environments. And for Thomas, if we take away one thought, perhaps from tonight, we should be thinking about the. The first three floors. What an amazing, graspable concept that is for an entire community to really think about. So thank you so much for stimulating thought. I hope there was enough controversy, thoughtfulness of the future, and enough challenge in there to really engage us all in further conversation, not just tonight, but beyond. So I'll leave you with a further thought. That is, will you join the ARUP family if you're not already part of it? Because we'd love you to. And together, we can really achieve so much more as one collaborative family working across the world.
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And that's all for this week's special edition of the Urbanist, brought to you in collaboration with arup. You can find out more about arup's work and how it is shaping the cities of tomorrow by heading over to arup. This episode of the Urbanist was produced and edited by myself and by David Stevens. I'm Carlotta Rebelo. Goodbye, and thank you for listening, City Lover.