NSL Colloquium 2014: Urban Design in Transition
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Mostafavi, Mohsen
The practice of urban design is in a state of transition. Transitions, if intended, can often be productive. Jose Lluis Sert established the first graduate program in urban design at Harvard University over fifty years ago, and since then urban design has come to occupy an important and productive space between planning and architecture. The focus of much of urban design’s work has been the middle ground, negotiating the space between architecture and the city. Because of circumstance, the tools and methods of urban design have also been limited to the middle scale. This middle scale intentionally provides urban design with the capacity to use recognizable, yet unspecific, architectural objects. Architecture in urban design invariably functions as a placeholder, a placeholder that in all likelihood is based on recollection of past architectures, of what pre-exists. But are the methods of urban design, many of which were developed in response to the rebuilding of the European city after the Second World War, capable of responding to the everchanging conditions of urbanization today? The aim of this lecture is to re-evaluate the criteria, in terms of both theory and practice, that might lead to alternative and contemporary strategies for the practice of urban design.
 I'm very happy to welcome you here for the lecture of Moshen Mustafavi. And you probably know or you think you know why we invited him. Moshen is the dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. We have very good and very strong relationships between our schools. He has been chairman of the Architectural Association in London. He has been dean at Cornell. So he has an incredible academic career. And I will not mention all the awards he got and all the committees and the jurors he is sitting in. So this would be a very good reason to be very honored to have him here. But that's not the reason. That's not the reason at all. We are here at NSL, at the network of city and landscape. We are interested in exploring the most advanced points in terms of teaching, in terms of research, and in terms of practice, dealing with urban design. Everybody is talking about the city nowadays and about the territory. A few people, some people do research on it and interpret it. But very few really shape the territory and the city with their research and with their practice. Moshen is one of them. And I think that what he is doing in his teaching, in his research, in his books, I will not mention all the books that he has written. This is a very famous one, ecological urbanism. In all his many-fold activities, he is one of the personalities of the contemporary personalities who is really trying to push the research on urban design, in a broader sense of the world, to its very limit, one who is really trying to innovate the instruments and in the aims and in the ways that we are shaping our territory and our cities. I think that he has developed a very clear, although complex position. And it is exactly this position that we are interested in, and it is this position that we need, very pointed positions, if we want our discipline, urban design, territorial design to really advance. So I am very happy to welcome Moshen. And I am very interested in his lecture, which has a title, as you know, Urban Design in Transition. And I welcome him very warmly and then ask you to do the same. Good evening. Can you hear me? Does it work? Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much, Vittorio, Claudia. I really feel so honored to be with you, but also to have so many friends here. As Vittorio said, I think this is, for me, really an opportunity that was, on the one hand, it has been part of the life of our school, but on the other hand, really, it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for Vittorio saying, there needs to be something if you can talk about this particular topic. And it is true that I have been thinking about urban issues, but I think specifically really discussing this topic of urban design as something that's not really just talking more broadly about urbanization or urbanism, is also something very important. And to be honest, this is the first time that I'm doing this particular talk, so I'm sure that it's quite rough around the edges. And it would be very good to have your comments and your feedback so that I can also get the chance to learn from what you're doing. I probably have put a few too many slides, so I will go through this fairly quickly so that we can actually have enough time for questions. At 6.15 I'll try not to talk for more than 45 minutes. I think it's true that this issue of urban design, I said in the little note that you might have received, is about this question of the middle scale, and in some ways it's interesting, because at the GST we have this concept of the different departments, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and therefore part of the whole idea of being the dean of the school is also the idea of how these different disciplines come together, and what is the status of each one of them, and precisely because of the fact that in some ways urban design also has a particular history in the school, this challenge in a way to also rethink with you this question of urban design is an interesting one, and that's why I also selected this concept of transition of the title, because I really believe that urban design is in a moment of transition, and by transition I mean that it's actually between two states. It's in this moment when it's open to discussion, what should happen, in which kind of direction should it go, and that's where I'm hoping that your comments and your thoughts would be able to open up that conversation. I think when we think about the city and when we think about the traditional city, we often are confronted with this idea that the city is a site of aesthetic pleasure, and it's a place where actually one's participation in the city is itself full of joy. When we look at the medieval city, I think it's maybe the fact that we don't have necessarily always a pictorial, an image, a sense of the whole, and that with the medieval city there is this very strong sense of its organic growth and the way that it has evolved, so the evolution of the city is an important part of it. I also feel that with many medieval cities, this is a kind of tangent, the relationship to topography is very interesting, where many medieval cities are in a way resolving the interface between architecture and the city, or architecture and urbanization, through the resolution of the geometry of topography, and that's also something else to bear in mind. When we think about the Renaissance city or the idealized city, we have a much clearer sense of the city as a pictorial project, as a piece of sonography as well. Of course, there's a degree of rationality that is part and parcel of the making of that city, but it's also the idea that one, as in theater, can also imagine the city. So if the medieval city is really about the idea of its evolving over time, it seems that to be in a kind of simplistic fashion, at least the idealized city, is about the construction of the sonography of the city as something which is made up of the architecture that makes that image possible to imagine the so-called ideal. Today, when we think about cities, the more successful examples of urban design, perhaps in the States, we can mention some things like Seattle, top left, where there is this park that was done some years ago and combining the transformation of public space with the idea of a sculpture park. We might mention the relationship to informal communities, and for example, the development of the city of Medellin and the way in which both architecture and the transformation of urban spaces have been part and parcel of that transformation. But in fact, the idea of the contemporary city is invariably sort of probably more correctly captured by places like Poudon, where one really sees that the organization of the city has to do with the organization of property, of the division of land, and the structure of the city is really the structure of private buildings. And essentially, the city is simply the infrastructure of the city itself, because more and more the main sites of the city are these sites of private development. The history of that kind of development, like Poudon, of course has its lineage in places like La Défense, as the construction of a totality of a whole, which is made possible as something that is created en masse. In places like China, when these cities happen, we also have phenomenal transformation, destruction that is also happening. So part of the question of urban design today, which I really am not addressing, is also the relationship to the old, the relationship to the existing, and the degree to which urban design sort of addresses both existing and new-built. In China and in Hong Kong, there is also a certain sort of tradition, the Kowloon World City, of dense structures that had multifunctional operations that happen inside them. And as we have gone through the transformation of these kinds of buildings, or the demolition of these, we are now arriving at a situation where the concept of density actually is missing pretty much this concept of the dynamic, the multi-use of the large scale, and in a sense the concept of variety or diversity is simply being alluded to through the application of color on the outside of buildings like this. So on the one hand, we have really the move towards densification and high-rise. On the other hand, the tradition of urbanization or urban design in certain parts of the States, through the success of projects like New Urbanism, have been really a return to the idea of the town, the idea that really, you know, somehow the best version of urbanization is represented by the idealization of the New England town and the way in which some sort of suburban development, semi-gated community, is evolving as the vision of the town that we should have. These kinds of constructions are also leading to projects like this, which is called, this is the sort of Las Vegas, Venice, where developers are trying to create, you know, residential developments with water in between canals as if Las Vegas was also something like Venice. But we are finding that the way in which the historic city or the traditional city is being interpreted, in many ways, is missing the life of the city. And so when we think about urban design and we think about the operations of urban design, this for me is like a typical image of what we find with urban design because what urban design is doing in many respects is basically showing the potential transformation of a totality and then what it uses is the idea of a generic architecture which stands for an architecture. And at the same time, more and more, you know, certain notions of public space or green and things like this. But I feel that as this process of urban design, as a design of the middle scale, is evolving, also this architecture that is the placeholder becomes the real architecture in some sense. In many instances, it's very difficult to have the idea of architecture being also something very specific. So what are the problems of sort of imagining the middle scale at a general level which then also promotes the concept of generality, of a sort of generic city? And I think this is one of the sort of problems that we face today. At Harvard, the department or the program in urban design started over 50 years ago by the Spanish architect who was the dean then called José Luis Sert. And here you see in that front row, Lou Kahn sitting next to Sert and really the discussion of urban design and the program in urban design developing. For Sert, urban design represented in some ways the space that was something like a subset of planning, where planning was becoming more specific and was moving towards the architectural. That for him represented the idea of urban design. You have to also remember that this is the period after the Second World War where there had been a great deal of destruction and there was in a way the continuity of the various projects of modernism and so the school became a good basis to develop, to articulate, something more specific about urbanization under the rubric of urban design. This program also led to the way in which at that time there was an interest to bring together the variety of different disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and planning as one of the key aspects of what constituted urban design. But in reality, this is something that didn't happen so much. So when Sert himself started to do a lot of projects in South America, he was in some ways continuing the tradition of modernist urbanism with really the idea of blocks in the middle of green spaces, but in some ways he was also more and more interested in the degree to which or in ways in which urban design could also become more locally specific to South America in terms of the evolution of an architecture which was responsive to the conditions of South America. Back in Cambridge, he built I think a rather remarkable project called the Peabody Terrace, which is this complex of graduate housing on the left hand side and you see some drawings of that where you have a combination of low rise and high rise and apartment buildings and things that are almost like houses with public spaces, gardens, facing the river, but also facing a community. In some ways, this was the most successful manifestation of urban design as developed during this time by Sert and coming out of the school. But in some ways, there was also another person that was around, was the man here, Hideo Sasaki, a Japanese American who was a landscape architect and he went on to create a practice called Sasaki Associates, which still exists. And I'm showing you this because I feel that if urban design was somehow this kind of subset of planning and negotiating between planning and architecture, the idea of urban design also as a recombination of architecture, planning, landscape, engineering, infrastructure, which was actually quite a kind of radical thought at the time, never became a sort of true reality, never became a true actuality. And the question is whether this is now part of the project of urban design. Is this something that now urban design has to really take on board? And therefore, if it has to take that on board, what are the ways in which it should engage with that kind of idea of the project? Nevertheless, at that time, people like Fumiiko Maki were also experimenting with other things that are also interesting for us to discuss. For example, one of the things that Maki was very keen on was the idea of the urban room, of the idea of spaces that are internal but are large enough to be conceived of, thought of as public spaces in the city. The closest example of these kinds of things that we might imagine today are, for example, railway stations. You go to the public space of Zurich station and there is something like a kind of public piazza of sorts, captured, caught inside the space of the station. And I believe that this is also something not dissimilar to what people like Maki had in mind. So the other thing I'd like to leave with you is really this concept of urban design dealing with certain structures where the concept of urbanization, the idea of the city, is internalized to architecture, becomes very much a sort of part of architecture. These set of thoughts are in some ways caught also between two moments in time. There is a film, there's a movie that was partly influenced by an interesting American woman scholar who used to be in California called Catherine Bauer, who was sort of one of the people behind the movie that was called The City, made just, you know, around the 30s and that kind of period. And you can see that Louis Mumford was actually the kind of narrator on this. And partly during this period, and it's really a continuation of certain ideas that people like Ebenezer Howard had with the Garden City movement, there is still during this period a certain concept of anti-city that is also very much present. So this particular film is showing the evils of the city, pollution, the problems of urbanization and really imagines the concept of the new town as something which is sort of much closer to nature and has certain associations with rural environments and in some ways is asking for the construction of a new town as something that avoids the evils of the traditional 19th century industrial city and therefore this would be the kind of ideal environment for children to grow, for schools to be there, for a kind of idyllic life. So you have to understand the movement towards urban design as something that's also happening in the context of these kinds of set of ideas. At the same time, soon after the development of urban design in the early 60s, you have the first manifestations of the move towards the city as a place of possibilities, as a place that actually does offer exciting things after the war, especially for example in France where there had been incredible devastation, in the 60s you find that there is really the idea that we, the state, can now also participate in providing a better life, a better quality of life for the citizens. Therefore, there is this suggestion of an alternative. And so Chris Marker, who some of you might be familiar with his work, also made a beautiful movie that I recommend to you called The Lovely Month of May. And this is, there is a little trailer from this film, and I just want you to sort of see this in the context of what I was saying about the 19th century. It's the most beautiful set in the world. And against this set, eight million Parisians act out a play or boo and hiss it. And after all, it's only they, the Parisians, who are able to tell us what makes Paris what it is, in this lovely month of May. For me, in my opinion, it's first to raise the family. It's this hour here, the hour of our work. I'm being bullied by my boss, bullied by my wife. I just have the tragedy that I'm afraid of. Now I'm going to drive you home. So it's okay, I don't even have the tranquility. Tomorrow we could inspire the week of tremors. There are only obstacles, the red light. We tend to forget that the last of the proletarians, a colonizer, always has a sub-proletarian, the one of the colonized, and that this reality survives the colonization. My grandmother always told me, my children, you're a French. Do you believe? Well, I do. So I think what's exciting about this film, that it shows you Paris as the metropolis, not as this kind of rural environment, that the city, the city of density, can also be the place that is, that place of loveliness, that has all sorts of possibilities for the citizens. And I think it opens up really also the role in the movie, for example, how urbanization, the building of new apartment buildings, building new housing, this also offers a new kind of possibility for democracy and for happiness, and also because this is happening after the whole sort of Algerian crisis. So it addresses questions of immigration. It's the first time that the poor in France are being given housing. In the movie, for example, there are people who have been living, family, French family, of five, six or seven in one or two rooms. And so to just, now it's hard for us in some ways to imagine, but in a way, the idea that social housing meant so much in terms of the kind of opportunities that it provided. And I think that that's really another aspect of urban design in terms of what can it do to life? What can it do in terms of the transformation of places? So you might be familiar with sort of projects like this. The Barbican, for example, in London, that to this day, remains one of the kind of interesting examples of dense residential development in the middle of the city, but combining it with school buildings, theater buildings, shops, markets, and things like that. And in some ways, it still remains as one of the better examples of the kind of the large-scale transformation of the city through sort of urban design. And now it's becoming very successful in London. This is a very hip kind of place, very desirable place. So is this sort of one of the possibilities for urban design that it grows at that kind of scale that is also part of the city itself, that it constructs a component of the city? Obviously, more recently, there's been also the question of regeneration, of urban regeneration, and the role of urban design as a component of development, of creating new kinds of spaces with places like Berlin, and with places like Yoraleil, and using, let's say, the idea of Yoraleil in terms of sort of multiple buildings to create also a sector of the city. And of course, just because Vittorio is here, just to get the conversation going, we also have something that's not very far from here as a project that he started with the kind of the concept of the urban design of the Novartis campus, and perhaps we could also have a kind of conversation about, I mean, that's very much a kind of institutional site in some ways, but I think it again, obviously presents a very specific kind of typology in terms of the importance of a rational project and then really, unlike some of the examples that I was saying, the focus on the quality of architecture and the specificity of architecture as something that makes the project. So in the context of all these debates and these kinds of ideas, this is why we also produced the book that Vittorio referred to, which we just actually with Alfredo and some other friends had an event for the Spanish edition in South America and for Portuguese edition in Brazil. And I think part of this is really about our responsibility to, in terms of educational institutions, to set up a certain dialogue and debate, to then use that dialogue and the communication of that dialogue to now also develop certain strategies for the transformation of our cities, but also as a way of using the academy of schools to develop strong theoretical positions. So for me, for example, in terms of Harvard, it was very important to say that if CERD had been trying to establish urban design, what is our responsibility today in terms of the formation of discourse? And in that sense, this project tried to have a certain sort of idea of method or methodology or approaches. And I think in that project, of course, one of the things about the contemporary city is about the recycling of infrastructure with things like the promenade planter in Paris. Another one is really about questions, for example, of nature, but the degree to which, in the case of this is the work of the French architect Jean-Renaud D, who built a series of apartment buildings, one in south of Paris, one in south of France, the idea of how to maximize green space, how to maximize balconies, outdoor space for the apartments. So I see this idea as something which is part and parcel of urban design, in the sense that the architecture is also trying to place the architectural project within the larger project of the social, of the creativity of the architectural project. So it's also trying to introduce a certain level of generosity with the building for the citizens, for the occupiers of this building, which actually at the beginning was highly criticized by, this was done as social housing. And therefore in France, even at that time, the workers who were going to occupy this building thought of it as being too bourgeois. And in some ways, they wanted to live in housing that looked like social housing, not housing that looked like something for the bourgeoisie. So I think this also is a kind of interesting thing in terms of how the concept of maximization of a condition is not that different from something like parametric design, if you like, or some better conditions of aspects of parametric design, but when Odi tried to just say, let's maximize this idea of the balcony and let's see what we do, what we get with that. So in the last few years, continuing from the project of ecological urbanism, we have tried around these questions of the urban and urban design to bring many other projects that can contribute to this conversation. So one of them is really the project of infrastructural landscape and the role of infrastructure as a way to bring sort of infrastructure and landscape together and to address, for example, issues as large as the whole evolution of coastal regions, which itself would be a kind of separate topic. But I'm just trying to touch on the fact that we are now trying to establish certain very specific research initiatives that can help address multiple themes and topics. Another one has been this concept of projective ecologies, which is going more into the role of landscape. So if, for example, Hido Sasaki during the third time there wasn't the kind of commitment of landscape, what can we do now, what is the role of landscape today in the project of urban design? And so some of the projects that are being developed in the school, in a way, address this question of the status of landscape as part of urban design. Recently there's been a number of kind of competitions and projects in Dallas, in Texas, and for example, one of the faculty who did some of those projects was basically involved working together between a sort of landscape firm and an architecture firm to try and bring together sort of transformation of the downtown of Dallas in conjunction with a river scheme that pays as much attention to the landscape situation as it does to the architectural project. Another aspect of this issue has been to do with informal communities and the concept of extremes, and the fact that urban design today has to deal with certain situations that are not very normal, so to speak, because we're dealing with enormous growth in the population in certain parts of the world. We're dealing with very, very complicated extreme conditions of weather and so on. So what is our capacity today to address these questions? Because in some ways, I am imagining that in many places the situation is so extreme that in some ways the kind of the normal conditions of urban design are incapable of addressing these things. So we now need to innovate new situations that have the capacity. Therefore, this idea of the extreme urbanism is also being part of a research initiative. More recently, we've had a group of people from the GSD, but also from the School of Public Health, from the Divinity School, work together also around this project called the CUMELLA, which is basically a religious ceremony that happens once every few years, but it brings roughly 100,000 people together in India for a religious ceremony that is then resulting in the creation of a temporary city. And so part of this is what is now also referred to as ephemeral urbanism, like how do you create urbanism that is temporary? And in India, where the government is really doing very little sometimes in terms of the state contributing to urbanization, it is astonishing what they are able to do in such a short period of time to actually construct a city. From the beginning, for a short period of time, 100,000 people coming and after the ceremony is finished, everything is taken away and the city, which has hospitals, which has restaurants and all of that, the site becomes as if nothing had happened there. So I think this is also a very interesting concept of what we can learn from temporary structures or from things that are just happening for a short period of time. I think another aspect of this kind of research investigation, so I'm just trying to give you multiple ways to get into this discussion of urban design, have been going into more specific conditions and really examining the particularity of conditions. So for the past three years, we have been conducting a series of studios in China, every one of them in a different city, one of them in a city called Jaman, and it has been dealing with this concept of the mega plot. The mega plot is when the city is actually selling very large tracts of land to developers who are then developing the city according to their own private motivations, and therefore you have a very strange kind of type of city that's growing, which is really a private city, a private enterprise, and therefore part of this challenge is given the realities of contemporary economic market because this is not, for example, a normal condition for urban design. This is a condition where the site is so massive and it's so privatized that then the concept of what is the public becomes up for discussion because it's actually fundamentally a sort of privatized city. So this idea of the mega plot, we try to understand what may be alternative strategies given the realities of the marketplace for the development of the mega plot. The other one dealt with the city of Macau, which as you know used to be the place where the Portuguese had colonized and then now was given back to China, and it's grown so fast as a center of gambling that it now is making more money than Las Vegas. But because of this growth, actually there's no room, it's also a small place, so they have to go across the border to China to make development. So what are the consequences of urbanization, of urban design when you have to build in another country, build across the border, where people have to go through immigration, for example, every day? So my point is that we're also now facing unusual circumstances and conditions, and therefore the project of urban design, the project of the kind of themes and issues that we're dealing with are very different than what we have been dealing with historically. So these are some of the kind of themes that have been present in the school and I think it would be very interesting to know what you consider as substantial issues, and some of them have been shown recently as part of an exhibition in the school. Vittorio also asked me, okay, show some things also that are projects that maybe you're working on and going into a different angle altogether. This is more like planning an urban design, right, an urban design and planning, and for the past couple of years I've actually also been working on a research project which is called Exuma. This is a sort of wonderful place to do a research project. These are a series of 365 islands in the Bahamas called the Exuma, and what is unusual about this is that it's one of the most beautiful places for tourism. You can see the color of the water and so on, but you won't believe it that this is also the site for some of the world's poorest people, as well as the islands that are owned by some of the world's wealthiest people. So you have this strange anomaly of the juxtaposition of the richest and the poorest, and basically the poor people work for the rich people who use the islands as their holiday homes and things like this. So it raises certain challenge of what to do with tourism, how to deal with economic development, how to deal with the creation of new kinds of urbanization for these poor islands and so on. So I think one of the things that I have learned in terms of working and collaborating with others on this project is the fact that one needs now also to not just work at the scale of the plan, at the scale of the physical, but actually in multiple ways and engage multiple agencies in order to be effective. So for this one, we have tried both to work at the design level, but also at the government level, at the level of working with the small community and being there and having meetings with the community. And for example, you won't believe it, but one of the things that we've had to do recently is just to find very modest ways to create economic development. And about two or three months ago, we had a group design these chicken groups to try and create very modest economic development. These things happened with like an IKEA map or a diagram, which then people make. Sometimes they got help from the U.S. Army people who came and worked with them over the weekend. And then we tried to bring, in a sense, planning into the schools and work with the schools in terms of the development of certain parts of the city. So basically this project of urban design and planning was operating at so many different scales to connect it with various parts of the community, because that's the kind of reality of the sort of sites that exist there. And then they were also involved in certain kinds of events, charades, to begin to have a greater sense of their own sort of public space, the potential future of this place and so on, trying to link the transformation of the islands to a sort of social economic political understanding of their rights and their possibilities in a way. So I want to just finish by just sort of touching on a few strategies and to see what you think are sort of other strategies for urban design, the urban design that is in this process of transition, if we're going to open it up. One of the, this is by the way sort of part of our elements studio for the urban design group, and it's a model that this group of students have made, and it's made of all these different fragments. Each one of the students has a series of buildings which then makes up the city. So these are some of their sort of fragments. They're a little bit like the idea of the analogical city, of the city of elements in one sense. And all of them, they also have this kind of taxonomy of drawings of the building. So this is very much a sort of architectural idea of the city, which is also a very dense city and so on. So one thing is really about the status of the model, the status of the thing that is made and the idea of the artifact. And we'll kind of come back to that. Another really is about the status of the section. And I think from the Rockefeller Center to lots of other projects, you know, projects that people like Ed Bacon worked on, one issue is what's the status of the section in the formation of urban design. Because remember that I'm also trying to react to the idea of urban design as a stenography, because urban design as a stenography is basically dealing with the image of the architecture. So if we are thinking about the city as something that is constructed by a kind of, if you like, a sort of delayed idea of the image, then things like the model as a way of configuring, of imagining the city, or the idea of the section as something which is an invisible version of the city, which I think, for example, even in Delirious New York with Rem's description of the athletic club, the fact of the kind of life that goes on inside the high rise, it's really also a description of the section. And the fact that the section is something which is sort of non-visual, it's not an image, it's a kind of performance. And I think in Japan, for example, with places like Roppongi, we have this concept of the urban design as a sectional development. So what is the status of the section? I think the work of Anthony Carroll, the British sculptor Anthony Carroll, did a series of sculptures which were called table pieces. In these table pieces, he made these pieces that couldn't be placed on a podium flat. So if you go back to one of the images that I showed at the beginning, going from the medieval city and discussing, mentioning the topography of the city, to the idealized city where the horizon line is flat, the line is straight. And Carol's table pieces couldn't really rest on a table. They had to be on the edge of the table. And therefore, this placing of the thing on the edge makes the datum line something that is in a state of suspense. You don't know where the ground is. The ground is actually something that is in a state of becoming, if you like. And in places like the Roppongi, there is this kind of ambiguity, because you're going up a hill, you don't really know where is the ground level of this building, since in Japan they're building three, four, five stories below ground. And so much of kind of life is happening below ground. So what is the status of the ground in the project of urban design? With that in mind, I think we've also had certain projects in the school that have tried to work with this notion of the high rise, not as something that sits on the horizontal flat plenum, the ground, but actually through the articulation of the interrelationship between a high rise project and the modulation of the ground, the project of architecture's relationship to the city is also something that is open to speculation. Another is around the question of the clustering or the gathering of the pieces as you see in the kind of idea of the high rise project, how the high rise as a cluster is different than the New York block structure of how a certain set of buildings might come together to constitute a different sense of the relationship of architecture to the urban. And this I think is touching on this question of the configuration or the relationship between architecture and site but architecture to itself. And this I think extends to the concept of the urban design as a means of thickening the ground, of seeing something where urban design and architecture and the city have become so intermeshed that it's impossible to decipher what is the singularity of architecture itself because it's as a mesh. This is by the way, this is kind of an experimental idea. I'm not suggesting that it's necessarily there's a one to sort of like a single step from this to a building project but I think in terms of the notion of the thickening of the relationship between architecture and the city, it's an interesting thing. Going back to the role and status of the model, I think for me one of the most interesting sort of models that dealt with this concept of a large scale territory is the model from Frank Lloyd Wright of Broadacre City and how that model had a kind of material quality of the relationship between the things that were built, the green, as the landscape as kind of stuff, as something that had quality. So this is really again all about the status of the model as a way of imagining, and though Wright himself was one of the anti-city people in many ways. And there are other examples now of what is the role of the model in terms of seeing a city or imagining a city. We now know this kind of thing, of course from our experience of visiting a lot of cities in China where every city seems to have a museum where there is the map and the model of the city, where you can see that. But I am showing you this because I think that it's important to discuss the relationship between the artifact that represents the city and the kind of vision of the city, in what way we imagine the city, especially since our cities are also going through very dynamic procedures. Are these now the best ways to also imagine those cities? Obviously I think the model that was done by OME for Lavilette, in my opinion is also very much inspired by things like the Brodecker model of trying to imagine now a version of Lavilette at that time that combined the landscape as material, as artifact, together with the buildings, together with the existing buildings and so on. But this is all about the devices through which we think through the project of urban design. This is a more contemporary manifestation of what I showed you with the Fumihiko Makis, the idea of the urban room where the event is becoming so massive that actually urban design is now inside the architecture. And what are the kind of problematics of that? Equally we have the idea of the relationship of the new to the existing in terms of hybrid structures with this project of Herzegandemaron, just in terms of how urban design is also the creation of new kinds of environments and combining all that new. So in terms of tools and devices, many of you, I don't know whether you know a program that is called City Engine. And City Engine is actually a software program that was designed, that was organized or part of a research project at ETH, maybe some five, ten years ago. And this is one of the kind of current programs that now exist for urban designers where you can basically imagine sort of before and after very instantaneously. And so I'm not showing you the video that does that, but it basically helps urban designers and therefore the citizens to see what is the consequence of their projects. So one of the things that we have a hard time is to show how will urban design transform a certain area. And therefore now we have these kinds of tools. This has been then acquired by a company in California called Esri that we work with quite closely because these are the people who also created geodesign and GIS. And so this is now part of a sort of GIS system. But basically my question here is around the idea of the tools for imagining the dynamic transformation of spaces through the intervention of projects. And so these projects, these software, in my opinion, also have consequences in terms of how we design because the ease with which the idea before and after is constructed through things like, through a city engine also has a consequence in terms of the sort of urban design that utilizes the software. It's like at the beginning of when we had computer software, how certain rendering techniques or certain kinds of software themselves produced their own architectural condition that came about from the utilization of the software. So what are the issues that relate to the kind of technique and the use of that? So I think then I wanted to pose against this the concept of montage and the way in which there has been a certain sort of technique in place to, you know, actually deal with multiple realities. I'm just going to go through these now very quickly because I realize that I've gone over the time that John Cate, just the system of notation, how we draw, how we can now talk about the concept of relationships, juxtapositions. I'm basically trying to ask what are the tools that we have where we can imagine another idea of urban design which is not imagistic, that's not pictorial. And so how do you imagine the idea of the sort of the relational? And of course you know then this connection to the way in which Kolaï City came about, the idea of the analogical city. So that's also the most recent idea of how to make urban design that we have. And so I won't dwell on this. One of the most influential though has been Gordon Cullen who was a British architect and urbanist who really came up with this idea of townscape. And my point is that townscape is in some ways more influential than many of these kinds of other traditions because it's about picturing the city. It's a kind of pictorial way of imagining the city. And that is really where we are with this business of sort of whether it's in China or whether it's in Las Vegas of the city in some ways being reduced to a form of pictorial. So some of these histories that we have should probably help us to imagine the role of urban design in different ways through the utilization of these tools which are much more performative than imagistic. At the same time, I think that there is another sort of tradition of this, of scenography people like Adolfo Appia and the way that they imagine the concept of the scene and setting and this is something that we would have to speak more about. And this is why I did this book about cities which comes more from the idea of narration about the description of the city, the life that's in there. And this is the sort of the reality of many of the cities that we have, Cardiff, other places. And this is really about the idea of the role and status of the political. And again, maybe we can leave that for later because this is all going very late. Finally, I just want to say that all of these things that I showed in the last two or three slides about the imagining of the life. So on the one hand, they're the tools of urban design. On the other hand, it's the kind of life that we want urbanization to bring about. It means that we have to understand the relationship of physicality to occurrence, to performance and the consequences of our actions in a different way. And I want to finish with also this video which is about the performance that takes place after an event in California where some youths are basically dancing in the city. And the city is a site of kind of choreography, but site of action. So in the same way, urban design and transition is also about questioning the kind of lives that are happening in our cities, but also how the city becomes a new kind of space for performance. And perhaps once you've seen this, we can have a few minutes of discussion. So let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. So hopefully we can open this up, but I just wanted to make sure because I went through this sort of last part of the slides quite quickly. So I want to make sure that I'm clear about the fact that on the one hand we have certain responsibilities. What kind of a place do we want? What sort of a city do we want? What is the kind of environment that we want to have? And then on the other hand, there's the question of like what tools do we have? How good are we? And we know that we really have the capacity to address these responsibilities that we are given. And therefore part of the process is on the one hand we are one of the citizens and imagining this idea of a better environment, a better world, something that's more equitable so the political, the economic, the cultural, the social dimension of these things become critical. And at the same time, it's not just simply being able to pay lip service to those things because I feel that during an earlier period when the social was made a significant project, architectural responses were made in the name of the social that just simply were moralistic responses and they were really not good enough. In that sense, housing was a social project but actually it didn't necessarily produce the best cities. And so now if we're imagining the idea of making a different kind of place, the circumstances are different. It's not just about the idea of doing a better building, it's the understanding of doing better buildings in the context of a different understanding of social, ethical, political responsibilities and it's that mixture that is a different ball game now. It's a different story. It's not something that we have had previously in the same way. And therefore the responsibility of the academy to this project is what? What do you do? How do we make that? And that is why things like the status of fiction, the role of the political, all of these things are also now part of our responsibilities. This is not somebody else's project. This is also our project. So I think that is why urban design is in the state of transition because it's trying to also define a different kind of ground of its aspirations and also like a doctor who is dealing with kind of new domains of investigation. They also have to have different tools and different techniques. So we also need to have different instruments in some way to be the catalyst for how we can respond to this shifting condition that is happening. And therefore the link between the academy and practice becomes a key component of the institution as a research engine for addressing kind of big picture problems. And yet the devices that we have are relatively modest. But nevertheless we have to hold on to whatever it is that we can hold on to. Any thoughts? Any recommendations? Torio, I don't know. Alfredo. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Margin. Thanks a lot also for the speech but also for the conclusion because after when I looked at, I don't know what you felt, but when I looked at the lovely video, last video that you showed, I thought what does it want us to tell? It was like saying, well, urban design is not important at all because you see this four fantastic guys dancing in a, not only under the rain, but in one of the most horrible urban situation that you can imagine. Or it was maybe a consolation saying whatever mistake you will do with your urban design, don't worry because life is stronger than anything that you do in the city, which is also, I think, true and nice, but it's not good enough. So thanks a lot for all this. Are there comments? I knew. Alfredo. Thank you for that inspiring lecture. You took us through an incredible complexity of the history of images and ideas behind urban design. But the thing that struck me the most that I'd probably just initiate a conversation here is that you began with the medieval city. And then you compared it to the ideal city. Now, in a way, the medieval city was built out by people and built out the social economical spaces in a more collective way. And you see that here in Niederdorf. And that's why you get such fascinating shapes and spaces and sizes and approximations and windows and directions, right? And that's where it's not the Cartesian city. It's the organic city, let's say. And then you showed us the ideal city, which is kind of the enlightenment, the Renaissance stepped in. We believed man could shape the territory. Man could enlighten and use geometry to cleanse the city, to clean it, to purify it, to create a theatrical city, as you put it. But wouldn't you say that that might have been the moment that we went wrong? The moment that we believed that we could rationally shape the city with an imposed grid, let's say the Cartesian grid became the dominating instrument, we lost touch with the very essence of what the city was. A kind of organically produced city built over time and lengths of time, and rather than the city of speculation, of parcelization, of the city as a game board, the city as control, the city as power. I think that that's a fair reading of those two drawings. The reason I would hesitate to make that conclusion is because, for example, if you think about New York, New York is also a Cartesian city. At the same time, it's a city of incredible diversity, and it's a city that has so many kind of multiplicity of situations, and it's so dynamic in terms of what goes on and so on and so forth. I'm trying to suggest that concepts can have within them the idea of a sort of grain of sand or some conditions of resistance. So the thing that I find a little bit problematic is the concept of ideality. It's really the idea that the form of picturing is so perfect that it doesn't enable contamination, whereas I could say New York has a certain idea of objectification, of rationality, and yet within that rationality, there are things that counter that rationality. They deny that rationality. So for me, it's more about this dynamic. This is why John Cage's drawing of showing the notation of how something is played, or how a piece of dance could occur, or something like that with these notations, because they're both instructional things, but they're also visual. I'm trying to figure that out in some way. And then I go one step further. You used the John Cage notation, but then we can go to the Decaddo sculpture, let's say, and say that the section is the key. So maybe no matter if it is a Cartesian grid like Manhattan, let's say although Manhattan would be an exception for the world, but actually that exception is actually being exported everywhere and not working exactly in that export model, but maybe it is sectional. So that's why when you have the dancers at the end, let's say on the city street, this is another layer. It's a layer of performance, or maybe there's layers that need to come on to contaminate that efficient, let's say, a Cartesian grid or division, that then would add the complexity that would give it the kind of the sectional complexity. Sure. I mean, the point that Vittorio was making about the film, I basically was having a marathon with myself mentally to try to get to the end in time just so that we could finish. And the film was there because one of those guys had lost his brother, was killed by the police. And so the dance was a memorial of sorts using the street corner as a site of reconciliation in some way. So it's also about the idea of violence. It's about the notion of the conflict of disagreement. And so the performance was also a way to use choreography to address this concept of conflict, of urban conflict, because the extension of this idea of multiple situations of resistance or what I call multiple conditions of conflict is something that I've been calling for this last book on the ethics of the urban, the idea of agonistic urbanism. And to use this, I don't know what the word is in German or, but I think in most places it's still agonistic. But agonism is also about the site as a site of conflict. And my criticism of showing some of the things like the New Urbanist Project and so on was that these kinds of places are about ironing out conflict. They're ironing out the concept of difference. So part of the strength of the Paris of Chris Marker is also Paris as a site of multiple interests, which are never resolved. It's the Algerians and the Africans who've come and the Parisians and the poor. And these conflictual conditions are also the things that make the city what it is as a site of kind of possibility. So that was a little bit the reason for the end as a kind of short-term as well. Thank you for your presentation. I greatly enjoyed it. Particularly the end, the last 15 minutes when you started to talk about the instruments and devices and the methods. And interestingly enough, they were very architectural. You talked about the ground, about the section, about the notations that can be deployed. And you presented them nearly without value. You didn't take position, you didn't proclaim how you would deploy those techniques. But then at the very end, in your epilogue after the movie, I heard that you were, I believe to have heard that you made a plea for responsibility, for ethics. And that there were important questions that we needed to address today. But you didn't take position. You presented the questions also value less. Unfortunately, I haven't read your newest book, so maybe the answers are there. So my question would be how do you, A, if we have to take position, vis-à-vis those important questions, and how would you connect them to these tools? Because those tools would be ultimately the means to carry out those intentions. So I started, this thing doesn't work, does it? This is not the part. I started with questioning the status of urban design as a project. Is this on? It's working? Okay. So urban design as a form of practice, because we, for example, I'm aware of this thing that when we talk at Harvard about the departments, we have architecture, which is a discipline. Landscape architecture, which is a discipline. Planning, which is a discipline. But many of my colleagues would say urban design is not a discipline. Urban design is a more of a practice. It's a practice that is at the intersection of some of these disciplines, which is really addressing the specificity of a certain condition. So just in terms of the structure of my presentation, I tried to start with my, this was my homework. Like, homework is urban design. So one thing is what is urban design? And then at the end, there is really the question of, you know, for too long, we have been the recipients as service providers of services to society. You sit in your office and you wait for a commission, for a project to come. And that this idea, this concept of practice is just not good enough for the academy, for practitioners. So I am trying to not make it value free, that the connection to the political is that this project of urban design is always a political project. And therefore, we now have to also state what are our belief systems, what are our interests, what is it that we want to do. And that the various versions of urban design that we've had, like the, I showed the Chinese Tollwan, or the Seaside Florida, these are completely full of value. They represent the interests of the marketplace and they also, they represent the interest of gated communities of a certain notion of homogeneity. That is not agonistic urbanism when we show, you know, Seaside or whatever. So now, if we are going to have this concept of a different set of values and a different sense of the city, then we also need to redefine the tools and the methodology of urban design. In that sense, I'm not providing the solution of what it looked like. So it was very important for me when we did things like the ecological urbanism to present them almost like a manual. And that this manual is like just something like the ingredients of a meal, like a recipe of some things that you can bring these things. But then it's very important that I also don't try to give it a particular look, but give it through certain samples, certain hints of what some of the conditions. So performance is one, the section is another one. The way in which the, in the states, for example, the interface between public and private is another one of these kinds of things. And I think it's very strongly that we have these positions, but I don't know that I have a singular outcome. That's what I don't. But I think I do want to, you know, agree with your reading of the end part of the presentation about the move towards the ethical and the political. And there's also in this, in the life of cities, is actually about the way in which the book doesn't work completely like that, but it was about the role of fiction and the way in which when you're designing for urban design, you're sketching and you're imagining things, for example, how something might happen. And I'm very interested in this relationship between the physical and the what may occur, the hypothetical occurrence. So this relationship between the physical and the performative is also something that we are very much responsible for. But I think I was trying to, for example, learn from the 19th century novel or from the idea, the traditions of literature in terms of helping architects or urban designers or urbanists or landscape architects also imagine. So, so these are all my like trying to use certain conditions to create new situations for imagining. But I think, you know, probably it would be worthwhile another time to spend, you know, a lot longer going through some of that kind of about fiction and about the political and things like this. I don't know if I answered any. Thanks. You had a question. One of the main tools we have, I think, is language. And if I if I look what happened to our ideas of what is the city, Europe, it's mostly described as a mixed city, socially and and culturally and in a broad range of differences or as you said, contrast mixed city. But on the other hand, I think the tool of this term is not functioning any longer because they are developed. They are used by very almost antagonistic players of the game. So, and I think one of the main things for us is to reinvent something that is maybe what you call the transition. I would describe it as a kind of self made city. So, that that you as architects are not not so much any longer in the position of planning and doing things by distance. You have to go or all the citizens of the cities want to be part of the process even more. And this, I think for us, by teaching students and young architects become quite difficult how to get out of the simulation of a plan and how to simulate, let's say, what what later comes by by by all the very very self sufficient citizens who want really have the argument and really want to be part of the planning process. So, and this is maybe why I see a shift by by us teaching not only by by teaching standards of what is a good plan and what is good architecture but also by preparing the students in a very cultural way of broad cultural educations that they are prepared of a situation they are not expecting. One thing that I would I don't know what thought you have what your reaction would be but in in America planning is not very physical. So planning as a discipline has become more and more something which is part of the social sciences. So you have planning more as policy, right and planning as project. I think in terms of the discussion of urban design, if it's a subset of planning, it might also be interesting to go the other way. So for me, for example, in the school, this is what I try to do a little bit is to say what is the relationship between planning and urban design, because I try to to create a situation with planning where it becomes more theoretical and at the same time is able to engage the physical more because if it's only the social science in terms of policy, it's not able to use the idea of actual design of physical design. So I think one interesting question is how can urban design affect planning and vice versa, because I don't know that there shouldn't be more planning, but maybe there should be more planning but a different kind of planning. And that's that's also because the nature of the planning what you I don't think you are planning in it, because it's mainly architecture or something. But you know when we have the American planning programs are very different. So actually going from the smaller scale to the larger scale is also an interesting issue in terms of how planning might be changed through the rethinking of urban design. Yeah, I mean, just maybe to step into that debate. If you go to the other end of that, we come again to the street corner that you showed us at the end. And at the same time, I was really fascinated by by your talk through the way how you unfolded the different interventions that that are done through urban design. And then you had these two insertions these two films. And suddenly does this was a totally different topic. I mean the same the design immediately changed to something else. Because we saw then the users we saw then the social. And I mean, if I understood you the right way you said, we should not try to shape the social and we should not start trying to organize the social and with such a position I would fully agree. But nevertheless, the social is key in our cities and how do these two moments are coming together. Because in that way, as you presented us, the cities and urban design, it is a very abstract level. And then suddenly the concrete enters like like a shock. It was like a shock. And also that that you showed the films. Suddenly there was time coming in because film is showing time. So how you see that relationship between the social and and urban design. Well, I didn't try to say that we shouldn't intervene in the social. I believe strongly that we have to participate in the interrelationship between the political and spatial. So part of this discussion is whether, for example, one can talk about democracy as a spatial project. Can you say, and this was the concept behind the book in the life of cities, can you say that the relationship the Zurich as a physical artifact is a different enabling artifact than Paris as a physical artifact is London is, I don't know, is some Beirut. And this relationship between the physical and its performative dimension is an important part of what we do. At the same time, what I am saying is that we should not be behaviorists in the sense of trying to be instrumental in terms of one to one correlation between what we design and what we expected to do. Nevertheless, when we design something, we have to have instruments that help us imagine possibilities. So what do you use to help yourself imagine what in English I would say, and otherwise, as something else, a different kind of life. So I have to use writing or fiction. Fiction, I mean just a kind of a scenario, a kind of a possibility, which helps the design, but at the same time, let's go over design. So you want the inspiration, but you don't want the instrumentality. You want the social ideas and the political ideas, but you don't want to be predictable in terms of outcome. And I think this is the sort of this is the sort of tension. And I'm trying to also get away from the architectural or the urban design as a sign of something like housing as a sign of social, but actually housing as a particular condition or a situation. And in that sense, that's why the performative is important because of the fact that it's about the happening. We are in this room and tonight, this in this space, our interactions are different than if we were in the lecture hall in Honeberg, for example. And in that sense, this is I'm trying to get at that issue of how something affects a condition. And then at the same time, you kind of let it go. Sorry. Thanks so much. I have a very short question, but I want to ask it with what might by now be an inadequate word, but I'm going to use it for lack of a better one. I'm just curious if the rural in scare quotes figures at all in your thinking about the future of urban design. I think this morning this afternoon I've actually been in Basel with the studio Basel and and some of the GST students and some of the students are working with Jack and Pierre and with Gunter on this, you know, the the Lucian book hearts, sort of version of of warning the book that he did in the fifties and really trying to understand the evolution of kind of or the transformation of the Swiss landscape or rural or what they call unbuilt environment. I think that right now there's a lot of interesting work or or or thought that's being given to urbanization as a topic. And I think that it's it's impossible to talk about urbanization without discussing urbanization as a bigger project that transcends the kind of the scale of urban but actually it's kind of a bigger picture. And so it depends. Some people would react strongly to you using the word rural, because they would say that there is no such thing anymore as rural because it's all part of the procedures of urbanization and the distinction between city and country or city and rural or urban and rural are artificial constructs. But I know exactly what you mean, and I'm very sympathetic to this idea and I believe that actually there are parts of the world where the rural is more rural than other places. So in Switzerland, for example, I think that rural is completely part of a project of Swiss urbanization. It's a it's a mode of thought it's part of Swiss identity landscape is is an artificial construct. And therefore, it's not it's not natural in the same sense that people when they mentioned the word rural, they mean that. So I think that that this is a very key part of it and more and more, if we spend time doing these kinds of projects, we're also trying to understand their consequence in other places, their impact in other places and so on. At the same time, I think next semester, in fact, we are going to do an event on this topic. We have this. You remember I showed you these two books in China, which is one on the on the on the mega plot the cross border. The third one is called rural urbanization, and it's really looking at the way in which the rural areas are becoming urbanized because also in China you have things where you're in the middle of the countryside. You drive for an hour and a half. There's nothing and suddenly there is 20 story buildings in the middle of what was the village before that they moved everybody from the village out. So I think these are very important issues. I think that we now need to kind of find tools to also understand this idea of the bigger, bigger picture of how one thing affects something else in other places. But I also think we haven't really done enough work on the topic because let's say in the past few years, you have lived there, you know this magazine called country life. And it's all about the life in the country and property and the idealization of the houses and the hotels and gardens and so on. I think there are so many versions of this idea of the rural or the country life or the or the happy life associated with nature that for us is becoming a kind of bigger thing. This is what I want to do next semester if we can. So maybe we can collaborate on that. Thank you very much. Time has passed quite quickly, which is not always true in lectures and discussions. So that's your merit. I would have a lot of questions to you, frankly. But I think this is true almost for everybody and maybe we have another time and other occasions of discussing it. I think that the fact that I have a lot of questions and I think that it's the same for you is really a consequence of the spectrum of possibilities and options that you have opened this kind of multiple access that you were mentioning at the beginning. And so we go, I think we go home or wherever we go now with a lot of, also to the desk or to the studio, with a lot of ideas and thoughts of course, which is I think the best thing that can be said of a lecture. So I would like you to thank again, Moshen, for this really wonderful presentation. Thank you so much for being here with us. I hope you have a great evening. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here with us. I hope you have a great evening. Thank you.
 I'm very happy to welcome you here for the lecture of Moshen Mustafavi.  And you probably know or you think you know why we invited him.  Moshen is the dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.  We have very good and very strong relationships between our schools.  He has been chairman of the Architectural Association in London.  He has been dean at Cornell.  So he has an incredible academic career.  And I will not mention all the awards he got and all the committees and the jurors he is sitting in.  So this would be a very good reason to be very honored to have him here.  But that's not the reason.  That's not the reason at all.  We are here at NSL, at the network of city and landscape.  We are interested in exploring the most advanced points in terms of teaching, in terms of research,  and in terms of practice, dealing with urban design.  Everybody is talking about the city nowadays and about the territory.  A few people, some people do research on it and interpret it.  But very few really shape the territory and the city with their research and with their practice.  Moshen is one of them.  And I think that what he is doing in his teaching, in his research, in his books,  I will not mention all the books that he has written.  This is a very famous one, ecological urbanism.  In all his many-fold activities, he is one of the personalities of the contemporary personalities  who is really trying to push the research on urban design, in a broader sense of the world,  to its very limit, one who is really trying to innovate the instruments and in the aims  and in the ways that we are shaping our territory and our cities.  I think that he has developed a very clear, although complex position.  And it is exactly this position that we are interested in,  and it is this position that we need, very pointed positions,  if we want our discipline, urban design, territorial design to really advance.  So I am very happy to welcome Moshen.  And I am very interested in his lecture, which has a title, as you know, Urban Design in Transition.  And I welcome him very warmly and then ask you to do the same.  Good evening. Can you hear me?  Does it work?  Thank you very much for being here.  Thank you very much, Vittorio, Claudia.  I really feel so honored to be with you, but also to have so many friends here.  As Vittorio said, I think this is, for me, really an opportunity that was,  on the one hand, it has been part of the life of our school,  but on the other hand, really, it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for Vittorio saying,  there needs to be something if you can talk about this particular topic.  And it is true that I have been thinking about urban issues,  but I think specifically really discussing this topic of urban design  as something that's not really just talking more broadly about urbanization or urbanism,  is also something very important.  And to be honest, this is the first time that I'm doing this particular talk,  so I'm sure that it's quite rough around the edges.  And it would be very good to have your comments and your feedback  so that I can also get the chance to learn from what you're doing.  I probably have put a few too many slides, so I will go through this fairly quickly  so that we can actually have enough time for questions.  At 6.15 I'll try not to talk for more than 45 minutes.  I think it's true that this issue of urban design,  I said in the little note that you might have received,  is about this question of the middle scale, and in some ways it's interesting,  because at the GST we have this concept of the different departments,  architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design,  and therefore part of the whole idea of being the dean of the school  is also the idea of how these different disciplines come together,  and what is the status of each one of them,  and precisely because of the fact that in some ways urban design  also has a particular history in the school,  this challenge in a way to also rethink with you  this question of urban design is an interesting one,  and that's why I also selected this concept of transition of the title,  because I really believe that urban design is in a moment of transition,  and by transition I mean that it's actually between two states.  It's in this moment when it's open to discussion,  what should happen, in which kind of direction should it go,  and that's where I'm hoping that your comments and your thoughts  would be able to open up that conversation.  I think when we think about the city and when we think about the traditional city,  we often are confronted with this idea that the city is a site of aesthetic pleasure,  and it's a place where actually one's participation in the city is itself full of joy.  When we look at the medieval city,  I think it's maybe the fact that we don't have necessarily always a pictorial,  an image, a sense of the whole,  and that with the medieval city there is this very strong sense of its organic growth  and the way that it has evolved,  so the evolution of the city is an important part of it.  I also feel that with many medieval cities, this is a kind of tangent,  the relationship to topography is very interesting,  where many medieval cities are in a way resolving the interface between architecture  and the city, or architecture and urbanization,  through the resolution of the geometry of topography,  and that's also something else to bear in mind.  When we think about the Renaissance city or the idealized city,  we have a much clearer sense of the city as a pictorial project,  as a piece of sonography as well.  Of course, there's a degree of rationality that is part and parcel of the making of that city,  but it's also the idea that one, as in theater, can also imagine the city.  So if the medieval city is really about the idea of its evolving over time,  it seems that to be in a kind of simplistic fashion, at least the idealized city,  is about the construction of the sonography of the city  as something which is made up of the architecture  that makes that image possible to imagine the so-called ideal.  Today, when we think about cities, the more successful examples of urban design,  perhaps in the States, we can mention some things like Seattle, top left,  where there is this park that was done some years ago  and combining the transformation of public space with the idea of a sculpture park.  We might mention the relationship to informal communities,  and for example, the development of the city of Medellin  and the way in which both architecture and the transformation of urban spaces  have been part and parcel of that transformation.  But in fact, the idea of the contemporary city  is invariably sort of probably more correctly captured by places like Poudon,  where one really sees that the organization of the city  has to do with the organization of property, of the division of land,  and the structure of the city is really the structure of private buildings.  And essentially, the city is simply the infrastructure of the city itself,  because more and more the main sites of the city are these sites of private development.  The history of that kind of development, like Poudon,  of course has its lineage in places like La Défense,  as the construction of a totality of a whole,  which is made possible as something that is created en masse.  In places like China, when these cities happen,  we also have phenomenal transformation, destruction that is also happening.  So part of the question of urban design today,  which I really am not addressing, is also the relationship to the old,  the relationship to the existing,  and the degree to which urban design sort of addresses both existing and new-built.  In China and in Hong Kong,  there is also a certain sort of tradition,  the Kowloon World City, of dense structures that had multifunctional operations  that happen inside them.  And as we have gone through the transformation of these kinds of buildings,  or the demolition of these,  we are now arriving at a situation where the concept of density  actually is missing pretty much this concept of the dynamic,  the multi-use of the large scale,  and in a sense the concept of variety or diversity  is simply being alluded to through the application of color  on the outside of buildings like this.  So on the one hand, we have really the move towards densification and high-rise.  On the other hand, the tradition of urbanization or urban design  in certain parts of the States,  through the success of projects like New Urbanism,  have been really a return to the idea of the town,  the idea that really, you know,  somehow the best version of urbanization is represented by the idealization  of the New England town  and the way in which some sort of suburban development,  semi-gated community,  is evolving as the vision of the town that we should have.  These kinds of constructions are also leading to projects like this,  which is called, this is the sort of Las Vegas, Venice,  where developers are trying to create, you know,  residential developments with water in between canals  as if Las Vegas was also something like Venice.  But we are finding that the way in which the historic city  or the traditional city is being interpreted,  in many ways, is missing the life of the city.  And so when we think about urban design  and we think about the operations of urban design,  this for me is like a typical image of what we find with urban design  because what urban design is doing in many respects  is basically showing the potential transformation of a totality  and then what it uses is the idea of a generic architecture  which stands for an architecture.  And at the same time, more and more, you know,  certain notions of public space or green and things like this.  But I feel that as this process of urban design,  as a design of the middle scale,  is evolving, also this architecture that is the placeholder  becomes the real architecture in some sense.  In many instances, it's very difficult to have the idea  of architecture being also something very specific.  So what are the problems of sort of imagining the middle scale  at a general level which then also promotes the concept of generality,  of a sort of generic city?  And I think this is one of the sort of problems that we face today.  At Harvard, the department or the program in urban design  started over 50 years ago by the Spanish architect  who was the dean then called José Luis Sert.  And here you see in that front row,  Lou Kahn sitting next to Sert  and really the discussion of urban design  and the program in urban design developing.  For Sert, urban design represented in some ways  the space that was something like a subset of planning,  where planning was becoming more specific  and was moving towards the architectural.  That for him represented the idea of urban design.  You have to also remember that this is the period  after the Second World War  where there had been a great deal of destruction  and there was in a way the continuity of the various projects of modernism  and so the school became a good basis to develop, to articulate,  something more specific about urbanization  under the rubric of urban design.  This program also led to the way in which at that time  there was an interest to bring together the variety of different disciplines  of architecture, landscape architecture and planning  as one of the key aspects of what constituted urban design.  But in reality, this is something that didn't happen so much.  So when Sert himself started to do a lot of projects in South America,  he was in some ways continuing the tradition of modernist urbanism  with really the idea of blocks in the middle of green spaces,  but in some ways he was also more and more interested in the degree to which  or in ways in which urban design could also become more locally specific  to South America in terms of the evolution of an architecture  which was responsive to the conditions of South America.  Back in Cambridge, he built I think a rather remarkable project  called the Peabody Terrace, which is this complex of graduate housing  on the left hand side and you see some drawings of that  where you have a combination of low rise and high rise  and apartment buildings and things that are almost like houses  with public spaces, gardens, facing the river, but also facing a community.  In some ways, this was the most successful manifestation of urban design  as developed during this time by Sert and coming out of the school.  But in some ways, there was also another person that was around,  was the man here, Hideo Sasaki, a Japanese American who was a landscape architect  and he went on to create a practice called Sasaki Associates, which still exists.  And I'm showing you this because I feel that if urban design was somehow this kind of subset  of planning and negotiating between planning and architecture,  the idea of urban design also as a recombination of architecture,  planning, landscape, engineering, infrastructure,  which was actually quite a kind of radical thought at the time,  never became a sort of true reality, never became a true actuality.  And the question is whether this is now part of the project of urban design.  Is this something that now urban design has to really take on board?  And therefore, if it has to take that on board,  what are the ways in which it should engage with that kind of idea of the project?  Nevertheless, at that time, people like Fumiiko Maki were also experimenting  with other things that are also interesting for us to discuss.  For example, one of the things that Maki was very keen on was the idea of the urban room,  of the idea of spaces that are internal but are large enough to be conceived of,  thought of as public spaces in the city.  The closest example of these kinds of things that we might imagine today are,  for example, railway stations.  You go to the public space of Zurich station and there is something  like a kind of public piazza of sorts, captured, caught inside the space of the station.  And I believe that this is also something not dissimilar to what people like Maki had in mind.  So the other thing I'd like to leave with you is really this concept of urban design dealing  with certain structures where the concept of urbanization, the idea of the city,  is internalized to architecture, becomes very much a sort of part of architecture.  These set of thoughts are in some ways caught also between two moments in time.  There is a film, there's a movie that was partly influenced  by an interesting American woman scholar who used to be in California called Catherine Bauer,  who was sort of one of the people behind the movie that was called The City,  made just, you know, around the 30s and that kind of period.  And you can see that Louis Mumford was actually the kind of narrator on this.  And partly during this period, and it's really a continuation of certain ideas  that people like Ebenezer Howard had with the Garden City movement,  there is still during this period a certain concept of anti-city that is also very much present.  So this particular film is showing the evils of the city, pollution,  the problems of urbanization and really imagines the concept of the new town  as something which is sort of much closer to nature and has certain associations  with rural environments and in some ways is asking for the construction of a new town  as something that avoids the evils of the traditional 19th century industrial city  and therefore this would be the kind of ideal environment for children to grow,  for schools to be there, for a kind of idyllic life.  So you have to understand the movement towards urban design as something that's also happening  in the context of these kinds of set of ideas.  At the same time, soon after the development of urban design in the early 60s,  you have the first manifestations of the move towards the city as a place of possibilities,  as a place that actually does offer exciting things after the war,  especially for example in France where there had been incredible devastation,  in the 60s you find that there is really the idea that we, the state,  can now also participate in providing a better life, a better quality of life for the citizens.  Therefore, there is this suggestion of an alternative.  And so Chris Marker, who some of you might be familiar with his work,  also made a beautiful movie that I recommend to you called The Lovely Month of May.  And this is, there is a little trailer from this film,  and I just want you to sort of see this in the context of what I was saying about the 19th century.  It's the most beautiful set in the world.  And against this set, eight million Parisians act out a play or boo and hiss it.  And after all, it's only they, the Parisians, who are able to tell us what makes Paris what it is,  in this lovely month of May.  For me, in my opinion, it's first to raise the family.  It's this hour here, the hour of our work.  I'm being bullied by my boss, bullied by my wife.  I just have the tragedy that I'm afraid of.  Now I'm going to drive you home.  So it's okay, I don't even have the tranquility.  Tomorrow we could inspire the week of tremors.  There are only obstacles, the red light.  We tend to forget that the last of the proletarians, a colonizer,  always has a sub-proletarian, the one of the colonized,  and that this reality survives the colonization.  My grandmother always told me,  my children, you're a French.  Do you believe?  Well, I do.  So I think what's exciting about this film,  that it shows you Paris as the metropolis,  not as this kind of rural environment,  that the city, the city of density,  can also be the place that is, that place of loveliness,  that has all sorts of possibilities for the citizens.  And I think it opens up really also the role in the movie,  for example, how urbanization,  the building of new apartment buildings,  building new housing,  this also offers a new kind of possibility for democracy  and for happiness, and also because this is happening  after the whole sort of Algerian crisis.  So it addresses questions of immigration.  It's the first time that the poor in France  are being given housing.  In the movie, for example, there are people  who have been living, family, French family,  of five, six or seven in one or two rooms.  And so to just, now it's hard for us in some ways to imagine,  but in a way, the idea that social housing meant so much  in terms of the kind of opportunities that it provided.  And I think that that's really another aspect of urban design  in terms of what can it do to life?  What can it do in terms of the transformation of places?  So you might be familiar with sort of projects like this.  The Barbican, for example, in London, that to this day,  remains one of the kind of interesting examples  of dense residential development in the middle of the city,  but combining it with school buildings, theater buildings,  shops, markets, and things like that.  And in some ways, it still remains as one of the better examples  of the kind of the large-scale transformation of the city  through sort of urban design.  And now it's becoming very successful in London.  This is a very hip kind of place, very desirable place.  So is this sort of one of the possibilities for urban design  that it grows at that kind of scale  that is also part of the city itself,  that it constructs a component of the city?  Obviously, more recently, there's been also the question  of regeneration, of urban regeneration,  and the role of urban design as a component of development,  of creating new kinds of spaces with places like Berlin,  and with places like Yoraleil,  and using, let's say, the idea of Yoraleil  in terms of sort of multiple buildings  to create also a sector of the city.  And of course, just because Vittorio is here,  just to get the conversation going,  we also have something that's not very far from here  as a project that he started with the kind of the concept  of the urban design of the Novartis campus,  and perhaps we could also have a kind of conversation about,  I mean, that's very much a kind of institutional site in some ways,  but I think it again, obviously presents a very specific kind of typology  in terms of the importance of a rational project  and then really, unlike some of the examples that I was saying,  the focus on the quality of architecture  and the specificity of architecture  as something that makes the project.  So in the context of all these debates and these kinds of ideas,  this is why we also produced the book that Vittorio referred to,  which we just actually with Alfredo and some other friends  had an event for the Spanish edition in South America  and for Portuguese edition in Brazil.  And I think part of this is really about our responsibility to,  in terms of educational institutions,  to set up a certain dialogue and debate,  to then use that dialogue and the communication of that dialogue  to now also develop certain strategies for the transformation of our cities,  but also as a way of using the academy of schools  to develop strong theoretical positions.  So for me, for example, in terms of Harvard,  it was very important to say that if CERD had been trying to establish urban design,  what is our responsibility today in terms of the formation of discourse?  And in that sense, this project tried to have a certain sort of idea  of method or methodology or approaches.  And I think in that project, of course,  one of the things about the contemporary city is about the recycling of infrastructure  with things like the promenade planter in Paris.  Another one is really about questions, for example, of nature,  but the degree to which, in the case of this is the work of the French architect Jean-Renaud D,  who built a series of apartment buildings, one in south of Paris, one in south of France,  the idea of how to maximize green space, how to maximize balconies,  outdoor space for the apartments.  So I see this idea as something which is part and parcel of urban design,  in the sense that the architecture is also trying to place the architectural project  within the larger project of the social, of the creativity of the architectural project.  So it's also trying to introduce a certain level of generosity with the building  for the citizens, for the occupiers of this building,  which actually at the beginning was highly criticized by, this was done as social housing.  And therefore in France, even at that time, the workers who were going to occupy this building  thought of it as being too bourgeois.  And in some ways, they wanted to live in housing that looked like social housing,  not housing that looked like something for the bourgeoisie.  So I think this also is a kind of interesting thing in terms of how the concept of maximization of a condition  is not that different from something like parametric design, if you like,  or some better conditions of aspects of parametric design,  but when Odi tried to just say, let's maximize this idea of the balcony  and let's see what we do, what we get with that.  So in the last few years, continuing from the project of ecological urbanism,  we have tried around these questions of the urban and urban design  to bring many other projects that can contribute to this conversation.  So one of them is really the project of infrastructural landscape  and the role of infrastructure as a way to bring sort of infrastructure and landscape together  and to address, for example, issues as large as the whole evolution of coastal regions,  which itself would be a kind of separate topic.  But I'm just trying to touch on the fact that we are now trying to establish certain very specific research initiatives  that can help address multiple themes and topics.  Another one has been this concept of projective ecologies, which is going more into the role of landscape.  So if, for example, Hido Sasaki during the third time there wasn't the kind of commitment of landscape,  what can we do now, what is the role of landscape today in the project of urban design?  And so some of the projects that are being developed in the school, in a way,  address this question of the status of landscape as part of urban design.  Recently there's been a number of kind of competitions and projects in Dallas, in Texas,  and for example, one of the faculty who did some of those projects was basically involved working together  between a sort of landscape firm and an architecture firm to try and bring together sort of transformation  of the downtown of Dallas in conjunction with a river scheme that pays as much attention  to the landscape situation as it does to the architectural project.  Another aspect of this issue has been to do with informal communities and the concept of extremes,  and the fact that urban design today has to deal with certain situations that are not very normal,  so to speak, because we're dealing with enormous growth in the population in certain parts of the world.  We're dealing with very, very complicated extreme conditions of weather and so on.  So what is our capacity today to address these questions?  Because in some ways, I am imagining that in many places the situation is so extreme  that in some ways the kind of the normal conditions of urban design are incapable of addressing these things.  So we now need to innovate new situations that have the capacity.  Therefore, this idea of the extreme urbanism is also being part of a research initiative.  More recently, we've had a group of people from the GSD, but also from the School of Public Health,  from the Divinity School, work together also around this project called the CUMELLA,  which is basically a religious ceremony that happens once every few years,  but it brings roughly 100,000 people together in India for a religious ceremony  that is then resulting in the creation of a temporary city.  And so part of this is what is now also referred to as ephemeral urbanism,  like how do you create urbanism that is temporary?  And in India, where the government is really doing very little sometimes in terms of the state contributing to urbanization,  it is astonishing what they are able to do in such a short period of time to actually construct a city.  From the beginning, for a short period of time, 100,000 people coming and after the ceremony is finished,  everything is taken away and the city, which has hospitals, which has restaurants and all of that,  the site becomes as if nothing had happened there.  So I think this is also a very interesting concept of what we can learn from temporary structures  or from things that are just happening for a short period of time.  I think another aspect of this kind of research investigation,  so I'm just trying to give you multiple ways to get into this discussion of urban design,  have been going into more specific conditions and really examining the particularity of conditions.  So for the past three years, we have been conducting a series of studios in China,  every one of them in a different city, one of them in a city called Jaman,  and it has been dealing with this concept of the mega plot.  The mega plot is when the city is actually selling very large tracts of land to developers  who are then developing the city according to their own private motivations,  and therefore you have a very strange kind of type of city that's growing,  which is really a private city, a private enterprise,  and therefore part of this challenge is given the realities of contemporary economic market  because this is not, for example, a normal condition for urban design.  This is a condition where the site is so massive and it's so privatized  that then the concept of what is the public becomes up for discussion  because it's actually fundamentally a sort of privatized city.  So this idea of the mega plot, we try to understand what may be alternative strategies  given the realities of the marketplace for the development of the mega plot.  The other one dealt with the city of Macau,  which as you know used to be the place where the Portuguese had colonized  and then now was given back to China,  and it's grown so fast as a center of gambling that it now is making more money than Las Vegas.  But because of this growth, actually there's no room, it's also a small place,  so they have to go across the border to China to make development.  So what are the consequences of urbanization, of urban design  when you have to build in another country, build across the border,  where people have to go through immigration, for example, every day?  So my point is that we're also now facing unusual circumstances and conditions,  and therefore the project of urban design, the project of the kind of themes and issues  that we're dealing with are very different than what we have been dealing with historically.  So these are some of the kind of themes that have been present in the school  and I think it would be very interesting to know what you consider as substantial issues,  and some of them have been shown recently as part of an exhibition in the school.  Vittorio also asked me, okay, show some things also that are projects that maybe you're working on  and going into a different angle altogether.  This is more like planning an urban design, right, an urban design and planning,  and for the past couple of years I've actually also been working on a research project  which is called Exuma.  This is a sort of wonderful place to do a research project.  These are a series of 365 islands in the Bahamas called the Exuma,  and what is unusual about this is that it's one of the most beautiful places for tourism.  You can see the color of the water and so on,  but you won't believe it that this is also the site for some of the world's poorest people,  as well as the islands that are owned by some of the world's wealthiest people.  So you have this strange anomaly of the juxtaposition of the richest and the poorest,  and basically the poor people work for the rich people who use the islands as their holiday homes and things like this.  So it raises certain challenge of what to do with tourism,  how to deal with economic development,  how to deal with the creation of new kinds of urbanization for these poor islands and so on.  So I think one of the things that I have learned in terms of working and collaborating with others on this project  is the fact that one needs now also to not just work at the scale of the plan,  at the scale of the physical, but actually in multiple ways and engage multiple agencies in order to be effective.  So for this one, we have tried both to work at the design level,  but also at the government level, at the level of working with the small community  and being there and having meetings with the community.  And for example, you won't believe it,  but one of the things that we've had to do recently is just to find very modest ways to create economic development.  And about two or three months ago, we had a group design these chicken groups to try and create very modest economic development.  These things happened with like an IKEA map or a diagram, which then people make.  Sometimes they got help from the U.S. Army people who came and worked with them over the weekend.  And then we tried to bring, in a sense, planning into the schools  and work with the schools in terms of the development of certain parts of the city.  So basically this project of urban design and planning was operating at so many different scales to connect it  with various parts of the community, because that's the kind of reality of the sort of sites that exist there.  And then they were also involved in certain kinds of events, charades,  to begin to have a greater sense of their own sort of public space,  the potential future of this place and so on,  trying to link the transformation of the islands to a sort of social economic political understanding  of their rights and their possibilities in a way.  So I want to just finish by just sort of touching on a few strategies  and to see what you think are sort of other strategies for urban design,  the urban design that is in this process of transition, if we're going to open it up.  One of the, this is by the way sort of part of our elements studio for the urban design group,  and it's a model that this group of students have made, and it's made of all these different fragments.  Each one of the students has a series of buildings which then makes up the city.  So these are some of their sort of fragments.  They're a little bit like the idea of the analogical city, of the city of elements in one sense.  And all of them, they also have this kind of taxonomy of drawings of the building.  So this is very much a sort of architectural idea of the city, which is also a very dense city and so on.  So one thing is really about the status of the model, the status of the thing that is made and the idea of the artifact.  And we'll kind of come back to that.  Another really is about the status of the section.  And I think from the Rockefeller Center to lots of other projects, you know, projects that people like Ed Bacon worked on,  one issue is what's the status of the section in the formation of urban design.  Because remember that I'm also trying to react to the idea of urban design as a stenography,  because urban design as a stenography is basically dealing with the image of the architecture.  So if we are thinking about the city as something that is constructed by a kind of, if you like, a sort of delayed idea of the image,  then things like the model as a way of configuring, of imagining the city,  or the idea of the section as something which is an invisible version of the city,  which I think, for example, even in Delirious New York with Rem's description of the athletic club,  the fact of the kind of life that goes on inside the high rise, it's really also a description of the section.  And the fact that the section is something which is sort of non-visual, it's not an image, it's a kind of performance.  And I think in Japan, for example, with places like Roppongi,  we have this concept of the urban design as a sectional development.  So what is the status of the section?  I think the work of Anthony Carroll, the British sculptor Anthony Carroll,  did a series of sculptures which were called table pieces.  In these table pieces, he made these pieces that couldn't be placed on a podium flat.  So if you go back to one of the images that I showed at the beginning,  going from the medieval city and discussing, mentioning the topography of the city,  to the idealized city where the horizon line is flat, the line is straight.  And Carol's table pieces couldn't really rest on a table.  They had to be on the edge of the table.  And therefore, this placing of the thing on the edge makes the datum line something that is in a state of suspense.  You don't know where the ground is.  The ground is actually something that is in a state of becoming, if you like.  And in places like the Roppongi, there is this kind of ambiguity,  because you're going up a hill, you don't really know where is the ground level of this building,  since in Japan they're building three, four, five stories below ground.  And so much of kind of life is happening below ground.  So what is the status of the ground in the project of urban design?  With that in mind, I think we've also had certain projects in the school  that have tried to work with this notion of the high rise,  not as something that sits on the horizontal flat plenum, the ground,  but actually through the articulation of the interrelationship between a high rise project  and the modulation of the ground, the project of architecture's relationship to the city  is also something that is open to speculation.  Another is around the question of the clustering or the gathering of the pieces  as you see in the kind of idea of the high rise project,  how the high rise as a cluster is different than the New York block structure  of how a certain set of buildings might come together to constitute  a different sense of the relationship of architecture to the urban.  And this I think is touching on this question of the configuration  or the relationship between architecture and site but architecture to itself.  And this I think extends to the concept of the urban design as a means of thickening the ground,  of seeing something where urban design and architecture and the city  have become so intermeshed that it's impossible to decipher  what is the singularity of architecture itself because it's as a mesh.  This is by the way, this is kind of an experimental idea.  I'm not suggesting that it's necessarily there's a one to sort of like a single step  from this to a building project but I think in terms of the notion of the thickening  of the relationship between architecture and the city, it's an interesting thing.  Going back to the role and status of the model,  I think for me one of the most interesting sort of models that dealt with this concept  of a large scale territory is the model from Frank Lloyd Wright of Broadacre City  and how that model had a kind of material quality of the relationship  between the things that were built, the green, as the landscape as kind of stuff,  as something that had quality.  So this is really again all about the status of the model as a way of imagining,  and though Wright himself was one of the anti-city people in many ways.  And there are other examples now of what is the role of the model  in terms of seeing a city or imagining a city.  We now know this kind of thing, of course from our experience of visiting a lot of cities in China  where every city seems to have a museum where there is the map and the model of the city,  where you can see that.  But I am showing you this because I think that it's important to discuss  the relationship between the artifact that represents the city  and the kind of vision of the city, in what way we imagine the city,  especially since our cities are also going through very dynamic procedures.  Are these now the best ways to also imagine those cities?  Obviously I think the model that was done by OME for Lavilette,  in my opinion is also very much inspired by things like the Brodecker model  of trying to imagine now a version of Lavilette at that time  that combined the landscape as material, as artifact,  together with the buildings, together with the existing buildings and so on.  But this is all about the devices through which we think through the project of urban design.  This is a more contemporary manifestation of what I showed you with the Fumihiko Makis,  the idea of the urban room where the event is becoming so massive  that actually urban design is now inside the architecture.  And what are the kind of problematics of that?  Equally we have the idea of the relationship of the new to the existing  in terms of hybrid structures with this project of Herzegandemaron,  just in terms of how urban design is also the creation of new kinds of environments  and combining all that new.  So in terms of tools and devices, many of you, I don't know  whether you know a program that is called City Engine.  And City Engine is actually a software program that was designed,  that was organized or part of a research project at ETH,  maybe some five, ten years ago.  And this is one of the kind of current programs that now exist for urban designers  where you can basically imagine sort of before and after very instantaneously.  And so I'm not showing you the video that does that,  but it basically helps urban designers and therefore the citizens  to see what is the consequence of their projects.  So one of the things that we have a hard time is to show how will urban design  transform a certain area.  And therefore now we have these kinds of tools.  This has been then acquired by a company in California called Esri  that we work with quite closely because these are the people who also created  geodesign and GIS.  And so this is now part of a sort of GIS system.  But basically my question here is around the idea of the tools  for imagining the dynamic transformation of spaces through the intervention of projects.  And so these projects, these software, in my opinion,  also have consequences in terms of how we design because the ease with which  the idea before and after is constructed through things like,  through a city engine also has a consequence in terms of the sort of urban design  that utilizes the software.  It's like at the beginning of when we had computer software,  how certain rendering techniques or certain kinds of software themselves  produced their own architectural condition that came about from the utilization  of the software.  So what are the issues that relate to the kind of technique and the use of that?  So I think then I wanted to pose against this the concept of montage  and the way in which there has been a certain sort of technique in place to,  you know, actually deal with multiple realities.  I'm just going to go through these now very quickly because I realize that I've gone over the time  that John Cate, just the system of notation, how we draw,  how we can now talk about the concept of relationships, juxtapositions.  I'm basically trying to ask what are the tools that we have where we can imagine  another idea of urban design which is not imagistic, that's not pictorial.  And so how do you imagine the idea of the sort of the relational?  And of course you know then this connection to the way in which Kolaï City came about,  the idea of the analogical city.  So that's also the most recent idea of how to make urban design that we have.  And so I won't dwell on this.  One of the most influential though has been Gordon Cullen  who was a British architect and urbanist who really came up with this idea of townscape.  And my point is that townscape is in some ways more influential than many of these kinds of other traditions  because it's about picturing the city.  It's a kind of pictorial way of imagining the city.  And that is really where we are with this business of sort of whether it's in China  or whether it's in Las Vegas of the city in some ways being reduced to a form of pictorial.  So some of these histories that we have should probably help us to imagine the role of urban design  in different ways through the utilization of these tools  which are much more performative than imagistic.  At the same time, I think that there is another sort of tradition of this, of scenography  people like Adolfo Appia and the way that they imagine the concept of the scene and setting  and this is something that we would have to speak more about.  And this is why I did this book about cities which comes more from the idea of narration  about the description of the city, the life that's in there.  And this is the sort of the reality of many of the cities that we have, Cardiff, other places.  And this is really about the idea of the role and status of the political.  And again, maybe we can leave that for later because this is all going very late.  Finally, I just want to say that all of these things that I showed in the last two or three slides  about the imagining of the life.  So on the one hand, they're the tools of urban design.  On the other hand, it's the kind of life that we want urbanization to bring about.  It means that we have to understand the relationship of physicality to occurrence, to performance  and the consequences of our actions in a different way.  And I want to finish with also this video which is about the performance that takes place after an event in California  where some youths are basically dancing in the city.  And the city is a site of kind of choreography, but site of action.  So in the same way, urban design and transition is also about questioning  the kind of lives that are happening in our cities, but also how the city becomes a new kind of space for performance.  And perhaps once you've seen this, we can have a few minutes of discussion.  So let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  Let's get started.  So hopefully we can open this up, but I just wanted to make sure because I went through this sort of last part of the slides quite quickly.  So I want to make sure that I'm clear about the fact that on the one hand we have certain responsibilities.  What kind of a place do we want? What sort of a city do we want? What is the kind of environment that we want to have?  And then on the other hand, there's the question of like what tools do we have? How good are we?  And we know that we really have the capacity to address these responsibilities that we are given.  And therefore part of the process is on the one hand we are one of the citizens and imagining this idea of a better environment, a better world,  something that's more equitable so the political, the economic, the cultural, the social dimension of these things become critical.  And at the same time, it's not just simply being able to pay lip service to those things because I feel that during an earlier period when the social was made a significant project,  architectural responses were made in the name of the social that just simply were moralistic responses and they were really not good enough.  In that sense, housing was a social project but actually it didn't necessarily produce the best cities.  And so now if we're imagining the idea of making a different kind of place, the circumstances are different.  It's not just about the idea of doing a better building, it's the understanding of doing better buildings in the context of a different understanding of social,  ethical, political responsibilities and it's that mixture that is a different ball game now.  It's a different story. It's not something that we have had previously in the same way.  And therefore the responsibility of the academy to this project is what? What do you do? How do we make that?  And that is why things like the status of fiction, the role of the political, all of these things are also now part of our responsibilities.  This is not somebody else's project. This is also our project.  So I think that is why urban design is in the state of transition because it's trying to also define a different kind of ground of its aspirations  and also like a doctor who is dealing with kind of new domains of investigation.  They also have to have different tools and different techniques.  So we also need to have different instruments in some way to be the catalyst for how we can respond to this shifting condition that is happening.  And therefore the link between the academy and practice becomes a key component of the institution as a research engine for addressing kind of big picture problems.  And yet the devices that we have are relatively modest.  But nevertheless we have to hold on to whatever it is that we can hold on to.  Any thoughts? Any recommendations?  Torio, I don't know. Alfredo.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thanks a lot, Margin.  Thanks a lot also for the speech but also for the conclusion because after when I looked at, I don't know what you felt, but when I looked at the lovely video, last video that you showed,  I thought what does it want us to tell? It was like saying, well, urban design is not important at all because you see this four fantastic guys dancing in a, not only under the rain, but in one of the most horrible urban situation that you can imagine.  Or it was maybe a consolation saying whatever mistake you will do with your urban design, don't worry because life is stronger than anything that you do in the city, which is also, I think, true and nice, but it's not good enough.  So thanks a lot for all this.  Are there comments? I knew.  Alfredo.  Thank you for that inspiring lecture. You took us through an incredible complexity of the history of images and ideas behind urban design.  But the thing that struck me the most that I'd probably just initiate a conversation here is that you began with the medieval city.  And then you compared it to the ideal city. Now, in a way, the medieval city was built out by people and built out the social economical spaces in a more collective way.  And you see that here in Niederdorf. And that's why you get such fascinating shapes and spaces and sizes and approximations and windows and directions, right?  And that's where it's not the Cartesian city. It's the organic city, let's say. And then you showed us the ideal city, which is kind of the enlightenment, the Renaissance stepped in.  We believed man could shape the territory. Man could enlighten and use geometry to cleanse the city, to clean it, to purify it, to create a theatrical city, as you put it.  But wouldn't you say that that might have been the moment that we went wrong?  The moment that we believed that we could rationally shape the city with an imposed grid, let's say the Cartesian grid became the dominating instrument,  we lost touch with the very essence of what the city was.  A kind of organically produced city built over time and lengths of time, and rather than the city of speculation, of parcelization, of the city as a game board, the city as control, the city as power.  I think that that's a fair reading of those two drawings. The reason I would hesitate to make that conclusion is because, for example, if you think about New York,  New York is also a Cartesian city. At the same time, it's a city of incredible diversity, and it's a city that has so many kind of multiplicity of situations,  and it's so dynamic in terms of what goes on and so on and so forth. I'm trying to suggest that concepts can have within them the idea of a sort of grain of sand or some conditions of resistance.  So the thing that I find a little bit problematic is the concept of ideality. It's really the idea that the form of picturing is so perfect that it doesn't enable contamination,  whereas I could say New York has a certain idea of objectification, of rationality, and yet within that rationality, there are things that counter that rationality.  They deny that rationality. So for me, it's more about this dynamic. This is why John Cage's drawing of showing the notation of how something is played,  or how a piece of dance could occur, or something like that with these notations, because they're both instructional things, but they're also visual.  I'm trying to figure that out in some way.  And then I go one step further. You used the John Cage notation, but then we can go to the Decaddo sculpture, let's say, and say that the section is the key.  So maybe no matter if it is a Cartesian grid like Manhattan, let's say although Manhattan would be an exception for the world, but actually that exception is actually being exported everywhere and not working exactly in that export model,  but maybe it is sectional. So that's why when you have the dancers at the end, let's say on the city street, this is another layer.  It's a layer of performance, or maybe there's layers that need to come on to contaminate that efficient, let's say, a Cartesian grid or division, that then would add the complexity that would give it the kind of the sectional complexity.  Sure. I mean, the point that Vittorio was making about the film, I basically was having a marathon with myself mentally to try to get to the end in time just so that we could finish.  And the film was there because one of those guys had lost his brother, was killed by the police. And so the dance was a memorial of sorts using the street corner as a site of reconciliation in some way.  So it's also about the idea of violence. It's about the notion of the conflict of disagreement. And so the performance was also a way to use choreography to address this concept of conflict, of urban conflict,  because the extension of this idea of multiple situations of resistance or what I call multiple conditions of conflict is something that I've been calling for this last book on the ethics of the urban, the idea of agonistic urbanism.  And to use this, I don't know what the word is in German or, but I think in most places it's still agonistic. But agonism is also about the site as a site of conflict.  And my criticism of showing some of the things like the New Urbanist Project and so on was that these kinds of places are about ironing out conflict.  They're ironing out the concept of difference. So part of the strength of the Paris of Chris Marker is also Paris as a site of multiple interests, which are never resolved.  It's the Algerians and the Africans who've come and the Parisians and the poor. And these conflictual conditions are also the things that make the city what it is as a site of kind of possibility.  So that was a little bit the reason for the end as a kind of short-term as well.  Thank you for your presentation. I greatly enjoyed it. Particularly the end, the last 15 minutes when you started to talk about the instruments and devices and the methods.  And interestingly enough, they were very architectural. You talked about the ground, about the section, about the notations that can be deployed.  And you presented them nearly without value. You didn't take position, you didn't proclaim how you would deploy those techniques.  But then at the very end, in your epilogue after the movie, I heard that you were, I believe to have heard that you made a plea for responsibility, for ethics.  And that there were important questions that we needed to address today. But you didn't take position. You presented the questions also value less.  Unfortunately, I haven't read your newest book, so maybe the answers are there. So my question would be how do you, A, if we have to take position,  vis-à-vis those important questions, and how would you connect them to these tools? Because those tools would be ultimately the means to carry out those intentions.  So I started, this thing doesn't work, does it? This is not the part. I started with questioning the status of urban design as a project.  Is this on?  It's working? Okay. So urban design as a form of practice, because we, for example, I'm aware of this thing that when we talk at Harvard about the departments,  we have architecture, which is a discipline. Landscape architecture, which is a discipline. Planning, which is a discipline.  But many of my colleagues would say urban design is not a discipline. Urban design is a more of a practice.  It's a practice that is at the intersection of some of these disciplines, which is really addressing the specificity of a certain condition.  So just in terms of the structure of my presentation, I tried to start with my, this was my homework. Like, homework is urban design.  So one thing is what is urban design?  And then at the end, there is really the question of, you know, for too long, we have been the recipients as service providers of services to society.  You sit in your office and you wait for a commission, for a project to come.  And that this idea, this concept of practice is just not good enough for the academy, for practitioners.  So I am trying to not make it value free, that the connection to the political is that this project of urban design is always a political project.  And therefore, we now have to also state what are our belief systems, what are our interests, what is it that we want to do.  And that the various versions of urban design that we've had, like the, I showed the Chinese Tollwan, or the Seaside Florida, these are completely full of value.  They represent the interests of the marketplace and they also, they represent the interest of gated communities of a certain notion of homogeneity.  That is not agonistic urbanism when we show, you know, Seaside or whatever.  So now, if we are going to have this concept of a different set of values and a different sense of the city, then we also need to redefine the tools and the methodology of urban design.  In that sense, I'm not providing the solution of what it looked like.  So it was very important for me when we did things like the ecological urbanism to present them almost like a manual.  And that this manual is like just something like the ingredients of a meal, like a recipe of some things that you can bring these things.  But then it's very important that I also don't try to give it a particular look, but give it through certain samples, certain hints of what some of the conditions.  So performance is one, the section is another one.  The way in which the, in the states, for example, the interface between public and private is another one of these kinds of things.  And I think it's very strongly that we have these positions, but I don't know that I have a singular outcome.  That's what I don't.  But I think I do want to, you know, agree with your reading of the end part of the presentation about the move towards the ethical and the political.  And there's also in this, in the life of cities, is actually about the way in which the book doesn't work completely like that,  but it was about the role of fiction and the way in which when you're designing for urban design, you're sketching and you're imagining things, for example,  how something might happen.  And I'm very interested in this relationship between the physical and the what may occur, the hypothetical occurrence.  So this relationship between the physical and the performative is also something that we are very much responsible for.  But I think I was trying to, for example, learn from the 19th century novel or from the idea, the traditions of literature in terms of helping architects or urban designers or urbanists or landscape architects also imagine.  So, so these are all my like trying to use certain conditions to create new situations for imagining.  But I think, you know, probably it would be worthwhile another time to spend, you know, a lot longer going through some of that kind of about fiction and about the political and things like this.  I don't know if I answered any.  Thanks. You had a question.  One of the main tools we have, I think, is language. And if I if I look what happened to our ideas of what is the city, Europe, it's mostly described as a mixed city, socially and and culturally and in a broad range of differences or as you said,  contrast mixed city. But on the other hand, I think the tool of this term is not functioning any longer because they are developed.  They are used by very almost antagonistic players of the game.  So, and I think one of the main things for us is to reinvent something that is maybe what you call the transition. I would describe it as a kind of self made city.  So, that that you as architects are not not so much any longer in the position of planning and doing things by distance. You have to go or all the citizens of the cities want to be part of the process even more.  And this, I think for us, by teaching students and young architects become quite difficult how to get out of the simulation of a plan and how to simulate, let's say, what what later comes by by by all the very  very self sufficient citizens who want really have the argument and really want to be part of the planning process. So, and this is maybe why I see a shift by by us teaching not only by by teaching standards of what is a good plan and what is good architecture  but also by preparing the students in a very cultural way of broad cultural educations that they are prepared of a situation they are not expecting.  One thing that I would I don't know what thought you have what your reaction would be but in in America planning is not very physical. So planning as a discipline has become more and more something which is part of the social sciences.  So you have planning more as policy, right and planning as project.  I think in terms of the discussion of urban design, if it's a subset of planning, it might also be interesting to go the other way. So for me, for example, in the school, this is what I try to do a little bit is to say what is the relationship between planning and urban design, because I try to to create a  situation with planning where it becomes more theoretical and at the same time is able to engage the physical more because if it's only the social science in terms of policy, it's not able to use the idea of actual design of physical design.  So I think one interesting question is how can urban design affect planning and vice versa, because I don't know that there shouldn't be more planning, but maybe there should be more planning but a different kind of planning.  And that's that's also because the nature of the planning what you I don't think you are planning in it, because it's mainly architecture or something. But you know when we have the American planning programs are very different.  So actually going from the smaller scale to the larger scale is also an interesting issue in terms of how planning might be changed through the rethinking of urban design.  Yeah, I mean, just maybe to step into that debate. If you go to the other end of that, we come again to the street corner that you showed us at the end.  And at the same time, I was really fascinated by by your talk through the way how you unfolded the different interventions that that are done through urban design. And then you had these two insertions these two films.  And suddenly does this was a totally different topic. I mean the same the design immediately changed to something else. Because we saw then the users we saw then the social. And I mean, if I understood you the right way you said, we should not try to shape the social  and we should not start trying to organize the social and with such a position I would fully agree. But nevertheless, the social is key in our cities and how do these two moments are coming together.  Because in that way, as you presented us, the cities and urban design, it is a very abstract level. And then suddenly the concrete enters like like a shock. It was like a shock. And also that that you showed the films.  Suddenly there was time coming in because film is showing time. So how you see that relationship between the social and and urban design.  Well, I didn't try to say that we shouldn't intervene in the social. I believe strongly that we have to participate in the interrelationship between the political and spatial.  So part of this discussion is whether, for example, one can talk about democracy as a spatial project. Can you say, and this was the concept behind the book in the life of cities, can you say that the relationship the Zurich as a physical artifact is a different enabling  artifact than Paris as a physical artifact is London is, I don't know, is some Beirut. And this relationship between the physical and its performative dimension is an important part of what we do.  At the same time, what I am saying is that we should not be behaviorists in the sense of trying to be instrumental in terms of one to one correlation between what we design and what we expected to do.  Nevertheless, when we design something, we have to have instruments that help us imagine possibilities. So what do you use to help yourself imagine what in English I would say, and otherwise, as something else, a different kind of life.  So I have to use writing or fiction. Fiction, I mean just a kind of a scenario, a kind of a possibility, which helps the design, but at the same time, let's go over design. So you want the inspiration, but you don't want the instrumentality.  You want the social ideas and the political ideas, but you don't want to be predictable in terms of outcome. And I think this is the sort of this is the sort of tension.  And I'm trying to also get away from the architectural or the urban design as a sign of something like housing as a sign of social, but actually housing as a particular condition or a situation.  And in that sense, that's why the performative is important because of the fact that it's about the happening. We are in this room and tonight, this in this space, our interactions are different than if we were in the lecture hall in Honeberg, for example.  And in that sense, this is I'm trying to get at that issue of how something affects a condition. And then at the same time, you kind of let it go.  Sorry.  Thanks so much. I have a very short question, but I want to ask it with what might by now be an inadequate word, but I'm going to use it for lack of a better one. I'm just curious if the rural in scare quotes figures at all in your thinking about the future of urban design.  I think this morning this afternoon I've actually been in Basel with the studio Basel and and some of the GST students and some of the students are working with Jack and Pierre and with Gunter on this, you know, the the Lucian book hearts, sort of version of  of warning the book that he did in the fifties and really trying to understand the evolution of kind of or the transformation of the Swiss landscape or rural or what they call unbuilt environment.  I think that right now there's a lot of interesting work or or or thought that's being given to urbanization as a topic. And I think that it's it's impossible to talk about urbanization without discussing urbanization as a bigger project that transcends the kind of the scale of urban  but actually it's kind of a bigger picture. And so it depends. Some people would react strongly to you using the word rural, because they would say that there is no such thing anymore as rural because it's all part of the procedures of urbanization and the  distinction between city and country or city and rural or urban and rural are artificial constructs. But I know exactly what you mean, and I'm very sympathetic to this idea and I believe that actually there are parts of the world where the rural is more rural  than other places. So in Switzerland, for example, I think that rural is completely part of a project of Swiss urbanization. It's a it's a mode of thought it's part of Swiss identity landscape is is an artificial construct.  And therefore, it's not it's not natural in the same sense that people when they mentioned the word rural, they mean that. So I think that that this is a very key part of it and more and more, if we spend time doing these kinds of projects, we're also trying to  understand their consequence in other places, their impact in other places and so on. At the same time, I think next semester, in fact, we are going to do an event on this topic. We have this. You remember I showed you these two books in China, which is one on the on the on the mega plot the  cross border. The third one is called rural urbanization, and it's really looking at the way in which the rural areas are becoming urbanized because also in China you have things where you're in the middle of the countryside. You drive for an hour and a half.  There's nothing and suddenly there is 20 story buildings in the middle of what was the village before that they moved everybody from the village out. So I think these are very important issues.  I think that we now need to kind of find tools to also understand this idea of the bigger, bigger picture of how one thing affects something else in other places. But I also think we haven't really done enough work on the topic because let's say in  the past few years, you have lived there, you know this magazine called country life. And it's all about the life in the country and property and the idealization of the houses and the hotels and gardens and so on.  I think there are so many versions of this idea of the rural or the country life or the or the happy life associated with nature that for us is becoming a kind of bigger thing. This is what I want to do next semester if we can. So maybe we can collaborate on that.  Thank you very much. Time has passed quite quickly, which is not always true in lectures and discussions. So that's your merit. I would have a lot of questions to you, frankly.  But I think this is true almost for everybody and maybe we have another time and other occasions of discussing it. I think that the fact that I have a lot of questions and I think that it's the same for you is really a consequence of the spectrum of possibilities  and options that you have opened this kind of multiple access that you were mentioning at the beginning. And so we go, I think we go home or wherever we go now with a lot of, also to the desk or to the studio, with a lot of ideas and thoughts  of course, which is I think the best thing that can be said of a lecture. So I would like you to thank again, Moshen, for this really wonderful presentation.  Thank you so much for being here with us. I hope you have a great evening. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here with us. I hope you have a great evening. Thank you.
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