talking about the urban crisis and the
possible solutions
the architecture that should be a
generator of a new vision of city
but today we can see architecture
reduced to banal architectures
some of them just reflecting the real
estate
value or the 'immobilien' value of the place
and the places that they are
so how do you suggest that architecture
could be to have a better city
i'm not sure whether architects are the
right persons for
talking about the future of the city
because this is this is a
societal question and it
needs a lot of alliances between
politics and
social workers and visionary cultural
workers or cultural performers and
studies and so on and architects are
only
one of these this
this is one answer another is
i think archit...
i agree that
the real estate industry and the
building
entrepreneurs are focusing very much on
the
economic value of their output
sometimes they extend it to a cultural
to a cultural value
in the sense of cultural economy and
cultural
cities in the competition of the cities
worldwide but this is a sort of
producing iconic buildings for
being very visible it's not
it's less about life in the cities and
the third one is
my understanding of architecture is in
fact it's
wider than focusing only on buildings
because i'm an urban designer and as an
urban designer i'm
i'm coming from architectural design
and this is the background for example
we try to explain in this book
which is unfortunately... this one is in
german but we
will soon edit an english version
it's about the architecture of the city
and this means that the... all this
architectural
approach you have to create environment
is not reduced to the scale of the
building it's...
you can apply it as well on urban scale
in different
levels from let's say
the space between two buildings to
public places
to the whole traffic system
and how and
the question how you
use the city and you how you move
through the city
talking about the 'nicht orte' that we have
how can architecture can help
to create a better atmosphere in the
city if we have
so many 'nicht orte' [non-places] in the city
i strongly believe in the power of
architecture to create
specific places and of course
architecture as
well can be used to produce the 'nicht
orte' in this sense of Marc Augé
places which are the same everywhere in
the world and so
shopping malls or airports or so
if you
enter an airport from the air side
you mostly you easily find your way
because it's just organized in the
similar way and
it's working with a lot of labels
signs to
guide you but architecture has...
so of course this is a question of
architecture as well
to produce these places
but architecture has on the other side
or
far above that the
potential to create specific site
specific places and i believe very much
in this
and the quality of or the capacity of
architecture to
increase the specificity of places which
has too
much to do with the culture of a place
that is
the history of the place and the... let's
say
the site specific
potential from the natural features
around at inside the place
this could be a connection to your main
question of research
cities and rivers so river is always
one of the great features which can
adorn a city to a very
specific place and even small rivers
do that
so i know so for example frankfurt
the city of frankfurt just to have an
example from this country
frankfurt is called frankfurt am main the
main is the river and in fact it's quite
a small river it's a side river to the
rhine river
which is one of the biggest in this
country and
the main river is
i think formerly when the city was
founded it's
from history it has been an old city
that was even used this river for
ships and traffic loads
and nowadays
quite unimportant in this sense
but the old city center is
adjacent to the river and then there are
some bridges for
for cars and for people just walking
and on the other side the
others the south side the quarter on the
south side
is an old residential commercial center
and is even called in german it's a very
nice
word 'dribbdebach'
this means opposite the river
but it's in a local dialect
'dribbdebach' means 'drüben vom bach'
[over the creek]
yeah this is just an example and we have
a lot of
smaller rivers in our cities which are
formerly didn't play a role in the
cityscape or the in the landscape of the
city because they are near to the
mountains and then they have they are
always
they have always been dangerous so in
in history they were dangerous because
in summer they have
nearly no water in the winter or in
spring after when the
snow is melting then they have
a lot of water so that is
this this different qualities over the
year makes it difficult to
deal with the river so in the 19th
century there were somehow canalized
channelized and then
so there were not never seen as
something
as a visual and atmospheric quality of
the city they're just
functional features for
traffic loads and so on but this changes
in all the cities even the cities which
has
these smaller rivers try to use them now
for
incorporating than the open spaces and
so
this can be a source of
individual specific site-specific
quality this of course in my sense is
a question of the architecture of the
city how
these inner free spaces borders
and
shores of the river banks can be
incorporated in this system of
open and closed and dense
and free
atmosphere
i'm talking about the day-to-day life
and the urban space is a scenery to the
day-to-day life
sometimes the scenery is just a place
that you pass by
and what i want to talk about is
how the scenery can be an active scenery
like the people were not just
being there but they are acting in this
place so
what about the architecture of the city
and
how can it can improve our day-to-day life
it has to be it has a lot of
it has a strong connection to the
architectural quality of a place
but it is not only about that
so it has to do with the cultural
behavior in a city
and this has to do
a lot to do with the let's say
okay the cultural
standard of behaving in the city
in a certain period of
our times so for example when i was
studying there
there were no street coffees in this
country
i thought that they always they were
saying no that's something
the italians do so you can go travel
there for holidays then you can go in
the street coffee in our country it's
too cold
it's impossible so meanwhile some
decades later you can you are happy if
you
if you see a street in the city center
without a street coffee because
they're everywhere everywhere even in
winter they
put some heating and some blankets to be
warm so people love to be outside
so it has changed a lot and this is in
the same cities as if
40 years ago so this is not that's not
really a matter of architecture it's a
matter of
how people are used to
certain social behavior and
i think a good cities or well-planned
cityscapes
can adapt to this change of behavior
or can or how can offer possibilities
and capacities and this
of course some
some cityscapes are more
inviting for
staying there and enjoying the place
some cityscapes are more inviting for
passing by
and of course it has a lot to do with
the
traffic system in the city whether you
are at all
allowed to stay somewhere or is it too
dangerous
so it's quite complex
result of mobility management
and architecture of a city in a
narrower sense the question is so
the buildings and the cities shape the
behaviors
but how the behaviors can also be
shaped by the space
not of course not the physical space
but
the atmosphere of the city
so how...
yeah the behavior so of course the
behavior
shapes the space in this space shapes
the behavior so it's a it's a reciprocal
relation but if you have
for example in
in munich we have several historical
buildings they have a
strong basement and with a
sort of
volume protruding or like a bench or
some stairs and meanwhile we have
in winter or especially in the
intermediate season when it's
quite cold some days the sun comes and
then
the sun shines on this sort of public
benches but they're not
they were not intended by building
those in former times as benches they
were just
the basement of the building and now you
people use them as sun benches so this
is
something which goes hand in hand so
on the one side the building offers a
sort of capability for using it on the
other hand
society has changed that people are
allowed to use
official buildings in such a way and
they are not kept as a
on a distance to those
i think this could be could be an
example for
how it merges into each other
and maybe i have to jump to another
topic which is related
we soon we in march we will have a
congress about
the the topic of porosity
and this is maybe one of the features
which could be
which are so interrelated with the
social behavior and the
architectural form so
porosity means spaces
are not separated but
merge into either each other they
interpenetrate
and this sphere or this spaces of
interpenetration
there are these complex bases which are
somehow influenced by
let's say for example the private and
the public
or the one institution or the other or
the
working place and street
place also could be different
functions or features which are
which are being connected and this is
something you can encourage by
architecture and this can be
used by cultural behavior in the society
and this is some something i'm
interested
in because it is
qualities you can influence by
architecture
but of course architecture is not all in
the world so
they have to be used or adopted by or
even introduced by
societal behavior
and coming back to the rivers for
example there is something which is
in text of sociology quite a
old metaphor for this threshold
and interconnection in cities is the
bridge
the bridge is something which brings the
two sides of the river together and
without the ridge
the bridges would be just not even two
sides here
that was different worlds and
the bridge is the object or
the architectural feature which
interconnects and is a
threshold from going toward from the one
side to the other side
if you are on the bridge there are at
least you're on both sides
yeah and being on both sides but in a
special place
this is something which is very
interesting in cityscapes and
and can be encouraged by architectural
design
nowadays we talk a lot about design
thinking to companies
and for example to this
startup so they are always talking about
design thinking to develop new
projects and new products and new
applications and everything
and the design thinking comes from
the design
but we urban designers
maybe are not properly using this tool
yes we use it to we there's a
there's a quite a academic discussion we
have since
10 years about again about design theory
so we had it already in the 60s with the
christopher alexander for example but there in those
days they were thinking they could
make a scientific rational
development out of design and this
somehow stopped and the discussion now
is about
the quality of design bringing
antagonistic elements not even or
different
difference together and this is the
quality of design
and this refers partly back
to this 60s discussion when they were
saying
when
they were talking about the
the aspect of wicked problems
a wicked problem this is from rittel
is a problem which is
which doesn't has a proper solution
a proper solution in the sense of one
right
outcome which is a technical
a technical question
might have the one single outcome
to answer the problem a wicked problem
is the category of problems which
is open to design solutions
because there's no not the right and the
wrong solution
you know sometimes
somehow you have to be
you have to get a sort of objective
result or idea
you know the inductive the deductive and
the abductive
the abductive i think this is the same
idea they use in economics and so when
they talk about
design thinking and of course our
discipline
is let's say in the heart of this design
thinking yeah and 
i even tried to establish a chair
for design theory here at the faculty
but
but i didn't succeed i didn't succeed
unfortunately i tried because today is
like a trend it's like a fashion
yeah it's it's talking about this yeah
but i'm not seeing the urbanism the
urban designers
talking too much about it now we don't
talk much about it i'm
one of the few and this faculty who
talks about that
i have one meter literature at home
about that
and of course we in urban design we have
always wicked problems
we have always even we have antagonistic
problems
some uh if you want if you
if you go to one solution in the one
direction you
maybe you um you have the big problem
that you
can't have the other problem
solved in the same in the same
project sometimes but it's the idea is
behind the design thinking
concept is that you find at least
because there is not the one solution at
least you find
the best yeah one which is
incorporating this aspects of the
different
fields of
problematics
here my topic is about rivers and cities
and i would like to hear a bit from you
what do you think about the relationship
between rivers and cities
tremendous important relation and
i've already talked a little bit in the
in the passage now in this interview
about the specificity of course we i
think the
to be concerned about rivers it
started in this country more about
concerning hygienic and
environmental aspects so first word
first in the beginning it was just the
hygienic aspect so to make
to have the at least the moderately
clean
water in this reverse right so that was
even started already in the 19th century
was
a sewage system and so on and then
later
in the 60s in this country the rivers
were
in a horrible state totally polluted
because
the sewage system for private
households somehow
worked but not for industry and for a
lot of
illegal and
then came let's say the ecological
turn in this country or in europe
at all and
slowly slowly submissions to the
river
were somehow cleaned
and then in the last step it was even
the cleaning process was so much
improved that the water heads
to bath in nearly drinking quality
and this is um now in the isar river we
have in this city
of munich it's in summer period they
they have this additional cleaning of
the in the huge plants
and the water is perfectly clean and
then they
transformed the river from um
sort of a channel which brings the water
fast as possible down to the next city
so
they introduced all these ecological
niches for fishes and
amphibia and fauna again
and flora of the river bed and tried to
re-establish a sort of a riverbed flora
and fauna
again with the additional quality to
have this
passing quality within the city and this
is of course very beautiful
and brings a special public life to the
city in summer
when the what when the river is used
like that
and in other cities they have this
they are working on the same projects
but it's always very different because
the river
is in each city very special it's a
natural environment and i'm very
impressed for example from
basel where you can swim in the rhine
which is a great adventure
because it's a big river it's very fast
and you can swim
i don't know three or four kilometer
and it's clean enough again to swim and
when i was a young girl
this river was so so so dirty here
but that is an effect of the
environmental policy
of the eu in the last
four decades let's say and but it's
again additional it's a
effect of the
urban design policy of the cities to use
this clean river now as an
urban social environment
that's great
so i could notice that here in germany
so everywhere of course but here in
germany maybe
the things are more we can see that more
like
the zeitgeist it's very materialized in
cities
so for example in the time of the
industries
everything was that had the same
solution like the city was separated in
four functions well and more
transport recreation and also the rivers
were
channelized to serve to immediate
functional needs
and everything and
so it was about the industrial times
but now maybe we are changing for a
digital
era or something so
the needs of the people will be
different the lives
will be different so what do you think
about the cities of the future
considering this new zeitgeist
maybe the new zeitgeist i don't know
whether the new zeitgeist is so
homogenic
as it has been maybe in industrial times
but
if we consider to be now in the
post-modern or 'zweite moderne' [2nd modern]
on a reflexive modern times
so it's a i don't mind
how you define it exactly but it is all
about the diversity yeah and we
appreciate
diversity nowadays and cities
are the places for diversity this is
the quality of cities
and i i don't believe we are
everything is about digital in this
city
these cities are unique
the success of munich is that it is
um keeping on with the digitalization
but on the other hand it has productive
industry still
and this is very important
they're producing cars which is
maybe one of the problems and creates another
problem
but it's yeah and for example
if we talk about creative industries so
this is all this
people who work with their brain then
we then they say
the creative industry in this city is so
strong because they have a very
highly development highly developed
small scale industry or handicraft or i
don't know how it's
exact title for these
because they can produce prototypes
yeah and this
connection between brain and hand is
quite strong in the city and this is
very important and i think this is
a city has to be to consider
or to put all their strengths and
this to be
to keep this diversity not only in
people but
in economy as well
and at least it's it's something
which helps to overcome crisis
and because crisis are mostly in
different fields so if you don't have
the totally world economic crisis but um
if you have the crisis in this or that
couple
of production of something you like
which is very strong now so at least you
have
if you have a lot of different
fields of economy in a city and of
cultural life in the city so it can
substitute
that was for example the problem of the
rural region in this country
which has only coal and steel in this
in the history and then in the 70s and
in the 80s
first coal was the mining was gone and
then steel was gone
so there's still a little bit coal but
it's just more
cultural project than the economic
project so
steel was still was gone second and then
there was
nothing there nothing so in the 60s they
started to found some
universities and where they were still
quite small and so it was not a
economic factor and this may be
munich is quite on a good way because it
has
all levels of
economic production including a strong
cultural economy and
these big universities and so all belong
together
so it's all about diversity
well one of the questions i made to
myself
on the stator conference and everything
so
in a time when we talk about diversity
and
culture and everything and
sustainability how is the shape how can
the cities
reflect those values and how is the
shape of the city
oh and i don't believe that the shape of
the city
directly represents these
changes for example let's see
this quarter here this quarter is a
quarter from
the beginning of the 19th the beginning
of the 19th
century it's 200 years old from
from the design structure
so but no problem so it's
adaptive adaptable enough
so that and cities always change slowly
slowly slowly
and so that it can incorporate new
developments
and the university grows and
takes over some other blocks and the
museums are growing and
the residential
plots getting more and more expensive
because it's a city
near to the city but it still has some
a lot of buildings from post wars period
which are quite
modest so it's a it's a good mixture and
it's
it adapts very slowly to
but very um let's say very
flexible to
cultural changes and this is uh i think
these are just
strong strong cities which have
this
sort of historical structure but
historically i mean
in the long period from
from our former times to the postwar and
late 20th centuries period so it's you
have this different
quarters in the city and and the um
the this quarter maybe adapt to this
need and this quarter maybe to adapt to
this need but you never
you never create a um perfect
new city for a new zeitgeist
and the most loved cities are which have
strong historical features as well
parallel to the
vivid contemporary life and
maybe there are some features from
different periods of
time which are very which are
resist to adapting to new
structures of behavior i don't know what
do we do with the autobahn if
cars are not any longer our
transport mean
i don't know but
maybe we have cars in 200 years as well
but
yeah we can we don't know today
but they are quite mono functional for
this individual transport system
very high speed individual but
can they adapt it to another completely
another typology
could be at least at least they could be
adapted to automatic driving
one of the the talks that we went
invited because of the fellowship was by
a nobel prize and he was talking about
the blue sky research
but the introduction he was explaining
that
he was just telling us some examples of
people trying to predict the future and
then
it was very funny because he presented
us
old postcards and everything and one of
the questions that he made was that
i don't remember exactly when but in
new york
the urban planners said that the maximum
population from new york could be i
don't remember one million inhabitants i
don't remember because if
it were bigger than that we would have
so many
'kacke' [shit] on the streets
that we could not live there anymore
because of the horses
because of the horses they couldn't
imagine another traffic system then
exactly you could not imagine another
thing so
that's why it's so hard to predict in
the future
it's it's nearly impossible you are
always you are always
thinking from your own state of problems
and
somehow transport them in the
future
sometimes people are very
very bright 'hellsichtig' [clairvoyant]
bright in their brain
so for example i
know an essay of h.g. wells
and he was predicting
a future settlement system and he says
the compact city will just distribute
into
a sort of urban sprawl
and because there is no necessity
necessity
to be so compact in the city's form
because we will have telecommunication
and we will have
individual driving and that he said 1900
then there was just the automobile it
was just invented
in the production i don't know whether
when the production fought production or
it was
even later i think and then
and the telegraphy was just invented
so he was really
bright because that
has been the it has been the effect of
these
two technical technical medias
we talk a lot about this a compact
cities
but sometimes i don't know here in
germany i can talk about brazilian
context
like the urban planners developers they
use this argument
to build even more and more and more and
more and more and then we don't have
places to breathe in the city and so
what do you
think about the limits of the compact
city
i think again it depends on the
location and the
environmental conditions could be very
very different
for example here in munich i think the
city is
quite modest in size and it's
in the outskirts it could be compact
more compact than now
so in the middle it's okay maybe and and
this
part of the city where we are here
now and schwabbing
which is the next one so they are quite
they are
quite compact but we have other parts of
the city which are not compact at all
but the size of the city is you you are
used to drive by bike
in this city and you can go everywhere
with bike so it's small enough
this i think it's a very
comfortable size of
bigness and compactness yeah and it is a
city of one and a half million
maybe two million or three million this
is the size of the city which is where i
don't have the problem with
you can't breathe any longer you have a
mixture of
compact quarters and parks and to the
isar river and
so this is quite maybe
in my eyes it's quite successful
environmental conditions
but maybe um mexico city or
sao paulo so this is completely another
category
and if we talk about walkable cities
also this is a these are out of
being a walkable city
in the size here so it's i
i think you have always to look precise
at the
this city you are you want to
to deal with and then adjust this
paradigm of compactness or of
densification or of
walkability and so on these specific
conditions
then we can discuss it yes
it's a good topic about gentrification
sometimes i
try to communicate a new kind of city
more related with the nature and
but more relationship with the river and
everything and one of the challenges is
how to prevent gentrification
there's no recipe
for that i think
the answer cannot be to improve quality
of the city
because this because this could be
the entrance door for
gentrification so they make it as ugly
as possible then the poor people can
live there in this ugly city here
this is not the solution
so i think the answer of
providing central gentrification
is not by
reducing quality or prohibiting
improvement of quality but is of them
the means of
economic and
systematic organization of
the real estate industry and
real estate maintenance
if this is directly connected to free
market
system then of course quality
improvement goes to higher prices
if you buffer this with a lot of
complicated regulations or
or reducing the
the possibility to gain individual
economic advantage of improvement then
it can work for example if we
when we had this
in germany the law of
city quarter improvement in the 70s
because the city the old city quarters
had the tendency to get completely
rotten
then this law introduced as well
a limit of price development
on the real estate
plot on the plots and
and we have and this is a question of
regulation by law
a society can develop these
regulations and and introduce these laws
to buffer the
negative side effect of improvisation
you want to talk about performative
urbanism
yeah performative urbanism is one of
the
topics of my chair and we did this
conference in this book
some years ago and it's somehow
at the backdrop or the
background of this book as well
the term performative comes from speech
act theory
and that it was invented by
austin and it's a neologism
and it means speech is representing
a meaning and
you are a woman i am a woman so two
women are talking with another if you
address each other as women we know what
it is
and in performative situation
speech creates a new real
reality it's not it's not representing
its creating
and this means for example there's
the very well-known example
if some people go to marry
then the priest says
now you are married you are married
he expressed this sentence and the new
reality is
existing a couple as a married couple
exists
before it didn't exist like this
in this status and there are a lot of
examples
from speech act theory it's the speech
is not only representing
but it is creating and this is
in the 90s as i think
transform to different
cultural spheres
and for example there's a very famous
book of judith butler
she in german it is 'hass spricht'
hate speech so if you address
something somebody with hate
it creates this tension
in society so acting produces
so these we transfer to
urbanism and that means
somehow addresses the question
we discussed before we talk
between physical feature of the city
and behavior
behavior in the city as well creates
spaces
and if you use the city in a certain way
for example if you try if our society
started some years ago
to bath in the isar the isar is now
another type of river in this city
so it's still the the river coming from
the mountains
it still has blue water and summer and
brown water when it rains and so on
everything is the same but in the
cityscape
something it's now it's a public
space
so the behavior creates a new
social space and a new
physical space and this interrelation
between
acting and
and architectural features
this is addressed by the performative
urbanism
and now nowadays in the
theory and urbanistic practice we
focus much more on
activities of people in the cities and
of course sometimes we
we act ourselves with student projects
or so we just we
go somewhere and introduce and
a temporary space on an open place or
something to
to interfere in the in a situation
and that is yeah i'm interested in
this
relation between
strong architecture on the one side so
it's not
that architecture doesn't play any
role any longer
and everything is just produced by
social activities but i'm interested in
the
interconnection
this performative urbanism is
something i'm really very interested
in this creating spaces by
by acting
'fertig, oder?' [finished, right?] unless you want to
talk about something else
thank you very much
yeah thank you for being here
