- Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to the Open Translation Lounge at TED Global 2013.
Today, we're happy to welcome Teddy Cruz
who just left the TED stage moments ago,
talking about a pretty bold way of designing, planning
and building cities in the future, which we're going to talk about today.
Here in the Lounge today, we have Bryant from China,
Irteza from Pakistan,
Jan from Czechoslovakia,
and Unnawut from Thailand.
And, on Skype, welcome to all of you.
Teddy, thanks again for joining us.
It's funny, when people talk about planning cities,
they always think of looking at these big, giant ones, Shanghai, Dubai,
why don't you judge those cities as an inspiration?
- Oh, gosh. You begin right away.
Again, as I mentioned in the talk, after the last year's of investment
in those environments, as the architecture, planning
and urban intelligentsia from all over the world fled en masse
to those environments, and that explosion of urbanisation from Dubai to Shanghai,
to many of these enclaves of economic power, I don't think,
and maybe you guys can tell me,
but I just don't see one single idea
that emerged from those transformations.
In reality, the best ideas about urbanisation in the context
of generating other modalities of planning,
of rethinking infrastructure,
of affordable housing,
of mobilising other processes of public participation,
and so on, were happening in Latin America, but nobody was noticing.
So, the provocation I have is that not one single idea was advanced
in Dubai or Shanghai.
In fact, they were just imitating and reproducing the worst recipes
of urban planning that were generated
in the United States in the last decades.
- I wonder what your strategy would be if,
let's say, we were to transplant you and say,
can we take some of these strategies and do them in these different countries?
When you have this kind of authoritarian capitalism, how could you deal with it?
- I've worked, in fact, in South Korea as an artist
intervening in projects that have to do with public space
and the politics of housing.
And I investigated many of those neighbourhoods
that were slated for demolition.
And it was amazing to investigate the amount of informal economies
of social organisational practices embedded in those neighbourhoods.
There was a man who built a snail farm on four rooftops
of his block, and, in doing so, he also produced
a co-operative model to sustain the economy
of that immediate environment.
It's hard to imagine
that those entrepreneurial social economic energies
are completely eroded.
Fine, we know the city needs to transform.
I'm not talking about preserving those neighbourhoods intact.
But before we destroy them, let's understand what they've produced.
Right.
T. Cruz: And what I've been investigating in my own section of the world,
on the border between Mexico and the United States,
is that density needs to be reimagined
as an amount of socio-economic exchanges per area,
and that's what defines many of those neighbourhoods.
But if a developer looks at it, they can't monetise that.
So, how do you sell that to the power brokers
or the stakeholders in the community, who are actually driving everything?
How do you come in as a designer and say, it's really complicated.
As we all know the world of architects and designers
has been eroded to some degree,
but when you're dealing with a massive problem,
I wonder what your strategy is for tackling it?
- That's a fantastic question.
I think that's where we begin to find and expand the role of architects
and planners that can begin to act as facilitators or mediators
of the bottom-up knowledge,
and the logics, economically and politically,
of top-down organisation.
Because even the activists working in those neighbourhoods
were not aware of that knowledge.
They are resisting the developers.
But they're not representing the knowledge of the community.
- So they're not giving them a solution?
- Exactly.
And I think that's a gap that needs to be filled.
It's a difficult issue because it all has to do with,
in the end, the amount of profit.
I think that enabling housing projects, or processes,
that enable a community to profit from its own infrastructure
and its own housing is what we need to talk about.
But, yes, in this polarisation between the bottom-up and the top-down,
there is much to be said and to be done, really,
in producing new models of political representation,
but also community participation.
And this is what is absent.
- So it's the designer as facilitator, translator, and mediator?
T. Cruz: Exactly.
That is one point that I wish I would have said in the 13 minutes,
but it's difficult to.
- I'd like to bring in some people from some large cities.
I'd like to bring in some commentary.
Nati, from Sao Paulo, do you have a question for Teddy?
So, based on what we are discussing here, I'd like to ask you,
how could developers reinvent their business?
Are there new ways for them
to follow in which they do not provide a kind of valorisation of improvements?
Is there a way that developers can change their business
and bring a good legacy to cities?
- The answer, in a sense, is that we can't wait for the developers.
They are not our clients.
I think we need to begin by ourselves gaining the knowledge
of the developer so that we, as designers, as architects,
urban planners, become the developers of new housing models,
because the knowledge is out there to be mobilised.
The kind of intelligence the developer has in manipulating resources
and time is all embedded in the spreadsheet.
And that knowledge has been away from us.
So, on the one hand, our clients should be ourselves,
Second, or primarily, in fact, the communities.
The idea that informal settlements or neighbourhoods
facilitated by existing community-based practices,
whether NGOs or other modes of representation,
can, in fact, also become developers of their own housing.
I would argue the examples need to be driven by us and not by the developers.
And only then can they get a sense.
But part of the issue of the urban crisis today is that the resources
of the many have been moved to the very few.
I think it's very difficult to convince the developer to have less profit.
So, that's the reason I think the early stages of transformation
will have to happen with very small scale examples
and models that can emerge from these communities.
But I would argue the importance of architects becoming
developers of affordable social housing in our time.
- We're going to take another question from Skype. Matti?
- My question is, if we are to realise this new way of citizenship,
where people create rather than just consume,
how do we change people's way of looking at citizenship
as something else than just consumerism?
- You're getting to the core of the challenge.
And that's the reason Latin America,
as one of the speakers today suggested, much more needs to be said about it.
What produced the transformation?
The urban transformation of places like Medellín in Colombia
that was considered the most dangerous city in the world
in the late '80s and early '90s
to becoming now an exemplary model of urban transformation.
Again, it was not about buildings, architecture or planning.
It was about a political transformation of institutions,
seeking a new type of interface with the public.
And that being said, which is another aspect that many designers,
architects and planners need to engage,
how to produce a new civic education,
engaging what the Colombians call a civic culture,
an urban pedagogy that begins to raise awareness
of the relationship of social norms and the construction of the city.
I think to re-engage a political will that invests the minds and hearts
of people in constructing their own city requires, once more,
mediation and investment in education, particularly.
A huge amount of work.
But some masochists, like you and I, we can engage, hopefully,
in producing new models of interface to produce an urban educational process.
I'm saying that because that's one of the closest projects
that I want to follow in the next years.
- I want to give the panel an opportunity to ask a question.
- I come from Bangkok.
A lot of what you said seems like we need to change a lot of things, right?
But for those that are already established,
especially in the city centre,
where you already have all the spaces occupied,
how do you think that area of the city could be changed, or not?
- Yes.
I think that this is what brings up an issue that was difficult also
to elaborate on in the 13 minutes.
It's the role of programming.
While certain buildings remain static, fixed,
that the orientation should be to rethink the retrofitting,
not necessarily through physical strategies,
but through intelligent programmatic hybrids,
or conditions that could anticipate
the intensification of economic and social activity.
So, we could be designers not only of space but of protocols,
that's what I was saying earlier.
- You need to own your own cities?
- A sense of ownership of your own city is essential.
And that's the reason, I think,
public participation in reforming governments is necessary.
- I feel like you need to come up with an urban handbook
for guerilla warfare, in terms of the design space.
To give concrete examples.
How can we deal with these conditions on a lot of different levels
is a huge problem.
At the end of the day, that's what I'm saying.
We think because we are educated in architectural schools,
that what we need to do as architects is just to design objects.
We could be designing many other things,
and I think the designing of social relations or even, at times,
political processes can be an interesting topic
that has been absent from our debate, I think.
- One more question from our viewers on Skype.
Sergio, would you like to ask a question?
- Yeah.
One of the things that struck me the most in your talk was
when you spoke about the people who were building the skate park.
And it was interesting to me for two reasons.
First because it shows that there are people who want to be
active in their citizenship.
And the fact that they were told, or they were required, to build an NGO.
But I see this as something that began as something much more unplanned,
something that could grow more organically.
And then it went to an NGO.
It required it to be more planned, more managed, as you say.
So, are we seeing two different models?
Would you prefer to have some growth that is more unplanned,
more organic, more typically reactive, if it's not as planned?
- I get it. In fact, it's one of the most provocative questions.
Yes, while we want to protect and uphold the magic of the unplanned,
part of the problem in terms of these communities being suppressed -
they're not able to advance socio-economically -
is that they lack representation.
Not that they "lack", they contain it,
but sometimes the instruments to formulate new forms of organisation
and management that can push against the top-down institution.
So I think I do believe that in order to really get to the next step,
the next layer, we need to construct other forms of governance.
That's not to say that skateboarders have to become rigid and planned.
No, they continue to organise themselves
by enabling forms of access into the magic of insurgence.
But they now have resources.
They now have a space which is physical and they call the shots.
In fact, they are inspiring other environments to do the same.
I wouldn't be afraid of that translation from the unplanned
into particular calibration of the planned,
but without selling out.
It is that middle, grey zone that needs to be activated
because we've been polarising ourselves based on this way
of looking in such a patronising way at the informal and the unplanned.
I think there is much to be constructed there,
in terms of new politics of urban development.
- We're going to have to end there.
We need to get people back into the session.
Teddy, thank you so much for joining us today.
- Thank you, and thank you for your questions.
Some of you, if we can keep in touch, and invite me to Portugal--
- Come any time. - Thank you.
- Thank you, everybody. We're back tomorrow.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)