"Freeze" is an English word
that means: stay still, don't move.
This word is dear to me, because it is linked to awakening.
In fact, I want to speak of awakening as something necessary
to shake our inertia, our inaction away.
And it is important to move right now
because an unexpected, risky future awaits us.
Movement is fundamental
to reconsider these risks in a positive way.
Sure, I talk about it from my point of view.
As an architect, I have to understand
what my role is within this change,
how I can intervene,
and above all the importance of architects and architecture
within this context.
The context we are talking about is climate change.
A change that entails,
not just a new, different scenario,
but rather an ever changing one,
second by second,
over the next hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
What about architecture?
Every time I talk about this topic, the question becomes,
Yes, this is a political issue
that's up to decision makers,
probably corporate CEOs,
industrial policies and the economy.
As you can see on this graph, the reality is not exactly like that.
Architects play a fundamental role.
If we talk about CO2,
we see that probably, indeed certainly,
CO2 emissions are largely caused by buildings.
If we also consider the transport system
and combine the two together,
considering how the city shape affects the transport system,
we will see that the city itself is the main cause of CO2 emissions.
The role of the architect is therefore important, if not pivotal.
In fact, we also know
what ingredients are needed
to meet this need.
Research helps us
so we know that these cities are more resilient,
they can adapt to this change more easily,
and this change comes with extreme climate changes.
So cities need to adapt to these extreme climate changes.
The second aspect is compactness.
We have to expect increasingly dense and compact cities
because the availability of resources is increasingly limited;
it's up to the productive land.
The larger the size of the city,
the greater the availability of productive land.
This leads me to conclude, aware as I am of the population growth,
if we don't want to get
to what the Portsmouth research centre calls the "impossible equation",
we will have to consider a new element,
which is the key element for awakening, and it's creativity.
That's why we talk about radical Concept,
we talk about vision,
the ability to see the world with different eyes.
This doesn't actually mean we just talk about the future
and no longer have to look at the past.
Before the industrial revolution, we are aware of that,
some of these models had already been applied.
Venice is clearly a radical city, a visionary city,
but we could also look to other models
such as Shibam, in Yemen,
a city that on every profile
meets our climate needs in the desert area.
An ultra-compact city that withstands the hot desert winds.
It has this white upper surface with high albedo
that allows a drastic reduction in the Heat Island Effect,
something that is often talked about
as if it was a problem ancestors weren't aware of.
Of course,
even this idea of being visionary is not new per se.
We know there was a historical period
when vision has been decisive,
and it has been decisive
precisely for that kind of ability to see the world in a radical way
that came from the world of architecture, or art.
I'm referring to the Renaissance.
What does the Renaissance have to do with today's climate crisis?
Because the crisis of the 14th century
had characteristics that closely match the current one:
a reduction in resources,
a population that was no longer able to access these resources,
climate change in the opposite direction,
i.e. a mini ice age.
And last but not least,
the problem related to the fact that a disease, the black death,
was somehow the reason
why society as a whole
took a different shape,
somehow upholstering economies and societies.
This is important because, obviously,
the reference to the first two factors is quite immediate,
but the reference to health is just as important,
while not self-evident.
We know that climate change will be a major cause of disease
in the next twenty years.
People like Leonardo, a visionary,
people who are able to see the world
with new, different eyes,
without the mental frames that affected us all,
is fundamental.
How can we nurture today
a creative ability that leads us to awaken?
I have my personal idea.
It comes from the fact, I am also an educator.
This can be done through education,
thanks to the fact that young people and students
are not conditioned like us dinosaurs
by a worldview
that is somehow determined by the last centuries of history.
So our job is precisely to try and ignite in them
the ability to be creative, inventive, even radical and extreme.
Here we see a series of works
done by students and collaborators of my Media Hub research centre
who are, as well as students, also real researchers.
This is Liam Stumbles in this example.
He figured out a city that is revolutionised
by the idea of eliminating car traffic altogether,
and reusing the stuff our highways are made of
to rebuild a new urban fabric.
Here we see the example of the city of Auckland
and the consequences for this city:
spaces originally intended for motorways
become parks and structures
that can be used by the whole city population.
We see that the system tries to take advantage
of state-of-the-art technologies, such as the use of drones,
and the so-called swarm behavior,
the ability of drones to move in swarms.
And we see that the possibility
of changing the performance of the city
gets critical in this line of thought.
Another example is to use botany as an unrban revolution tool;
the ecological systems that arise from plants' genetic modification.
Or to draw a city, as in the case of Naim Mukif,
assuming that the city must be drawn
not only on human flows,
on those that are the movements of people and their needs,
but also on that of bees -
just today it has been declared
that bees are the planet's most important animals.
Or we can use cellular stuff of this type,
we can understand how it expands, and infer from that
what the rearrangement tendencies of these organisms are.
And we can also understand, at the same time,
how we can directly use this material as a building material.
In this case we use it as a brise soleil,
as a possibility to make the windows more opaque,
by controlling the development.
Or an extreme like this, designed by Joyce Kwan,
which is the transformation of cities in a totally organic solution.
Here we see a project by Michael Brewster and Bevin Liang,
focused on the chance
of including automation and robotics in the city.
This technology allows the city to be resilient,
meaning that the ability to adapt
precisely depends on the city's robotic equipment.
It's not just about speculative elaborations,
it's also about making responsive models,
as in this case, using an Arduino,
to these project hypotheses,
to the last city in this series that I'd like to show you,
which is a city in Antarctica with extreme conditions.
What we are talking about here
is the possibility of using
our planet's extreme climate conditions
as resources,
obviously limiting our carbon footprint.
However, these extreme areas
generate usable resources.
Here we see examples
of this city system, station system
which are a form of colonisation of Antarctica.
We see that, in some way,
this system is very similar to that of oil platforms
but its goal is completely different:
harness marine movements, for example,
and recreate a habitat
that promotes a good relationship between humans and animals.
Here we see how a relationship is somehow created with the oceanic fauna.
Now the typical question, when I talk about these things, is:
What's the cost for transition?
The question is not a random one,
because it is seemingly a rhetorical one.
Many people say, a change would cost a hell of a lot.
After all, our society is based on fossil fuels,
and maintaining the status quo, in many people's opinion,
is certainly a cheaper strategy.
The answer is no.
By "No", I mean that transition is cheaper than the status quo.
We do not have time to elaborate here,
but a few images are enough to understand why that's not the case.
Here is a state-of-the-art oil platform
that digs, sucks
the last drops of blood from our planet,
from the depths of the ocean
with irreversible damage to biodiversity.
The second objection is about the cities I showed you.
If you asked, I am convinced more than half of you
would hold the point, these are dystopian visions,
and many among you have already said to your neighbour:
"Oh yes, interesting, maybe - hopefully - but I'd never want to live there".
This is interesting,
because it is probably correct to say "I would never want to live there".
But what is dystopia, if not also a condition
of unfamiliarity with a certain condition.
Because our natural condition is this:
we don't live in country houses with a backyard.
We live in this conditions.
80% of the world's population already lives like this today,
and probably much more so in future.
Either the left or the right one, 50 / 50.
Are we sure that this condition is not a dystopian condition,
or it just so happens,
our feeling of comfort with the environment we live in
is only related to familiarity with this environment?
This is a question I'd rather not to answer.
You probably already understood
that those cities I took as examples
try to say one very precise thing, that is, to stimulate this discussion.
It would come handy for me to show you much more reassuring models.
I'd wrap up saying that awakening, in my point of view,
asks to see the world from a completely different perspective.
I was lucky in my life:
for work and research, I was able to move to New Zealand
and this allowed me to actually see the world
from as far as possible from my country,
and from the most different perspective also.
From the South Pacific,
and in particular from a fauna, from an environmental context
that's so different from ours,
even if it is said that 2.000 years ago, even before the Roman Empire,
New Zealand looked very much like Italy.
What particularly strikes me about New Zealand
is the biodiversity and the characteristics of the fauna.
New Zealand, mind you,
is a place where humans, Maori, didn't get until 1200-1300,
and in 1700 we Westerners came to colonise it.
So a natural habitat thrived
that's extremely different from our usual one.
The kakapo, in my opinion,
is an animal that somewhat represents this condition.
Kakapos don't fly,
despite being large parrots.
When it has to reproduce
it chooses one of the dozens of volcanoes that are found for example in Auckland -
hundreds, maybe thousands are all across New Zealand,
and goes to the top of this hill.
Once at the top of this hill, it starts screaming.
This is his way of attracting his partner,
who in turn climbs this hill to mate.
Now, I always think about this condition
because I come from Tuscany,
and I imagine a wild boar climbing up a hill and screaming.
I don't know how long it would take
before a hunter goes and takes the dinner,
hinted at by this signal.
Another very interesting aspect
is that at a certain point in his life the kakapo met humanity,
And what the kakapo did,
when he met man for the first time,
was freezing: he stopped, he got stuck,
hoping that the hunter would not detect him,
hoping to trick him into thinking the kakapo was actually a tree or a stone.
Just imagine how successful this strategy turned out to be,
and the risks of extinction the kakapo still faces today.
And that's my bottom line: basically, we are the kakapo today,
And I hope that's a consideration that you will share with me.
(Applause)