 Good evening everyone. Thank you for not leaving the building. It's really too rainy to leave. I'm so glad to be here on behalf of Dean Hakka and Director K. Dwarf from Sensor of Regrets. Welcome to our guest Helene Sohlt from Gale for our urban design sponsored lecture. It's kind of serendipitous that I'm introducing Helene today because coincidentally there's a show at PS1 in Queens called Life Between Buildings. Those of you who know Jan Gale's work will recognize the title of his 1971 book published in English in 1987. And in fact the curators of the show do cite the book and thank the work. The artists in the current show ranging from the 1970s to the present take on the contested terrain outside of buildings. That is streets vacant lots run down parks community gardens going as I said from the 70s and late 60s even the artists and the curators devote considerable attention to squatters activists Latinx and black organizations since the late 60s who were a vital force in radical art and spatial production in the period. The show includes some familiar artists such as Gordon Bada Clarke or community groups like Charras an acronym that's an educational and housing activist group from the period. And on the whole one might describe the artists in the exhibit as creators or seekers of alternative spaces and uses outside of financial and institutional controls with gardens housing arts open to all a paradise if you will built on what appeared to be the ruins of the city in the New York of the 70s. Lowry side to Harlem to the Bronx. In other words this was a struggle in New York City as across many places in the world to activate public space and public actions. Meanwhile, Jan Gale's life between buildings the real one offered a parallel struggle to claim public space for the majority of its users. Gale had traveled widely starting in the mid 60s sketching traditional town plans and informal uses. And from these experiences as well as a growing discomfort with conventional modernist slash bureaucratic slash developer slash technologically driven solutions. He sought to reassert the primary capacities and needs of spaces for people users of publics. In all this scale was not unlike other notable urbanist writers and observers of modern cities. This would include Jane Jacobs of course from 1961 Brunard Rudofsky streets for people in 1969. And strangely enough Rudofsky's book helped generate ideas here in New York City under the Lindsay administration in the early 70s. With one essay collection titled more streets for people in 1973. Other names you probably familiar with William White on Apple Yard among others active since the 70s in New York looking to rescale reframe re people and redesign. Usually in pedestrianized places streets that matched and oftentimes cited on Gale. So life between billion buildings for me is something of a meme shaping the discourse of urban designer planning in US during and since the complex 1970s. Terms such as street publicness accessibility were central to those debates about adapting modernist cities and districts and including new changes in policy participation and formal procedures as well as on the downside new modes of regulation and surveillance for such spaces. So jumping to the present we have Hela who quite arguably has transformed girls work after 2000 when she co-founded the Gale Studio which is I think the name it's hard to just say Gale. Under so hold the firm became more complex was asked to engage more deeply in the politics and collectivities of the 21st century public space and development. Not to mention climate change. Under her guidance I would say the firm moved from urbanism towards urbanization. In other words the firm now maneuvers across complex social political and financial minefields best known for exclusion and evasion misdirected technologies instead of pursuing different voices and different actors as they ought. Now according to the website Gale engages citizens decision makers company leaders and organizations which is a lot of ground to cover now led by. Among recent works of the firm some stand out and display the difficulties of urbanization including the 2015 public life and urban justice in New York City's plazas done with the J. Mox Max Bond Center for design and the just city. And in 2018 the encode the quote inclusive healthy places book a guide to inclusion and health and public space learning global globally to transform locally. And most recently adaptive public space places for people in the pandemic and beyond. These are longish titles I agree but they demonstrate a commitment to justice and fairness as integral parts of urban and planetary change. So I'm sure there's a lot of work for us to see a lot of work for us to talk about and Adam and I will respond and gather questions from the audience. So I please welcome. So to speak to you so much. It's actually quite an honor to to come in and meet with you tonight. And I'm going to give you a little bit of an introduction to how we think and approach our work at Gale. And then I've selected three different projects and and just to give you a little bit of a sneak peek into some of the work that we are doing. With particular relevance I think for for the U.S. But first a little bit about me. I started out in building architecture and then went into urban design. I actually have a master's from University of Washington in Seattle besides having a master's from from the architecture school in Copenhagen. So I actually lived and studied here in the U.S. And when I came back from the U.S. I started doing some kitchen table type projects together with with Jan. And and he invited me to start the office together back in the year 2000. So that's already 22 years ago at the time I was 28 years old and Jan was 64. And he had been focusing the majority of his life on books and article writing and research. And and he had a little bit of a soul consultancy type work going on when he was doing a little bit of consulting towards the later part of his academic career. But he had never had an office. So so we set out with this very ambitious idea about wanting to change the paradigm of planning globally. And and and towards you know a focus that was more around centered around equity. And and you know it became very much my job. You could say to create a practice because Jan had a very developed methodology of studying people studying life within public spaces. But we had to sort of create ways of engaging with people locally and decision makers and so forth and design outcomes. So that it wasn't just a theoretical approach. So that has very much been my job these years to create that practice. And we are still very very much in that creative spirit I would say in our office. Engaging with with quite a diverse set of clients today. After these 22 years that that that we've been around by now we have been working across the world. We we now also have data collected in terms of human behavior and experiences in all of those places. And we can also now use that database to to compare various places. But our mission has always remained very much true to when we started out namely to make cities for and with people. And by that we really mean making sure that we are building cities and communities that are equitable healthy and sustainable places for all. So we today we have offices in Copenhagen New York and San Francisco. But we also are starting to after COVID operate more as I would say a network organization. So we have people based in Portugal and Spain and Germany and Egypt as well. So starting to sort of branch out and and and working in quite new ways. But across all these different places where we have worked we meet a lot of the same issues that that our clients are dealing with. Whether it's being a greater political divide or whether we have safety and security issues or transport issues or economic funding issues or inequality issues or affordable housing issues. It's very many of the same issues that we are meeting in so many different places. And what we feel is is a way to approach these different issues is actually from a human centered approach because central to all of those issues I would argue is a people and a behavioral aspect. We are people are decision makers people are transporting themselves. It is the people that that that that that don't necessarily have equal opportunities and so forth. So by approaching it from that angle we we try to get political political support for the change processes that we engage in from across a quite diverse political spectrum. And and and I think it also helps a lot with this more data driven approach that we have that we can collect evidence for for the types of changes that we are arguing for. So we are moving away from this you could say siloed approach to planning into a focus where we are we want to learn how do people actually experience places. Today this is the way that unfortunately we have organized our sort of cities. We have the transport department the planning department the cultural department the social departments and so forth and none of those departments necessarily speak with one another. So when we work in cities we try to set up across the parliament or working groups. Multistakeholder processes where we engage hundreds of people. And this sounds maybe very obvious to you but it is super difficult. And just a couple of years ago I attended a mayor's meeting in the Sephardi network. Do you know the Sephardi network. Yeah. It's it's it's an organization of the 60 or 96 I think largest cities in the world coming together focusing mainly on climate change. But but there was a poll amongst mayors and they were supposed to sort of check in this meeting that I was a part of what problem was the biggest problem. Was it electrifying the public transportation fleet or was it to make sure that we meet the energy transition that we need or is it to address inequalities in society or what were the biggest issues. And to my surprise the number one issue that came out was to ensure integrated planning. Because that should just shows how difficult it is also from a decision maker and politician point of view to make sure that we actually think holistically about the solutions that we need to deliver. So often when we meet in in various parts of the world we we hear this oh our culture is different. You may have changed Copenhagen but that's never going to work in in New York. Or people would say climates are different in in Buenos Aires we would never bicycle because it's too hot. But actually what we try to focus on is that despite the fact that there are cultural differences and climatic differences if we focus on what we have in common. What we share as human beings how we feel safe how we feel accommodated for how we feel a sense of belonging how we feel invited. What is what is triggering our sensors how we can be together with other people. If we focus on some of these behavioral needs that we have we can actually find solutions where we can accommodate for local cultures and the differences that we have in climate. Again I often show this picture of Copenhagen because yeah you can see we have bad weather in Copenhagen too. And yet today more than 55 percent of the population is bicycling to work every single day and 70 percent of those people are continuing to bicycle during winter. Despite the fact that we have some days with with with snow or hot wind as you have it here in New York sometimes too. So it's it's really about understanding how we can design how we can apply urban design but from this human behavior perspective learning what people actually do. By studying movements and activities and who's actually there and so forth and not what people say they do but what they actually do. So what can we smell what can we hear what can we touch what can we see all these different things are incredibly important for our lived experience. So just a few notes about what is the what is going on in society right now. So when covid broke out we got some support from from a couple of foundations to do a quite wide survey across cities globally. And and and these are some of the findings that that came out of that story study. So the fact of course that city centers are struggling. We saw that these numbers are from the city center of Copenhagen that in many cities we saw that the pedestrian numbers for example and activity levels dropped. So to to like 85 percent or 80 percent less activity than than they used to be. And in most cases these activity levels are not up to where we were before covid. Neighborhoods on the other hand were thriving because people were working from home and there will be much more activity where people closer to where people live. We saw more public space and park being this necessary relief where people would go. People would seek out the natural places in the cities because they perceive that to be more more more healthy. So green places blue places closer to water but but places where they could be together with other people but at a close but at a safe distance to one another. Cities had cleaner air due to reduced traffic especially cities like Milan and Paris and others that are very contaminated on a daily basis were much much cleaner. We saw physical distancing and new citizen skills developing where people were starting to use apps and work collaborate and engage virtually. And then we also saw more in a more inactivity more obesity and more mental illnesses unfortunately on the rise especially amongst young people and and teenagers. So if you're interested in reading more of these you can download this survey on our website but it actually changed I think the way that we have also started working because some of the stuff that we've been dealing with for a long time. On equity and health became really essential. I think more of our decisions may decision makers and they felt on their own body how important it was to have access to green space and to have access to to what I call true public space. So we started doing more emergency planning in terms of opening up streets and and making sure that for example local shops could could open up outdoors to to support the local economies. And I think we wish we could discuss for example how the changes now impacting the way that we think about planning going forward. I think we would probably see more polycentric urban areas and and pushing the envelope I would say for mixed use maybe where people are living today we need even more mixed use. We see multimodal mobility networks being developed we we should have even more focus on walking and biking again. We should have a wealth of public spaces with a focus on inclusion and mental health. So every city should have a public space plan not just a strategic plan but a public space plan. We would see more networks now on clean air and data that supports reprogramming and then the use of digital tools for engagement and then focusing on planning for empathy and impact where investments are needed the most. So these are some of the trends you could say that that we are seeing across the work that we are doing right now. And this all points to what was already being mentioned more of the work that we have also been focusing on focusing on inclusion health and climate action. So just a little bit as well of an intro here in terms of overarching approach to how agile we need to be because I think for many years at least for the past I don't know. For 20 years we've been advocating in our office for not just sort of making fixed very fixed plans but having maybe a more strong vision and having sort of a planning framework where we could sort of guide decisions within that framework and having sort of what we would call coordinated decision making. But I don't think this is even agile enough just to have wider plans or more flexible plans is not even flexible enough for the issues that we are dealing with in urban areas right now. So I think we need to have an approach to planning where we think much more life first or people first where we expand the notion of vision to become more purpose oriented defining the the wicked problems that we need to work with within that purpose. And here I'm also thinking about for example the UN sustainability goals and others strategizing as a constant process rather than having a fixed strategy planning as a more constant process rather than having a fixed plan. And then using these little solutions to to do quick rapid prototyping and experimenting much more because we don't have all the solutions we don't have all the answers. So this actually requires a whole lot of change without decision makers because if they should dare do this they need to lean out more they need to go in dialogue with with people more they be they need to to use their budgets differently. And and we need to listen more carefully to local people. So so again this is not an easy thing to do but but I'm quite I'm quite convinced that we need to move in this direction. So summing up we start at at street level we start with people in every project and try to learn what people need and and how they behave on an everyday basis. We have an app and several sort of digital tools where we can also now do this so we can also instruct community organizers to to go out and gather some of this data so that we can help make sense of this data afterwards. We would always curate what we call sort of a creative process of engagement where we collaborate across these various departments or multi stakeholder approach. And then with public spaces at the heart I don't think there is any project in our organization today that doesn't have public space as as an important element. And then as I mentioned pushing the envelope for how we understand mixed use and developing what we call the human scale city. And and and that's basically a city where where we can sort of relate to to the size of buildings but also to the mix of uses and support people connecting within with each other. And then making it iterative because as I mentioned it doesn't work having just one big plan. We have to break it down so that we can get stuff done and be more pragmatic in our work especially when we work in the in the urban. So with this sort of intro I'm going to show you some some some projects of of what we've done. And and then we can have a conversation about that. So but many of you may know that here in New York we were engaged in the whole public plaza program and the bicycle program back in 2007. I'm not going to talk about that but just to mention that some of you may know that we hear we were engaged in that whole thing. And and but but a lot of what we do has has has focused on transforming public spaces. In this case it's the waterfront in Shanghai back in 2018. This is how it looked very inaccessible very dead at night. Not a lot of activity happening during the day. And we made a strategy for how to activate this whole area and after four years forty two kilometers of pedestrianized space have been built along the river. Creating access for four point eight million people who now on a daily basis have access to this space where they can walk they can bicycle they can play with their kids. They can meet with their fellow neighbors and so forth and more than 80 percent that are using this space on a daily basis are walking or taking public transportation here. So it's really being very accessible to the communities that are living close by. So this is an example of a sort of a classic I would say Gale project where we help make a public space strategy and make convert something into becoming much more accessible. And and then of course Copenhagen that's where I live on an everyday basis and we have helped transform the city of Copenhagen for for now many years. This is how Copenhagen looked back in the 1930s. It was a very sort of industrial city and a working harbour you could say just the 20 years that we have been operating as a company. This is the amount of public spaces that have been created and transformed in the city centre of Copenhagen as well as all the bicycle lanes that have been built. And we had a very strong bicycle culture way back then before the world war where people would actually there would be lots of lots of cars and lots of bikes. And then after the world war all these bikes disappeared when we sort of cleaned up the streets and the traffic engineers were doing a very very great job in terms of making the traffic more smooth. And then all the way up to today where we have a much more balanced situation again and in fact we have more bicycles in the city than we have cars. So today I would say Copenhagen has completely transformed to become one of the greatest small cities in the world. And it is not so much about one single project that I'm proud of but it's more transformed the way of life. So bicycling is not about transport it's a way of life as so many other things in the city. But that's just those are sort of classic geel projects. So I wanted to share maybe a few other projects that are not so classic necessarily. The first one being this this project that we did during COVID actually. And this is this goes back to the rapid prototyping and the idea about developing a design that we can then scale up very similar actually to the public space project here in New York where there was the pilot plazas and the Times Square and Madison Square and all these pilots that were built before it was scaled up as a public program. But when we look at health it's important to understand that 80% of the health is actually you could say supported by by by not just the access to clinical care but the way that we design and plan for for communities. So the social factors the individual behaviors and so forth and that is very much determined by the way that we design our physical environment. So of course when COVID came how do we ensure that people had access to testing and access to health you could say. And most places in the US this is how it looked you had to have a car in order to drive to the testing. And it wasn't very accessible to all the people who don't own a car or or couldn't necessarily get to those places very easily. So we were approached by curative who I think is in charge of about 20% of all testing across the US. And with the with the problem how do we make testing more more more approachable and accessible you could say. So we try to address this from a design and urban design angle as well from how was the physical experience of going to to the test or what about the mental experience. Do you feel do you feel that that that it's safe and so forth and then the social experience the norms the communication aspect and so forth. So we did four things first we we we developed a test process and a and a testing kit together with with the team. Then used the user focus design to develop a testing kiosk. Then we help them with strategic site selection and and then a smart deployment system afterwards. So this is how the very quick the the the kiosk was designed. We had sort of a and maker space where it was actually being built and prototyped very very quickly with builders in a in a studio over two months. We tested it and we observed how people were using it and interview people and so forth. In the beginning people were lining up and we found out that they felt unsafe and an app was developed so that they could actually book book at time. And then we went into the deployment system by looking at daily cases social vulnerability and test positive rates and then mapping that across the entire country to help select the places where people needed it the most. So this was all about using place levers to drive health outcomes really understanding that the health levers in this case was all about making it social making it sure make sure that you have a real human near you. That you have great impressions and and and could have conversations and and and all these different things that could actually support your experience and more likely that you would actually get get tested. And and all of this is now leading to an idea about creating health hubs not just having a test kiosk but thinking more broadly about what are the other services that we need to design around these places to make it more even more sort of something that you might do in relation to to meeting other people. So that was an example of you could say where we come we connect sort of design thinking and urban design thinking with the idea that I was talking about the having the strategy and the wicked problem that you want to help solve. But then also testing and rapidly prototyping something before you actually deploy it nationally. This second project is is is something where we have been looking more into to a master planning project in Copenhagen. And I found this was relevant because we've tried to apply this master plan for with with the UN sustainability goals. And I think there's a lot of opportunity here in the US to also make new developments even more sustainable. So I thought about just showing you a few a few ways that we have been dealing with this. So that's the site over there. Connecting a park with with the water in the case of Copenhagen. We are also tapping into a lot of overarching strategic plans that we need to make sure that the city is actually or this site is is is related to. This is a strategy that we have actually helped the city do as well. It's called co-creative Copenhagen. And it's talking about the vision for the city to be human supportive of relationships. We have the climate neutral plan for for for Copenhagen as well with the ambition of being climate neutral in 2025. Don't quite think they'll get there. But that was the plan. Then we have the overall strategy plan and then the the UN sustainability goals. All of these have been politically adopted. So we needed to to address every one of these. So we came up with a concept that consists of three elements or three themes, one to be socially connected. The second that the neighborhood should be green and attractive and then climate positive. So basically we've taken a map according to all the SDGs, which ones are actually connecting to these three three themes. It's not all the 17 goals that we have splashed out over this project, you could say, but we've tried to take the ones that are the most relevant. And then basically making sure that once we get into the building design and to the layout of of buildings that we address everything from local biodiversity to to sharing facilities to flexible flexible full plates and so forth to to these various principles. So every indicator within these goals, we've tried to address that indicator within the design. Also down to the development of testbeds for circular resource centers where you should be able to reuse things and have material banks and reuse stations so that you can share materials and things with your neighbors. And this is actually being tested right now in Copenhagen with these larger material banks where you can share things with with neighbors and then making this roadmap for circularity before and after construction. So that could be everything from going into how you actually built with modular materials to how you focus in circularity in terms of sharing economy and what you can build yourself to again flexible buildings and smart city smart city elements. And then we've broken that down. So this is this is one example of of just a couple of snapshots into into how we have sort of designed this into everything from the buildings to the public spaces and a couple of images here of of of how that neighborhood is is then designed. So I think it's all up to to us as designers to also help our clients have higher aspirations to to to see whether we can actually not stem to to have ambitions also in this climate area so that we can make sure that we are in fact delivering on these three in this case three strategies to green and active neighborhood. The socially connected neighborhood that I showed before. And then the climate friendly neighborhood building in the climate adaptive solutions into the both the spaces and the buildings. And then I think I have time for one last case. Right. And and this is looking into retail because now we've looked at sort of design thinking with the kiosk project and we've talked about I've talked about the sort of overarching master planning approach and scale. But I think there is also a lot of stuff happening right now especially maybe in the US around retail because during covid we there is so much retail now happening online. I think now I forgot what the what the number of. Candy maybe you can remember but but the number of malls in in the US right now that that are sort of up for development is like huge. Yeah. So so a project we've worked on is in West Palm Beach. This actually started out before covid. But you could say a mall that was losing its its foothold in terms of not really having a great local performance. It was no longer working as a meeting place. Many of the stores and anchor stores had left and the developers were already sort of thinking about what what could actually be done in this neighborhood. So they started out with this visual artists and trying to also use the old Macy's store as a sort of a shared workers space and and really doing a lot of different things just by focusing on the buildings. But we came into the into the process and started to look at this in a in a slightly more holistic way thinking how can we transform transform the buildings and the public spaces as a as a sort of a new creative place for people to go. And something that we felt was incredibly important was for it to feel more authentic. And for us authentic Ness in Florida in this case was really much about adding planting and more green and some of that natural plants from the area. So this is a picture of the redesign of the local streets and some of that why vibe and and and greening that we were able to to create. And so much more activity came into to the area just also with this focus and comfort that people could actually just spend time there. They didn't have to buy something but they could just sit and spend time on on on benches and enjoy the spaces of the area. But then of course also recognizing then that it is a heart for the community and it is an event an event space at the same same time. This is actually connecting also Rosemary's Avenue all the way up to a to a community you could say north of this site that is that hasn't seen development for generations. So when we started working with the city or with the developers or we also started working with the city at the same time. Looking at how we could actually also make sure that this community towards the north that they actually also got some some positive outcomes of this new development. But there was a lot of mistrust I would say in this area because they hadn't as I mentioned seen any kinds of investment for a very long time. So it started out being much more about programming and building trust and making sure that we came back on the same days as we said we would. And starting to sort of engage the community to on food programs and and and all kinds of outdoor activities. And and it was amazing to see how the local people actually organize themselves and and were open to start using this this neighborhood little you could say park together. But it took a lot of effort to break down this this mistrust that had been in the area for a very very long time. So slowly we have been able to develop both you could say trust in this area and transform the whole sort of mall at the same time. And now there is becoming there is starting to become a development along the Rosemary Avenue and new companies are coming in. And so so I think it's all that it's it's also about building this you could say trust and more careful development over time so that we don't necessarily displace people. But we can accommodate for for a more slowly you could say social development as well of this area so people can stay. So that was three very different examples of work. And I think we should maybe stop there and take questions and have a little bit of a discussion. Thank you. So thank you. Hello for that presentation especially knowing that it's now two in the morning. So I really appreciated hearing from you. And you know like David before coming I took a look at like between buildings and amazing to see that and how much that informed my development as an urban planner and designer 20 years ago. But then also seeing your presentation tonight seeing how much the practice has shifted and also to see how much the demand on public space has shifted. And I think you know when I was thinking about public space it was really in simple fashion thinking about you know creating spaces for people to gather thinking about how it may relate to economic activity. So it was about as far as it got. We think about the demands today on public space as a form of infrastructure to think about micro mobility to think about biodiversity to think about cooling spaces to think about addressing inequality and creating that may not be able to be obtained in other places. And so to think about how you as a practitioner are addressing these increased demands and with these demands come all sorts of new forms of regulation and how you bounce up against clients who are feeling that tension to regulate urban space. I wanted to ask you you know what is it like to deal with a client who is not able to open up to some of the things that you are suggesting you know really have defined ideas about how public space should be used. Whether it is because of the adjacent property owners and their demands or because of fears about what will happen to that public space. How do you deal. I'm very curious about the challenges and the problems that come up. You've presented some great solutions but you know what happens in those kinds of instances. Yeah. It's very much I think about bringing the client on a journey. I think as I mentioned if we when we work in cities we try to to to for example bring people from out out get them out of the offices and into the city to actually workshop and experience things outside. A lot of planners today are just sitting at their desks or working inside of cities and they are not necessarily out that much. So that's one one tool that we use a lot. When we work with private sector and developers it's it's very much about trying to sort of understand their where they're coming from and why things are difficult but then also showing them that it is possible. To to to open up or to to to think differently. So we we have we often invite them for example to come visit us in Copenhagen and we would take private developers on a tour to show them that it's possible to have non gated communities or that it's possible to have an open. School yard with no guard railing. As a local resource for a community. Or just talk about quality of housing. So so I think it's about trying to. Not disregard the local issues because we need to understand how we overcome the barriers but but but but trying to take them on a journey. And sometimes it might not be going all the way to to to to the most ideal solution from the very beginning but then accepting that we need to we need to break it up in in chunks. So to speak or steps if you may before you sort of maybe get to the most ideal design solution. Yeah. And then we are very fortunate because sometimes we also say no that it is a good thing. I mean sometimes you can actually say no and one good example that we had we had a developer come to us and they wanted to build super super dense and super tall. In a place where we felt it was inappropriate. So we said no to the project. And then we didn't hear from the client for about a month. And we were like oh gosh what happened and they will never come back and then we and then we call them. And and then and then they said it's so interesting you said no that has never happened to us before. So we had to take it all the way up and discuss why at board level. And and then they actually came back and gave us the project. Because they were actually ready to lower their expectations for density. So sometimes you have to also just be a little bold. Even though it can be tough. Yeah. Thank you for a really rich presentation. I'm particularly fascinated with retailing in America. But I'm going to actually not go there except for the dead malls and all of that Armageddon. Actually I'm taken up with you mentioned the sustainable development goals from the U.N. And it made me think about publics or the public as a as a category as a as a socially constructed category. And I'm wondering if you have clients that come through the U.N. who basically can't afford you. Or clients who come through the front come from the global south where their problems may seem bigger than ones that you have. You're clearly good at. So I guess I'm going to push a little bit to see how you you deal with the not already successful. If I may go so far as to say that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's tough. I mean we we have. We we've worked in Mexico City and in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires and many places that are big and messy and don't necessarily have the same funds as we do. Sometimes our work is supported when we do work with public sector. It is sometimes supported by private philanthropy or foundations that basically fill the gap or support the work. We also I actually have another another example of a project where we've worked in Buenos Aires and a favela and that work was supported by the Inter-American Development Bank. So you could say a department or of the World Bank. But of course it's difficult to to compete with let's say local offices in Brazil where labor costs is like 20 percent of what they are here. If not 10 percent. So yeah. Yeah. You know picking up on this idea of labor costs and thinking about your staff and who you work with when you work in places around the world thinking about the different kinds of people you need in your office and they're not all doing renderings. You know just talk a little bit if you don't mind about like how you think about staffing projects both in terms of the skills and also working globally what that means how you begin to bring people in or how you think about partnerships as well to accommodate. We are a super collaborative type company because we know that it's not about Copenhagen is Copenhagen icing the world. It's not about one solution fits all it's it's really about using our methods to understand local needs and then trying to develop solutions that are fit for that culture in that place. So we almost always collaborate whether it's understanding a local food system or whether it's engaging someone locally. We almost always have local partners. It can also be on policy work or whatever at every level we try to engage various experts and local local collaborators. In terms of who works in in Gale we we are a quite diverse team. We are about 100 staff and probably have something between 15 and 20 different nationalities employed. And the areas of expertise range from landscape architects and planners and building architects to people with a communications background or anthropology background or science data scientists background or communications background are quite diverse and we try to make sure that when we engage in a new project that we both have a core project team that has diverse skill sets. But then we also often set up like a reference team who is able to engage with the project team at at various times throughout the project. So we are just starting up a new project where we are going to try to determine what is social infrastructure and how can we actually better plan and budget for social infrastructure. And for for a project like that we need to we need to engage partners who are already operating in that field and engage experts globally actually. So so that's a little bit about how how we would approach it. But but I think in a in a more traditional you could say architecture practice. It would be about how to deliver the best design or and we don't really think like that in our office. For us it's not about the building itself or the project itself. It is about what the building does or it's about what the project does. So we are more interested in impact than or or you could say impact or or yeah I guess impact. Then then then then it's not that we don't have a design expression. We definitely do but but it's not so much what engages us I think broadly in the company. I'd like to open it up to the audience. Anybody have questions. So are people walking around with microphones. Hello. My name is Jason Ahuja. Thank you for your talk. I think that problem of defining infrastructure is one that was very popular here in the U.S. Recently and the Biden administration with the federal bill put their money behind digital infrastructure and broadband infrastructure. I think what you said about the effects of that infrastructure whether it's a building or whether it is a digital network. It's going to reorganize geographies. It's kind of the focal point of conversations now here in this country. Have you seen that as well in your global work and considerations of how broadband and the digital divide will impact the organization the organization of people both in their professional lives and their personal lives. Yeah. That discussion I think is also a global one in terms of making sure that people have equitable access to all kinds of infrastructure. We are also I think more and more trying to understand the connection between virtual and physical space for example and one of our we have a couple of PhD researchers in our office and they are actually also looking into understanding activities that social media and how that impacts the physical realm or the physical space and how we can also record and map sense a sense of belonging for example. So I don't think there is a lot of knowledge actually about these relationships between virtual and physical space and definitely not when it comes to understanding impact. So maybe that's an area of research and investigation. Yeah. Hi, I'm Anna Garan Kumar. Thank you so much for the lecture. My question kind of continues off of that. So in a lot of cities where you don't have this database of knowledge for example like in New York City you have an insane amount of data about the city that's already recorded and available. In the public realm. So in cities where you don't have this sort of knowledge base and where you have a lot of your design driven by data. How do you go about collecting this data where that sort of infrastructure isn't available and how do you navigate that sort of mistrust that exists. You know with data collection with almost surveillance that sort of thing. Yeah, that's a lot of places in the world. There is no data and and then we try to build the data. So for example when we started work working in Buenos Aires we were engaged to do their their first 10 year plan or 10 year strategy. And in in one of the favelas where we worked there was no maps. There was no knowledge really about how many people lived there. So we we convinced the client to start off the process actually with a three months period where we had a team of people who went to Buenos Aires and lived there and we we recorded data. So we went out to actually survey and map. So we used some of our own data methods for the favela. We also used the project team used drones to actually you could say make maps based on pictures of of how the area was developed. We assume that there was about 50 to 60,000 people living in the area but we couldn't know for sure. So yeah, it's about making making use of what you have. And then I think being healthy skeptical on the data that you are given because sometimes the data that the government has in certain places of the world is not sufficient or not really. So so being skeptical enough to actually combine that with your own studies of how things work in an area. Actually I when I was at school I select a selective course from the school of applied analytics basically to do data visualization. Then I realized that way before statistics and data we architects are building cities are building house are designed the world. So it's not about data driven design it's design drive data data from the Greek word demo is the same route as demo. It means people. So at first how statistics were invented is to collect a contagious disease from each people. So that we get we get information from people. So that's our talent. We can design space for people. We can design cities for people. Why do we need data? Why? Yeah, it's the hand in the egg question, right? But I do have an answer because basically because basically it's after I started like data visualization even some programming language. I realized that it's the new technology computer science. They designed their device their house is iPhone is Instagram they designed their product to collect data. That's why they can have a self efficient system to collect data and analyst data and then update their product. However, it's not how we architects work and it's not how house or how city works because we are more than data. And we have more meaning and activities in the city happening. So that's actually my original question. I want to ask, like, do you have any psychological team or clinic therapist team in your research team? Because a lot of your designs talking about how the city, the public space and the design will eventually change our behavior in a mental way or physical way. But I think that requires really professional knowledge from psychologists. No, we actually don't have psychologists on our team. But it's interesting your comment because Professor Gale, when he started wondering into this research field, it was actually because his wife was a psychologist. So back in the 60s, Ingrid started asking, you know, why are architects doing these awful environments for people? You know, why are you not considering people's mental health and well being? So I think this whole field of research and area of research that Jan started out with was very much based on these questions from more of a psychological perspective. We have anthropologists working with us and using those methods to do ethnographic research and so forth. But when we did, it's also because we don't have, I think, enough work where we could actually hire specialists like that. But when we did a project where we have developed a framework for inclusive healthy places, that was also referenced, you can actually download that framework on our website. You can use it in your own projects. We also have a website where you can see how the American Planning Association have tried to adopt this framework and other organizations as well. But when we developed that project, we engaged 25 to 30 different health practitioners in helping us develop those indicators. And we were lucky as well to get support to invite these health practitioners to physical onsite workshops, both here in Newark, actually, and in Philadelphia and in Copenhagen. And it was super, super interesting. I always, like, just love getting into a new field, like meeting medical researchers and so forth and understanding the way they use their language and helping them see, oh, it actually matters if they're on the side of a bin in Copenhagen, there is a place where you can put your bottles because then homeless people can actually take those bottles and they can get money in a store rather than having to dig through garbage. And having discussions onsite, showing medical researchers some concrete design solutions that makes the city more inclusive. That was just super, super interesting and also something that we learned a lot from, I would say, in our studio because we need to learn how to speak the language of these various fields in order to get stuff done. I think one of the underlying implications of that question about data is that data is never autonomous. For both sides of it, data is human interpreted, human created. And I think as I.L. Watson showed us just a short while ago, data is manipulable. And I'm really fascinated at how many people you do talk to, as you say, medical people, just to learn about their environments and their practices. Very simply to get beyond the silos that the experts in architecture seem to be able to do everything, which was an earlier model. And so I think we still have time for some questions. Yeah, well, thank you very much. Hello, this was an amazing talk and I really enjoyed it and there were all these different things that I'd like to ask you. This one in particular that I'm very interested on is the 2018 project in Shanghai, the waterfront, which is actually such an amazing project and so transformative for the entire city. Actually, I would say it's beyond the city or it's connecting different cities in a way and it's also regulating its relationship with the water, which is also an infrastructure and the site for many other things. And it has to do with also the multidisciplinary aspect of your office, the fact that you're doing both planning, urban design, architecture, landscape. I think that that project is actually happening in a context that is very much driven, like Chinese cities in Shanghai also are very much built through and defined and the revolution is very much defined through planning versus other cities that are very much the result of smaller interventions with more kind of tactic approach. And my impression is that there you were combining different disciplines, the quality of space that urban design can bring and landscape architecture can bring, but the scale and the overall management of planning in a way. So I would like to ask you first how you work across fields and traditions and tools in a project like this and the second how much pedagogy was needed in a project like that to actually facilitate that the city of like Shanghai could somehow accept the methodology like the one that you were proposing. Yeah, it's absolutely right that especially in China everything is very planned and so what we try to do there is to you could say again start with the same methodology of actually mapping how people could get more access, understanding where the local barriers were and so forth, but very quickly elevating it up to some very, very basic strategies. So that project is super simple. Of course it is complex project, but it's actually super simple strategy wise. It has four strategies. One is to make sure that everyone can actually walk along the water. Second strategy is to make sure that all the communities have access to the space and can walk and bicycle and use public transportation. Third strategy is to open up buildings in the ground floors to activate the buildings that are facing the space and then fourth element program it. Super easy, easy to understand. We can communicate it in diagrams. You can draw it on a little piece of paper and that's actually what we try to do like elevate things up so that it becomes a super clear, easy to understand guideline. And from there it's then of course all the complex stuff starts with negotiation and designs and what have you, but if you can constantly elevate it up and say oh this is why we're doing it, then I think you can do it. In Copenhagen it took 20 years. In Copenhagen we did a so called blue plan back in the year 2002 where we said people should be able to bicycle and walk along the whole inner harbour. And only last year the last piece was done because Copenhagen actually has a lot of small islands, so the last bridge was built last year and now you can for the first time bicycle and walk along the inner harbour of Copenhagen 22 kilometres, but it took 20 years. So in China it took four, but maybe the design is not sort of the quality of the implementation is not as high as in Copenhagen, but it's there. And what I'm mostly happy about now with that project is not necessarily the outcome as such, but the fact that the policy, because afterwards we were able to write an urban design policy. And that policy has now been adopted very much as you say, not only by Shanghai, but by 20 municipalities around Shanghai. So it is now becoming street design guidelines for how to implement streets in the entire region. And if they work as fast as they do in Shanghai, I think we can see rapid change. And that's what I'm focused on. I'm focused on trying to, by showing some lead examples, get to the policy level where we can then afterwards implement that scale. Because that's the level of change we need by now. Hi. My name is Austin. I was struck by two things. One, you're seemingly very intentional framing of what I think are inarguably lovely solutions, a series of very beautiful solutions against the backdrop of the wicked problems. Wicked problems, of course, being by definition unsolvable. So I'm just curious as to how you see the practice of architecture and urban design as a kind of problem and solution framework against the series of wicked problems. And then the second thing I'd like you to reflect on was, again, just given how sort of wonderful all the projects looked, photographed, everyone looks happy, they're playing chess, they're riding bicycles. There is, I don't know, a kind of pervasive utopic quality to those images, especially given your sort of emphasis on the global nature of your practice and all the things that we all have in common, despite our local. So I was just curious, is that utopic quality useful again? It's like a banned word in the academy. But is it a useful quality against the kind of wicked problems? Is it something that maybe misses a big part of what makes cities human cities? They aren't always happy, they're not always lovely, they're often wonderful because they're messy and fraught and scary sometimes. So again, it goes back to sort of like how we practice design. Are we in the best place when we're practicing it painting a picture of loveliness all the time? Well, so when I talk about wicked problems, it's because more and more urban problems are wicked in the sense that there is not a client for those problems. There is not a client who can solve air quality issues. There is not a client who can design and implement a healthy food system. So some of the issues we've also been asked by a foundation in Holland to think about how the urban environment can help solve childhood obesity. So again, there is not one client being the school system or the health practitioners or the municipality. But what we are seeing is that I think actually, or what we are discussing in our office at least, is that the neighborhood scale is often the missing piece because when we look at, for example, food, we have national guidelines that are very specific towards human behavior. You should eat this according to the food pyramid or you should eat no more sugar than this or don't drink more than that. But the actual physical environment is missing. So everything that has to do with the enabling piece of how we can actually live our lives. And that's where we focus. Can I interrupt for a second? I want to reframe the question a little bit. Well, one half of it is as designers, can we get away from renderings to represent success? The other is, do you have measures of success that you use in your projects? Like is there a point where you go back to a place or there is some way of... And there is a question about trying to be utopian as well and what we are trying to do with our cities. But I think that question of measuring success and how we measure success, I think there's a... I'm very interested to know how your practice may address that. Hopefully I'm not taking advantage of your question. No. So continuing on that question about... I don't think there is any perfect. I think we do care a lot in our practice about places being used. So the fact that there is life in places is actually a success criteria for us. We don't design only for the beauty of an area, even though that many people also care for the aesthetics of places. But I wouldn't say that we have a standard for success. If you read Making Cities for People, or Cities for People, the book, there is... We've developed some quality criteria where we think as space is... I guess it could also be the equivalent of a success criteria, but that has more to do with people feeling a level of security and safety and also comfort and the fact that the place has sort of what we call this human scale. But otherwise, I don't think we have success criteria that would fit every single place in the entire world. We would probably define that differently from place to place with the client, depending on what the project is. But I like messy places too. Copenhagen is a very beautiful place and many people would say it's too beautiful and it's probably too curated. And if you go to a lot of other places, it's less beautiful and much more messy. And I think those are maybe the places where we also learn a lot in our practice from having worked in South America or in Asia or other places. I hope that answers a little bit of your question. I have a question about... Finally, I can get to retail. Retail is interesting because historically it's the most surveyed activity. It's an activity in which the buyers and producers like to know about the people shopping. I'm sorry, the sellers and the producers survey populations in order to get the right goods. It's a history of surveillance that is written through retailing and shopping. So I'm wondering if considering the Armageddon that seems upon us with retailing and online shopping, et cetera, how can that... First of all, how do you approach older locations such as the one in West Palm more structurally, more fundamentally? And also, how do you think that affects the rest of the way you practice once you've started looking at the world through the lens of the happiness quotient of retailing? Yeah, retail is a really difficult area and impacts our cities in so many ways, logistics and so forth. I think it relates a little bit to the tendencies or the trends that I was talking about in the very beginning. I mean, we are engaged in another project actually also here in the States where we are converting a mall where only 20% of the mall is working. It's very successful and works as a neighborhood meeting place. But we are engaging the whole surrounding community in terms of developing a concept for a mixed-use neighborhood. And that is actually also about building trust because the community, they don't want new neighbors. They don't want to see development. They like to just know that the mall is there and for them to go shopping and they don't... Well, they might recognize that it's declining and so forth, but it's really about engaging to understand how you can actually build something that is more diverse that they can also then benefit from. So that's a project that we are also engaging in and it's super difficult because there is no public transport so we need to anticipate that we can build it. There are no local uses other than housing in this mall so identifying all the other functions that you could actually build into the place and imagining new ways of living in a more circular way, as I mentioned also in the project from Copenhagen, where we don't necessarily need to buy all that new stuff all the time, but we can enter new economic systems. And that's going to require a lot of experimentation and providing people access to testing ways of behavior that they don't necessarily know of today. And that's where I think the pilot projects are super helpful because a lot of people will say, oh, I would never bicycle or I would never share this and that, but when you provide the option to try it out, maybe more people will, and then you can actually start building more of a communal infrastructure or collectivism or whatever you could say. I do think there is an element of citizenship that we try to sort of build into most of our projects and of course coming from social or democratic Copenhagen, I need to say this, but it is about understanding, notion of citizenship is really about understanding by contributing to something shared you gain as an individual. And if we can build that into the projects and understand how we design those shared systems, be it food, be it public space, be it products, then we can maybe start changing the way we live. I think that the goal of citizenship is fabulous and it strikes me at the last minute that that's like the opposite goal of retailing. It's based on individuation, so good luck to you in your American projects, although probably now globally. And I think the universalism question is a great tension in your practice, which is a tension that architecture has always had, whether situations or solutions or goals should be universal at all, how much qualifies that, how much universalization becomes a problem. I think it's a wicked problem that's built into your practice, so a wicked problem in this case being a very good problem to avoid seeing things with one lens but understanding that there may be certain qualities that do cross borders. I think, I don't know, when are we supposed to leave? Okay, sorry, not me. Hi, I'm Kaya. I have a question maybe about the Social Democratic Copenhagen but I would like to, I'm curious about a global survey because you showed the map of all the different projects that you worked, places that you worked in and so I'm curious to see or hear your opinion on both sort of where have you seen the most opportunity to breaking down these silos between departments when it comes to the public realm? Can you see a difference between Asia or Europe or the United States? And then similar, or along those lines, also this sort of interest in experimentation and appetite for people trying things that they're not quite sure, you just mentioned them all, people don't actually really want anything new there and can you, in this global survey, also see differences in whether it's in a Democratic place or less Democratic place or does it depend on sometimes individual mayors or planners that can kind of steer projects in one direction or another? Yeah, I mean when it comes to the surveys, there are many differences in the different places where we surveyed. So for example, where people spend time outdoors, we saw in many places more intergenerational activity. Of course that's kind of natural, you would expect that when children are not able to go to school and maybe elderly people are taking more care of them and so forth, but we saw significant differences in terms of gender, for example, across different cultures. Surprisingly, more elderly women were meeting outdoors in Scandinavia and Northern Europe where we saw men spending more time being alone, where that was actually a little bit the opposite in the US where we saw groups of men hanging out more and we haven't sort of been digging deeper into why. Why was that? But there is definitely differences, of course, when you dig deeper into the research of various kinds depending on where in the world it is. So some of the sort of overarching things that I was referring to here was kind of some of the more general things that we saw across the entire survey. And what was the other question again, sorry? Oh, breaking down silos. Yeah, that is super interesting question. I think it is in smaller cities, it's more about size or it's not always about culture. In smaller cities we see an easier connect between various departments than we see it in the big, big cities where especially in cities like New York or Mexico City or the mega cities, it's almost like a minister overseeing a whole area. And in those places it's more difficult with the cross-pollination. I think I've been, I'm super fascinated about working in South America in general. Everything we've done in Argentina and Brazil and Chile and Colombia and so forth because there is such a, we always meet this young generation between 25 and 40 years old who are so ambitious around trying to make a change. And that I'm always so fascinated by these young people that are in leadership positions within public sector and really wanting to make a difference. And so it's been easier for us somehow to build some of those cross-organizational teams in some of those places where it's messier, the systems are not fully in place, it's a little bit chaotic, we have a time pressure, we have less money, then we actually have had an easier time setting up those structures and those organizations in those places. It's hard in the US in certain ways because the public sector is so, when it comes to planning in the US under so much pressure and there are so little resources, also just in people terms, not just in money terms but also just there are few people, few hands. But on the other hand, I think you have a fantastic way of collaborating across foundation, public sector and local organizations in the US which is much more developed than we see it in Northern Europe. So it just means different things in different geographies so to speak. But regardless I think working in smaller cities and by that I mean sort of one and a half million and down those cities tend to be more collaborative across silos and also quite interestingly also sometimes in the very small cities operating in ways where one leader would be overseeing for example roads and parks or economic development and planning and that's super interesting to see some of those hybrid departments. I have a question. I think we have time for one more. I'm getting the nod. Thank you very much for a very engaging presentation. My name is Chatra Viezo. You mentioned wicked problems and kind of following up on some of the questions. You know wicked problems acknowledges that these are systemic problems and obviously architecture, urban planning can't solve all these problems. And you mentioned the kind of mistrust at the end with the retail you know that mistrust I think everybody wants safe open public spaces but at the same time people don't want to be priced out of their homes and that is probably part of that mistrust. So I'm wondering how Gell or Haskell had the opportunity to use its power and leverage to maybe push for more robust social infrastructure you know because this is not a social democratic country especially in the United States more affordable housing, affordable healthcare things like that that are also things that contribute to quality of life. So how do you navigate that aspect of it? Yeah. Thank you. Definitely. I mean we try to push that I would say in every single project but specifically on social housing we are and have been advising in Denmark for example we have a foundation that provides development grants to social housing estates across the entire country and it's actually a system that has been set up and has worked for 150 years so it's a system that I've tried to advocate for that you should adopt somehow here in the US but basically it works so that every housing estate first lend money from the state for a 30-year period at a low rent to build the estate and then once the loan is paid back then they keep paying money but instead of paying to the loan they pay a part of their rent into a national foundation and the national foundation is then so it's a circular system where every estate can then apply for money from the foundation for social programs and physical programs and it's very interesting because the foundation is not a public organization it's a private setup and it's able to work in a contra-financial cycle mechanism so when we have prices going up or we have slowdown and recession then the foundation can actually go in and counter that and actually put more activity into society so during COVID for example the foundation actually said some other things are slowing down in society but this is when we will now invest 45 billion Danish Kroner into social housing across Denmark and we have then been helping the foundation to ensure that that investment going into physical infrastructure and physical buildings is being done with an equitable lens and an equitable outcome so we are facilitating two advisory boards for the foundation now one with a social focus and one with a physical and now having done that for two years we are now merging the two boards and starting to reorganize the foundation so that we ensure that the social outcome is considered in every project they sponsor so that's just one example of how we would approach but affordability of course is one of the biggest issues in cities right now and something that we are very much engaged in as an office as well I think it's been quite an evening thank you so much it's been extremely informative and that's great to see your work and to hear you speak about it thank you