 I was, as a student, I was a squatter and then I became a neighborhood activist and then I started to do social housing and as a social housing architect in Holland you start to do neighborhoods because the projects are large scale and then I ended up doing large scale urban designs and the culmination of that is the Hafen city in Hamburg on the left last year the Olympic legacy not for London but for Hamburg which was the first comprehensive urban design act to jump across the city of the elbow to the south and which was exited by a referendum in the wake of doing many of these sorry yes in the wake of many of doing of many of these projects we just we started to do a research on what we call Grand Projet in the tradition of Pompidou and his Paris concept and we collected 26 projects worldwide in 15 countries and 23 cities and research them superficially then cook them down to around eight so here you see top left La Défense in the middle you see King's Cross on the right hand you see Hafen City down left you see what the hell do you see there Tokyo Maranouchi in the middle you see the beginning of Marina Bay in Singapore and on the the right hand side you see Luya in Pudong Island in Shanghai we do not only look at these projects as isolated things but for instance here you see in King's Cross we look at how these projects are part of a constellation of centralities that can be read as an orientation network across the city of London and their relation in between there's a tradition in these projects one is for instance Canary Wharf which is more or less from the same period as La Défense and these are hardcore multifunctional aircraft carriers that have been landed from the sky rudelessly onto the city and that's why we call these projects wolves they are mostly privately owned and they are very strongly gated and have a strong control all over skyscrapers that have two large floor plates that are not flexible etc but you see also in this picture that Canary Wharf is not only a wolf it turns to be gradually a sheep because the interesting thing about these bad projects is that over time they attract housing they attract transport they attract connectivity and then gradually they start indeed at the end networking into the city today we know that so there's a kind of evolution so if you look at Hafen City it is based on extreme networking it is based on giving small plots away to developers it is based on incremental development piece by piece and of diversity in program architecture grade level and so on and so on if you look at La Défense you see the same you see that La Défense was landed like Canary Wharf but it created in the end the centrality and the centrality attracted a whole kind of urban district around it which kind of organizes itself as fungus around it and you see that even on the right hand side La Défense starts to Chinese identify itself gradually which is the next and maybe the final thesis if you look go to Pudong Island in Shanghai which is partly co-designed by the Epadesa the designers of La Défense you see this compound of large skyscrapers that are set into a field with no public space they have no real connectivity in terms of permeability there's no internal external integration and they don't talk to each other and the neighborhood itself doesn't talk to the surroundings it's interesting to see a comparison between Pudong Island and Wall Street where you see what an immense differentiation difference in public space street pattern and fineness of connectivity Wall Street shows against this Pudong Island in more or less with the same density and on the right hand side drawing by Peter Rowe that shows this famous diagonal that runs into the middle of nowhere as a kind of copy of the Champs Elysees from La Défense last project I will show you is the and also then show that there is also an evolution in Asia in terms of mega projects being becoming more human is Marina Bay which is a successive large scale development that seems not to end at all the first one is Marina Square which you see here in the front and it's a kind of it was meant like a kind of Florentine Italian nollie system of public spaces they are all covered underground and overground as you see conceived by Hong Kong developers and designed by American architects like Philip Johnson and Roger Dinklow so it's a kind of enormous caricature that has been built there quite successful on a landfill and is the house the home of the formula formula one racing track activities that are every now and then in Singapore and by chance they are held on the same day as the national as the international bicycle day ironically which the government of Singapore finds a little bit awkward here you see this is a kind of symbolic picture because the director of the Hafen city in Hamburg is standing here praying in front of the model of Singapore where all this these fantastic goodies are being produced successively over the decades and what we work there with our research lab around five seven years now and we have gradually a kind of influence on the way that the town planners think about the city so this first Florentine project you could say was a very initial thing the second phase is a couple of skyscrapers that you see here that still have the problem that they have enormous floor plates and one block one plot one building so no diversity only internally directed but gradually we have been able to manage to discuss smaller plots with the example of New York where real estate can also get a lot of value even with small blocks and we give them little boxes of cardboard like you see here with zoning laws in which they can play and see how the how they can really create a little bit more diversity within the development of that and last but not least this is Marina Bay South that's a revolutionary change in which perimeter block developments are being combined with towers and semi-public and public spaces that are transitional like you see here in official diagrams of the center of livable cities which is one of the main drivers of these kind of developments in Singapore which has a great spin-off in other Asian cities you shouldn't underestimate the effect that it has enough in Saigon Jakarta etc these people do and it is not a surprise that these the images that they produce are very strongly related to the European tradition I talked two days ago to Liu Tai Keur the big maker of Singapore and he said yeah actually we were all only aspired by the European city the last development that is now going to be done which you see here from the Marina Bay Sands hotel is the container terminal terminal in the back and this container terminal is an enormous piece which is going to be an extension of the CBD this is the size of it it's about one and a half times the size of half and city and what is very interesting is that gradually the society is geared towards that there's going not to be a made a master plan but there is first a community created this community we are also co-creating and this community is is going to stakeholder the master plan together and there will be different scenarios with all kinds of new insights of development like what does high density mixed use really mean to also tackle the myths that all these concepts have with a lot of categories that are also including economic sociologic and psychological and research energy systems information technology mobility and transport planning of course there's a big discussion about light urbanism etc now Singapore of course has a bad name maybe that's also right you can compare it a little bit with the West Berlin it even has less border controls than West Berlin in its ace but actually it is a large corner basin of over 10 million people and what is of course very ironic is you cannot discuss that this is a large corner basin you can only talk within the walls I have to stop now I see thank you very much thanks case I wanted to try and tie what how you introduced yourself as somebody who's grown out of being an architect and ex-architect back to the point that was the subject of the session before lunch which was really as I understood at a discussion about the limits of architecture and all the limits of design I'm very struck in your presentation and I'm delighted that urban design has expanded and grown as a profession in the way that it has and I think there's no question that we have much better cities because of it not least because architects are very bad at the spaces beyond the building but my question to you and perhaps you don't have an answer and we can pick up on it later on is what are the limits professionally of the urban designer in particular what I'm thinking about is when you're designing beyond just the big project when you're designing the whole city or perhaps more importantly what I was really thinking about is about the system of cities where do you put multiple big projects which is an issue in the parts of the world where you are building at scale much less than it is when you're building in established cities we've only got a little bit of room to maneuver but when you're thinking about the west coast of Africa we are going to be doing a lot of building a lot of mega projects do you need special design skills to engage with a different kind of person who will make the political decisions about that it's not the same kind of banker it's not the same scale of politician and just as you were talking and I was thinking well how do you even represent that are there limits to design when we think about the system of cities is my question you know an architect sees the completion of his design within the taste of his own aesthetics after it has been completed the urban designer is the coordinator of everybody's bad taste and usually does not survive his project he is a cogwheel in a machine and has to very carefully conquer his position but what is the crux is I do hardly know people who are well who are doing very good urban designs which of course have to be open and incremental and adaptive and so on who have not been an architect or a landscape architect or something related so you have to be a designer to in order to be proactive in creating robust public space systems in an urban context and the kind of interpretation of the local context you are coordinator also of politics designers implementation people population and engineers you are on the on the kind of hinge point between between I lost it I have a little bit of a jet lag sorry yes between design and science so let's say what is extremely important what is not so very developed in my experience with architects is that there's a very important component of let's say science on level of transportation and economics etc needs to feed in your work as an urban designer and I know Andy's got a question on this but it does seem to me we need to think about this both from the perspective of the person implementing the mega project but also from the perspective of the person writing the specs or the terms of reference for these very large scale interventions at the urban scale so when you have whether it's the minister of a human settlements department or the treasury and she commissions work from urban designers what is she expecting and do we need a special language to begin to train people so that they ask for the right kinds of things and that we brief people correctly but let's hand over that you recover a bit from jet lag and just say to think about this and we'll come back to this in discussion which is the city that cities that 26 or so that you've studied of the kind of mega projects the contrast between the presentation of those and this morning's different you know the sort of alternatives from below and I'm very curious because you've you've worked in so many different environments is what's the connection between these two in some ways many of these cities these global centers more relate to one another than they even do to their surrounding context or the communities the city of refugees we saw this morning or in Lagos and I'm very curious what is when the relationship but what is one learn what is the connection between these two things as an urban designer working on very large context that these aren't islands unto themselves but actually how they address the fundamentals of what's happening in urbanization in many of these countries yeah I think if you talk about a mega projects they happen and if you wanted or not and you have to decide as a designer or an architect or an urban designer do you want to have influence or not my decision to focus primarily on urban design was that I discovered that architects are ignored by large scale urbanization and by politics and that I think that the discipline of architecture and design needs to have influence on large scale urbanization that's the first thing the second thing is that our mega projects are always complementary to slums and other things they are economically economically in a certain dynamic balance if you like or not and they are centralities in a system in which conurbations are either concentrated but sometimes also much more spread out that the myth that 60% of the people lives in cities is not true at least half of these people lives in desiccota areas that are spread out along the Ganges or in Shanghai and so on and so our mega projects or centralities if you like I don't like the work of mega projects at all but working on centralities as nodes of encounter on all levels economic culture etc is very important if you don't interfere it will be done by developers and politicians that want to kind of stamp their life on to the city and I think that is a lost chance if you don't do that.