 Good afternoon, good evening to all of you, our viewers this evening and our wonderful speakers. My name is Anna Herrhausen, I am Executive Director of Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft. We are a think tank and convening organization founded by Deutsche Bank almost 30 years ago. We are based in Berlin and we collaborate internationally with academic institutions and civil society organizations. More than 15 years ago, we embarked upon a global investigation into the future of cities. We did so together with a group of academics from the London School of Economics. You know many of these people now as the leading figures of the internationally renowned Centre of Competence LSE cities. The investigation today is known as the Urban Age Programme. Not too long ago, we felt that we had come close to discovering what one of my predecessors once called a grammar of success of cities. I know it's oversimplifying but in essence we said high density living and working, mass public transport and of course mixed communities. Those were the ingredients that we emphasized for sustainable and vibrant cities. And then of course the pandemic happened. Social distancing replaced density. The car again or the bike replaced mass public transport. And sheer need often came to be the driver of innovation, not so much proximity allowing computer scientists maybe and venture capitalists bumping into each other at after works drinks. In addition, stepping back from the immediate challenges to what many of us had come to accept as sake of the art of when thinking about cities. The pandemic laid bare some of the structural flaws that we're grappling with in the way in which we organize our modern lives. Questions about environmental sustainability, about social equity and about technological progress. What is it that we value? How do we express that? And how do we organize in order to preserve and nurture that? With these core questions in mind, and with a view to the aforementioned immediate challenges, the pandemic poses to what we have long thought about as state of the art when thinking about cities. I put a house in Gesellschaft and LSE cities together conceived a series of urban age debates entitled cities in the 2020s. It is with great pleasure now that I welcome you all to this second out of five debates. The series has covered or will cover questions around the future of work, the future of mobility, or the future of commerce. Today, we're all here to talk about the significance of the dangers to and the potential of public space. Let's talk about humanizing the city. We have a fantastic group of urban thinkers and practitioners here with us this evening. We're going to text Rosyana Montiel, Elizabeth Dilla, and Amanda Levite, and author Suketu Mehta. Ricky Burdett of LSE Cities has the pleasure and the privilege of guiding us all through the session. So please, Ricky, over to you. Thank you very much. Anna, and let me add my welcome on behalf of the LSE to the global audience, which typical of an LSE event is now tuning into this event. Let me spend just a few seconds on explaining how the evening is going to be organized, and then we will move on to the different presentations and a longer discussion about this issue of humanizing the city. Now, the event is going to last roughly an hour and a half left. It will end at 7 o'clock British summertime, which is in an hour and 24 minutes-ish. And in the last part of it, there will be an opportunity to have questions and answers from those of you who are listening in from around the world. Now, the function for that, as many of you know, you're all now used to Zoom webinars, is to use the Q&A facility at the bottom of the screen. When you do that, pretend you were in a room with three or 400 people around you, so be brief, even when you write it and actually say who you are and what your affiliation is, if you feel that's relevant. We expect from a global LSE international audience tough questions, and I will fill them or a few of them will have to select them and pass them on to the speakers in the final part of our talk. The session is going to be organized with three roughly 10 minute PowerPoint presentations by the three speakers that again I'll introduce very, very briefly. These are the architects Rosanna, Amanda, and Liz. So Keto, Mehta, and I and others will join in a longer conversation, which will take us for the next half an hour or so. And then, as I said before, we will have a Q&A for the last 15 minutes or so. So let me begin by just setting the context of the themes which Anna has already talked about, but also the speakers. Since we're talking about humanizing the city from the perspective of how space impacts on society, that's very much the central philosophical issue of LSE cities and our work at the urban age. We've asked three architects and urban designers, three architects and urban designers who work at different scales and in very, very different contexts, but they're all committed to using design to enrich people's lives. So Keto Mehta has been an observer and a commentator on how the public space of the city can either promote the wonder or even frustrate human exchange and interaction. So it will be interesting to get his view on the comments that are made and more wider sort of speculations of what's happening to the public realm in cities in this near post pandemic phase depending of course where you are in the world. It's so different in different parts of the world right now. Rosanna Montiel will be the first speaker, followed by Amanda Levite who is based in London and then by Liz Dinner. I will introduce them very briefly as we come to them. But I'm going to start by asking Rosanna to prepare her start share with her PowerPoint presentation. She has been leading her group, the Studio de Arquitectura in Mexico City for a number of years. They've focused mainly not only on public projects across Mexican cities, she teaches at Cornell and will present a few projects which raise these issues of how to intervene in the social life of the city. Rosanna over to you. So good afternoon everyone. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you to LSE and Ricky for the invitation to be part of this significant event. Sharing this space with Lisa Amanda and Tsuketu. What has made us be here today is the shared concern of rethinking urban spaces as places to meet and connect for humans to interact. And I think I can speak for all of us here that more than ever we all want to gather together. And then I would like to share two projects which speak about the reactivation of public space as an anchor for resilience and equity in society. These two projects seek to humanize the city. They illustrate my work methodology and summarize one of my main tasks in architecture, transforming space into place, which for me translates into place making. What's making is about building community, designing a place for everyone to build meaningful relationships. So I will now start with the presentation. This is Mexico City. This is the place where I live, where I work, one of the places I constantly study from summing out from the urban condition and social relations to summing in into the micro object we find in the city. The largest mega city in the world with around 22 million, including the metropolitan area. It is a continuous city that seems to never end. It intimidates us all expected growth worldwide will take place in urban centers by 2030 Mexico is expected to be the eight largest economy in the world. It is home to a multiplicity of cities. I have redrawn my city on different layers and scales, but most importantly, I've gone out there to listen and learn from the city itself. The projects that I'm going to explain now are two among many public housing projects I have worked on in the last few years. The first one is located in Mexico City, the other one in the state of Zacatecas. The foundation by in front of it, the Institute of National Housing Fund for workers, whose main function is to provide workers with mortgage. Throughout Mexico housing complexes are massive, one out of four Mexicans, either leave or have lived in some sort of social housing. They are cities in their own right. They repeat and multiply themselves infinitely. The first project is called common unity. Common unity was an intervention with it in the San Pablo Halpa housing complex located in a very dense and industrialized northern part of Mexico City. The unit has close to 7000 inhabitants. Originally, it had been built as one full unit, all connected through public spaces. But when we arrived to Halpa, we found partitions everywhere. Access have been altered by residents through walls, gates and fences that have become a barrier to habitability. Halpa had no free space for civic life. As you can see, people even caged their cars. These barriers were according to them untouchable. People thought they would bring more security, although it was the opposite. The area was incredibly insecure. So we work around them in order to make them permeable, democratic and meaningful. We engage the community through different several side actions and workshops. Side actions is something we do all the time. There are very low cost interventions that involve the local people with their space in a ludic innovative way. Their purpose is to get people to voice their needs and aspirations. The added value of letting people represent their own space is they become aware of the world of what they have. So we transform the sectors of that unit into what we termed common unity. One of our design strategies to free privatized spaces for public use was to shift the vertical, railing walls, gates and closures, which separate and divide for the horizontal roofed shelter floor patterns and common grounds that connect, reunite and encourage community interaction. Design spoke for itself in common unity. People willingly gave up 90% of the barriers. Trust was the touchstone for change. This is how we found the space and we transform it into this. The horizontal became more than just a roof. The shelter common areas we designed expanded the program of potential activities through compact multifunctional structures that invited all age groups around the clock. This project was low cost. We were signified simple materials to improve the public space. The place can be experienced today with different activities. People have to go have got to know each other. Children play together. There are parties. They take lessons. They do ceremonies. They screen movies at night and adults sweep the floor and keep it clean because they care about it. The flexible boundaries made the common areas more than a front yard or a park. They bonded neighbors. There was also an old leaky shed and we transform the same space into a shiny, shiny library called El Saloncito. So the new space facilitated a different kind of ownership and appropriation, one that habituates inhabitants to work for the common good. Through place making, we built with the community, not only for it, our design substituted barriers for boundaries. Place making is understanding that the value of architecture is not only laying bricks, but activating a social construction. The second project I will talk about is called Fresnillo Playground. Located exactly in the center of Mexico, the state of Zacatecas is a strategic root of one of the most powerful drug cartels in the country. Fresnillo is the second largest city in the state. It is an incredibly hot and deserted place and it is known as one of the most fearful cities in Mexico. This housing complex of 102 buildings where the project happened is not a welcoming place. When we arrived, the aggressive colors of the buildings were intimidating. There was no vegetation, no public areas, no parks. So we were invited to design a public space for the community to gather. The housing state is constantly hogged by members of organized crime. So the social landscape is intrinsically violent. We were even provided with guards to be able to work. So beside the social scars inflicted upon people, this housing complex had a visible urban scar. A former opener sewage canal had been paved and what remained was a dry creek dividing the unit into two. The presence of barriers was very clear. The bridge blocked the access underneath for anyone to pass. And a wheelchair or a stroller could not cross it because one had to go down the stairs and then up again to use the bridge. So this exacerbated the problem of disconnection and division. We observed that children tried to slide in the rain gutters and that gave us the idea of creating playground with the slopes and transforming the blocking bridge into a new type of connection. Workshops, as always, were organized to involve people. Our main tactic was transforming this hostile border into an attractive horizon that people would feel drawn to. We made an accessible bridge that opened up an esplanade underneath and this new bridge included games, shade, and it became the place to be. We also rebuilt the canal slopes to make them work as resting area as agorasteps and as part of a playground program of games of stairs and slides. One of the most important things we did was to change the color of 102 buildings into an earthy and neutral color palette. As simple as it sounds, this was a radical change that made people feel they were living in a different place, safer and more welcoming. So unclaimed urban spaces can be transformed into inclusive places reaching function diversity. Places of resilience where despite the surrounding violence, young people like Lalo can teach their dance classes. This talented dancer might never be able to leave Fresnillo, but this place has given him hope, joy, and an opportunity to share his talents and become a leader. Today there are more than 100 kids playing there every day. It's become an active playground. Play has become essential to reduce insecurity and violence. When you, when you really observe the topography of a place, you can immediately find possibilities to transform a disused urban space and resignify it with little resources. This is how scarcity becomes abundance. What I just talked about freeing space to generate community is for me a way of place making. And not only that, but also city making. My learnings from doing these projects, resulting seven principles that contribute in humanizing the city that I'd like to share to conclude. We must seek content in context, change barriers into boundaries, start with a shift of perception, approach the landscape as the program, resignify materials, work with temporality, and hold beauty as a basic right. The city is humanized when the space becomes a place. Thank you very much. Rosanna, I think we all appreciated that very, very succinct description of very complex project. I want to ask you one thing. We'll talk later about this very important phrase that you've used a couple of times and even wrote up, which is you're going from what is a barrier, an impermeable barrier into a porous border. And we'll talk about that because I think it cuts across many of the project. In other words, a physical thing that has social impact, right, we'll talk about that. Can you just say something about how did these projects emerge? Who was the client? Who came to you? How did that happen? Sure. So both of these projects were commissioned by InfoNavi. As I said before, InfoNavi is the Institute of the National Funding for Workers. They found housing for workers. So it was the former director, Carlos Cedillo. He invited many architects, different architects to participate. And the brief was how can we rehabilitate a series of all housing complexes, which were in really bad shape? And how can we provide them with public spaces? So for us, it was really, really important to understand very deeply what we were assigned and how we would do it. So first, at the beginning, we were told that we could not get into San Pablo Jalpa, for example, because they didn't know if we were going to build it. So for us, it was really important to search content in context. So we went undercovered as sociologists. And I think that we are also sociologists as architects. So that's one of our personas. So how to do it in a creative way and engaging with people was very important. But I think that we as architects, we have to work with people. We have to listen very carefully. But after we as architects have the vision to give them more. So we always try to give more in our projects. So if they ask for a roof, we give them more. Rosanna, we'll come back to some of these bigger issues that you raised there, but very significant that the client in a way also recognize that the physical impairment needed to be fixed. Now, Amanda Levite is, as I said, based in the UK runs a large practice that is working internationally. I've known her for a very long time, and I know that she's been fiercely committed to innovation and public debate about these issues. So she's going to talk about a couple of projects which she's completed, and one important new idea about giving life to the center of the city. Amanda, so if you're able to, could you move now to the presentation? Thank you. Thank you, Ricky, and I'm really, really delighted to be in this company and Rosanna, I loved your presentation and Ricky, thank you for inviting me. So I'm going to show you first of all two museums where arguably the urban moves that we made were more important than the architectural ones. This is the mat in Lisbon on the Tegas River, it's where the Great Explorer is set off, and we wanted to capture that very outward looking characteristic of the city, and yet Lisbon is cut off from its waterfront by train tracks and a highway. So our first move was to persuade our client, the energy company, EDP, that we also needed to design a bridge to the other side of the railway tracks in order to connect the museum back to the city. So we identified a small square on the other side where we could span over the road without any need for steps, and then land on the roof of the museum. And with this really quite simple move, which actually became the generator for the entire design. Not any help reconcile a city whose waterfront was cut off, but we created a new public space on the roof. And at the opening weekend, more than 80,000 people, that's 14% of the population of Lisbon congregated on the roof and along the riverfront. This is one of the most visited museums in Portugal, and it is in effect, a privately funded public building. This elevated square which is in fact the roof of the museum is now part of the Riverside Walk. It's a destination and it's a wonderful vantage point to just look across the water. It would be more importantly to be able to look backwards to the city and give you a completely new perspective of the urban context. But I think it's perhaps what we didn't do that is as important as what we did do. And untypically for an architect, we did not build as high as we could have done. As a counter-intuitive, we had to sink the gallery spaces, some of them below the water table. But by designing a low-slung building, we preserved what is important, and that is the views from the city to the water and the views from the other side of the river back to the city. This was very much on the riverfront, making places to sit close to the water with steps that go down literally into the river, and then steps closer to the museum where you can take shade from the roof. And there's this magic moment at the top of the steps, and I wish we could say we designed it, but we didn't. We just kind of discovered it. But when you stand below the overhang of the roof, you can literally hear the sound of the waves reflected above you. And there is another unexpected moment that we simply could not have imagined when a group of musicians used the ceramic tiles of the facade as a musical instrument. So moving to my hometown, London, and the Victorian Albert Museum, the original way into the museum is a rather grand entrance on Cromwell Road, which is a very busy traffic artery that runs east-west. With this project, our task was to design a second entrance off Exhibition Road that runs north-south, as well as a vast space for the museum's headline shows. Exhibition Road is the home not just to the V&A, but to other museums, to Imperial College, and the Royal Albert Hall. It was newly pedestrianised, but there was nowhere to step off the main drag of the street. We saw a really fantastic opportunity here, which was to renegotiate the relationship between the Museum of the Street by taking the street into the museum and taking the museum out onto the street. But to do this, we had to overcome literally a huge barrier. This stone screen, which faces onto Exhibition Road, was a very important part of the museum's heritage. It was originally designed to hide the boiler rooms, but they've long since gone. And we took a very big risk when we did the competition. We argued that the success of this project was dependent on a radical alteration to this Grade 1 listed screen, because its purpose was no longer to hide, but to reveal. And when we won the competition, we had to then make this same argument to the planners and the heritage bodies and persuade them that the social imperative of access in both a literal and metaphorical way overrode the conservation arguments. We did succeed and the screen is now repurposed, if you like, as a colonnade. And it was this move that unlocked the potential of the project, because it creates a new courtyard and allows you just to drift in off the street. There's a cafe in the sun, which you can see on the left, and we persuaded the museum to open the cafe outside of museum hours to better connect it with the city. And it's really an altogether more informal, very different way of entering a museum. In the foreground, you can see the oculus, which looks down into the gallery that we designed below ground, which is the very edge of this project. And the repurposed screen now opens up a completely new view of the street. The way that the public use the courtyard has been transformative. It's changed the way people see the museum, and it's changed also the way the institution see themselves. And just like in Lisbon, it's sometimes the things that you don't do that allow the unexpected to happen. And that's why we did not clutter the courtyard with all the paraphernalia that goes with an entrance, and why we kept it as flat as possible, so that it could be appropriated by the public. And then to just let the life of the city into the museum. Now this courtyard is owned by the museum, but it very much belongs to the public. And since the new entrance was opened, visitor numbers at the V&A and I'm talking pre pandemic were up 23%. And this was at a time when visitor numbers to museums in London were in decline. And I think that really speaks of the value of creating public urban space in a cultural context. Now what is much more of a challenge and it's a challenge that I want to take on is how do we do this in the commercial sector where retail has been ravaged by the accelerated shift to online shopping. This is Oxford Street in London once London's flagship retail destination. But the perfect storm of the pandemic, combined with a trend for online shopping has forced many stores and many department stores to close, leaving vast shipwrecks of buildings in the high street and a huge loss of jobs. But the department store used to be a very important part of the community and part of community life. These buildings they hold collective memories, they have historic significance and they're extremely well built. And yet many are threatened with demolition to make way for office blocks. And this just feels wrong. And do we really need more office blocks right now. These are very difficult buildings to repurpose, because they lack daylight, and they are very deep in plan that makes them very difficult to easily convert, but we want to find a way of bringing them back to life. At the end of the 19th century, Emil Zolo wrote beautifully about the department store as a metaphor for modern urban life as a whole way of being. I want to see if we can reimagine a new way of being within the shell of a vacant department store and make it a place of discovery and community again. So we've taken as an example, the now defunct House of Fraser department store of history, but it could be any store on any high street. And we've been thinking about what kind of activities could animate this somewhat problematic space and make it attractive and exciting to today's public. And in this project we want to question the nature of public space inside buildings. Can we speak to community values, not just through design, but through the very programming within buildings. Our first thought here is to open up the ground floor and create a through route as a food market with stalls where you can eat together. We've begun to imagine growing a community around the theme of food, because food brings people together, because integrating the urban and nature has never been more important. And because there are really exciting developments in urban farming that speak to the next generation, and their hopes and their values. So here we can display some of this cultivate and share in a way that delights and spas with hydroponic farming growing food vertically without the need for sunlight, growing mushrooms in the basement research and education spaces at the edges. This is really just the very beginning of a project, but I hope it speaks to the topic of today's discussion and the potential for creating new social typologies that capture the mood and the character of our time. Thank you. Amanda, thanks very much. And again, very interesting to see that a number of concepts about what is impermeable becoming permeable what is perceived as being private or belonging to a museum becomes part of the city. I know Suketu has written about him or probably comment about the issue of appropriation you mentioned that word who's space is it and how is it used but can you just comment briefly on the first two projects because I think we'll pick up the big issues you've raised about bringing life back into the street in a moment in the bigger discussion. How difficult was it to, in a way go outside of the classic brief of a museum, which is about galleries and all that. And again, not unlike my question to Rosanna you know did you have a client that was already attuned, but probably more importantly in terms of this bigger debate of where cities are going in the 2020s. Do you feel that this discussion of greater integration of institutions of housing and more is getting easier. I'm not sure whether it's getting easier, but I think it's becoming more understood and I think there are really interesting. I think there's a kind of appetite for interesting public public private partnerships. And I think that's definitely what you will need in the commercial sector. But you know in the in the case of Lisbon we had a very visionary client in the CEO of EDP who completely, you know when we propose that the success of the museum was dependent on a bridge he was completely supportive. And we presented to the city who are also very supportive and delighted to have a bridge that was being paid for by an energy company in fact that the mayor who we presented to at the time is now the Prime Minister of Portugal. And it's, you know, it's, it's not I don't think it's about easy or not easy. I think it's our responsibility as architects to spark these conversations to provoke debate about this kind of thing and maybe you know bring the private sector and the public sector together. You've provoked us already with the discussion about what to do with redundant department stores. So we'll come back to that. This is a partner in DiRosco Fidio and Renfro and with her partner Ricardo and now other partners has been responsible for some, for me the most provocative and effective public projects in many cities of course in New York, Moscow will see some of those projects in a moment but also Milan, LA, London. And at the moment smaller projects are not a bigger project we hope we would have had, which was the music center near the Barbican, but that for the moment is on hold. I think one of the things that distinguishes Liz's approach and we'll hear that in a moment is this complete commitment not unlike the previous two speakers to innovation experimentation and practice and sort of putting the two together. So Liz, if your technology is working, can I ask you to talk about some of the projects that deal with this notion of humanizing the city. Okay, very good. So it's, it's, thank you for inviting me and I could say Amanda I've been to two of your projects and I could attest to their success. And I have yet to see Rosanna's. I'm going to just start by saying that the work of my studio has always been guided by the principle that urban spaces public and democratic like air and water until it is cut up and privatized as as property. It's up to us we're responsible I think all of us to protect the public realm, and especially now under threat of regimes are regimes that you know that might actually suppress our desire to, you know to express ourselves, but also it's under threat by greed developer greed. And so I want to show two projects today. The first is the Highline which I think many people know but I will just say some things about it. It is now 17 years in the making. And it's a transformation of a 1.5 mile stretch of obsolete urban infrastructure, industrial infrastructure into a linear park, and the way we found it. And after the 1980s. It's at derelict and in a neighborhood that look like this. And the idea was, you know, to take this, this piece of property, which was unused and bring green space into an area that was really underserved by green space, but also with an argument. To serve as a catalyst, because in this area, all the property owners and developers really felt that this rusting piece of infrastructure devalued their properties. So the Highline has now been open fast forward for a number of years. In 2009, it opened its first chunk, and it continued to grow. Many people have visited the Highline and I think it might be really familiar to you. I think one of the things that really worked was the defamiliarization of the city from the point of view of 25 feet in the air. And in a, in a sort of culture that feeds on work all the time and consuming every second of the day. This was an area to really do nothing, you know, we're sitting and and strolling a very new idea to urbanites was reintroduced. The Highline has been used for lots of things. People discover it and birdwatching and education and dancing and and music and films and and so forth. And so it has become incredibly popular to New Yorkers. And what was not envisioned initially was that a place that was originally imagined to serve maybe 400,000 people a year pre pandemic had 8 million visitors per year more than all of these other sort of tourist destinations, all over New York. The Highline also went viral. So cities across six continents were inspired by the Highline to turn their obsolete infrastructure into public space. And this is from London to Paris and Tokyo, Seoul, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Mumbai, just the world over. And this was dubbed as the Highline effect, after the Bilbao effect. And even the transformation of highways, you know, with on weekends, with astroturf, and people just sort of starting to hang out, starting to hang out. And this really became a phenomenon. As a result of the Highline fever, we were invited into an international competition to create a park in Moscow, the first new park in 50 years. And on a historically charged side in Moscow next door to St. Basil's Cathedral and Red Square and the Kremlin, right by the river. And this was, I'll just go back a moment. This is on the footprint of a Khrushchev-era hotel called the Rossiya Hotel. And it was the largest one of 3000 rooms. But we had a moral dilemma. Should we work in a country under a repressive regime? Well, you know, we convinced ourselves that this project was for Muscovites. And it wasn't to represent the regime. Despite the rigid, the frigid relations between US and Russia at the time, the speculation was that an American firm could never win this competition on such an important site. We won, somehow we won. And unlike formal parks in Russia with axial movement and a limited selection of official plans and restricted access to vegetation, the Ariade Park was designed for people to interact with nature. And this is the plan we call this wild urbanism. And it's a kind of hybrid park in which hardscape and landscape topography and buildings are intertwined into a new type of public space. And against the competition brief, which requested no large areas for people to congregate, obviously next to the Kremlin. We had large sweeping areas for people to come together. It's amazing that we won this competition. The site was leveled, totally leveled. And we built a topography from it. You could see here, looking in one direction. The landscape and the hardscape there's a crust, a glass crust over a hill that we've made, which is the roof of a of the new Philharmonic Hall, which we didn't do on an area where kind of boomerang goes very close to the river over a very large highway where the river is inaccessible. And we tucked lots of buildings and program into the topography under the crust, a big area this is working with augmented climate where open air, the grass actually grows in and survives in the winter. This is a visitor that came by at the beginning. And, you know, fortunately the project was not overly politicized, and we were spared. The first, the park was surprisingly popular one million visitors in the first month. And you could see some of the some of the images here. And you could see that there is, you know, an invitation for the public to come in and and use the the public space and a kind of uninhibiting way very, very different from other Moscow parks. Then we, after this sort of great success and we were allotted then all of a sudden came press about how this park has promoted sexual activities in the park. And we were, we were really kind of surprised and we felt like, Wow, this is a success. People are feeling so free in the space that they can really enjoy the space and each other. So, to us, it was a victory. And also, it became a national stamp and, you know, somehow absorbed and, and nevertheless, you know, an international group coming in very much appreciated. So freedoms in coming back to the High Line freedoms of sort of expressing love and, and, you know, like a very amorous place as it turned out. But there was another unexpected effect, so coming back to the High Line. This is the city's initial investment of 115 million stimulated over $5 billion of urban development in the surrounding neighborhoods. And the High Line was essentially a tipping point in the growth of the far west side. Once considered an eyesore that devalued adjacent property the High Line ignited a feeding frenzy for developers. And more than anyone had imagined this success and ultimately gentrification came faster than than we could have predicted. The cheapest real estate became the most expensive real estate in New York. And you could see some of these headlines here. By seeing this rapid change we asked ourselves, what is the measure of success for the architectural catalyst and can the catalyst fall victim to its own success. What are the ethics of entering into an, and entering into an all an altering a city's life cycle. The possibility of the architect in shaping the aftermath of urban change that they didn't quite predict. And what would we have done anything differently than, than we did now knowing, you know, at that point now and what, knowing what we know now. I just want to show you just a couple of slides of this post occupancy project which is our response to our, some of our own questions, which is to take the High Line as a platform for an urban stage. We created what we called the my long opera and looking at the past and looking at this alienating future. It's, it's just a hard look at where we are. So this is called a biography of seven o'clock, and it situated 1000 singers along the 1.5 miles of the High Line. And most of these 40 quieters, non professional singers so and 250 professional singers so 1000 and all, and you can see, you could just some of these images, and hear a little bit of No grocery store around here anymore. No place to get your shoes. Okay, so the public navigates this site and and interacts very very close in close proximity to 1000 New Yorkers, and I have to say in closing on late, but there was a palpable sense of citizenship and shared values in this piece. Thanks, Luz. And I think you've managed to certainly give all of us who are watching a sense of the importance of this intervention. I mean, you called it loud urbanism. I've never heard that term before, but the question I had in mind, which I think will also bring in. So Kato in a second is that the fact that you're, you didn't, in a way know what the consequences would be you talked about these two extremes of unintended consequences. And in many ways, you know, so Kato has written a lot about the best thing a public space can do is not determine everything is actually to see what the hell happens that's quite good. And I think you reacted to that but also say just a little bit more as a designer where do you where do you stop short. What do you do is it good that something is not finished that in a way society or the organization, the world that then occupies that environment in a way takes over I know you've thought about that. Yeah, I mean, you know, in a way as a designer you have to imagine how something is used how it's going to be interpreted and, you know, I think about our projects very cinematically as events as places to inhabit. But of course, you can't define the way people use these spaces and very often they're used, they're abused and sometimes they're used in novel ways that you could have never expected, much more rich than you would have expected. So I think, you know, it's impossible to not to design without imagining, you know, the finality of the project and, and, and the public engagement of it. But in a sense, it's just like giving the car keys to the kids, you know, I mean it's like, that's it it's yours it's your it's your life. And, you know, when you finish the project. One has to expect, and if it's a good project and if it's successful that it will live on beyond your control in positive ways that you can't imagine. Let me bring you in. I mean, all these discussions make me think of one word which is complexity. But you know where there is complexity or layers of complexity in the projects that we've seen six or seven up on now success maybe is measured by complexity, you've written about that in particular you did a wonderful piece with Michael Kimmelman in the New York City really quite recently during the pandemic where you did a virtual walk through one of your favorite very mixed neighborhoods in in New York City the wider New York City Jackson Heights, where you talked about one space, which happens to be called Diversity Plaza I think so I mean maybe it was named after the event, but can you give us your reflections on the, you know, the importance of public space in, I guess, promoting rather than frustrating this level of diversity and complexity. Thank you for working and and thank you to the presenters for these really hot provoking presentations for their work. Diversity Plaza to answer your question is a little patch of ground right outside the subway in Jackson Heights in the borough of Queens in New York, where I grew up when I came from Bombay to New York, and Diversity Plaza was a project. One of the prime movers was Janet Sadiq Khan, the then Trans Commissioner of Transportation. She basically blocked off a small stretch of road and made it a pedestrian plaza. Now Jackson Heights really lacks for any kind of public space there aren't any big parks down even small parks. And this is space now. It's just got a few benches really nothing much have been done to it. If you want to know what's happening with the Bangladeshi elections or relationships between Tibetans and Chinese. You can go to Diversity Plaza and find little groups of immigrants Jackson Heights is arguably the most diverse neighborhood in the country, and you find these people debating the politics of their homelands, and you can pick up stories of these people. They're here so it's an incredibly human space in the big city and the challenge for cities like New York, or Mumbai or London, going forward is after the pandemic. We're on a stricken and driven planet. So in the last year. In the cities that I've been to I mean I'm in New York right now. I've seen a level of anger that I haven't ever people are furious and they're also the world is more grotesquely unequal than ever before. Jeff Bezos in the last year, increased his wealth by $64 billion is now worth $177 billion. So the great problem facing cities before the pandemic was gentrification it didn't matter how beautiful the cities were, how visionary the projects were if you can afford to live there. And in the last year what we've seen is cities have become public spaces for social justice movements. I live now in Manhattan in Greenwich Village. The streets were ringing with declarations that black lives matter. People were out in the streets, people of all races. But what we've also seen now is that language itself seems to have splintered. Architects talk in a particular kind of language for shoulders talk in a different language writers talk in a different language. You referred to the post pandemic phase at the beginning of the presentation and my social media feed is filled with selfies of people celebrating in New York. You go out to Brooklyn you go to Manhattan people are on the streets they're eating they're reuniting with friends and family that I haven't seen for a year. At the same time, from my friends and family in Delhi in Mumbai, I'm seeing images of a charnel house. Tens of thousands of Indians are dying every day the hospitals are full, the funeral homes are full. And the government's responses. They're going full steam ahead on a project called Central Vista which is going to remake Delhi a $3 billion project a kind of vanity project for the Modi government, and it's been declared an essential service so it's an example of how not to humanize the city. I can pick up on this point because it seems to me that many of the initiatives that actually have been presented today. But many of the things you, Sukhet are critical about including this, you know, top down anodyne generic vision for yet another city of the 21st century right always succeed in doing at least two or three things one is that they become soulless. They are completely deterministic and sort of their day to day experiences. And the third thing they become unused they become simplified. I think Richard Senate used the word they become stupefied in the sense and Rosanna I was I was wondering on this notion of having to in a way fix things many of the projects that you are involved in are about retrofitting something that is there and that was made by a previous generation of architects probably well intended, but trying to sort of put them together and I think, or fix them I mean I think Amanda's project with the department store and, and obviously the high line itself are also examples of using something to do something else. And I was just interested if any of you but Rosanna maybe you start picking up this notion of complexity and different patterns of behavior. How does the arrangement of the space make a difference. Thank you. So, thank you Amanda I really like the idea of refurbishing this commercial spaces. We did a project in the studio where these buildings are 22 buildings connected to the subway stations. It's a network of networks in Mexico City, and they're under use. They're abandoned, many of them they use like one floor and they're 22 buildings imagine in the center of Mexico City, that were their iconic their identical, and they're used to connect the subway stations. And they're there so we propose this idea of why don't we transform these buildings into social spaces with with new programming. And we have talked with the government and all the time and we have had like everyone is excited about the project, but then we go and there are many bureaucratic things that stop it from going. And then we can see that all these buildings that are there that are derelict. How can we really find this way in transforming and using them. So I think that these ideas, even that they're not built to put them in, you know, like here to comment about them or how I think that there are many, many spaces that are already there. And we just have to shift our perception of how to use them to revitalize the cities in a different way. And I think that the three of us have shown this type of ideas and projects of maybe like showing how we can do architecture in a different way. Amanda. I think what I know why I enjoy working on existing buildings is because there's a kind of a built in resistance, which you need to respond to and in a, in a sense that creates complexity without it without you having to invent it and it creates diversity. And I also think there's an absolute obligation now to reduce the amount of demolition, if we, you know, because it's polluting it's wasteful, if we can repurpose and adapt existing buildings, I think it is. I think it's also the right thing to do but I'm, I'm interested in this idea of complexity but I think an existing structure gives you that resistance and for me as an architect I find that really important where where I find it very challenging is when you get given a more of a kind of green field site and it's very difficult to begin to know how to construct the narrative. Liz, you want to add to that. Yeah, I guess, you know, I always, I always feel that, you know, we're not. I never enter a tabular as a, even as a great green field site like there's a there's someone that's been through here before some logics that have been there before. And particularly now, we do have a responsibility to rethink old things with new logics, and to actually conceive new things with open logics for an unknown future, you know, and not to be locked in maybe, you know, in. In a way that the that we've built, you know, in the past, buildings that are dedicated to particular functions typologically. You know that make it very hard to adapt to a future that's changing faster than we could actually produce and make architecture and, you know, root buildings into the ground architecture is so slow it's so geofixed and society is changing so fast so what you know how can you think forward in terms of building and I guess you know it's how can you imagine architecture of distinction without generic form going forward. But I do think that you know we have a lot of materials at our disposal a lot of spaces at our disposal and that's our first obligation. Just to remind the audience that now is the time to I know you have already put forward some Q&A so that in the last minutes before we close we can field some of those questions so keep them coming and send them on to the Q&A. I wonder whether you again wanted to comment on that but also connect this you know you were pretty clear a moment ago about your, you know, heavy criticism of how national governments effectively can affect the spaces of the city and whether a level of dramatic engagement can happen or not. Where do you feel design fits into that and I mean you've talked about that basically nationalism can shut down borders and you know we those words resonate of course with the recent developments and in the countries that are represented here to say more about that. So, it's not just governments that can hook up cities. The High Line is a wonderful project. And I remember walking on the High Line the days opened and feeling this. Being my city again with this wonderful perspective, but then the High Line leads to Hudson Yards, which it seemed like a piece of Dubai blasted off into space and landed on the west side of Manhattan. There's a giant shopping mall there whose sole purpose it seems to me is to make you feel poor the moment you walk in. So members of the public are invited to come out and walk up this vessel and then throw themselves off it. The Hudson Yards is for me everything that New York shouldn't be. There's another space in the Barrow of Queens which people very few people are aware of. It's a project. It's another rail line and I'd love to take any of you walking there. It's a three and a half mile long track, which right now is like the Garden of Eden but with graffiti. And there's a group of people who want to transform it into a Queens version of the High Line. And I think one of the problems we have in the cities across the world is that we concentrate when we're thinking of public space and public art where the rich live and the rest of the city when the suburbs and the experts also deserve this kind of humanizing the talents of our best architects and planners. And unfortunately right now they seem to be located where the money is. So at Hudson Yards in New York and Central Vista in Delhi are examples of what not to do. Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights seems to me is an example of what to do. More than ever we need to think of how to humanize three places. The Bazaar, which is the shopping mall that Amanda envisioned, the park or the playground, and the library. The libraries are as Eric Kleinberg has pointed out, palaces for the people. So, I think in the post pandemic world we were greater than ever need for us to connect. But if recent events are any guide, we're going very fast in the other direction. I mean, just to change tone a little bit, you know, given our audience is not going to be all designers. Given the urban age project, very much will cover people who are involved in public policy, academia and much else. You know, there is a strong view that sociability, well-being in cities is not anything to do with the environment they live in, but to do with their health, to do with their wealth, to do with their social bonds and much else. And it would be interesting to hear at this moment in time where there's been so much in intensification of the urban experience because we've not been able to go there. Whether any of you feel that that sort of relationship between the world of the social and the world of physical has actually become more apparent. I mean, just like Liz, you were saying you're 25 feet up and you see the city in a different way. Are we seeing sort of opening up of these discourses? Liz? I'm not exactly sure what the question is, but I can just tell you, you know, there's a, I think we're, excuse me, all computing a post-pandemic world right now. And it's, you know, it's very difficult to actually, you know, imagine and make conclusions, but to tell you my own sort of personal experience was a week ago reentering my New York that I remember. But it was a very, very slow reentry to a public event in the middle of the night, you know, and very, very carefully. To reenter a city that I helped to make, you know, parts of the city that I helped to make and seeing them in a very unfamiliar way for the first time. And I think there is, you know, as we slowly start to reawaken and hopefully trust medicine and science and the fate of cities and that cities are actually important and density counts. And it's something that six foot, you know, distance actually started to get us away from notions of density. I think it's going to be slow, but, and I think some of us will have been changed forever. But it's, I think, you know, there's a need to help sort of bring us back to a semblance of urban life as we knew it. It's going to happen very slowly. I'm going to Rosanna or Amanda, do you want to comment on that? There's just a couple of things. I mean, I think what the pandemic has really shown us is a kind of greater or made us aware of it to have a how important it is to have a greater appreciation of the small things, finding that little bit of sunlight to sit outside your front door, whether it's watching a neighbor's flowers grow at the front. You know, and how important it is to bring nature closer to our cities. I mean, I would just maybe question you Liz about density because density counts, but there's a limit to density and who's, you know, how do we, how do we understand what is the right density and when it gets too much. You know, if you look at housing standards, particularly in London, but I mean, it's the same throughout the world. Social housing standards, but the spaces, they are too small. And there is not enough outside space that, you know, when you have such density that you only have a finite amount of land. Things are going to get smaller and smaller and I'm not, I don't believe that's the right way to go. Rosanna, isn't your project in common unity all about that. I mean, these are highly dense environments with tiny apartments and therefore the investment was made in the space in between. Exactly. So the idea is like, it's not just your apartment, but how do you extend this apartment into public space. And then how can you do many of the activities that you could do inside but just going outside. I think one of the things that to continue the idea of the pandemic. I think that what we have seen, for example, we have tried many times in Mexico to take out to the streets, the restaurants, just that not just as simple as that. And that there was a lot of, no, you could not go into the street, you cannot go into the sidewalk or sidewalk or just at some point. And today, we see all the restaurants outside. So now, you know, like this private. The private restaurants or private things are coming outside because of a necessity to be outside. So I think that this is an opportunity to take this idea of bringing the inside to the outside and changing the idea of how we use the street and how we use the sidewalks and how we use this. So that's a question for you from the public, but what you just said about the pavements I think, so Keto you said very recently that actually all these eateries all these restaurants, particularly in the posh areas of New York City have stopped gentrification in its tracks. I thought that was an interesting idea, but let we might want to go back. So there's a question from Teresa Maria Teresa Sanchez to Rosana, which is what type of approach that you use in your field work, or consulting with the residents was it centered or did you use other approaches and that's a sort of not dissimilar question to Liz from Ben Smith to architects designing public space. Well it's not it's not, it's a different question, try to resist design do architects designing public space try to resist surveillance. Is it a true public space it was covered in by CCTV or over pleased to keep the area clean and I think one of the implications behind that is, you know, who are you listening to in terms of but Rosana, maybe you can answer that question first. So, well, we like to do as I said before this type of side actions that are very low cost very simple very ephemeral that we have done a lot of them. There's like to going with a chalk and tracing some things in the floor, and this changed the perception of people of what they have of their space. So it starts to begin with an engagement of them of being curious about what's going to happen. And also we work with these map queries that are more qualitative than quantitative. So the idea of just going with them and asking where did you give your first case, where do you smoke your first cigarette or go engaging with different questions. We have to ask the right questions in order to have like all this information that can inform after the project. So doing this in a qualitative way and engaging, it completely gives you a different answer. If you just asking quantitative or in or in data based questions. So I think that this was really important for the project. Yeah, that question that was for me is that the absolutely thorny question. It's, you know, typically places that are out of sight can be abused and therefore they become perhaps a bit dangerous and that's why, you know, all eyes on, you know, has sort of become sort of a thing where where you can see it you know it's in the air it's out in the open and people don't abuse, but I actually believe that one can design public space of different qualities, different scales, spaces of intimacy that are not, you know, within public view and you know I showed a little bit of that and sorry, although the cameras came out, you know, it's true. But I believe that if you design good quality space people won't abuse it and therefore, you know, it will remain safe and therefore not surveilled. I do want to say one thing to Amanda you know just about the density thing because I, you know, they're the, every city is different, and New York has emptied out New York is thinned out beyond belief, and many of my members of my studio have moved away. And you know what my fear is that you know as we spoke about before the pandemic. More and more populations will be in cities and cities are getting denser and denser, you know, way over 50% before the pandemic of people live in cities. The, you know, the trend to leave cities and to not believe in cities anymore is a huge concern and that's really what I meant about believing in. There's something about cities that should be believed in and, and that is the quality of life, of course, you know it's not. I wasn't really referring to sizes and minimal sizes of apartments but the sense of living near each other without the fear of contagion. And you know, in fact I think it's been scientifically proved that people that live in cities are actually more resilient than people that don't. That's really, you know, the only point about that. I love cities I'm a believer in cities I can't imagine myself not living in a city. But I think, you know that there are many things that we are that we don't know, we don't know what will happen but I think we may find ourselves with a lot of empty high rise office blocks in cities. We learn to work remotely, you know, at distance, or at home and, and how are we going to deal with that. And how can we use this opportunity particularly in kind of downtown areas that are totally dead at night, you know where all people who who work that go, go home somewhere else. How can we use this opportunity to bring back a kind of social diversity but also a mixity of uses and functions. This is why you're proposing the reuse of the department store so there's a question to you which from Lucy Minio to you Amanda saying regarding the reuse of major retail premises. What social and economic research or citizen consultation informed the interior program shown in your slides so I know we've not. We've not. We've not got there yet. And, you know, this is this is really the beginning of an idea. And it's a good question because to really make it believable and real, we do have to have a, you know, we do have to structure the very nature of the consultation and not only that but also, you know, the economic model for it. But I think it's, you know, I do think it's important to to dream and to start somewhere. And from, you know, a very humble beginning you can maybe extract something a little bit more meaningful over time. So we have just a few minutes left before I wrap up and sigling wine Brenner from Jerusalem has asked a very simple question which I'm perhaps going to start with Rosanna and go round, and maybe end with Suketa which is, how can design help overcome politically complicated and separated cities, which results in which result in unequal distribution of infrastructure resources and green areas. Obviously this is such an all encompassing question that it may be impossible to answer in a succinct way but perhaps Rosanna if we start by you know, you clearly showed in your two very concise projects. The issue of division in in a, you know, in a more localized way than the questioner implies do you want to comment on that and go go around the zoom table. So, I think that changing this idea of barriers into boundaries and changing the idea of space into place connects like barriers lock out everyone, they divide they separate. And when you change them and you open and you make them more porous as just as simple as changing the vertical for the horizontal. Or just, you know, like thinking that if you couldn't cross a bridge just have to put it up like they're very simple things that maybe they were not thought before, and just giving this ideas of and also believing that small matters. It's also important because it doesn't it the scale doesn't matter. It's the things that you're changing and I think that the cities are also changed by the small interventions or acupunctures that once you're adding many of them, you're changing the city. And, and so with this idea of boundaries, it also talks about this idea of space experience by the body and that it's informed by the daily life and historical narratives and then how you start adding and the place is where really people gather and create meaningful relationships. Amanda, you want to add your thoughts. I mean, it's a very, very hard question to answer and I maybe have kind of two answers at a different scale what one is that to propose projects that demand that unexpected parties come together and collaborate to effect something and make it. realizable. And the other is a smaller scale to, you know, as architects, I think, you know, we're very reactive as a profession, I don't think my fellow architects here are at all but, but as a profession I think we are and and I think we need to be a little more entrepreneurial and, you know, understand what are the unmet needs in the community that we know a little bit about identify what those unmet needs are work with the community work, putting together the framework for a project raising the funding for it, you know, not just designing going way way beyond that. So, you know, at a kind of smaller scale sort of personal level that's something that I think, you know, we can all make a contribution to but I think, thinking bigger, you know, just projects that will bring together different will bring together the politicians will excite the politicians as much as the community, as much as the developer. And then everybody's work together. Well, Liz, we saw the pictures of relatively. I don't know whether it was excited or or the muse to a president of Russia went through one of your parts. But what are your thoughts just in 30 seconds please and then. Okay, well, you know, gorilla action is one just take over a site, you know, and use it in an interesting way and then see if it takes to is become citizen activists expand the agency of architects to actually like Amanda says, imagine things convince people show them the benefits what's in it for them, you know, and get people to do the right thing. And the last thing is, it's really in the end, a matter of policy, and, and it's having a seat at the table, earning a seat at the table and being able to influence the government. I'm glad to hear that as at the LSE, we agree with that so get the last 30 seconds. Thank you. Great threat to cities before the pandemic was gentrification and the pandemic kind of has stopped that dead in its tracks, rents are down all over New York. People are leaving, but not in places like Jackson Heights where they don't have the luxury of having a second home in the Hudson Valley. Jackson Heights is booming. I don't think New York is dead. There's lots of young people now who are able to come into New York so there's a lot of opportunities and, you know, in just in terms of what architects can do. I think what we what's needed is a re-envisioning of space, both public and private so midtown office buildings, for example, in Bombay where I grew up, no office is ever empty at night because the people who work there often sleep in the office buildings. So what if we reimagined these empty office buildings as hotels or cafes or some sort of gathering places at night after the workers live. We've all used now in the last year to thinking of rethinking of home as office and what if we think of office as home. I'm going to have to stop you there, but I think these summary comments in response to that very big question do cut across some of the approaches presented today. First of all, there needs to be a genuine understanding of what the social cultural economic problem is. Secondly, make the most of what is there. I don't just invent for the sake of it but also use extraordinary imagination and innovation to solve the problems of humanizing the city. On behalf of Anna, her house and everyone at LSE cities are for speakers today and for all of you who attended from across the world. Thank you very much and hope you join the next session, which will be on mobility and the city, the date to be announced. Thank you all very much.