Philosopher and architecture school faculty member Chris Younès advocates implementing “regenerative synergies” so that “building” can stop going hand in hand with “destroying.” We need to learn to collaborate and observe the dynamics of nature, but also work towards a new form of harmony—not only in esthetic, but also in ethical and political terms—in order to improve the construction of inhabited environments.
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In the current climate of instability, new ways of thinking and acting are being considered. Among them are two attitudes of care for the living and the non-living. The planning of cities and territories is the privileged field of application of these concepts, symbols of a profound reconfiguration of our relationship to the world.
What is the impact of current economic transformations (the financialization and the acceleration of the economy, the increasing value of intangible assets) on the way architecture is produced? In only ten years, a massive influx of private capital has transformed existing buildings into fast-moving liquid financial assets. On the contrary, the production process of new projects has slowed down considerably and become much more complex, all the while the resources of the government and local authorities are dwindling. As a result, a process of devolution and transfer of architectural production to the private sector is occurring, and it is probably irreversible. In France, cultural and architectural needs were seen as being legitimately addressed only by public contracts due to the country’s Jacobin tradition (i.e., a centralized State tradition). Private commissions must gradually emancipate from the tutelage of the public sector; to achieve this, private decision-makers must increase their knowledge of architecture and architects and understand that design is at the heart of the process of value creation. Bertrand Julien-Laferrière graduated from École Centrale, Paris, University of California, Berkeley, and Insead. He is Head of Real Estate at Ardian, a leading Alternative Asset Manager in Europe.
When they acknowledged the global urban boom at the turn of the twenty-first century, Western observers were dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the revolution that was unfolding. A small number of thinkers such as Saskia Sassen and Rem Koolhaas have nevertheless tried to grasp the phenomenon through concepts such as the “generic city” and the “global city.” After nearly fifteen years, this urbanization of the world is still advancing at full speed, even though a number of critical factors seem to have come into play. For this issue of Stream, Saskia Sassen looks back on our urban condition and on the evolutions of the “global city,” highlighting the increasing importance of social issues. More than ever before, she believes that the complexity of the city makes it the right scale for formulating sustainable strategies by repositioning our relationship with the biosphere. Saskia Sassen is a sociologist. Specialist of globalization, migrations and the sociology of the world’s largest cities, she teaches at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and a professor of the humanities at New York University.