For Christian de Portzamparc, the prehistory of the contemporary urban revolution can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, just sixty years ago, and to the age of discontinuous urbanization and functional zoning by isolated pockets that reflected a negation of the street. Today, the effects of the new environmental challenges and the ubiquity of technologies are provoking a change of scale in our approach to cities. Digital technologies are transforming our relationship to space and time, and we experience the city as a dislocated and disjointed structure. Confronted with this “despatialization,” we must start afresh from the physical places themselves and reconsider materials, territories and infrastructure in order to envision the true goals of architecture.
Christian de Portzamparc is a French architect and urban planner, recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 1994 and of the Grand Prix de l’Urbanisme in 2004.
Stream : Since 2000, global urbanization, which has transformed our human condition into an urban condition, has been widely accepted. A number of factors (including environmental awareness and the digital era) have become more important. What do you think are the key factors in the evolution of this global urbanization? And do you feel that we are living in a time of rupture or capitulation, rather than just an evolution?
Christian de Portzamparc : While I was growing up in Rennes, in the northwest of France, I watched enthusiastically as the clean, white buildings of the HLM low-income housing projects were built on farmland. Armies of city buildings came to conquer the countryside. Whether from the rural exodus or from post-colonial migration, every day for thirty years, more than three hundred people came to live in Paris. In places such as Istanbul and Mexico City, the number was even greater—upwards of one thousand per day. In the huge slum that was Nanterre, I remember having seen families that didn’t even have corrugated iron; they made their houses by burrowing into the garbage heaps. The French priest Abbé Pierre led a call to action, and with a swift efficiency that today seems unimaginable, a majority of the citizens were housed. Urbanized peripheries of a surprising scale sprung up around the traditional city centers, where the fields, the hedgerows, and the trees were chopped down in order to make way for large-scale building schemes.
Stream : Environmental pressure has led a certain number of the actors whom we have met to believe that we have entered the Anthropocene—a geological period during which humans have become the primary vector of evolution of the planet, and which requires us to rethink our relationship to the biosphere. In this context, how do you understand the abundance of metaphors of living organisms, from the organic to the metabolic, in the approaches to urban phenomena? Does this seem pertinent to you?
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In this interview filmed at the AIA Architecture Centre in New York, Michael Speaks, Dean of the School of Architecture of Syracuse, talks about the Design Energy Futures program that focuses on low-carbon planning and products. It aims to analyse datas in order to conceive scenarios of plausible futures and thus offer a better planification for urban expansion.
When one travels to visit the smart cities that are emerging everywhere on the planet, one is confronted with urban realities that are so novel that they seem to be perpetually underway. That is, should these cities finally fully materialize one day, and not simply remain an object of well-intentioned and more or less single-minded discourse. The consultant Julien Eymeri confronts for Stream his experience of Songdo (the Korean smart city) and Masdar (its Emirati equivalent), along with Detroit’s reinvention and transformation efforts to question the characteristics of cities in the digital era and the role of business in their development. Julien Eymeri is consultant at Quartier Libre Agency.
Carlo Ratti is an architect and the director of the Senseable City Lab of the MIT, a research institute that develops tools through design and science to learn about cities. The internet of things allows us to manage urban systems in a more efficient way: waste, traffic, lighting, etc. The biological world is increasingly converging with digital and physical environments. As an expert of Open-Source architecture, Ratti explains how collaborative systems are essential tools to build the cities of tomorrow.