Curatorial Statement

No Cities, No Future
1.
When we started off on the adventure of the 5th IABR: Making City in 2009, our premise was our conviction that in an era of extreme worldwide urbanization, ‘making city’ is a project that belongs at the center of the societal and political debate about the future.

Making city is not purely a matter for architects, urban designers or planners, a question of more or better plans. The city affects us all. the city is what makes co-existence possible in a physical sense. It accommodates the various actors and their conflicting or coinciding individual aspirations and projects. Guiding and governing the city is the art of manipulating this physical carrier actively and with feeling, so that it can become the catalyst for emancipation for all these different, diverse and constantly changing social, cultural, and economic interests.

Yet making city is not at the center of political thinking and action. the transformation of the city is too rarely regarded as an instrument to facilitate the aspirations of its residents and to address societal challenges. as a result, today the practice of designing, of planning, of organizing the living environment remains far removed from the governance of our cities.

The 5th IABR was therefore developed as a search for a new relationship between the governance and the transformation of the city, between politics and design. how do we go about making city?

2.
We began by focusing on three intertwined issues: the role of design and of the set of tools of planning; the role of the alliances of actors actively operating in the process of making city; and the role of good governance.

The existing set of tools available to planners is open yet adaptive. It is circumscribed by legislation and regulation and top-down master planning and is therefore difficult to bend to specific circumstances. We operated from the premise that the generic approach that dominates the current practice of urban design is not sufficient. It must be possible to develop a set of tools with which we can address, with greater sensitivity to the unique nature of a site and with better results, the challenges that are accumulating in our cities. And design can and must play a crucial role in this. Desig should not be employed at the end of the process, to give a three-dimensional shape to what has already been decided. Design should be employed as one of the elements that drive the decision-making process and the alliance that follows from it.

Alliances are necessary, but they do not drop out of thin air. They are the product of a communally experienced and articulated sense of urgency. A true, purposeful alliance can only emerge when parties surmount their mutual differences and feel compelled, temporarily or not, to work together because they recognize the common goal and the importance of doing so. Far more often than a government, it is those directly concerned – private or public parties, citizens or corporations, societal or cultural organizations – who have a direct and individual interest in addressing an urban challenge, in the actual implementation of the transformation.

Such alliances are flexible; they are often formed spontaneously and sometimes dissolve just as quickly. But they are essential in terms of guaranteeing the acuity and the purposefulness of the transformation process. a strong alliance of committed stakeholders at the helm drives a process forward and does not lose sight of the relationship between the cause, the urban urgency, and the result, the urban transformation.

One of the greatest barriers to the effective functioning of an alliance is the way governments normally plan. The generic system of rules does not enable governments to respond adequately to the specific qualities of a place, the varying urban conditions and the ever-changing configuration of alliances. The government is far too generic a process manager, ignoring individual objectives and individual visions and only able to respond reactively to challenges and coalitions. Its reflex is to cling to legislation and regulation, resulting in an ever greater gap between bureaucracy and reality.

This reality is complex, because it involves a constantly evolving dynamic of urban urgencies and actors’ needs. It is imperative for all governments, local to national, to engage actively in making city. a reconsideration of what governance is in response to this complex urban reality is a crucial element of the Making City project. how can we rethink the functioning of municipal and national governments in such a way that design-based research can contribute to a planning process that is goal-oriented and at the same time provide maximum room for reflection and debate? How can such a planning process lead to an effective long-term policy paired with clear administrative decisions in the short term?

Good governance would call on a government to create the conditions in which flexible alliances and specific, individual practices can thrive, but it would also prod it to become an active partner itself in specific alliances.

3.
Those are the principles with which we began the Making City project. We did not, however, want this to be merely theoretical. A biennale about making city must actually submit ideas and practices to specific places and the concrete ambitions of actors. It must actually test the roles of and the relationships between planning, design, and politics, in search of alternatives for the way city is made. we were determined, even more than in previous editions, to have the 5th IABR play a role beyond the safe world of the culture sector, take on the role of the societal entrepreneur who gets his hands dirty and takes up a central position in the process of making city. This fifth edition of the IABR was not to be a biennale about ‘making city’ as a theme, produced from a safe distance. the IaBr as a cultural institution had to be explicitly an active partner in making city. This would also enable it to test the role that a cultural actor can play in that process. In addition to curators, therefore, the 5th IABR needed local curators; in addition to an international platform the IABR had to become a project developer as well. ‘Walk the talk’ was the motto.

With this aim in mind we looked for partners with whom we could form alliances based on locally urgent challenges for the purpose of actively and actually making city. We found these partners in our base of rotterdam, in São Paulo and in Istanbul, and in the Dutch government.

In Rotterdam, an old European city that is dealing with contraction and social problems, and which like many such cities is facing a transformation challenge in difficult economic times, we joined forces with ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], run by Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman, landscape architects who are very active in the public debate about the city. On the test Site rotterdam they confront the existing set of tools for making city with the principles of transience.São Paulo, the engine of the booming Brazilian economy, with over 20 million inhabitants in one metropolitan area, is also facing a transformation challenge. The city was built on its production-oriented infrastructure and has now entered a new phase: how can a set of tools be developed with which the city can finally become a city for its inhabitants? We formed an alliance with elisabete França, director of the city’s social housing department, and appointed Fernando de Mello Franco and his partners at MMBB arquitetos as local curator, two parties who have participated intensively in previous editions of the IABR.

Of the three cities, Istanbul is by far the oldest, but also the youngest. Unlike the other two cities it is still growing rapidly, and its challenge is to maintain a proper balance between its extremely high rate of expansion and its ecological interests, to make urbanization, landscape, and water work for instead of against one another. How can a set of tools be developed here that can break away from the rigid existing practice, with its extreme emphasis on mass housing construction? In Istanbul we found committed and professional partners in Mayor Ahmet Haşim Baltacı and his team of the municipality of Arnavutköy, while Asu Aksoy of Istanbul Bilgi University was named local curator.

We formed a fourth alliance with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. Together we set up Atelier Making Projects, focusing on seven major national spatial planning projects in The Netherlands: Zuidas City Centre, the city of Rotterdam South, the Metropolitan Landscape, Rhine-Meuse Delta, 100,000 Jobs for Almere, Creating Nodes, and Making Olympic Cities. under the direction of atelier masters Paul Gerretsen and Elien Wierenga, each project got its own ‘treatment,’ specifically targeted at recalibrating or reinforcing the relationship between the substantive agenda of the national government and the implementation of the projects themselves, including the process and performance of (political) decision making.

Based on a call for entries, we selected another 23 projects supported by actors and cities in which experiments were and are being conducted that fit in well with the objectives of the Making City project. ongoing planning projects and experiments from cities and regions like Groningen and Delhi, Bordeaux and The Hague, Flanders, the Veneto and the Nile Delta, Paris and Zurich, Eindhoven and Brussels, New York, Guatemala City, Diyarbakir, Batam and Kentucky became participants in the joint search to transform territory in a way that responds to the societal urgencies that come together in our cities.

the Urban Meetings organized in Rotterdam, Istanbul and São Paulo brought together the questions, the knowledge, and the insights of all the cities and actors taking part in the Making City project. This produced, through exchange and collaboration, a more precise and shared insight into the initial premise, and a clearer overview of the aspects that needed to be fundamentally reconsidered. In the process a number of shared insights and working methods also emerged as a series of alternative, more pertinent ways of making city.

Working with our partners strengthened, substantiated and brought up to date our original premise, that the current circumstances, made more acute by the financial crisis, present an ideal opportunity to give new impetus to the process of making city through a multidisciplinary and proactive approach that pairs new planning strategies with new alliances rooted in specific knowledge and local conditions. The city is too often seen as a territory for the accommodation of the market, with the government at a distance and the inhabitant as a consumer, and hardly if at all as a catalyst for social and economic emancipation. It is high time for a change in thinking about city making, because something extraordinary is happening.

4.
In what is historically speaking an improbably short period of only 200 years, the world’s population will have grown from less than a billion in the first half of the nineteenth century to about 9 billion by the middle of this century. And in what historically speaking really is the blink of an eye, a period of less than 100 years, the urban population will have grown from half a billion to over 7 billion in 2050.

These extraordinarily intense developments of mutually reinforcing expansion and densification are unprecedented in human history, and we remarkably fail to understand them; we are in the very midst of these developments yet usually treat these numbers as mere information. The city is the most complex artefact ever produced by human civilization; people settle there by the billions, yet they actually know too little about building, planning, designing, and governing their cities. Yet while the big cities of the world, especially, are often in a poor state, they continue to exert a powerful attraction. every year, tens of millions of people leave the countryside, and we have to assume they know what they are doing. Even if the city does not turn out to be a paradise for them, it might be for their children or grandchildren. Apparently it is better to be poor in the city than in the countryside.

The future and the city blur, that is the great myth of our time; that is the driving force for dramatic changes: the city equals opportunity.

The main reasons for this lie in what the city, as a generator of wealth and innovation, delivers. education, services, health care, food, water, energy – everything is cheaper on a per capita basis in the concentrated city. The closer to each other people live and work, the more creativity, commerce and wealth is generated, and the better life becomes for the individual. Families therefore become smaller. while having many children is an advantage in the countryside, in the city children are a risk and cost factor. Birth rates are dropping in the city, which is the main reason the world’s population is expected to stabilize around 2050. This in turn reinforces the position of women, who participate in the economic process more easily in the city.

Cities are efficient, also in an ecological sense. Not only are cities smarter, more adaptive and more transformative, but densification is also to the city dweller’s advantage: he uses less land, less energy, less water and produces less pollution than someone who lives in a less densely populated area. the per capita ecological footprint is smaller in the city than in the countryside, and it gets smaller as the city becomes denser and larger. even environmental activists are now embracing the city because they understand that our greatest challenge, striking a balance between demographic explosion, ecological equilibrium and economic performance, in other words enabling billions of people to continue to produce sufficient wealth in a sustainable way, must and can be resolved in and by the city.

We also know that the bigger a city is, the better it performs for its inhabitants in an economic sense. In other words, the socioeconomic performance of a city grows faster than a purely linear relationship to the number of its inhabitants would suggest. The precise turning point (if there is one) is unclear, but for the time being it is true that, in the case of the city, ‘…it pays to be bigger.’ Bigger not just in the sense of massiveness, of the megacity, but also in the sense of accessibility and proximity, of the urban region in which the network of proximities creates the mass. The more mass a city has within its reach, the better it performs for its inhabitants in a socioeconomic sense. The future of mankind is therefore inextricably linked to the future of the city, involving a relationship between the level of scale of the city, its ecological performance and the quality of the housing, working and living conditions of its inhabitants. Cities, and especially large urban regions, create wealth and stimulate innovation and creativity, and they do this in a relatively sustainable way. this, clearly, presents us with a challenge: Should we make the future of the city the guiding principle of our political, economic and social action?

There is no choice! our future, after all, depends on the way we govern, plan, and design our cities. This applies to Rotterdam, to The Netherlands and to Europe as much as it does to the rest of the world. In europe, however, it is also true that cities are no longer growing, and the dividends of urbanization have largely been consumed even as worldwide competition is intensifying. The old continent, once the crisis is over, will have a lot of catching up to do. Its future lies more than ever in its cities. That is where it will have to make a difference and where the big issues and challenges play out: globalization, economic transformation, migration, demographic changes, urban poverty, and the social challenges connected with it; sustainability and climate change; scale expansion, (inner-city) transformation, densification, contraction, and intensification.

The European innovation agenda can only be successful if countries in their collaboration, therefore as the european union, allow this agenda to be guided (at least in part) by the economic strength and creative innovation potential of the cities, of the urban regions and their capacity to make a difference on an international scale. the Europe of its citizens is the Europe of its cities.

Spatial planning should support and spur future development: social, economic and ecological. The city can no longer be a territory for the accommodation of the market, but how then can it be far better positioned as a catalyst for social and economic emancipation? there lies the challenge. can we take on this challenge? are we ready for it?

5.
All challenges come together in the city – that was our premise. But the existing set of tools, the ‘physical’ answer of the planners, designers, and administrators, is no longer equal to the scale, the diversity, and the dynamism of the city, to the power with which the urban system has developed. Reactivity reigns, and this makes a sustainable development process almost impossible. We have created a machinery of obstruction that carries us further and further away from the essence of the task at hand. With our blind faith in the existing institutional parameters, we get bogged down in the process, in the pre-determined division of responsibilities, in a culture of negotiation, and a planning based on compromise. we are stuck on the wrong course.

We must therefore make room and time, dare to believe in transience, in detours, in trial and error. we have to dare to test things literally in the reality of the city. Such an approach can lead to a different way of working, thinking, and operating, together with all stakeholders. But we must also dare to allow this approach to become consequential within the existing institutions and within the existing frameworks of regulations, consultation, and investments. we must not forget that the existing frameworks and institutions themselves have to change. That requires all the parties involved, individually, to make a very conscious choice and to reconsider very thoroughly what their own responsibilities are in terms of the transformation task. without a genuine commitment from the actors involved, the existing practice will not change, and testing will then be merely a pastime in times of crisis.

How then do we get the most out of these detours for reflection, the extra time and room to try out ideas and plans? More specifically, how do we make consequential the lessons we learn in the temporary test zones set up by the IABR and how do we implement them in real-life practice? How do we create conditions in which alliances are given a chance? How can our politics be grafted fundamentally onto the making of city?

Things have to change, and they can change. more and more parties in more and more places are making time and room for new approaches, and these are steps in the right direction. New instruments are beginning to find their way into investment strategies, planning regulations, and development plans; there are increased signs of a sustainable development perspective. But how to imbed a new, open approach, consistently and constructively, in the transformation strategies that are still the norm in the institutional world of governments, market parties, business, education, researchers, and societal organizations – that is still an open question.

Bringing adaptability and flexibility, and the appreciation of the potency and the effect of the process of transformation itself back into the institutions – that is the trump card this 5th IABR is laying on the table. It is time for the next step. we must seek to make explicit not only what is at stake, but also how we want to proceed. on 20 april, during the Urban Summit on the day after the opening of the 5th IABR, we will make a concrete start on this together with the alliances that have contributed to the Making City project. there are opportunities for a transformation agenda for the city, an agenda that calls for action, for actual transformation and institutional change; an urban agenda that is driven by the dynamism and the potencies of the cities themselves. we must grab these opportunities.
No cities, no future.

George Brugmans, Joachim Declerck, Henk Ovink

Click here for a short film introduction to the main exhibition of the 5th IABR: Making City featuring Anne Skovbro, Bruce Katz and Dirk Sijmons (this film was commissioned by the IABR and produced by The Office for Nonfiction Storytelling (ONS)).