Norman Foster and Alejandro Aravena on Social Housing - 'Future of Cities' Conversations Series

Well, what I would love to talk about, I mean the

future

of

cities

, how do you see the forces that will shape the city of the

future

? But if architecture is about improving the quality of life, then surely this is right at the heart of architecture. But how can we effect that revolution, that transformation? Could you jump right into Alejandro Hi, how are you? Look, thank you very much for doing that. I'm very happy, happy with this conversation, can I just jump right in and It's kind of an introduction, so to speak. I mean, you established your practice almost 30 years ago as an architect.

You're a Pritzker Prize winner. You were the director of the Venice Biennale. You taught at Harvard and I think it must have been 20 years. You created a partnership called elemental, which unusually perhaps unique, is a partnership between a university, an oil company and you with the goals of infrastructure and affordable

housing

. Could you tell us how it works? Sounds like a very unusual combination. It's still unusual for me and And I would say the reason it started that way is because I had an engineer as a partner from the beginning, so his way of looking at problems was completely different than an architect when I arrived. to teach. in edward um i met this guy, andres jacoby was a transportation engineer doing his masters at the kennedy school of government and to make a long story short, he said why don't we do something with

social

housing

and in my architect mind do something meaningful a book , a seminar, an exhibition and, in my wildest dreams, a prototype, a one-to-one scale housing prototype, in his engineer mind he had to go to the market and prove the market wrong by following exactly the same rules as everyone else and that meant at least 100 units with the same budget, in case you had a point and wanted to make it replicable then you have to follow exactly the same restrictions as everyone else, so with that in mind you should go into reality with the same restrictions and We understood very quickly that no one was paying to think better about the question, so, in a way, what was missing was brains rather than bricks and we looked for money for whoever could.

At first we were using our university academic salary to match our selves in some way to self-subsidize ourselves, but if we want to make it sustainable, we had to go for a different plan and that is why making it sustainable in the first place means that you cannot living off charity, it has to be like that. Professional quality and quality must be paid for, it's quite fair, of course, no one would like to make money on this wealth or anything similar, and then for this company, in particular, universities were more or less in the DNA, but only for this company they understood.

Very soon, as part of contributing to society, there were many ways and not necessarily in their own field, so in the end they gave some initial capital. They could have uh this could have been some kind of angel capital any kind of thing for a startup at that time the name startup didn't exist uh and of course their condition was okay here you have some money to start working but then you have to find your own path and it was actually very good because one of the conditions was professional freedom and intellectual independence, we will not follow any other agenda that a certain project deserves anything else and that is part of our freedom, I guess, and that was very clean from the beginning and that's how it started in a way and the role of the oil company in this company now well, it's two things, like I said, I was a man, so double click on the story a little bit, not too much, but just a little when I try to multiply the first project we did in the north of Chile following the housing policy and that policy meant seven thousand five hundred dollars for a house with which we had to buy the land, renovate it and build the house and the distribution conventional of that money was one third each one third four for land one third for sanitation one third for housing so you had to build the house with 2,500 but worse than that is that you have to buy land with 2,500 per family, which means close to zero and zero is in the peripheries, the neglected periphery is where all the problems have been accumulating not only in Latin America but in the world, so to think better about that, we present a different design solution, so we wanted to go from one example to seven examples.

You know, Chile is five thousand kilometers long and goes from Moscow to Mumbai, so we had the opportunity to test different solutions for different contexts, from the cultural context, the climatic context, the geographical context, and to make that effort to demonstrate that the market was wrong in different situations, we applied for a grant and innovation grants are not in architecture, I mean, I mean, if you go through architecture schools, your grants when they go very well are fifty thousand dollars and we needed a million dollars to do these seven housing complexes, so we went to an engineering innovation fund and it was mainly about technology and we wanted to produce seismically isolated solutions, so we partnered with an engineering school, so again my engineering partner engineering at the beginning was crucial and for that there is money, let's say to innovate technologically so we had to disguise architecture as a technological innovation to be able to apply for larger grants after two years we ran out of money we were already working with families for more than a year we had to work for free we couldn't abandon families and in this kind of desperation we were looking for someone to invest in thinking better about our

cities

, so I guess it's not necessarily its own field, but I guess companies and that was faster than go to the state.

We are interested in improving the quality of life in general and definitely housing in a relatively small country like Chile. There are 100,000 grants a year, so if you make a mistake you multiply it by many, but if you eventually improve that, then you can contribute. in a more significant way for the general coexistence of people in cities who come to cities a large portion of humanity is deprived in terms of slums or informal settlements however you make them uh in other words, fourteen 14 don't have access to clean water, modern sanitation, electricity, adequate shelter, one way or another, your attention has been focused on that part of humanity, that's right, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, and as you get into that question, actually, right here in the back, you see there's something that looks like an equation, not because I think I'm a scientist, but I think it's better to explain the terms that you need. address and then check if you did better or not, it's just for clarity purposes but I got into this. It is a type of question as a designer, not as, say, humanitarian aid or as a politician, although you have to learn these different languages ​​of economics, politics,

social

movements and the environment, but in the end what we do is translate all those forces. in shape, so the question is what informs that shape and here you get into these big forces at play and um, the thing is that never before in the history of humanity have we seen this movement toward cities that, even if it's contrary to the intuition It's great news, I mean that cities are incredibly powerful at producing wealth but also efficient at distributing quality of life through public policies.

The problem is that we are being threatened by what we call threat 3. We scale speed and scarcity to answer the question of that. equation and it is expressed like this we have to respond and accommodate a million people per week moving to the cities with ten thousand dollars per family on average, that is more or less the money that and this process of migration to the cities occurs in the countries poorest in the world. world, that's why the amount of money per family is approximately that, if we don't solve this question, eh, it's not that people will stop coming to cities, they will come anyway, but they will live in terrible conditions and I guess that kind of The challenge is the one that one would like to be around.

I mean, if you think you have any knowledge, then here we have a challenge, a professional challenge. That's why I said it's about professional quality, not professional charity and everything else. Of course, this is not just design, design is just the way to synthesize a very complex question and the more complex the question, the greater the need for synthesis at the very core of architecture, there is a very powerful tool which is the project, the design, um, without reducing. The initial complexity of the project collects, identifies priorities and organizes into a key proposal in a non-linear way and I suppose it was important that architecture could contribute to this non-architectural question with the tools that we have at the center of our practice.

I have read about your project half of a good house and I have seen it like many of us and I have been inspired by projects like that. How has the follow-up worked? In other words, could you briefly explain the investment? in the basic infrastructure of the house leaving open the potential to presumably expand in the future. I am very happy with this question because it gives me the opportunity to explain once again the starting point of this because the media has taken this up. idea of ​​giving away half a good house instead of a small one and can drive and we have actually received some criticism, how is it possible that you are giving away half houses?

But it's not the right way to frame the starting point and and in fact, here on the back, the evidence shows that a middle class family and this applies from Scandinavia to Latin America to developing countries lives reasonably well in Let's say 80 square meters more or less 80 90 square meters in total. We ourselves live reasonably well on 80 square meters, so if you have money from public money or family savings, that's fine, then you can build what you need and want, but what if you don't have money again? The evidence shows that in a context of scarcity. In the best of cases public funds and pay around 40 square meters that is a fact you cannot pay more than 40 or you could say the case of Chile for example hey we are going to build houses of 80 square meters so you have to serve half of families per year we need to build 90,000 units per year to reduce the deficit in Chile we are currently delivering 60,000 so each year informal settlements grow by 30,000 families if we want to make larger houses that number will go down even more and the level of informality will increase and there we do have a problem when once the family enters into informality then in the best of cases by being able to deliver only 40 square meters the only thing we did was why not look at those 40 square meters which are a fact, not like a small house, which is what I mean in the market, even for marketing reasons, you will see the shape of a middle class house, uh, and then reduced to half its size and in a cute way. decorated and architects are usually called in to decorate that little shed, as Richard Rodgers once said, it's like putting lipstick on a gorilla and usually the design looks like this kind of decoration or good taste applied to hard fats and we thought that design is about framing. the question in another way and that is why we look at those same 40 square meters that I will emphasize again are a fact that can no longer be delivered not as a small house but as half of that good middle class house of 80 square meters that is there.

Same time. 40 square meters but the moment you frame it as half of that good the key question is which half does not have enough resources and we identify five different conditions to belong and this is the definition of a public policy for half of the On the other hand , it is important to understand that the houses that families will not be able to make on their own are different from those in the developed world. Housing policies tend to be property-oriented in developing countries, meaning that the largest transfer of public money to a family asset is through housing subsidy; families eventually become owners of their homes. of the process all of us when buying a house increases its value over time is almost the definition of an investment that does not happen in social housing is closer to buying cars than buying houses, so we identified a set of design conditions that can allow A family expects that family asset to increase in value over time, and if that happens, it's not just a shelter from the environment, it's an economic tool to overcome. poverty with that increase in the value of your home, then you can enter the different economic systems and pay for a better education, start a small business, in the end you have possibilities and, then, the test we did with the first project was good, was it okay? can we deal? with this strategy of better allocating resources and focusing on what is most critical for the family and at the same timewhich guarantees a gain in value and the proof is that I received this video not long ago made by a photographer who was actually sent by an English magazine to do a service on the first project we did, I guess to show that it was shit later 15 years or whatever, the beauty of it is that this video that one of the owners sent us said that his home is now worth 10 times more, so he didn't want to sell his house but he wanted to do it.

They offered him 70,000 uh 7-0 instead of 7,000, that was the reason for the beginning, in reality the policy voucher is 7,500 of which 7,200 are state subsidy, the family savings are 300 dollars, so the family turned three hundred dollars into seventy thousand dollars and, of course, if you look at the thing, and this is I guess what's more complicated for us architects, with the aesthetic expectations of society, I was referring to at the beginning, our improvements are simply relative , not absolute, they are relative to having done nothing or what the alternative was compared to the alternative, then you understand the values, you don't show a picture and it looks fantastic, it is a more conventional way of testing architecture, so I always I ask the people who go to that first project that, in addition to putting the camera on top of the project, they turn the camera around and show the neighborhood that neighborhood, in principle, is a middle-class family neighborhood, it is four blocks from the beach. is in this I mean actually it is so expensive that the land there at the beginning cost three times more than what social housing could afford, but if you look at that city, if you put a photo, it looks like Islam, so our standards for the class On average they don't look that good, but the economic value of that part of the city is the fact that you don't have to travel an hour to work or study or go to medical care there is a value that is invisible to the images and I guess that is the type of things that we have the challenge of communicating and I mean listening to you, I think you would share the proposal. that the way forward is to transform informal settlements from within instead of demolishing and relocating them often with dire social consequences because the relocation is done away from the infrastructure, it is the way from the source of income.

Would you agree with that? I just want to clarify that don't talk beforehand, I mean, this conversation is happening spontaneously and for some reason what you just said is here, I mean, I made these kinds of sketches beforehand just in case they were useful and they just happened. be the common thread of how to approach this issue and you are absolutely right, the question is how we see informal settlements and the decline of self-construction not as the problem but as the solution to understand the and this is maybe maybe something that we learned after rebuilding a city, after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile, we had an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake that destroyed 300,000 units, so when you try to rebuild cities that are resilient against tsunamis, you understand that you can't. fight nature, I'm serious, there is no point in trying to resist the force of nature, in that case our approach was to dissipate the energy at best, but understand that these forces are much bigger than you with informal settlements. something like this is a force that is so much bigger that if we frame it properly it could be part of the solution, not part of the problem actually, right here, somewhere here, there is a reversal or inversion of the classical concept of development.

And this is an idea from Joanne Kloss, former mayor of Barcelona and executive director of Eu Habitad Three, which took place in 2016 in Quito. She said that her attempt was to convince mayors that cities are not the consequence but the cause of development. that first you become rich and once you become rich then you build good cities. His point was that if we build good cities we can unleash development, we just have to follow this triad here Rule of law, right financing and right design and by that he meant that in the current scheme, at best, we have public partnerships. -private, so two sources of funding for people living in Islam are that they have a huge amount of resources and they just don't want to spend them on a piece of land from which they can become addicted, so they put it somewhere else in the moment when the rule of law is guaranteed, all that money goes into building the city and with the right design and here comes the notion of the architect as a strategy or properly framing where all those great forces will be channeled instead of being repressed or, yes, replaced by the formal construction market, so here there is this kind of conventional sequence, let's say, even if you do it right. because this is already something that wants to take the formal, a formal process to informality, something that does not happen in marginal neighborhoods, so the first thing is to define the rule of law and it was an interesting experiment in Chile in the 70s that was called operation shock.

In reality, the only cost of the first movement was just drawing with chalk on the land, property of the different families. Yes, that cost almost nothing, just design and that is pure design and defining what is public, what is private and defining the moment. very difficult to change it or define it individually, so it belongs to what families cannot do on the road, in any case, the rule of law, the first thing the conventional sequence would do is bring sanitation, it may take a while and then build the sanitary. cabins and then you have a round that both the informal settlement itself and those properties tend to be worthless, I mean the quality of the neighborhood is close to zero and that is not part of the things you would like to do when transferring money from the state to a family, so our approach was fine, let's start from the same point, the rule of law, the chalk on the floor, just the pure form, but then let's move the sanitary cabin from step three to step two, the only difference is that the sanitary cabin is at the front of the lot and there are two floors, in fact someone said at the beginning of the elementary process, but what you are doing is exactly the same as what was done in the 60s and 70s, there are only two floors and at front of the lot. exactly that's the difference, it's not rocket science, I mean, the moment you have two stories, then you are building the structure for yourself and your neighbor for that growth, but you are also guaranteeing a part of the urban front, so sanitary cabin number two with something specific. design conditions only then is sanitation brought in and this is important, it is a question of time more than space, families need to be removed from informality as soon as possible and incorporated into this scheme, if you wait too long, settlements will begin to grow at a rate that is simply not sustainable, so by putting sanitation in step three instead of two and that is how our world has changed we now have technology that did not exist in the 60s and 70s, let's call it cellular urbanism or sanitation cell phone of greed I was watching a Bill Gates documentary on Netflix and its first episode and the first season is about the bathroom, you know, the water nearby, uh, because nothing has been invented among the system of greed, they are very expensive. and quite low and dig a hole in the ground with all the consequences in between, there is nothing, so I guess today we have technology for cellular sanitation and the cellular organism and, if that happens, then number four, frame it and provide the structure so that families can channel their own interventions so uh that capacity is part of the solution not part of the problem finally

alejandro

I mean, if you had to go back and describe your vision of the city of the future how would you describe it what are the trends perhaps that what we are seeing now will inform that city of the future.

I would say that today we have two requests to answer that question, which is the most general, one of the other influenced by the pandemic. I suppose it is a question that is floating in the air almost everywhere regarding the first donations. Cities are not an accumulation of houses because of the concentration of opportunities that are extremely relevant and crucial particularly for poor families that is why they come to the cities, people come to cities looking for opportunities, it is not that they are wanting to live in bad conditions, but I suppose that the cost of living in marginal neighborhoods is less than the benefit of having the opportunity to access a better life, employment, education, healthcare, etc., so if cities are a concentration of opportunity, it is particularly crucial for poor families, then cities should be measured by what can be done in them for free.

The way to look at the city of the future would be to consider those elements and components that exist as a public good in other forms. I would say that in the city for the future, what is most important is that we are not going to build open spaces, public spaces the width of the street, even and this connects with the pandemic and has shown that open spaces can be at the Outdoors has become more and more of an antidote because we may have some vaccines now that are starting to fade there may be another virus so the house will still be the only vaccine like it was at the beginning I had these two recommendations, you know, wash your hands, stay home, but what if you can't wash your hands and you can stay home because there's no hope?

So I suppose there will be important and important requests and challenges in providing them, but the spaces in between are crucial for peaceful coexistence, the quality of the public will be somehow crucial to ensure some quality in this friction that is created by living together and with Regarding the pandemic, yes, we will still have to take measures. but I guess our gregarious nature, still, and this is an Indian gentleman and in a lecture he once told me that we may be using 21st century software, but our hardware is prehistoric, our bodies haven't changed, emotions still move us or or preventing us from moving and that prehistoric way of experiencing life will require building this place in the places where we need that that's kind of where intuitively I think we're going to have to move, I think that's a great note. to finish Alejandro thank you very much I really appreciate it thank you very much goodbye