I suppose you're designing nice houses for people. Is that the case? No, that's not the case. I'm an architect, that's the case, but I'm a planner, I'm an urban planner and this is what I've been doing on my personal life. I started actually out in Zambia in the mid-seventies and ever since I've come back to the African continent. We start in Copenhagen, located by the sea most cities in the world where as a matter of history located by the sea Due to transport. Copenhagen is no exception. Also, many cities were built with a fortification system, for a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. Again, Copenhagen is no exception. I take you to another part of the world, which is Africa, Maputo, also by the sea. Socially, Maputo is very different to Copenhagen as it is very much a divided city. This is the colonially built city and this is the informally built city. Eighty-five percent of the population lives here, fifteen percent of the population lives in the formally built city and this is very typical for most developing countries. You can see here from a distance, you have the informally built settlement in the front and you have a formally built city in the back. If you go and take a closer look, you can see lots of pros and cons, you see it's it's quite dense, everything is in one story, it's lacking most services, sanitation, or pit latrines or septic tanks. Water provision is there. Very few and limited open spaces, where we created a football field, which is very typical for informal settlements all over, are there however. If you go to another part of world, South America - this is Rio - you have also informal settlements - favelas. Most people consider favelas as dangerous places - some of them are dangerous places - but in reality most informal settlements being Darabi, in India, being favela in Rio, being informal settlement in Africa, are not dangerous places. What to do in informal settlements? Many project have been developed and very few are still very good solution. Transport is a major issue. In the case of Rio, this quite expensive system with cable cars has been implemented. However, it is too costly and many are the poor residents here simply don't have the money to enter the cable car. So, the facility is there but many people can simply not afford to make use of it. What you also see in in in urban development in many parts of the world including Denmark and all over is gentrification. What is gentrification? it means that former poor people's housing becomes attractive due to location and middle and upper-middle classes are moving in. In the case of Rio, you see this is a here, in a very fantastic location by a beach famous beach, Ipanema, and this is undergoing extremely fast gentrification now. In 10-15 years time there are very few of the original residents living here. And this is Rio again, this is from an informal settlements, favela, and it's quite amazing that is this is one of the cases where the informal settlements actually are located in prime locations - fantastic view here over the city and the famous Sugar Loaf. If you go to other parts of Latin America - this is Chile, Valparaiso, you see the same gentrification processes, rather poor housing here and then you see a new housing coming up here for sale. Within some few years a lot of this will be here and many of these houses will be demolished. The process is quite rapid here, you see old housing here and you see new developments coming in. If we go back to the capital city of Mozambique, Maputo, you see the central city with a mixture of high-rise and rather low-rise developments and you also should notice the rather green structures - all roads are lined with trees providing a much-needed and desired shade. If you take this city where we are standing now in Copenhagen, hundred 150 years ago most of Copenhagen was developed with blocks of flats blocks, typically 100 or 200 meters by 200 meters and inside these blocks, when they were built it was mostly for speculation and there were houses all over for renting, inside. Most of these houses has been demolished and these days and the inner courtyards are used for the benefit of the residents and this has become very popular residential areas. It's another kind of gentrification as well. Planning is of course an important issue. Quite often we see that planning is there and quite often it doesn't work, it is not being implemented as it was supposed to be implemented. Market forces are very strong and things happens along the way. I think the case of Copenhagen this is quite famous, the finger plan, which is many years old - 66 years old - and somehow it is still working. However there, open spaces were supposed to be left between the fingers are under increasing pressure as a city develops. But somehow you can still identify the structure and somehow it is still guiding the urban development. But this is a reality and you can see the degree that structures are under quite serious pressure for urban development. In other parts of the world this is Mozambique, are also doing planning. The reality there - this is only some drawings on a piece of paper - the reality is totally different and nothing will be implemented according to any plan because enforcement of development control is absent - poor countries simply don't have that - and another issue, which is important there's no culture, there's no tradition for doing this. So, this is planning, the planning is there, fine, everybody's happy, everybody's clapping, but it doesn't work. Regional planning is another issue, which is also to be very complicated and the case of Copenhagen and Sweden, Denmark and Sweden, it has been, for many years, tried to link together the entire urban region, with limited success. However in the year 2000 a bridge was built, a huge investment, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in the recent times, in Denmark and Sweden, and it has, to some extent, linked the region better together. However, in reality, what was expected has not at all been achieved. Not at all. The idea was to integrate the labor market and people should commute - it doesn't happen at all. Now, all cities are undergoing transformation. No city anywhere in the world is static, and the times are changing, the industrial times are over now and all over the world almost harbors are undergoing - and waterfronts - are undergoing transformations. And to some extent also the old building structures that are there - were there - can be reused. However, in quite a few cases it doesn't really happen. Very often, these kind of buildings are being demolished. However it happens that they will be reusing some silos - that has been reused and refurbished, in Copenhagen, for transforming into fashionable housing. Other part of of the waterfront and the harbor, in Copenhagen is undergoing massive transformations and and they are following along the same lines as Copenhagen has developed, for many years, a block development, somehow hundred by hundred metres, a block with inner courtyard, for the benefit of the residents, as an open space. And a new development in Copenhagen, a new city - another harbor area, which is not working anymore - and this is very important to try to understand, this 40,000 new homes and 40,000 new jobs, that is the plan at least, that is the goal, so balanced homes and employment opportunities in order to avoid too much commuting. If it will happen or not happen in reality, time will tell but it is important, at least. This is a big step forward that attempts otherwise to balance that. And they're trying also to integrate the social, the cultural and economic, of course, but also environmental sustainability. This is just to say that that housing is very diverse and for for many years, in many countries housing was owner-occupied. Historically it was mostly owner-occupied. Then, after the Industrial Revolution more and more people came to the cities and there was a huge demand for accommodation, speculation took place and rental accommodation became the norm. That has over the last three or four decades been undergoing changes again and is very important to study this and try to understand this because this influence heavily in the way that cities are developing. A lot changed in 1933. Planners met in Athens, Le Corbusier was a big star as a planner, as an architect and many architects met and they signed a charter for the future of ours cities in the world - modernism was born. And it's all over. The first case here is Copenhagen - Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Hungary, in the entire what you used to call the Eastern Block massive housing like this - actually forty million people still live like this. And there's a clash now after communism fell, what about ownership? Who owns what? Who does not own? Who is responsible? Who is not responsible? Very complicated issues. Most of this hasn't been sold. But renters are still there and the everyday maintenance is very complicated. And there's a land ownership - very complicated issue here because the former - in the case of Riga - the former landowners are now reclaiming that rights. It was taken from them in 1945, when the Soviet Union took over and for almost 50 years, it belonged to the state. Latvia became independent in 1990 and then the lender said, here we are, this is my land, and the modernist developments were built on top of the former and now they're starting to build inside here. Very complicated. But also - this is one of the richest country in the world - this a Switzerland - you see modernism was their, high-rise buildings like this. This is russia, this is southern Russia, Dagestan, the same and this is now, being built now and they continue to build. So, in many parts of the world it hasn't stopped yet. In China, they do it all the time. China does that all the time also in their development aid, in Africa, high-rise buildings built along one of these lines and and it doesn't work. This is Paris, in 2005. The most serious urban riots since world war two, started in July 2005. Within a week, France was in a state of emergency. It was really an eye-opener. What is this? What is happening? And in 2011 it happen in London and spreaded to the entire UK. Palestine, as quite a few other cities in the world - we tend to forget that quite often - is living along you could call it apartheid lines - divided cities - the haves and the have-nots or the ones in power, the ones not in power. Palestine is maybe in extreme, but you have the same in Nicosia, in Cyprus, you have the same in Belfast, in Ireland and many others are actually divided. We tend to forget. This is an extreme in this case. And it is an extreme, I was there just after a teargas attack, everything's closed and they are now starting to open up again. Security forces in control of the urban environment is massive, in the case of Palestine. This is something I personally was involved in, in the 80s. We laid out this and we only succeeded in this because land was nationalized and they could do this at a very big scale. So we let out 10,000 plots over four years and all has been built upon, ever since. This is a good part of the story. The bad part of the story is that the infrastructures are lacking. The social services are lacking. No schools has been built here yet. It was supposed to be built for schools in these vacant plots or health institutions or kindergartens. Nothing has been built. This is what I did when I was younger than I am today at least, in eighty-five. This is the plan, this is a layout in blocks, small blocks with aid plots in each block. And then an open space in the middle and then some bigger open spaces. The last issue, before I shall finalize, is something that nobody talked about twenty years ago and today everybody talks about it. I don't think anybody - twenty years ago - it didn't even existed as a terminology, climate change. Today, everybody knows what climate change is all about and at least most acknowledges, it's a big issue. This is just here next door, where I live. This is was last year, a heavy storm and this is the reality and we have to face this reality and we have to not only technically design that water doesn't enter - ok this is fine if we can do that - but I think that there's a much broader issue here that we need to plan, in order that we don't come in a situation that is not needed to technically secure that water doesn't enter our house, that we actually build on sites where one cannot imagine that floods will come. But this is another very big issue because then there's a big part of the country and it's been discussed a lot, in many countries, low-lying area has value - and land value is a big issue - they will then have land value zero, because if you can't come build on them, then the land value becomes zero and then there are huge political pressure to change that. This is where I live, just here next door this is a co-housing shared ownership community, three-storey, where the ground floor has direct access to the outside and then internal staircases. 156 units. But even here we have difficulties and you will be able to study more what the city of Copenhagen has in mind in order to counteract this. What to do. That's no simple clear answer to that question: what to do? Nobody really knows. Many ideas and they are, even now, engineering and architecture and planning companies actually somehow announcing themselves as specialists in in climate change mitigation and climate change building resilience. There's a lot of propaganda in this, I think. There's a lot of common sense that we still need to be considering.
