Cities of Opportunity

www.pwc.com© 2011 PwC. All rights reserved. “PwC” and “PwC US” refer to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership, which is a member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, each member firm of which is a separate legal entity. This document is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.

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©2011 The Partnership for New York City, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cities of Opportunity 2011 makes its fourth analysis of the trajectory of 26 cities, all capitals of finance, commerce and culture—and through their performance, seeks to open a window on what makes cities function best.

The Upper East Side of Manhattan, with Midtown in the background.

The more cities change, the more forward-looking perspective matters…

Robert Moritz Chairman and Senior Partner PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Kenneth I. Chenault Chairman and CEO American Express Co.

Co-chairman Partnership for New York City

Terry J. Lundgren Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Macy’s Inc.

Co-chairman Partnership for New York City

Yours truly,

The notion of the city has come a long way. But the heart of what a city is remains the same: people drawn together, today in ever-increasing densities and numbers, to work as a community.

Cities of Opportunity is dedicated to understanding what makes urban dynam-ics work, and communicating what we learn to government officials, policymakers, busi-nesspersons, scholars and citizens mutually invested in the success of their city or cities.

This marks our fourth study. Like cities them-selves, we keep evolving. Cities of Opportunity 2011 includes more cities, greater analysis and

deeper exploration of core issues. This year we compare 26 cities—with San Francisco, Berlin, Madrid, Moscow, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi joining and Houston rejoining. We also look closely at a few of the challenges that are most pressing at the moment—regional management, education, sustainability, density, transportation and preservation.

It is not a coincidence that images of innovative and historic libraries (in Seattle and Stockholm) begin and end the interviews in our study. Nor is the focus on transporta-tion, energy, environment, housing and health that weaves throughout. Both tangible and intangible—physical and intellectual capital—

have to be in balance for modern cities to enjoy healthy growth. Minds spur innova-tion; roads, rails, communications networks, schools and hospitals lay the groundwork on which new ideas can grow. In an ideal world, prosperity follows. But, as we all know, progress toward any ideal requires day-to- day work. This study represents our part in the effort.

Yes, Cities of Opportunity is changing. But the heart of what we are doing—trying to shed light on what makes major cities healthy—remains the same. All three of us sincerely hope you find value and interest in the study.

Interview

How is the nature of cities changing?

It’s a total cliché now to say that more than half of mankind lives in cities. What it actually means is that there has been an enormous influx from the countryside to urban condi-tions, and that influx has led to an enormous scale of city building—particularly in Asia and, almost by default, in Africa and Latin America. So, we are confronting a unique situation where cities are becoming so ubiquitous that they have ceased to be able to be defined as single entities with a single character. They are now almost always so big that they have fallen apart into fragments. Almost every new city now has dense parts, empty parts, low parts and high

Few people have thought as profoundly about cities as Dutch architect, author and Harvard School of Design professor Rem Koolhaas, head of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. In books such as Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL, he has redefined attitudes toward urban architecture. But Koolhaas, winner of the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000, is no mere theorist: his iconic buildings include Seattle’s Central Library and Beijing’s dazzling CCTV tower. Here, Koolhaas discusses the startling transformation of cities such as Beijing and Dubai, the wonders of Berlin, and how New York lost its creative mojo.

parts. So, you can no longer talk about a city as a single typology. Only in the cities that are old and ancient can you actually talk about character: as soon as they’re new or undergoing all this transformation, it becomes impossible.

The new cities are only cities in name. I would say that the most important features that we use to define cities—which we typi-cally define in terms of public spaces, the coherence of streets, plazas, the overall composi-tion—that those terminologies are becoming less and less rel-evant to really understand what cities are. If you look at Dubai or Beijing or anything in the Pearl River Delta, for instance, what we see are vastly greater

Striding across the Seattle Central Library, recently called Rem Koolhaas’ “masterpiece” by The Financial Times.

Rem Koolhaas muses on changing cities…and on his own quest to reinvent them in a way that serves the public good

freedoms that are applied to the notion of what a city is. The architecture profession, which is really still fundamentally set, is equipped to deal with one kind of city—the city that has form—and remains, almost in its entirety, inadequately equipped to think of the other kind of city. So, my role is, to some extent, a matter of mediating between an old and a new conception of the city.

How does your hometown, Rotterdam, fit into this concep-tion of modern cities as being increasingly fragmented and lacking in coherence or unified character?

We’re in Rotterdam. But, if the snow stops, you see another city five kilometers away; and

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another city 10 kilometers away. So, you see no evidence of den-sity here, but actually we have 10 million people living in this mess. And yet we are stubbornly clinging to the notion that we are inhabiting a city called Rotterdam. I would say we are inhabiting a situation called vaguely Belgium, Netherlands, et cetera.

What can architecture do for a city?

What architecture can do is seemingly the same in almost every decade, but actually com-pletely different. In antiquity, architecture was occasionally expressing the core values of and for a society by building temples. In the Renaissance, architects were presumably working for the powers that be or for the Pope or aristoc-racy. In the 19th century and a large part of the 20th century, architects worked for the public sector and articulated how industrial society should look and cohere. A lot of private commissioners were a part of that, but, on the whole, cities were shaped by collective forces.

If you look at the current situation, which has been characterized by maybe 20

or 30 years of market economy, there’s been a drastic change because that public dimension has weakened almost immeasur-ably, so we are now very often serving private interests. And so, if you ask what can architec-ture do, we could do workers’ housing 30 years ago or cheap housing 40 years ago. Now, I can’t do it anymore, simply because nobody asks me. And it’s assumed that an office like ours would not be interested in it, even though, in fact, I really want to do it and I’m very interested in trying to find it. So, invisibly, what we do and can do changes unbelievably. For instance, if you look at the amount of museums that the elite of architecture is building, you get the sense that, okay, apparently they can build museums. But we’re building other large-scale public investments—airports, railway stations and other infrastructure—less and less.

So you’re not getting to design huge public projects anymore—things like Euralille, the massive urban development you finished building outside Paris in 1994?

Euralille was really a beautiful moment because it was commis-

sioned by the French state when Mitterrand was president. It was when the French state had the means to be a public strength and force. So, I know what it is to have the full support of the state behind you, and all the deadlines of the state, because it had to coincide with the comple-tion of the tunnel under the Channel and the connection between Paris and London. I seriously doubt whether today a commission like that would ever go to me or one of my peers. We get more and more emblems or things that can be icons. But a serious work of planning infrastructure, I don’t think they would ever entrust it to us anymore.

Why not?

Architecture has been in a strange situation where we have become more prominent but less important, less crucial. We looked at the architects on the covers of Time, and it’s a very interesting statistic: the last architect ever was Philip Johnson in ’79. That was a year before Reagan and before the real launch of the market economy.

I’m really interested in doing something useful. So, a country like China is unbelievably interesting because it needs thinking about what it’s going to be and what it wants to be.

Beijing’s CCTV Tower

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New York was the site of an unbelievable explosion of creativity. But in the past 30 years, I’ve seen little of that same creativity… The real difficulty of New York is that the quality of buildings has become so unbelievably low… that it prevents you from appreciating the city’s initial genius.

Twenty years ago, when you were designing huge European projects like Euralille and the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, you remarked that a “constellation of need, means and naivete” was coming together that was similar to that which had triggered New York’s miracle. What produced this phenom-enon in Europe?

Mainly, it was the last moment when the European Union was a very confident and inspir-ing entity, and when, instead of a gloomy, constant friction and negotiation, it was: “We’re Europe. We’re big. We have something to do. We have ambition.” And there were, in many countries, ambitions that really articulated that. We felt it almost like a surge, almost in the same year, where all these things came together in the late ’80s, and we had to operate on projects either bigger than had ever been the case in Europe or more ambitious—particularly in the mixing of ideas. So, it was a moment really of renewal, when people were asking: what can you put together to create a new culture?

Given your strong sense of public service, do you lament not getting these large state projects today where you’re basically building the Grand Central Stations of tomorrow?

I’m not spending a lot of time lamenting things. What’s ironic

about the position of the architect is that it essentially has a very important passive component. An architect waits for somebody to come to them wanting something, and then the architect becomes the instru-ment by which this desire is realized. But in the last 10 years we’ve been able to say, “We’re not going to wait. This is what we want to do.” And since we’re interested in doing this, we’re looking for an environment or a client or a country or a terri-tory where we can actually do this. What made this possible is partly becoming a so-called public figure, maybe partly also teaching at Harvard and there-fore having a position external to simply being an architect. But, maybe more than anything, it was creating this second office, AMO [the research and analysis arm of the Office for Metropoli-tan Architecture], which enables us to engage in some activism, even though we are architects. So, instead of lamenting, we’ve really tried to develop tools that operate in the current world, that enable us to do other things than what we would typically get.

Would a good example of that be the renewable energy project the EU commissioned you to design in Europe that extended into Africa?

Yeah, of course. I was interested in thinking about Africa and thinking about the connection

between poverty and the enormity of sizes there. I’ve also become very interested in the idea of preservation. So, I consider one of the most crucial things we’re doing right now is the massive planning of the Hermitage museum in St. Peters-burg, which to some extent was also partly an initiative of ours, or a way in which we could form a relationship with the director and strategize together what the Hermitage could be, rather than the director saying to the architect, “This is what I want. You do it.” So, it became more of a joint effort or collaboration. By developing these models, we are getting to projects that are a little bit outside what we’d typically get without this more energetic and more critical approach to what the archi-tectural field produces today. That is the key thing. It’s really a constant sense of criticality, and also a constant sense of dissatisfaction with the current procedures—a kind of produc-tive dissatisfaction.

When it comes to preservation, should cities try to balance old and new, making more effort to retain what was good about older ways of living?

It’s a very complex situation. The times when there was a huge political enthusiasm for uprooting entire urban condi-tions—as in Singapore, for instance—are actually gone.

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The more traditional side, so to speak, has made important inroads, and there are very few situations I’m aware of now where they’re really just bulldoz-ing. Even in Beijing, there’s a lot of reconsideration of the center—the hutongs. Even if you look in Rio now, you see that some of the favelas are being considered for World Heritage status. So, there’s obviously a great awareness of the value of existing things. But that has one paradoxical effect: that the exist-ing things in themselves are very uncritically maintained because not all existing things really deserve eternal life.

On the other hand, there are many conditions that are new and are not based on eliminat-ing the old—conditions that are simply new and started from scratch. That is the typical city like Atlanta: it’s not that there was a wonderful city there that they got rid of. There was little there. And now it’s a metropolis. So, I think this getting rid of the old is really a very American and European trauma—and what is really the key is, what happens if there is no old. In Shenzhen, there simply was nothing. There were rice fields and a fishing village—and now it’s 10 million people. That’s a very important discussion: can you be happy in that environment? Can archi-tecture be legitimate in that

environment? What are the qualities of that environment? Because most people tend to criticize them and tend to not be happy with newness only. But it’s possible to find posi-tive things where typically few people find them: for instance, if a city is a mess of completely random things, you have an enormous freedom to move in any way. In the same way, even Rotterdam has a lot of freedoms that an older envi-ronment doesn’t really have.

What about Berlin, which seems like the opposite of Shenzhen?

Oh, it’s a fantastic city. It’s one of my favorite cities.

You built housing in Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie 20 years ago, and you built the Nether-lands Embassy there in 2003. How has the city changed in the decades you’ve known it?

I was born in the last year of the war. But, first of all, maybe out of a spirit of contradiction, I was never anti-German, even though that was the obvious way to be, and that was certainly encouraged by my parents and schoolteachers. So, when I was a journalist and a scriptwriter, we wrote a movie about a good German. And that was really a very strong statement in 1968. I was interested in both politics and not anti-German. So, when I was in architecture school,

the idea that a city could be divided and accommodate two completely opposite political systems really fascinated me. I made a study of the Berlin Wall, which was in a way the interface between those two systems, and therefore, on the two sides, represented those systems in a very pure and almost propagan-distic way.

Of course, one of the funny things about getting older is that it gives you a confidence that no situation is ever permanent. And if you look at younger col-leagues, there are a number of people who believe that the cur-rent situation will be indefinitely prolonged somehow, that for the rest of their lives they will be in front of laptops. Actually, if you see the number of real upheav-als that took place in my life, you can be sure that there will be more. The beauty of Berlin, of course, is that it’s the stage of a number of very radical trans-formations, and that it wears the traces of those transformations in a very poetic way—but that there is still a real substance that was always there. That’s what makes it, right now, such a wonderful city. Also, frankly, the fact that it had a rich part and a poor part, and that you still feel that opposition, and that it’s not luxurious in its entire center like Paris, for instance. It is also very pleasant right now.

I was just in Dubai. There was this skyscraper there. It’s maybe absurd; it’s maybe totally unsustainable... Nevertheless, I have a sense of exhilaration and awe because it’s so extreme… It’s so stunningly, stunningly present that I cannot deny there’s an excitement in it.

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You’ve written lovingly of New York. Does it still hold a special place in your heart in terms of what it represents?

Yes, it remains for me a city that had a crucial role in developing a particular repertoire. In that way, it was the site of an unbe-lievable explosion of creativity. But I have to say that, in the past 30 years, I’ve seen little of that same creativity in terms of being inventive or critical or demanding. I think the real difficulty of New York is that, in the last 30 years, the quality of buildings has become so unbelievably low; there’s so little newness that, in a way, it now acts like a bulk of mediocrity that almost prevents you from appreciating the city’s initial qualities or initial ingenuity or initial genius.

Does this decline in creativity reflect the competitive pressure to do everything cheaper and faster? Or is this just an era in which public spiritedness has diminished?

I have a feeling it’s both.

Is this more the case in New York than elsewhere?

No, no, no. It’s the same here. I don’t think at all that it’s just a New York issue. But it’s more noticeable in New York because

there was so much that was different there, and the city was so fresh and was really the essence of newness.

Chicago is another interesting American city in that it had a fire, was rebuilt with collabra-tion from planners, architects and business, and it’s now a pleasure to walk around, to see.

Very much, yeah. Chicago has always had a discourse about planning, and has had planners. Therefore, it has results that are recognizable as planning. Perhaps in New York you have that, too, but both the beauty and the tragedy of New York was that the first gesture was so over-whelmingly genius and powerful that everything else after that never had the same impact or the same status. In Chicago, they continued to think about the city in a more creative way, perhaps because the beginning was not so overwhelming. But the result is that it’s a very impressive, beautiful city.

You were asked to enter a contest to design the new World Trade Center in Manhat-tan, but chose instead to focus on CCTV’s headquarters in Beijing. Why?

To be honest, I felt more engaged with the issue of trying

to imagine China, of trying to participate in an effort of really drastic renewal and drastic change, rather than being involved in an effort of con-solidation. Plus, I have to admit that there was another issue: I thought the World Trade Center buildings were so superb. I liked them so much that the idea of trying to even imagine some-thing different on that same site really seemed impossible.

You’re saying that architectur-ally, not sentimentally?

Architecturally, yeah. They were not simple. But they were obviously simple. Did you like Man on Wire, the movie about the guy who walked between the towers on a tightrope?1 You should see the movie, because then maybe you’ll understand why I like the buildings.

What else appealed to you about the project in Beijing?

As an architect, I definitely hoped that I could do something useful and something that is not necessarily connected either to fashion or to, let’s say, the more glamorous part of contempo-rary life. I’m really interested in doing something useful. So, a

Are we actually able to reinvent things? Are we as creative as our forefathers? Are we able to really renew ourselves in a way that is significant? Or are we hiding in our caves or in our familiar world?

The Netherlands Embassy in Berlin

1 Man on Wire, 2008, directed by James Marsh, documents the 1974 walk between the World Trade Center towers by Philippe Petit.

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country like China is unbeliev-ably interesting because it needs thinking about what it’s going to be and what it wants to be. And, by coincidence, at that point I was in a moment when I could actually contribute to that. Very literally, if a city like Beijing is building so much, then I find it very interesting to do a building there which is more original than what you would typically get, and that also shows that certain enormous programs of enormous skill can have properties that are slightly less alienating or slightly less egotistical. And then, with the building itself—a project for Chinese Central Television—it would really be interesting to think of a media company, what it represents, what its relation-ship with the public can be, how open or closed it can be. That’s another really challenging thing. So, it represented a number of challenges that were good for me to think about.

What else strikes you about the extraordinary transformation China is undergoing?

It’s totally contrary to the com-mon interpretation, but one thing you see is how seriously China is dealing with climate change. I think that needs to be noted. If you see what they do with wind energy, solar energy, and how pervasive it is, I really

find that exciting. They are even making a really serious effort to take the super-tanker in a differ-ent direction. For me, that’s one of the positive things I can see.

Were newer Chinese cities like Shenzhen designed with any kind of model in mind?

No, no. The problem is that urbanization in America and Europe flattened around 1900, and urbanization in Asia started taking off in a really harsh way maybe in the ‘70s. If you look at all the manifestos that were written about urbanism by Europeans like Le Corbusier, it basically ends in 1930. Previ-ously, when we were urbanizing, we thought about cities, and we had opinions about how they should be. Now, we stopped having opinions about how cities should be. So, the irony is that when a lot of these new cities were being built, we stopped thinking, and they didn’t yet have the routine or tradition of thinking about that kind of modernity. It happened in a fallow period—in a strange, in-between state. That’s why I think that to make a contribu-tion to this and to try to develop models for urbanization is, in itself, very valid because, at this point, the city is defined by a kind of Western default. That’s also why I wrote Generic City. It’s like the default, the obvious

skyscraper or the obvious city block, the obvious curtain wall, put together in an obvious way.

Is there an optimal density for a city, whether in China or elsewhere?

No. Within the current condition the city will neither be dense nor not-dense. It will have density, but in parcels and in locations. But it also will have its counterpart. That’s why I’m so fascinated by the image of Shenzhen where you see the big-gest intersection of the city 400 meters away from a rice field. So, it’s no longer either dense or not dense. You’ll have the same thing everywhere. And that’s the irony in the 21st century. The skyscraper is combined with the hovel, and so you can have a skyscraper anywhere, even if it’s in a desert. It’s no longer a system of density with all the repercussions. You have a very local, contained and unique point of density that can exist in relative isolation.

Does this create aesthetic problems in places like Dubai?

You can see it either as an aesthetic crisis or new aesthetic conditions.

There’s something good about it?

Yeah. I was just in Dubai. There was this skyscraper there.

The beauty of Berlin is that it’s the stage of a number of very radical transformations, and that it wears the traces of those transformations in a very poetic way—but that there is still a real substance that was always there. That’s what makes it such a wonderful city.

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It’s maybe absurd. It’s maybe unsustainable. Nevertheless, if I see it there, I have a sense of exhilaration and awe because it’s so extreme, and exactly because it’s not surrounded by anything like it. It’s so stun-ningly, stunningly present that I cannot deny that there’s an excitement in it.

How do cars fit into cities like this? Should we think about different ways to get around?

A car in a city like New York is, of course, totally different than a car in a city like Dubai. Dubai is actually designed for it, and is relatively straightforward. You have a highway, then you go off the highway, then sooner or later you get into a garage. So, I would say that certain cities now accommodate cars quite well. If cars change or become more sustainable, I think that will remain quite a persistent model, simply because it gives so much flexibility, and this flex-ibility is almost unimaginable through any other device. As long as we are politically able and willing to give everyone the freedom to essentially go where they want, that’s a fairly unavoidable model—these individual capsules.

But in existing cities, it’s much more problematic. Traffic in New York is truly a nightmare

of constant frustration. One of the problems of the market economy has been that, rather than enriching the public sector or reinforcing public transport, they started to undermine it. So, what you have in many Euro-pean cities is the worst of both worlds. You have a weakened public transport, weakened infrastructure of trains, and almost pervasive car use. They could have avoided a lot of this if the public sector had been enhanced. But they bought all the arguments for privatization, all the virtues of the market economy. And the result is a nightmare.

Another place you’ve studied is Lagos, Nigeria, one of the world’s biggest and seemingly most chaotic cities. Why has it fascinated you?

We started looking at it in the mid-’90s, which was literally the pits. It was also politically the pits. It was really the end of a very decadent period of dictator-ship. So, the public sector had almost ceased to exist. People were simply condemned to be on their own and survive on their own, without any support. And I realized that this was a condition that is, in a way, very cruel, but I also saw a lot of evidence of how it stimulated incredible smartness in a city like that.

If we have to take maybe 12 important decisions a day in our life—you know, what time do we go to work, what time do we go back, what do we eat—they really have 500 or thousands of decisions to make in Lagos. For instance, “Can my kid go to school right now? How do I do that—with which bus? What’s functioning?” It’s so much more intricate that you realize that there’s really a driving intelli-gence simply of survival in that kind of environment. Lagos is now actually doing relatively well. So, some of the exces-sive conditions that I saw there are rapidly diminishing. It was fascinating to see that every dysfunctionality triggered a new functionality there. Okay, if traf-fic doesn’t move, it means that the accumulation of stranded vehicles represents a commercial opportunity to sell things. But it’s relatively normalizing. And now that it normalizes, you see that it actually benefits from a series of quite traditional urban interventions—like bridges, planning traffic intersections, and efforts for hygiene that were partly put in there already in the ’70s and ’80s and that are slowly being resumed. So, it’s going in a great direction, partly because of the restoration of democracy of a kind and of political process, partly because of a lesser degree of tribalism, and also because of more money.

The beauty and the tragedy of New York was that the first gesture was so overwhelmingly genius and powerful that everything else after that never had the same impact or the same status. In Chicago, they continued to think about the city in a more creative way.

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You wrote 15 years ago that “globalization astronomically expands the realm of possibility for better or worse.” Where does globalization stand today?

Globalization is undergoing constant change, and we’re very clearly in a period of waning enthusiasm for it. With the economic crisis, you see it on every level. And so we have an ironic situation where we live in a period of globalization, yet every single nation wants to be more itself. I find this also very noticeable in our clients. For the first time, Chinese projects have to be Chinese; Arab projects, Arabic; Dutch projects, Dutch. So, we are losing a kind of internationalism as a virtue or as a positive thing. On the contrary, there’s a fear of that. It’s a very clear and marked difference, which also has a lot of political repercussions. You see it in a of lack of generosity toward travel-ers, toward immigrants. It’s not grinding to a halt, because it’s clearly proceeding, but it’s slow-ing down, perhaps, or provoking very strong counter-movements, and provoking a huge anxiety about identity.

Is it because there’s less money around due to the financial crisis?

Perhaps. But it’s also indepen-dent of that. I’m Dutch, and the great thing about Holland is that we were always happy to change our identity, so long as we could earn money and could sell everything for this, even our grandmothers. Therefore, I’ve experienced the incredible vir-tues or rewards of that freedom. But it’s very rare now. I used to compare Europe to a suicide pact where we all said, “Okay, we forget about our nation; we become something else that is, in itself, a great enterprise.” But then only the small countries proceeded with the suicide, and then the big ones stood up and said, “Hey, we are not going to do it. You are dead, but we …” You see that kind of tension everywhere now.

Your own perspective is unusu-ally international. How were you were shaped by being born in Rotterdam, then living in Indonesia before returning to this bombed-out city?

It was very important, particu-larly because I went with my parents in ’52 when Indonesia had become independent.

It was not a colonial situation but actually the immediate exhilaration of the post-colonial moment, so we had to behave like Indonesians. And I went to an Indonesian school and joined the Indonesian Boy Scouts, and so I knew from a very early age what it is to be among differ-ent people and to enjoy being among completely different people. I think it gave me simply a versatility and an anthropologi-cal interest in how other people live and what they believe in and what is important to them. That has hugely informed everything we do. So, that’s maybe the most crucial thing. Also, it made me physically less obsessed with ownership or material things. Of course, that is, in a certain way, the thing of the ‘60s genera-tion. But even before I could be affected by that, I experienced how happy you can be without possessions, or how life can be almost independent of posses-sions. And I think that’s also a very important thing.

Given how consumerism domi-nates many of our lives, what’s your view of the role shopping plays in cities?

Well, my relationship to shopping was profoundly marked by the fact that I became a shopper first

Cities are becoming so ubiquitous that they have ceased to be able to be defined as single entities with a single character. They are now almost always so big that they have fallen apart into fragments.

View from the CCTV Tower in Beijing.

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in Indonesia, so for me the ideal form of shopping is markets. I almost don’t know a single market that I don’t profoundly like and where I don’t like walking, whether it’s in Asia, here, in France or in Africa. It’s almost always a wonderful and vivid experience. But there was a time when shopping and its integration and consolidation in the department store did have a certain excitement and beauty. Some of the first department stores in Paris were almost tangi-ble moments of euphoria about what the world was capable of producing, a little bit like the Great Exposition in London in the mid-19th century. Even after the war, there were moments when department stores had a kind of message. There’s a department store here called De Bijenkorf; I remember how, if you wanted to be modern and buy fresh and well-designed and intelligent things, you would go there, and that excitement was still there.

I would say that, with the proliferation of brands and their increasing occupation of the center, there is a very nega-tive effect on the whole notion of adventure because a brand and adventure are not quite compatible terms. That is why we were interested in working for Prada, because their explicit obligation or explicit task was to

undo that kind of predictability, and to reintroduce a degree of unpredictability. We did it by, for instance, making some of the Prada stores able to perform also as a public space. At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, the Prada store changes form and becomes a cinema. With Prada, on the whole, we have worked on trying to undo the rigor mortis that a brand typically acquires.

What do you mean by combating rigor mortis?

Well, they’re really creative [at Prada]. And as long as there is creativity, there is newness and freshness, while what you see with many brands is that they can flourish even after the disappearance of their original maker—so, we are almost in the domain of ghosts or memory. And, ironically, even in the world of fashion, they’re now talking about heritage. Fash-ion used to be basically about new things. Now, suddenly, it’s about heritage. So, I think this is all part of a huge pessimism, perhaps, or a huge fear that is driving a lot of our culture at this moment. Are we actually able to reinvent things? Are we as creative as our forefathers? Are we able to really renew ourselves in a way that is signifi-cant? Or are we hiding in our caves or in our familiar world?

What’s your answer? Are we as creative as our forefathers?

I’m not convinced what we do is a lot better than what architects did in the ’30s and ’40s. It’s certainly less messianic, less ambitious in terms of its social impact. But, on the other hand, I’m also very optimistic because, yes, we can invent really new experiences. And I’m confident that we have introduced a few.

One realm where you’ve reinvented things was in your design for the Seattle Central Library. What challenges did you face in rethinking the function of a library at a time when many people are betting against books even being around in future?

Well, with the gaining strength of the virtual and of all these other forms of networks that are intangible and cannot express in form, it seemed to me that one of the last remaining powers that architecture would still have is to express the public and the collective. The first library where we really tried to articulate that was a project in Paris. So, although the Seattle library was a very precise effort to think about libraries, and although our concert hall in Porto was a very precise effort to think about music, there is also a way in which they are both conceived simply as spaces that are neces-sary to allow gathering. There

That’s the irony in the 21st century. The skyscraper is combined with the hovel, and so you can have a skyscraper anywhere, even if it’s in a desert.

10 | Cities of Opportunity | PwC

are so many competing domains today that don’t require gather-ing, that the act of gathering in itself has become crucial. No matter what technical evolution is, it seems as if this need to gather is actually fairly consis-tent. I think that is partly the reason those two buildings work well—that they accommodate the gathering, regardless of whether it’s for a concert or a specific library.

But, in addition, Seattle was, of course, the ideal place at that point to think about the future of the book because there were so many people plotting the demise of the book. We did extensive research, so I still remember that Microsoft people showed us for the first time their tablet that was going to make it [the book] completely redun-dant. And we could devise a situation where we said, “Okay, so there will always be books. But there will also be a lot of other things.” So, the main issue was that we surround books with other possibilities and enhance books through other possibilities. We also decided not to claim that the real had more value than the virtual; on the contrary, we tried to justify both. And what we tried to do maybe more than everything else is show that the main quality of both a book and a library is that you can have randomness in terms of getting access.

The great thing in a library is to find things you’re not looking for, and I think that kind of randomness is stronger in a library than on the Internet. So, we were there when the death of the book was declared; we worked with the people that actually had launched the war. But, 20 years later, the book is still around and flourishing almost like never before. The interesting thing is that the book itself is now showing the effects of the Internet in its whole appearance. And books are now made with greater freedom, greater virtuosity of navigation, more like hypertext than before. So far, I would say that it’s a pretty permanent form, and that it has been able to absorb a lot of the better qualities of the Internet quite successfully.

You get a lot of requests to design museums. Where do museums fit into city life?

The museum is partly defined by its architecture and partly by its contents. And, of course, the most wonderful conditions are when the two coincide. But they don’t have to coincide. I mean, I love certain museums that have incredible contents but are housed in terrible environments and vice-versa. But what has happened to the museum is, in a way, that it’s become part of a city branding effort. So, what used to be almost the symbol of

patience and of accumulation over time, and therefore a deep relationship with history, is now ironically a symbol of newness. And we, as architects, have been very much benefiting from that tendency in terms of getting a lot of work. But we haven’t really thought of the conse-quences in a very thorough or smart way yet. That’s why I try to step out of that situation and try to simply look at the work with the Hermitage Museum, which undeniably has one of the most amazing collections and is also undeniably one of the most amazing architectures, and see whether we could do new things in the combination of these two, rather than add our own new museum. So for me, it’s a matter of taking a step aside.

What are you trying to achieve at the Hermitage?

The buildings started as a palace—a private museum for the tsars. Then, later they built a public museum and a small the-ater. It’s basically a collection of four buildings. Each of these has a separate status, and they’re connected by bridges. If you go now to the museum, you move through the whole thing as if it’s a single entity. And they’re going to add another museum to it. So, this idea that it’s a single entity cannot be extended here because it’s simply become too big, like an airport.

One of the problems of the market economy has been that, rather than enriching the public sector or reinforcing public transport, they started to undermine it. So, what you have in many European cities is the worst of both worlds. You have a weakened public transport, weakened infrastructure of trains, and almost pervasive car use.

Partnership for New York | Cities of Opportunity | 11

What we are beginning to do is to say: maybe we should not only emphasize the art and use each of these as a museum, but maybe we should look again at the history. This is where the tsars lived; it’s also where the Russian Revolution broke out. So, let’s see whether we can make the experience of this building reveal more about that period. Let’s see whether we can make part of the building talk more about the collections of the tsars. What we’re trying to do, instead of seeing it as a continuous thing that you can take in over a few hours, is to disconnect them—to look at the specificity of each as a way of exploring more layers than simply art. We want to create a greater complexity, but maybe also greater transparency, regarding what happened there. What was the point of different collections? What were they trying to say?

While you’ve typically had an urban focus, you’ve also written about the “thinning” process that occurs in rural areas when people move to cities. What impact has this demographic shift had on the countryside?

In my own writing, I basically stopped being interested in the city, and I’m writing about the countryside now because I think that’s the area of greatest change. It’s based on experience:

my partner has parents with a house in Switzerland. So, I’ve been able to see the evolution of the so-called “village” over time, and it’s breathtaking how much happens there and how completely transformed it is. It’s a surreptitious transforma-tion. I’ve seen, for the first time, robotized tractors now working in Swiss alpine meadows. You see Thai maids looking after the children of people who are living two weeks a year in transformed barns. It’s at least as radical and probably also as artificial as what’s happening the city. So, the thinning is, for me, an inter-est in the question: if everyone moves to the city, what happens to the territory they left behind?

Do you have theories yet?

No, I don’t have theories. I’m very skeptical of the word “theory.” In a certain way, I never had theories. I just had interests, and was interested in subjects that I tried to analyze. I would say I have analyses, not really theories.

In forming these analyses, is your work process to send colleagues out to study issues, take in lots of information, then emerge at the end with something intelligent?

Yeah. I basically remain a journalist, I think. Also, at this point, we add elements of a historian, of an anthropologist,

of a sociologist, of an economist, of a politician—all aspects that we’re trying to cover or that we occasionally intersect with. So, it’s not only that we send people out. We also collaborate increas-ingly with people from those sectors and those professions.

If someone said you could design anything, anywhere, what would you like to do?

I don’t have a particularly intense desire to do any one particular thing. I think the issue is whether we can do useful things and things that are politi-cally significant and that are not supporting the wrong side. That would make me happy, and makes me happy.

In youthful photos of you and also throughout your work, there’s a sense of playfulness. Is architecture a form of play and fun for you?

That’s actually a really good question because I’m always really surprised that nobody gets our sense of play or our sense of humor, because we are hav-ing—and I am having—huge, huge fun. I’m not always seri-ous, and I think in my writing it’s always ambiguous whether it’s entirely serious. The irony and the sadness for me is that the architecture profession is so humorless, even though it’s a very crucial part of thinking: irony, sarcasm—all these modes

We have an ironic situation where we live in a period of globalization, yet every single nation wants to be more itself. For the first time, Chinese projects have to be Chinese; Arab projects, Arabic; Dutch projects, Dutch. We are losing a kind of internationalism as a virtue or as a positive thing. On the contrary, there’s a fear of that.

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are crucial to approach some-thing from every different direction. And they’re very important for me personally. So I’m very happy you ask it, and also very happy that you actually see it.

Has serious society forgotten the importance of play, fun and healthy creativity?

I don’t know. You certainly cannot say it’s an uncreative moment because there is incred-ible creativity. But I think one thing is that each of us has become more oversensitive, or less willing to put ourselves into question.

More self-protective?

Yeah, I think so, and more easily hurt. And I think that simply is a humorless tendency.

What’s your favorite city to visit?

Extremely difficult to say. I visit cities for different reasons.

I looked at PwC’s list [of 26 cities in the study] and there’s almost not a single city on it that I don’t in many ways like. I love Rome. I love Istanbul. I love Damascus. I’ve just recently dis-covered Damascus; it’s amazing. Maybe all these cities have some of that quality—that your time is not a linear sequence, but it’s a series where every period is still reflected there as if it didn’t pass. That richness is really irresist-ible. But I also like entirely new things, like Shenzhen and Dubai. I’m very promiscuous in that sense.

If you were told that you couldn’t keep globetrotting and had to stay permanently in one city, which one would you choose?

That’s a very, very difficult question. There was a period when I felt that Paris would be a wonderful place to find some stability, but I really can’t say.

One last question. You’ve writ-ten that you’re not an optimist, but that optimism is implicit in being an architect. Is it natural for thoughtful people to be pessimistic and melancholy, not least in the knowledge that we all eventually die?

It’s not dying that makes me pes-simistic or melancholy. I’m not pessimistic. But, if you’re intel-ligent, there is so much evidence of evil things that melancholy is, I think, a totally inevitable posi-tion. But, at the same time, if you want to be active, you have to be an optimist. And so it’s that simple. Thank you.

With the proliferation of brands and their increasing occupation of the center, there is a very negative effect on the whole notion of adventure [in shopping] because a brand and adventure are not quite compatible terms.

On research …Merrill Pond Partnership for New York City mpond@pfnyc.org +1 212.493.7515

Sabrina McColgan PwC sabrina.y.c.mccolgan@us.pwc.com +1 646.471.8180

On media inquiries …Michael Scotto Partnership for New York City mscotto@pfnyc.org +1 212.493.7511

Elliott Frieder PwC elliott.j.frieder@us.pwc.com +1 646.471.3108

For more information

On business implications …PwCHazem Galal Global Leader, Cities Network hazem.galal@br.pwc.com +55 21 3232 6168

Jan Sturesson Global Leader, Government & Public Services jan.sturesson@se.pwc.com +46 (0)46 286 93 39

Egon de Haas Global Director, Government & Public Services egon.de.haas@nl.pwc.com +31 (0) 20 5686162

Contributors

Photography: Rem Koolhaas—Getty ImagesJudith Rodin—Jennifer AltmanKlaus Baur, Guenther Krug and René Gurka— Thomas Dworzak for Magnum PhotosMortimer Zuckerman—Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times1953 High Line photo—James Shaughnessy, courtesy Friends of the High LineLeif Edvinsson and 2011 High Line photo—Kate Örne

Strategic Direction

PwC Tom Craren Brendan Dougher

Core Team

Partnership for New York City Brook Jackson Roger Maldonado Merrill Pond Michael Scotto Andrew Sullivan

PwCPer Berglund Dorothy Jones Adiba Khan Sabrina McColgan Colin McIlheney Cliona O’Beirne Tatiana Pechenik William Sand Thomas van Horn

Project direction

PwC William Sand, communications

Partnership for New York City Kathryn Wylde

DesignOdgis + Company Janet Odgis Rhian Swierat

Partnership for New York City Merrill Pond, research

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