Urbanized

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Cities today have been doing

the same thing

that they've done for

three, four, five thousand years.

They've been the place where

the flows of people,

the flows of money,

the flows of goods have coalesced.

Cities are always

the physical manifestation

of the big forces at play.

Economic forces,

social forces,

environmental forces.

The thing that attracts us to the city

is the chance encounter,

it's the knowledge that you'll

be able to start here,

end up there, go back there,

but that something unexpected

will happen along the way,

that you'll make a discovery.

That, in a way, is the magic of cities.

Urban design is really

the language of the city.

When you walk down a street,

everything you see has been designed.

The width of the sidewalk,

where trees are planted,

the scale of the trees,

how the street furniture interacts.

How many stores you have per block,

the height of the buildings,

where they set back.

Each one of these things

has been thought about.

The thing about urban design

is that unlike it being

a solitary enterprise of an

artist sitting in her or his studio,

what you really have is

a multi-disciplinary group of people

coming together working

on the same project

but coming from very different

perspectives,

having different agendas,

and different roles.

So you've got the architect.

You've got the developer

or group of developers.

You have state and federal

and city agencies.

You have the public,

which is a major component.

You have landmarks or other

historically minded groups.

And they all come together

to work against and with each other

in order to bring the project

to fruition.

These can range from small,

temporary interventions

to massive large-scale

infrastructural projects.

Forces of change are happening

on every level.

Technological change, new forms and

modes of transportation.

The eventualities of man-made

and natural disasters.

These are all things that are going

to be addressed by urban design.

The world today is changing

pretty dramatically,

shifting toward more and more

people living in cities.

Cities accelerated relatively slowly

from pre-Greek, pre-Roman times.

It took centuries

to reach those numbers which might

be something like a million.

By the 20th Century

10% of the population

of the world was living in cities.

Only two years ago it was 50%.

And if we continue at the pace

we are, which we will,

it will be something like 75%

in forty years' time.

The pace now is putting an enormous

amount of pressure and strain

on any system

which has limited resources.

33%, roughly,

of new urban dwellers today

live in slums.

That's a third of the world's

population...

without the most basic amenities,

without sewers,

without water, without sanitation.

Today Mumbai has the same number

of people as the whole of London

living in slum conditions.

And Mumbai is set to become

the biggest city in the world in 2050,

therefore bigger than Tokyo.

That means the slum population,

if it were to be the same

or roughly like it,

would be New York and London

put together.

What you have in this city

is a situation where...

the real estate developers

on the one hand

and the slum dwellers on the other

are actually carving out

the design of the city.

The poor people are doing it because

the plan has no space for them.

The construction industry produced

a huge housing boom for the top 10%

and then increasing crisis

for everyone else.

The big downside

of informal settlements

which needs

to be urgently resolved

is the question of health

and hygiene.

How do you bring sanitation and

how do you bring water supply, etc.

That is I think what makes

them inhuman, unlivable,

and I think a complete reflection

of the failure of this society

to create human habitat.

The city says that if there is

one toilet for fifty people,

that is 10 families

have one toilet seat,

it means they have

is adequate sanitation.

But in 1989

the ratio of people to a toilet seat

was 900 people to a toilet seat.

Today it's come down to 600.

Our local politicians say,

"Oh, we don't want to build

toilets in slums,

because it will encourage people

to come."

As if people come to sh*t.

You have a situation in which

an informal settlement

gets ignored for a very long time.

And because there is no space

for growth

it gets denser and denser and denser.

The issue is that you've got all

this growth over the next 20, 30 years,

basically a doubling

of the urban population.

At the same time, you haven't dealt

with the people who are already there.

You know, it's very easy to get

incredibly pessimistic

and dark about the prospects

looking forward,

because if you just look at the

numbers and the trend lines,

it is profoundly depressing, I mean,

you just want to slit

your wrists basically,

so this is not a healthy area of

research and engagement.

But that said, at the same time,

we know from history

is that you really need a small group

of innovators, a small group of people

that can demonstrate

how to do things differently,

and once that gets mainstreamed,

change happens really quickly.

If we do not take care

how the process of migration

towards cities is going to happen,

the process of urbanization is going

to happen in the form of slums.

So we're in an urgency to

generate the conditions

so that the flow

of people into cities

happens in a good way.

With the Lo Barnechea project the main

priority was location.

Behind me you see the group

of families in the situation before,

meaning they live in a slum.

What we are trying to do

is that knowing

that the location is so important,

because schools, transportation,

jobs are in this part of the city,

which is actually

the richest part of the city.

What we were looking for was to find

a design that was able to pay

for very expensive land, but keep

all those networks.

So much more important then an extra

square meter of house,

was a better located square meter

of land, which tends to be expensive.

With a subsidy that is about $10,000

that is given to a poor family

that will then become

an owner of the house,

we had to buy the land,

provide the infrastructure,

and build the houses.

Instead of producing tiny units,

we asked ourselves

"Why don't we think of it

as half of a good house?"

And we thought it was efficient

to make the half

that a family could never achieve

on their own.

And then allow families to do

the other half, on their own,

with their own timing,

according to their own needs.

We call it participatory design.

To have a participatory design means

to have families sitting at the table

to help us decide what are we going

to deliver from day one

and what can be left so that families

themselves take care of that.

We asked families

what was more important:

a water heater or a bathtub.

There was not enough money for both.

Decision makers, or politicians,

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