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Politics of Planning Entrepreneurial Urban Development
Interview with Patrik Schumacher for Caos Planejado
Questions by Anthony Ling, architect and urban planner, founder and editor of Caos Planejado
What is your explanation for the current housing crisis in London, and what do you think are interesting ways to solve it?
PS: The housing crisis is an affordability crisis caused by government supply restrictions. Why are we suffering a housing shortage while nobody has to worry about a banana shortage, a bicycle crisis, or an auto-mobile shortage? By the way in socialist countries all the above are endemic. The explanation is that the housing market, in contrast to the bicycle market, is highly politicized, i.e. it suffers from massive state interference, which prevents this market from functioning. We need to break these fetters and set the housing market free. In fact, we need to set the whole real estate market free, and allow all urban development decisions to be determined by market processes, allowing economic rather than political criteria to guide the allocation of land, capital and labor resources here.
Some critics explain London’s high housing prices through the increase in large funds owning several buildings throughout the city, as well as wealthy foreigners purchasing second or third homes in luxury real estate only to leave them empty most of the year. How much do you think that impacts real estate prices compared to the reasons you have written about so far?
PS: The first premise of rising prices is demand. This demand is coming from talented people attracted by London’s life style and high value work opportunities. London is a potent creative industry hub which attracts talent from around the world. This should be very welcome. It implies a growing city with the need for a growing and improving housing stock. This construction needs to be financed and foreign investments should be very welcome as the required savings are not available locally. It should also be welcomed that the global elites are looking at London as their second or third home. This can only add to London’s attractiveness and business. Without government supply restrictions all this demand could be met profitable and the overall upgrading of the city and its economic thriving would be accelerated for the benefit of all. The fact that some apartments are sitting empty as investments banking on appreciation rather than being rented out is lamentable. However, I do not think this is a major factor, and further , I think it is itself a consequence of government restrictions. The high rate of appreciation that makes this pattern of investment viable is due to the imposed supply restrictions. Also, the well-intentioned but misguided laws protecting tenants contribute to the fact of empty flats, as well as discouraging investment in buy-to-let, thus further increasing rents. To summarize: I believe foreign investment funds of developers make a vital positive contribution to London housing supply. Foreign individual investments of buyers are admittedly competing for demand but even as part time users they should be welcome, as potential subletting landlords too. Holding empty flats as an investment is an anomaly that a proper market system would not generate. In any case I believe this factor is not quantitatively significant and cited by the left as ideologically convenient scape goat, as they are unwilling to see the problem where it really lies, namely in the political restrictions and distortions imposed on the housing market.
London, as well as other European capital cities, is commonly used in Brazil as an urban planning benchmark by academics and specialists. Some of the reasons include mixed use, low building heights, extensive underground public transportation, historical preservation and strong publicly-funded social housing policies. What would be your main criticism on the European urban model, with London as a main example?
P.S: London with its relentless growth is a paradigmatic exemplar of the urban concentration process in global hub cities. This new urban dynamic is not only a fascinating challenge and task for architects but first of all requires new degrees of freedom for urban entrepreneurs and their architects who need this freedom to experiment, discover and create the best ways to weave the new urban texture and to garner the potential synergies through new intricate programmatic juxtapositions. Only an unhampered market process can be such a discovery process and has the information processing capacity and agility to weave a viable complex urban order for this new dynamic societal context. That’s why planners need to get out of the way, not only for the sake of housing supply, but of course housing is important.
Besides general land-use and density restrictions, the imposition of restrictive housing standards is yet another counterproductive political impediment to housing prosperity. Urban entrepreneurs and their architects have no room for innovation at all in the housing sector. Planners impose land uses, overall quantum, and in the case of residential uses, they impose unit mixes, i.e. how many studio flats, 1 bedroom flats, 2 bedroom flats, 3bedroom flats etc. are to be built, how many units can be accessed via a lift lobby, they impose minimum unit sizes for each category, minimum room sizes for all rooms, as well as facilities like bathrooms, washing machines, balconies etc. The masterplan usually prescribes building heights and building outlines which need to be strictly adhered to. Facades are subject to restrictions in terms of the amount of permitted glazing areas, and the architectural articulation and material expression is also subject to planners’ approval. There is hardly anything left to be decided by the entrepreneur and his architect. Competition via creative product innovations is thus being blocked. Developers solely compete with respect to who is best at negotiating deals with the planning authorities who have considerable discretionary powers to strike deals. Insider knowledge about local planners and councilors delivers the key competitive edge here. Unfortunately in the current system it is in these ‘political’ negotiations where profits are made or lost, especially with respect to the negotiated imposition of affordable housing quotas. Resources are thus diverted into these negotiations which, in the parlance of public choice economics, must be classified as “rent-seeking” efforts. The beneficiaries are special interests protected or privileged by the politicians and their planners. However, the overall resulting misallocation of time, labour, land, and capital resources imposes a dead weight loss on total social production.
In the current market situation, the most problematic of these impositions are the restriction of the number of small units allowed per development, and the imposed minimum unit sizes, especially for the smallest units. Currently studio flats below 38sqm are not permitted. Yet, units half that size, built at an earlier time, are rare and thus at the moment overprized, hotly desired commodities, for rent or for sale. Lifting this prohibition would allow a whole new (lower) income group, which is now excluded, to enter the market. This move would both boost overall unit numbers and affordability. That this obvious move is not seen or indeed resisted by the very same left-leaning politicians and commentators who otherwise proclaim to represent the interests of lower income groups can perhaps either be put down to an ideological position where a world without state paternalism cannot be imagined other than as utter chaos, or it is part and parcel of the instinctual attempt to protect the (real or imagined) interests of the politically decisive median voter, to the exclusion of all other segments.
That the housing situation is a huge priority for many of us, is brought home by the fact that most of us are willing to pay a very large part of our total income on our homes, up to 80% in many cases of young professionals for whom centrality of location is vital.
This restrictive state interference, taking away many options that would otherwise allow the market to tailor and optimize our residential conditions in accordance with our individual life requirements and desires, is a huge deal, a real let down and existential impoverishment.
You have been regarded as controversial and received some criticism on your urban planning ideas by mainstream media and urban planning academia, with ideas such as architectural deregulation and developing parts of Hyde Park. Using this as an opportunity to clarify yourself, is there any significant misunderstanding by these critics? And why do you think you are seen as controversial?
PS: My critics think I want to scrap public spaces. Not quite, there is a nuance here: I am not talking about scrapping public spaces but about abolishing publically owned spaces. I insist on this distinction. Shopping malls and most of canary wharf are public spaces, privately owned, managed and maintained. Most museums in the US are privately owned, managed and maintained. They are spaces offered to the general public. I think all public spaces can be and should be privately owned, just like facebook, google+ and twitter are fantastic, life-enhancing free public communication spaces created by entrepreneurs. Public space is an entrepreneurial task! Let entrepreneurs experiment and discover versatile uses, let a thousand flowers bloom. The idea that all spaces must be all-inclusive and equally attractive to all is dreadful PC non-sense. Current publically owned public spaces are bland, sterile, one-fits-all spaces that cater for the lowest common denominator and have to avoid offending anybody’s taste or sensibilities. They are both overly restrictive and over-policed and overly licentious and under-policed, depending on the respective wishes of our diverse publics.
You have argued that parametricism as a “new global style for architecture and urban design”, and have written about “parametric urbanism”. Could you give an example of a potential practical application of parametric urban planning in contemporary cities? Is parametric urbanism a tool urban planners can use to design better cities? Or is it a new broader concept of urbanism?
PS: The starting premise of parametric urbanism is the unsatisfactory disarticulation, lack of identity and indeed visual chaos generated by recent, market-driven urbanization processes. The initial intuition of parametric urbanism was use the new ordering capatities of parametricism – like gradients, smooth transitions, adaptive morphing, rule-based correlations between subsystems like topography, path-network and urban fabric differentiation - as master-planning moves in the hands of politically empowered architects imposing the desired complex, variegated urban order from above. However, it became clear that any approach to urbanism had to work with rather against increasing entrepreneurial freedoms. My current concept therefore assumes increased entrepreneurial freedoms in the discovery of ways of urban life and increased creative freedoms for their architects’ spatial translation of these entrepreneurial ideas. How can this lead to more order? The market process is an evolutionary process that operates via mutation (trial and error), selection and reproduction. It is self-correcting, self-regulation, leading to a self-organized order. Thus we might presume that the land use allocation and thus the programmatic dimension of the urban and architectural order is to be determined by architecture’s private clients within a market process that allocates land resources to the most valued uses.
As a follow up: in a conversation with Peter Eisenman a few years ago you used the term “garbage spill urbanisation” to illustrate deregulated urban development. In the other hand, in recent interviews you have also promoted a less regulated real estate market. What are the main risks in deregulating urban development, and where do you stand today regarding urban regulations?
PS: In the absence of stylistic and methodological coherence we cannot expect the underlying programmatic order delivered by the unhampered market process to become legible as a spatio-morphological order. The result is the visual chaos I have called garbage spill urbanization. For order to visual order re-emerge – not as empty formalism but as articulation of the otherwise illegible market-based programmatic order - we must presume a hegemonic stylistic and methodological paradigm that has the versatility and ordering capacity to translate the social order into a legible, complex variegated spatial order. A shared paradigm offers the prospect of coherence across multiple authors working for multiple clients. No controlling hand needs to be presupposed. A path-dependent visual order and urban identity can emerge bottom-up if each individual design intervention articulates the locational synergies as formal affiliations via the new, versatile compositional resources of parametricism with an ethos of seeking out continuities and resonances. The necessary control is produced not via prescriptions but via collegial criticism and professional pride.
This new and admittedly ambitious concept of a parametric urbanism can draw and exploit the following a powerful analogy: The analogy of unplanned multi-author parametric urbanism with a multi-species ecology. Consider the way the various features and creatures within a natural environment coalesce to create a complex variegated order on the basis of rules - in turn based on the complex interaction of multiple laws of nature – that establish systematic correlations between the various organic and inorganic subsystems that make up a natural landscape. The topography correlates with the path of the river, the river together with topography and sun orientation differentiate the flora and the differentiation of the flora – together with river and topography - shape the differentiation and distribution of the fauna, which in turn impacts back on the fauna and thus often also on rivers and even the topography. While thus causality is complex and not easy to unravel, correlations and thus inference potentials are being established in all directions, and give information to those who want to navigate such a landscape. The key here is the build-up of correlations and associations (irrespective of the underlying causality). Each new species of plant or animal proliferates according to its own rules of adaptation and survival. For instance, the moss grows differentially on the terraced rock surface in certain shaded slopes, i.e. depending on surface pattern, sun orientation, self-shading rock formation etc. A population of a certain species of birds then might settle on these slopes accordingly etc. In the same way parametricism envisions the build-up of a densely layered urban environment via differentiated, rule-based architectural interventions, that are designed via scripts that form the new architectural sub-systems, just like a new species settles into a natural environment. This process delivers rich diversity, yet fully correlated, if designed according to the heuristics of parametricism. Each new architect/author can be uniquely creative in inventing and designing the rules/scripts of his/her project and participate in its own unique way in the build-up of a variegated, information-rich urban order. The analogy also extends to the navigation in rule-based environments: the urbanite’s intuitive orientation within a parametric urban environment functions analogous to animal cognition/navigation in a natural environment.
Your architectural practice is strong in promoting the use of technology in architecture and construction. However, to turn avant-garde architectural concepts into reality, many of your firms’ designs have higher building costs than average. How do you see technology being a factor in decreasing building costs, and what kind of projects are you involved in with that goal?
PS: First of all economy can never be reduced to cost only. We must always relate costs to benefits and the presumption here is that articulatory versatility and affiliative adaptiveness adds social functionality benefits, including legibility benefits. Having said this, I insist that on the cost side parametricism also technical functionality advantages in store that will eventually also show up as cost advantages. Parametricism is the only contemporary style that is fully congenial with the computationally empowered engineering advances of recent years. The optimization and fine grained adaptation of structural systems to load differentiations will lead to tonnage and cost reductions . Similarly, the nuanced adaptation of building form, perforations and shading elements to environmental parameters like sun exposure, wind and rain will lead to efficiencies in running costs and material savings in systems. The presumption here is that once the current investments in file to factory and robotic fabrication have been generalized the geometric complexity comes nearly for free while delivering material savings. Currently we are looking at modular prefabrication for housing construction in the co-living segment, and our idea is here to work with parametrically variable rather than rigidly serial modules or units.
What advice would you give young architects or urban enthusiasts that read this website? Are there any books or articles you would specifically recommend?
PS: For the architects and urban designers amongst your readers I recommend joining the grass hopper world and investing in scripting skills. For those who are theoretically inclined and wish to gain an empowering overview about their discipline and its historical tasks I would like to recommend my two-volume treatise ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’.