#6 Urban Economics
Article based on the Architectural Democracy's podcast interview with Petr Suska, Fri, Sep 08, 2023:
Petr's background is in urban economics. He focuses on looking at the value of public space, trying to quantify and build up arguments that would justify the expansion of public greenery and public transit.
Petr discusses projects related to the circular economy, construction waste, and climate change adaptation in various countries. The conversation then shifts to the importance of communication with clients and the challenges of implementing new technologies and urban planning concepts, like the 15-minute city. Petr emphasises the need for practical solutions and public support, citing examples of successful projects and failures like Stuttgart 21. The interview concludes with a discussion on the role of competitions in urban design and the potential of NEOM as a living lab for experimental urban planning.
Topics discussed and Petr's point of view:
Value of public space: quantifying the value of public space to justify expanding public greenery and transit.
Circular economy and climate change adaptation: projects related to construction waste and climate change adaptation, emphasising the need for practical solutions with tangible impact. He believes that climate adaptation interventions have more immediate impact than carbon offsetting.
Communication with clients and public support: the importance of clear communication and gaining public support for urban planning projects to ensure their long-term success and sustainability.
Challenges of implementing new technologies and urban planning concepts: challenges of integrating new technologies and concepts like the 15-minute city into existing urban frameworks, emphasising the need for practical solutions and public acceptance.
The role of data in urban planning: While acknowledging the potential of data-driven urban design, Petr also recognizes the challenges of accessing and integrating proprietary data, as well as the need for expertise to interpret it meaningfully.
The future of mobility and the decline of car dependency: Petr observes the declining trend of car ownership in the West and emphasises the need to focus on alternative, sustainable modes of transportation. He believes that rising car costs will further drive this shift.
Stuttgart 21 as a failure in public engagement and design: Petr critiques the Stuttgart 21 project as a failure in public participation and design, highlighting the importance of involving local communities in the planning process.
The potential of NEOM as a living lab for experimental urban planning: Petr sees NEOM as a unique opportunity to test new urban planning concepts at a large scale, acknowledging both the potential benefits and the uncertainties involved in such an experimental project.
The role of competitions in urban design: While acknowledging the potential benefits of competitions, Petr believes that a collaborative approach involving a shortlist of qualified firms can lead to better outcomes, emphasising the importance of consensus and shared goals.
Transcript:
Petr: We have projects in the realm of circular economy looking at construction waste, and how existing buildings can be turned into new structures. This is done with German construction companies, but also with regional and international development projects funded by the German Development Bank or the German Ministry for environment. We also look at for example landslides in Peru and floodings in India, extreme drought, Earth erosion, in Saltillo in Mexico and we come up with a bunch of different interventions. We have a heavy urban focus but we also bring in very specific technology, research, or technology innovation, from other institutes, be it solar power, future building materials or processes, new mobility systems...
Mark: So much of the narrative is about mitigation. Net Zero. The Biden administration is focused around a gigantic mitigation investment. Do you feel the narrative needs to be more practical? Are you in a position where you can affect the brief? Or how do you handle it when you're on the other side of the table?
Petr: when we went to India, Mexico and Peru, we didn't know specifically what area we will be focusing on, and we tried to work together and identify a challenge that we all agree to be significant, but we also felt that there could be some short term measures that would be able to alleviate the impact of further erosion or flooding. We would bring in specific technology that would help with that. The problem with mitigation, and I see that with a lot of companies is that everyone just offsets carbon. That's borderline greenwashing, we need to be doing a lot more. On the practical level, doing climate adaptation interventions, now, when the planet is a lot warmer, has a lot more impact than trading carbon, and it is an impact you can see, because if you're introducing infrastructure into cities, or if you're expanding parks, or if you're cooling down cities (eliminating heat islands), all of that are things that people can experience. And I think that's what drives me to do the projects that I do.
Aibeo: Do you feel that communication with clients is working out in your process?
Petr: I think so. I think communication is hugely important, I don't think it makes sense to come up with a digger and start digging up a pool, I think, there's a lot of explaining and getting kind of the buy in from people that are being affected by some of these, macro, mega climate changes on a daily basis, and I think our job is first to identify the problem, then just to explain how we think is the best way to tackle it, and then get the public support or participation behind that, to actually be able to have sustainable and long lasting impact. People actually own the things that we invent. It is very fragile, but oftentimes our role is to be at the interface between what the private sector is coming up with, with new technologies onto the market, and the public sector that isn't ready to accept everything, that is being sold to them and can't identify it, that actually helps them, become a better city. And I think the big problem of the original Smart City discussion was that companies were selling to cities, and cities were buying things that were locked or made no sense. It didn't bring any value. And so in Fraunhofer, our role, the role of our institute, was to filter this and establish a dialogue between what the private sector is coming up with, and helping them to design products and solutions that actually fit to what what particular cities are looking to, or the particular challenges that they're looking to tackle.
Mark: One of the things about the mobility space is that it brings along a lot of stakeholders. So what's your experience in its benefits and practicality?
Petr: To a massive extent our cities are determined by these legacies of how wide roads are and in which direction they go and how cities are built. And we all live in kind of old cities with a historic centre. And if you want to move from the outskirts of the city, you almost always have to go through the city centre. To me, and I'm gonna bring up neon here, I think it's quite an interesting idea, when you think, hey let's think about the most efficient mobility system and it is a line, it isn't a place where you have to go through massive hubs and change multiple times. Linear mobility is the most efficient and fastest, but there is a beauty in living in cities with mediaeval city centres, and I don't think we're gonna be ditching them any time soon. So we have to work around that. And those are the types of legacies that somehow we have to integrate into all of this new technology, be it on demand, delivery of goods things, predictive shopping, things that like storage, for example, Amazon is having a strategy to deliver everything to you within a 30 minutes span, and that's going to be just logistically, for most of our cities, an absolutely insane thing to manage. I mean, you go to New York, and cars aren't being parked double, but they're triple parked.
We had an interesting project with DHL, and they basically prepay their fines that they will get, for the entire year, because it's impossible not to double, triple park, or park in the middle of an intersection. And all of that is associated with delivering goods, and we'll see more of this, as our buildings aren't constructed to have storage for so many packages arriving, even the big buildings. It's just like the market is always one or two steps ahead of you. And the problem that we have, I think, in Europe, particularly, is that we're always kind of chasing the right solution to a problem that somehow is created externally. And I think the way to do this is to actually define the rules of the game better.
Japan is extremely regulated, their biggest innovation is actually deregulating particular districts to test new types of technologies and seeing how those of those can be used or leveraged to tackle.
Aibeo: Do you have any examples of recent challenges?
Petr: There's an interesting district in Kyoto that is kind of similar to what you guys are doing in Helsinki. Japan has the fastest ageing population on the planet and they were testing these kind of assisted vehicles that you could hop on them when you can't really walk too far, and seeing basically how you can use these these micro mobility solutions products to keep people outside having them being part of what's happening on the street, and I thought that was actually very democratic. And I think innovation in this direction is always welcome. And there's this Japanese industry OEMs companies that have this living lab and they're testing how to get older people or seniors outside into public space and how we can blend pedestrians and slow moving Micro Mobility vehicles.
Aibeo: you've been involved with the neon project, the big line project going on in Saudi Arabia. And then you just said now, being democratic is to bring people into the streets, meaning the public space. Like, as if the private space would not be democratic, but indeed that one is dictatorial. In a way, in a private space you're your own king. When you go to the public space, you have to involve other people. So you have to get along. And NEOM is trying to redefine, in a way, the public space with all the pros and cons that we see in that approach. So how is your perspective with this?
Petr: There's a saying, if you go to a truly democratic city or a democratic society, the public space is just as good as the interior of people's private homes. Now, if you've been to anywhere, less democratic, or regions that maybe don't have such a high level of democracy we perhaps used to in the West, you see that public space is completely neglected. Sidewalks are not existent. But you have extremely plush and luxury, private homes, and you have that massive contrast. And I think the smaller the contrast is, the more you can argue that that quality of public space actually is an indication of how vibrant local democracy is.
Aibeo: That's a great indicator, is this being used as an index?
Petr: I don't think so. But we could test it. It'd be fun. One of my first projects was in Tbilisi, and we came down with this sophisticated methodology of assessing their readiness to adapt to climate change. And there were sidewalks that were used as parking spaces, basically you walked on the main road, and I realised we need to really go way back and focus on the basics.
Aibeo: The Economist makes this yearly survey on the healthiness of democracies, and I don't think they have that as an index of measure, as a metric. And I just came from Nepal, and the public life, the streets, are disgraceful. One has to watch out for every step taken. And the people with some means take a big car, and the bigger the car, the more priority you have, you just push yourself through the traffic. But then, private life is very different. it's a really purposeful and very effective index that we could see being implemented.
Petr: going back to neon, I think, in particular the line, it doesn't exist anywhere else. So we don't really know what zero gravity urbanism actually is, and how we'll experience it. I think there's a genuine attempt to make sure that it is livable, but for me, the most exciting thing is that it is basically applied research. It is what we do on a massive scale, is it going to work? No one really knows. Are we comfortable moving up and down and left to right, rather than commuting horizontally? I don't know. We'll have to see. I think there are to some extent vertical cities already, Tokyo or New York, where you have a really high density of services and functions. But I think the attempt is somehow democratic in the sense that everyone gets the same view, pretty much. I mean, some people might be a lot lower. And on the line, and some might be really high up and might have better views. But if you're looking essentially the same thing, or everyone's gonna be looking at the same thing, which I think is an interesting kind of level. The whole point of that view is unique and exclusive. But when it comes to the public space, the designs that I've seen, kind of remind me of these hanging gardens of Babylon, that I hope will be accessible to everyone, but there might be, if the main tenants are Saudis, they're very conscious of the private space and inner courtyards and kind of closed off areas. And it might be the case that there's maybe more private space than public space. But I don't think that that's been decided yet. And I think it needs to be informed by what the users actually are willing to live in, because it's already pretty experimental. And I think there has to be an economic or business case, behind the line, otherwise it's not going to function.
Aibeo: Is it also the case in Saudi, at least it was so in Oman, in public facilities, like the library, that you also have an elevator for men and another one for women?
Petr: I don't know. Neon is very much different from the rest of Saudi Arabia. And so it's going to have its new constitution, new regional government, they're supposed to be a very different loss force also aimed at attracting westerners. So it is supposed to be kind of this relaxed region.
Mark: If you show up at Fraunhofer do they have an expectation, an ideology on the transit space? So for example you have a belief system on trams or you don't believe in trams or that, you have pre-conceptions that are with validity to them, and that's part of your offering, or you approach each engagement completely neutral?
Petr: So I think that this is a general theme to imagine what the future will look like in 10 years. And, see if we can draw a roadmap to it. Based on what we know, and we work a lot with technology, foresight, we call it technology radar. And we have a system of identifying kind of disruptive technologies, that are conducive to sustainable urban development, but it also is affected by the type of project that you work on the projects, where you test technology, and it might not be suitable for all cities, the volocopter, for example it is maybe only suitable for some regions, for some use cases. It might not make sense to kind of force it to be integrated in every single urban transit system. But then we could have projects with cities and they'd be asking us does it make sense to expand the trams here? What is the cost per mile versus buses for fuel cell buses? Or are there ways that we can redesign these intersections using data that will help us decrease the number of accidents so some of these questions are very practical. And so we will be looking at near MS data from car manufacturers from Mercedes, we work quite a lot with them. Amazing data troves from near misses spanning back 10 years so if you drive up you had a newer or better Mercedes 10 years ago, you were already producing tons of data on near misses, the environment and all that can be tapped into and help us design safer intersections. There's an interesting project with the TFL in London, testing exactly that, and they've redesigned intersections for better passage of cyclists and they're expanding that use case because it seems that they were able to use data and understand data to redesign particular parts of the city that make them safer for the cyclists, for example.
But I don't think we necessarily have a mantra, I think there's a push on individual transit to go electric. And I think that's being pushed by the OEMs. And, and I think we just kind of hopped on board, I think there was a big push to test and see if shared mobility is a theme. And I think we all realised that it just makes no money. So everyone's trying to ditch their shared mobility project. Maybe except for the scooters, the limes, and, and birds and whatnot, but I don't think they're actually making money with that. I think it's rather a PR exercise.
Aibeo: The dream of a parameterised city where you have the data for everything. it's there, right? You have, as you said, cars, creating data, even people with their phones, tracking and all their behaviours, but then comes the access to all that data to justify any kind of implementation. But you don't have such access!
Petr: Right. Well, because lots of the data are very proprietary, you need very specific and expensive expertise to be able to actually integrate data and work with them in a meaningful way. And by that, I mean, you can't make any decisions nowadays without data. But I think maybe just going back to our mantra, I think multimodal micro mobility, kind of 15 minutes cities, I think those are some of the, I would say, some of the main themes when it comes to mobility.
Mark: Do you have an ideological war against the car?
Petr: I don't think so. The peak car year in the West was in 2017. And ever since we've seen the drop in terms of sales of cars in the West, and drop in the number of people getting driver's licence. And those are the two main indicators that show us that the car is a thing that will play a role, but it's not going to be a central one in the way we move around our cities. And I think we rather, focus on ways, I wouldn't say we fight against the car, we look at ways to preserve a reasonable amount of driving at a reasonable speed. What are the externalities that are produced by Cars in cities? And how do we price them, I think it's still extremely cheap, to own a car in a city that takes up a lot of space, by parking it for 98% of the time, and not using other modes of transit that are available. And I think there are people that just will never quit driving, and that's fine. But I think I think we need to focus on other forms of mobility that will lead to us having cleaner, better cities. And I think that what will help us is the fact that it just the OEMs will not make cheap cars anymore. So what we're going to end up with is very expensive cars, because they have higher profit margins. An interesting example of this is VW which is pretty much all going to abandon the golf and the Golf was kind of the staple, it was kind of their main car, the main car that you'd buy in Germany, you kind of want it to blend in the profit margin on the golf is 900 euros, more or less. The development cost is the same as for the Porsche 911. And it's kind of the same reason why I mentioned that is that it's the same company producing these two cars. The profit margin on the 911 is 18,000. And you don't just sell as many of them and so logically, you just go for the higher profit margin and sell fewer luxury cars. And when you look at missions and the cost, the cost of materials that are going into producing cars just makes no sense to make small cars. And so ultimately, we're going to be facing a situation when we'll have to move masses and the middle class because they're not going to have cars, and I think it actually is going to be a challenge, because we will have to accommodate their mobility needs and help them shift their behaviour from being used to having one to three cars, to relying on what the city provides.
In Stuttgart, public transit, they've integrated these mini events. And what is interesting is that you have virtual stops, so they stop where the demand is, and you pick up people along the way, and you kind of share the ride. And it's become really popular, particularly during COVID When people were afraid of these big buses. And we all know that public ridership is still 10-15% In some cities, even lower than 20% in New York. I think it's 40% to pre COVID, public transit ridership. But well, we've seen an increase in individual kinds of non motorised transit or bicycles, different types of micro mobility vehicles. And I think this is an opportunity for us to push for more different modes of sustainable mobility into our cities, and reduce our dependence on cars.
Mark: If you get around in Palestine, or Pakistan, an awful lot of it is as you describe: pick up minivans that stop when there's a group, a small fee, and it's not on a published schedule. It's not organised in a conventional way. You can't see it on the web, but it's highly organised in a practical way. Do we have something to learn from them?
Petr: I think so. There's the dabbawala delivery system. I'm sure you guys are familiar with this in India. And it's completely non computerised. I think they have the SEMA six certification for being one of the most efficient delivery systems. And there's, it's human driven. There's nothing else behind it. And I think the same goes for me. I remember taking a taxi in Morocco, and from the airport, and we ended up picking up a woman with two chickens. You meet people that you wouldn't have met otherwise, you have new interactions. So I think there is a lot to learn from these agents. I don't think everything has to come from Europe or North America or wherever.
Mark: Let's come back to the 15 Minute city for a second because in Finland, everything is basically a 15 minute city. But let's just say in larger countries, it's a promising concept with enormous potential benefits. But at the same token, you see this pushback. The Americans believe it's overly politicised and top down, businesses have concerns about the impact on their trading areas, the transportation impact, etc, etc. And it's not clear that there's a consensus around the 15 Minute city. So coming back to your work in terms of stakeholder engagement and management. How do you deal with that kind of a thing? You say you're facing a client who wants to do this but doesn't have that coalition? What would you do?
Petr: It's tough because, in particular, the US had the auto pact, from the 50s. We've committed to building strip malls and having suburban areas and designing our entire mobility ecosystem around the car. When that goes away, who's going to live in these places? We see Macy's for example, or Sears in massive trouble. All because people are in the kind of shopping mall culture that is evaporating. People want to live in areas that are walkable and that are diverse, that aren't kind of closed off or homogenous that aren't kind of separate from what's happening in the city. And I think it's going to be a challenge. What is going to happen with some of these massive shopping mall areas, that used to be kind of the economic power for a long time? So you have de-urbanisation, re urbanisation kind of people tend to flow back and forth. Apparently, according to the latest studies, millennials are now flocking into the suburbs again, and we're seeing some of the high streets. And again, I think that was accelerated by COVID, being kind of emptier again, and we're looking for new functions for our high streets. But how do you explain a 15 minute city, to someone who has two cars and lives in a suburban Michigan? I don't know. I think it's tough. I think it's tough because it ultimately means that you have to completely change. I think there should be space for everyone to live the way they want to, but they shouldn't be living at a cost to our society. And I think that's happening right now. Unless we find a way to price all these externalities that are being caused by car dependent systems society, we're always going to have a clash between people that prefer the city to the people that prefer the outskirts. I'm not a big fan of forcing anyone to live in a particular way or social engineering these things, but I think you have to experience a 15 minute city, I think it really is worth going to a city centre that is walkable, that has greenery that has cafes, that maybe gets you to think or doubt the way you've lived so far being dependent on
Aibeo: The 15 minute city reminds me of Kathmandu. Just came back from there. I was surprised that there are no shopping malls. It's all small shops everywhere. And if you walk around, if you go to the street, it's full of shops, everywhere, everything, all kinds of stuff from construction hardware just beside an optician, restaurant, etc. And we on this side of the world are not used to that anymore. It's like you have to know the person or the local dealership and walk around in that area. So that's the 15 Minute city there, right. But it's not really pleasant to walk around there. It's a bit challenging also to find the things. So it's as if they skipped this process of scaling up the city. And now we are redefining that, because historically, politically or whatever, culturally, but they probably are now in the better direction. They could use that opportunity.
Petr: I think we forget what our cities in Europe used to look like 20 years ago. Vienna 20 years ago was awful. So was Copenhagen. We've seen this this kind of results of slow, methodical systematic work on getting people to other modes of transit, getting cars out of cities, or reintroducing diverse retail, into our urban areas that basically gets people to want to move and live back to to the city centre having more blue infrastructure opening up rivers that we've caught we feel cemented over.
Aibeo: What is blue infrastructure?
Petr: Water rivers, ponds... The kind of things that bring different aspects of livability to cities. So I think we can learn in our own backyard how to transition to a 15 minute city, and that is less car dependent, but I think the fewer cars there will be inevitably, because they're just going to be too expensive. Eventually, more will be pushed to have denser urban areas that are ultimately within the 15 minute walking range, I think it's inevitable because it's just not going to be possible for everyone to own a car.
Mark: But it sounds like that for your work on the 15 minutes City, that is a central organising concept. Which has different levels of acceptance in different markets. So what is the process you're facing with a city administration, and there's a, let's say, loose coalition that's interested in this politically, but others don't understand this concept at all. How can you connect these and make the bottom up connect with the top down?
Petr: Stuttgart is the headquarters of Porsche and Daimler. And it was bombed by the allied forces. And so it was a huge opportunity to rebuild it in the 50s, and the 60s. Those big, boom years of the car industry, they've put two massive highways to get people really quickly through the city and their cars. And so, right now, you have that legacy, and you're trying to live with it, or rather transform it. And the way we've done that was with a proof of concept and, or, in a very scientific way that your concept works, hosing off the road, introducing some greenery there.
There's projects in Berlin where they've done that, where they had kind of outdoor seating for people, restaurants, play areas, only bicycles and or bikers and bicycles and cyclists and pedestrians were allowed in, and it completely transformed the city. And of course, there were people that were complaining about the multiplier effect of closing that main road and, there being actually congestion traffic jams on the adjacent roads, but it showed that you can kind of bring a completely new life and vibrancy and atmosphere to the central part of a city. That road, which was a pilot, stayed closed, it is closed forever, and it will stay that way. And we've seen that in the pandemic, lots of cities were testing these ideas. And they were saying it's temporary. The bike lane on Times Square, that was supposed to be temporary, once you have a critical mass that's using this once you have the kind of the social demand for that, and you build it from that pilot, you can grow to a much larger scale.
Mark: So what you're describing is akin to Aryan philosophy, not Freudian, right? It's like, let's put this out there and see what it takes. Do the dogs eat this dog food? If they do, let's get more dog food like it? It's a conditioned response thing, not about persuasion.
Petr: I think we know we've tried to argue with reports and studies and surveys and what not. Ultimately, lots of these decisions are political. And I think if you can show and this is such an advantage when you're coming from a research perspective, particularly applied research perspective. You can say look, let's test it. It's a lab. Let's have a living lab. Let's see what and how it works. Let's evaluate The data before, during and after, let's see what the impact was. Let's monitor demand all as a quantitative and qualitative assessment and see if it makes sense to scale this up.
Aibeo: Can one measure the level of acceptance?
Petr: What basically happened was that the locals, the people that lived on the street locally, formed a kind of interest group to preserve that. And then suddenly, they have a political voice. And they go to their representatives and say we want to keep it this way. And that, and so I think that's what I was talking about creating social demand for these interventions is that once they are there, and once they are socially accepted and supported, and the local communities are organised around these kinds of physical interventions, it's very difficult to get rid of them.
Aibeo: So more like an active participant.
Petr: It is a sneaky way to maybe do it. But I think it's a very efficient way. Because I do believe that we should be testing things in the public realm a lot more. And when you were talking about how we don't know how to relate to our cities, just when everything is just cars and intersections and traffic light signals, and everything looks the same, we just kind of switch off, and so your brain, 80% of computational power is automated. So you're consciously making about 20%. And so I think that has an impact on the way we relate to public space as well, we just accept the fact that we live in a shitty public space. But I think once you've changed things that your brain isn't used to seeing on a daily basis, once you have a new tree, a new bench, a pond, or once you remove these cars from the street, it makes you aware that there is more.
Mark: as someone who has been living here in Helsinki since 2015. One thing I noticed right away is that the public sphere is a desirable, acceptable public space in which you are going to meet your fellow citizens. So in this culture, people dress up to go out. In other cultures, people go out looking like slobs, because the public sphere doesn't matter. Here, you're actually going with some charitable intention, greeting the person at the supermarket or the post office, there's some form of engagement. Let me ask you on another topic here relating to this. One of the strategies that cities will use to develop ideas with a brief, is a contest, a competition of some kind, what is your professional view about the role of competitions? Do you think they're overused? What do you feel about them?
Petr: I think competitions can improve the overall quality of the final design. But I think the way we approach it is that we'd normally have a kind of a short list of companies that we think are really good, and we'd try to get them on board. And even get them to collaborate if we're trying to get it because the ultimate Holy Grail is somehow a coded, co designed, co created space that we all agree on. I think competitions make sense but I also think that sometimes they're overrated in the sense that we really just rely on who is the best. What are the criteria or the parameters of the best design? Is it the one that has, I don't know, the most trees or the one that has the most windows? The investment into public theatre or park or something. But I think agreeing on getting kind of the majority to agree and I'm on the way we'd like to live is a lot more important than maybe what it looks like.
Mark: if I could channel your BF Skinner mode, from what you were saying before, I could see that you would say what you're saying, Peter, which is that you could argue forever about the mythical best design, or you could do something and cause a reaction and then build on that reaction. And that seems to be where you're coming from. Right?
Petr: Well, what I wanted to add to that is, we work a lot with artists, we have a collaboration with the ZKM, the Centre for art and media, in Karlsruhe.I think it's the number two most visited gallery of modern art museum in the world, after the MoMA in New York. I think if you have these temporary exhibitions or art interventions that are drawing your attention to a particular topic, that also seems to have a dialogue sparking effect. And we've been kind of toying with this. And how can we? How can we work more with artists to open a discussion about a very ugly underpass? And so that's maybe from our experience, one of the things that seems to work is that people tend to be more tolerant towards.
Mark: well, Pedro has a lot of experiences with that sort of gamification aspect....
Aibeo: if you're going to do some alteration in the city, you should do that as a membrane. And the membrane should include some kind of an artistic space that you provide to the citizens, local citizens, like they can discover what's going to happen in that new site or new area. But I was just now wondering about Stuttgart 21. Most people don't know exactly what happened, please summarise.
Petr: Yes, lots of people, I think it's a failed exercise on how not to do urban participation. It's one of the largest public infrastructure projects in Germany, together with the Berlin Airport. Funny enough. And it was supposed to be finished in 2021. It's 2023, and I don't think it's going to be finished next year. But the way that project was created, the way it was imposed, the way that it is designed, the way the construction, was just an anecdote. You have to walk for a good 15 minutes from the main square, weaving your way through a construction site being closed off, and basically a box that's being up basically, by the time you get to the end of the platform, you're kind of parboiled. Ultimately, the biggest failure was that no one asked the city nor the investors, they failed to ask at the right time and engage with the local community at the right time.
Aibeo: You would see this as mobility?
Petr: We still have protests today, every Saturday against Stuttgart 21. And it's because it's just such a failure in participation, but I think it's a failure in Design, because, because it's, basically a massive underground structure that doesn't allow for any new technologies really to be operated in there. It is a huge hub. It doesn't really integrate too. It doesn't really integrate other forms of mobility. I think it's a statement really, of how not to do any In public transit development at all, I think it's a great study in how to fail successfully.
Mark: Well, that's a good note. Well, Peter, this has been a terrific hour. We look forward to a further debate on the traditional circular design of cities versus the linear design, which is the big experiment. And your characterization of neon as a frontier, living lab, in its own way, albeit a very pushed out living lab, that will be an interesting point to come back to and future discussions.
Petr: I think it's the largest living lab that I've ever worked on. To be quite honest, I don't think there's a larger one. The scale is just enormous. And I think even if 2% of the line happens, it will still be a massive achievement, I think, because of all the constraints and challenges that you have. And I think lots of it will be due to technology and modular and some of the work that Mark was working on looking at new ways of constructing these things, because it's not just about having the line, it's about how do we get there, to having it successfully. And I think we talked with Roger Nicholson, and others, to see how you can kind of simplify all these modules that are going to be going into it and, and I think that it could be an interesting blueprint for the way we build cities.
So again, it's a great way to test the things that we think might help us build faster, more efficient, more sustainable. And I don't know what the urbanisation rate for Helsinki is but it is my understanding that there's gonna be quite a lot of development happening. And then I think Helsinki is expecting to have 10s of 1000s of new people, this pressure is very similar in most cities and the West needs to find new ways to urbanise and build, hopefully an aesthetically pleasing architecture that will house these new masses, hopefully as 15 minutes cities.
Pedro Aibéo & Mark Linder, 2024
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