Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
So why cats?
I love cats. Millions of people love cats.
Particularly, if you see a cat like this, having a total comfort.
It is the comfort issue that I am interested in.
As an architect, I design houses for people to make them feel comfortable.
So I decided to observe cats
and see whether I can learn something more about comfort.
I started to look at them,
at how they move around the space, how they inhabit the home.
What I realized was that cats never pass the open space in the middle.
For example, if we have a door opening, a cat would never go through the middle,
it would always go like this, sticking to one side.
For example, if we have an intruder in the cat's private space,
like a guest in the kitchen,
it approaches the intruder closely sticking to the wall,
dragging its tail along the wall just to make sure everything is fine,
the house is still there, and everything is under control.
In cases when cats lack the spacial security, they run.
For example, you hardly can see a cat that walks across the street slowly,
it is usually running or is in a bit of a hurry at least.
So I started thinking about humans, about people:
how do we move around the city
and what can we do to make the city more comfortable?
So I was standing there on the street and observed people,
and I realized that we are just like cats.
We use the street as a transit zone for getting from one point to another,
from one comfort zone, home, to another comfort zone - work.
This makes me ask,
"When was the last time when you stopped on the street?"
Or to be more specific,
"When was the last time when you stopped on the street voluntarily?"
Here is one example when we stop on the street:
it's a traffic light.
So I started to search for others, and one obvious example is a park,
this is where people use to hang out.
I extruded three crucial elements
that make people stop and enjoy themselves.
One is nature - you can see the couple mingling in the background,
you would never see that happen on a pavement, for example.
The other one is infrastructure, the bench,
it is much easier to feel comfortable when you are seated.
And the other one is friends -
you hardly see people hanging out in public space when they are alone.
So you need friends or at least a replacement of a friend,
for example, a book, or a dog, or a smartphone.
If we have a chance to observe people, that is a bonus for this place
because, you know, it's just like TV,
you like to watch other people being uncomfortable.
So I started to wonder whether we can make the street
- thinking also about the city as a whole -
a destination rather than a transit zone.
So I took the three crucial elements
- friends, infrastructure, benches, we found some nature on the street -
and driven by this pure curiosity,
we tried to make ourselves comfortable on the street.
We did some things we usually do when we are comfortable
- we set up a barbecue, we had some wine -
but, you know, it felt a bit awkward to do that on the street,
and then we sort of realized that our heads are full of taboos
about what to do and what not to do in a public space.
No pointing with your finger at people,
- "It's impolite," is what your mom teaches you when you're little -
no starring at people, no food
- if you drop something on the ground, forget about eating it again,
it's a street, it's a dirty place -
no alcohol.
If you want to have a meeting, gather larger groups of people,
you have to have a permission from the city council.
So how can we possibly feel comfortable in this situation?
Another question is, "Is there enough space in the city?"
When we sit on a sidewalk, we disturb some pedestrians,
so I started to wonder whether there is a space.
The winter came, I was still thinking about it,
and I noticed these snowdrifts on the sidewalks,
and I started to wonder why this space is used as a storage for half a year
when it could be used otherwise;
it is an expensive space in the city center.
Another thing about snow
is that it really is a privilege to be an urban designer in the north
because we don't need complicated devices, complicated tracking technology
to see how people move around in the city.
All we have to do is to take a look at the ground
and see the marks that are left by people, by different users of the city.
For example, here the cars leave a very clear mark
of what teritory they use;
the pedestrians leave very clear marks what the space is that they are using.
And the orange line shows the physical space,
the side of the pavement.
So this sort of shows
that we are living in two parallel realities.
One is the built environment that we use,
and the other one is how we actually use the city space,
so this obviously tells me
that there is something wrong with the design in our cities.
If we project the winter situation back on the summer situation,
this is what we get:
the blue field indicates the space
that we can reclaim from car infrastructures
without bothering car infrastructures.
So we have actually plenty of space
for bike lanes, for greenery, for infrastructure,
for all kinds of things to happen in dense city conditions,
it's just the matter of how we organize it.
We have to look carefully at it and see what it tells us.
And the more we zoom out, the scarier it gets
from intersections scale
to a larger city scale to a regional scale.
Here is one space which I wonder why we never question
why it is the way it is and how it did get here.
Here we see how this space could be used,
not particularly because we are fans of tennis,
but to show just the size of the space that is misused.
You notice the green strip in the middle of the road?
That is the philosophy behind a simple countryside road
that I am fascinated about.
It is that we should take and use only as much as we need
and leave the rest for nature,
or in the case of a city, for people.
OK, so we got some ideas, we got some thoughts
how we should treat our city, so how do we do that?
A quite typical tool for it is urban planning,
so when you hear 'urban planning',
what is the first image that pops up in your head?
It is probably something like this.
When I was trying to search for comfort in the city,
I asked myself,
"What does my feeling of comfort has to do with this kind of image?"
Images like these [predominate] the media space
when we talk about the future of our cities.
So if you really want to talk about the future of our cities,
you have to start doing it from the street level
because that is where the people are, that is where our final clients are,
the ones who will be using that space.
We should do it not only in a form of exhibition
where there is a static proposal and a viewer,
but it's very important to talk to people, to explain the ideas,
to understand problems in detail that are there on the ground.
Because if we build the environment around human needs,
instead of building an environment and then placing humans there to live,
it's more likely that it will last longer, it will be sustainable,
it will be used by people.
So we started to experiment with forms of communication,
how we could do this.
This is an architecture office that we set up in our street,
and we just asked people to come and listened to their stories,
and tried to understand their perception of the city.
We even put out a house, designed specially for [people to gather]
- designers, architects, politicians, decision makers -
to sort of point out that there is something wrong with the city,
that we have to think about it more
and make it happen on higher levels where decisions are made.
So we are not cats in space, we are humans in space,
and we believe that it is possible to feel [comfortable] in the cities,
and to make it a place where to grow
rather than to stop for a second to earn money
and then escape back to the suburbs or the countryside.
So finally, why are we doing this?
Why provoke, why try to mingle?
Why bother talking to strangers?
I happened to study in this one architecture school,
and there was this professor who said,
"There are three things
that you have to do in order to pass my course.
The first one is to attend my lectures, obviously.
The second one is
don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
And the third one is to attend [the schoolbar on Thursdays];
that is the place where you will learn most."
So that is the power of diversity for me.
Thank you.
(Applause)