Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was.
Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His argument is that the way the built environment carved itself into separate professions last century has left none of them able to do the actual job. Transforming a place means understanding law, media, budgets, referenda and human psychology, and no architecture school teaches any of it.
We get into what urban regeneration should and should not be, why both neighbours in an argument about one parking space have a legitimate case, how the Commit to Green project is bringing blue-green infrastructure back into a contaminated former landfill in Milan and a landslide-prone site on the edge of Barcelona, and why the recovery of Ukrainian cities cannot wait for a perfect moment that may never arrive.
Haris also talks about the two cities that raised him. Sarajevo, which lost almost everything when the Cold War ended, and Berlin, which gained almost everything. He explains why the "smart city" buzzword is more useful than its critics allow, why architectural competitions bin most of the knowledge they generate, and why the single-name genius architect is a marketing fiction worth retiring. Plus central midfield as a theory of project management, moustaches as a theory of fashion cycles, and a childhood memory from a refugee camp that he still describes as beautiful.
Chapters:0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro and The Urban Forum
4:23 Drees & Sommer & a little bit of Zurich history
9:44 The fallacy of 20th century hyperspecialization
14:37 Growing up in Sarajevo shaped Haris' drive
18:48 Urban Regeneration: what it should and shouldn't be
25:56 Geopolitics, stakeholders and scaling up urban regeneration
35:10 Baukultur, Inclusivity and the Blue-Green Infrastructure
43:15 Co-op-e-tition and horizontalizing authorship
49:54 AI and the Smart Cities Movement
54:59 A collage of Haris' project work and "bridges”
1:06:23 Heading in the right direction?
1:08:34 What excites Haris about the future?
1:10:40 Q&A Start
1:10:50 What does innovation mean to you?
1:12:45 Key Moment, Book, Person
1:17:08 Time Management
1:20:52 Favourite childhood memory
1:24:31 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:28:17 Where can people find you?
1:29:54 Final Message
1:31:33 Outro
Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
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