On February 22, 2013 the Architectural League will present “The City That Never Was,” a symposium that uses the crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future forms of urbanization. Gregory Wessner, the League’s Special Projects Director, sat down with symposium co-organizers Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa to talk about their research and why architects and planners need to rethink urban design for the 21st century.
Gregory Wessner: Let’s start by talking about the title of the symposium, “The City That Never Was,” because I think that will give you a chance to explain the larger focus of research that the two of you have been doing.
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What the title of the symposium suggests is the need to fundamentally reject the idea that 21st century urbanization is somehow a transportable, reproducible, standardized product.
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In “The City That Never Was,” everything was predicated upon expectations of endless growth. Reality says otherwise.
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If you’re a young designer or you’re a small practice and you have the opportunity to build at the scale we are talking about, the likelihood that you’re going to turn it down is slim to none.
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At a point in 2005 almost 20 percent of Spain’s GDP was tied to the construction industry–which meant that when that all disappeared, millions of people lost their jobs.
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The problem is that with the crash, the influx of private developers stopped: cities, towns, and villages all over Spain found themselves with huge amounts of unoccupied urban infrastructure.
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The situation in Spain was delirious in every way. In terms of the physical outcome, but in some ways also the rationale that drove the kind of decision-making process.
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This conversation took place on October 15, 2012.
All images courtesy of Google Earth.
http://archleague.org/2012/10/delirious-development/
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