KOOZ The title of your book is inspired by Italian American economist Mariana Mazzucato, who argues for why and how the state must take a leading role in solving societal challenges, opening up a series of urgent political and systemic questions. Could you start by expanding on this reference and how it has informed your approach?

CHRISTIAN PAGH There are several aspects actually in terms of inspiration from Mazzucato. One being her diagnosis that systemic flaws in the economy must be addressed from a public perspective. Something is wrong, in the sense that the economic frameworks of today do not help to create a sustainable societal or urban development. There's something that's systemically dysfunctional. The more optimistic aspect — which we really appreciate — is that her book is a call for action. Yes, we can actually create a public sector that's more creative, more innovative, and that enables private actors to become better agents for the society we want, a society that´s more socially fair, sustainably etcetera. So, there’s a twofold thing: noting that there's something to be fixed and calling for an optimistic and progressive role of the public sector. Our book, and this allusion to the mission, is a call for thinking and taking action with our public institutions — not seeing them as bureaucratic and boring, and all these things that we often say about the public sector – and beyond. We must all come together to make it better. And we can!

KOOZ This brings to mind the renowned quote and position of Amitav Ghosh, who says that our crisis today is a crisis of the imagination; it’s important to rediscover the imagination and creative thinking, not only in terms of individuals but also in terms of systems.

CP Indeed, that's really at the heart of what we're trying to do; it's about remembering that we're capable of all kinds of fantastic things: humankind can achieve so much. We seem to have forgotten that we can create great solutions, institutions of solidarity and beautiful, fair cities. Why are we forgetting it? And how do we remedy it? Those are the questions, amongst others, that we ask in the book.

KOOZ The book begins with the Nordic countries, but then it expands to other geographies, bringing together a multitude of case studies and voices which feed into the six sections of the publication. How do these sections frame the different actors and ingredients necessary to rewire our neighbourhoods as more diverse, generous and sustainable entities?

CP The fact is that the neighbourhood — as a horizon and scale for human existence — is nobody's “core business”, right? Nobody is in charge of the neighbourhood. We can see that some departments manage the streets or maintain hospitals or schools; there are institutions that are responsible for these things. The neighbourhood is not the object of public governance, as are many other parts of society.

That is why the book looks at different dimensions of the neighbourhood and the urban realm: social infrastructure, mobility, the management of nature and urban governance – these different domains should be much more aware of the potentials of the neighbourhood scale — this is all too often forgotten, making so many urban interventions lost opportunities for neighbourhood quality.

Good architects, developers and planners intuitively work with the neighbourhood context. They think about how what they built relates to the neighbourhood needs and gives something to the context. Sadly, however, far too many buildings are just put up without any care for anything but the function itself. Maybe 80% of what we build is basically self-absorbed: whether it's housing, offices, institutions or other functions, they generally focus on their own interests. It's like a party full of egotistical, self-absorbed people — and of course, that turns out to be a pretty bad party. So, we have to make the party better, by asking everybody – in this case buildings and organisations – to be more polite, kind and generous to their surroundings, to the neighbourhood, and for the benefit of the public.

KOOZ Throughout the book, there is an argument for less sectorial let's say compartmentalisation, but rather, for a greater engagement across and between these distinct sectors. How much does Mission Neighbourhood advocate for a cross pollination across the different sectors?

CP That is the main argument: we need more cross pollination. It's kind of an old, tired horse; I have probably heard this mantra for thirty years. But it's as true as ever. Take for example the people and organisations that work with mobility and roads, they tend to have a very hard time thinking about what's outside the road. Mobility is an obvious domain, where there is way too little understanding of how mobility and urban quality relates to one another. And this really fucks up many cities.

One of the main ambitions of the book is to remind all the actors in the urban realm that we are part of a system or an ecosystem that is both more complex, and richer than just the individual project. We argue that the neighbourhood scale offers a reasonable scale of complexity. It is an intuitive and meaningful horizon to work with. We argue that we must develop the language and practical capabilities for cross pollination across sectors. For example, we can really develop a lot of urban quality if we consider mobility, urban planning, climate protections, biodiversity and neighbourhood quality together. Often, they are handled by five different departments. We have several great examples of things like this in the book.

KOOZ The book argues that one way to formulate meaningful neighbourhoods is to reframe urban planning as a process of strategic design or innovation. How does this entail looking at planning and urban design as more than just architectural design, employing a wider understanding of the interactions and systems which govern and constitute an urban environment?

CP I appreciate that question! At the heart of what we're saying is that the way we produce our cities today is very technocratic — and also for good reasons, in some ways, right? We do need engineers, economists and bureaucrats; we need a lot of specific competencies in the sector of building.But what we often seem to forget, though, is the human aspect of how things feel, how we experience our world and how we connect with other people in our urban environments. We lack an interest in human interaction and too often fail to be creative with the social dimension of human life, which is really essential. We must take an interest in the everyday life of people and other living creatures; and respond to this with more empathy, sound judgement and creativity.

KOOZ Let’s say, a more holistic approach and vision which understands the building not as an isolated artefact but rather as part of an expanded network.

CP In a sense, it’s important to both zoom out and be more holistic, also to zoom in and be creative with actual projects, and to explore new concepts: what about the good old dream of putting the elderly care centre on top of the kindergarten? Can this actually work, and how could we make it real? It might not be an architectural project at the beginning; it could also be a business model or a way of working together; it could entail other types of design, to ensure an usual programme or a new management model to make it work.

KOOZ The production of the built environment has been left in the hands of the capital interests, chance and outdated forms of public planning. In her contribution, Martha Thorne talks about the “carrot and stick” as one possible modality for the public and private sectors to come together. To what extent is the creation of a more diverse, generous and sustainable city bound up with the designing of the legal and economic systems which connect the public to the private?

CP I think that the carrot and the stick metaphor that Martha puts forward is quite good. We need to work on the systems design, on making it easier and more relevant for urban actors to do good, to contribute to urban quality and social and environmental sustainability. We need to incentivise that by using the carrot — literally rewarding good projects — be it by reduced taxes, quicker approval of projects or more density on the plot. Similarly, we must punish the actors who keep repeatedly doing shit projects. It's not easy to change these processes, but it's super-urgent that we embark on that endeavour: rewiring public governance models. We must look at both the building law and the wider urban governance structures, and the whole train of bureaucratic procedures.

KOOZ There's quite a hands-on example of this in the publication, which I believe is called Startblokka. Could you share a few words on that, as a featured case study?

CP The Startblokka project is part of a transformation area on the edge of Oslo and represents an interesting public-private collaboration. Here, a private developer and the local authorities have collaborated on creating a social innovation hub that hosts smaller companies and associations and provides local community access. These actors come together in this old factory building that has been put at their disposal for a low cost. Startblokka has become a place where people meet each other in an area with many meeting places and thus helps develop a new social infrastructure. That investment, from the developer, from the city and the community, both builds local capacity and contributes to place quality which is essential for good neighbourhoods.

The problem is that the public sector has no established mechanism to reward this approach to urban development; investments in social infrastructure are not acknowledged today in Norway, and they should be! And I think we should expect much more than just living up to building regulations when we engage in urban planning: we need to build local connectivity, as the Startblokka project does.Unfortunately we don’t know whether the social hub of Startblokka remains when they start the full transformation of the area.I think they're working seriously on making it permanent, but way too often, projects like this tend to last just a few years before the ’real’ building starts taking place, right? We need to work on developing initiatives like this at scale, and strengthen the conditions for them to last over time.

I‘d like to mention another project, in Malmö, which is called Noisy Neighbours, from the book. Local actors and the think tank, CSAM, have made a really rich analysis of the industrial area Sofielund in Malmö. They found that many of the organisations, companies and activities there depended on being noisy. Based on this, they proposed a simple change to the building law in terms of sound for the future development. Now they have regulated the area with a higher sound level, making it impossible to build housing there. This protects the area from typical gentrification, allowing it to remain a productive neighbourhood. Just by changing one number in the building code, they managed to change the whole game for development in the area!

KOOZ It's interesting to have landed on these two case studies: the last one could clearly be described as bottom-up whilst the first one is rather top-down. At the end of the day, whether operating at the scale of the neighbourhood or the scale of the city, these urban metropolises need to cater to and be driven by both these kinds of initiatives.

CP Yes, we need both! We do need to look at how we rewire to those dynamics: it's not that top down is bad, we also need top down. But most of all we need to make more and better connections — also horizontally, where we can connect the world of planning, architecture and building with other domains. What if the school department and the tax department and the elderly centre came together? How can we connect spaces, competencies, and resources in this neighbourhood? I would highlight the need for horizontal cross-pollination and innovation, notably within the public sector, but also beyond.

KOOZ How much do policies count? How much does the definition of new policies and legislation enable or foster this diversity of imagination and creativity and collaborations?

CP Policy is, of course, super-important. In one way — and this is maybe a bit naive — I would hope that politics could be considered as more of a creative endeavour. The language of politics makes it seem like this kind of competition; everything is looked at as positioning and power games and so on. But I think we should look at politics as this imaginary — it’s a lot to do with potential, right? It's about the things that we can dream about and that we can enable.

Of course, politics is also quite technocratic and interest-driven. As soon as you get into the reality of it, it can be hard to remain super enthusiastic and dreamy. But still, it is also a creative task. If you look specifically at urban bureaucracy and building code, you are really at the heart of how our cities are produced. Our cities are formed by money and law. I think we need to rewire the understanding of law in planning. At least here in Norway, it's a very rigid interpretation: it’s too often “whatever it says on page 75” and that’s it. Of course, we need to have laws, but I think we also need to reintroduce the role of professional judgement and rethink our decision-making regimes.

This is discussed in one of the last contributions to the book — a really thought-provoking article by Morten S. Thaning, a philosopher. He argues that we must look at our decision-making structures and how the formalistic nature of modern public management is really quite dysfunctional in many contexts, including urban planning and architecture. He argues that we need to understand how we can enable professionals to form intersubjective communities that can inform decision making, beyond just following a formal rule. This is one dimension of how politics and bureaucracy can and should be reconsidered – and eventually even designed?

Christian Bason, former head of the Danish Design Centre has worked extensively on innovation in the public sector, using design thinking as an instrument for policy development and for systemic change. His argument is that design methods and tools can enable both professionals and citizens to be a part of forming new, more responsive solutions. We need better policies to enable better design, but design methods can also improve policy-making and governance.

KOOZ Going back to the title, Mission Neighbourhood: (Re)forming Communities, it would seem to have at least two dimensions: first, a discussion of the systems of this type of space, and secondly as a call-to-action for the unleashing of its creative potential. Where do you see this mission going in the coming months, and what are your next steps?

CP For sure it's a long mission and probably slightly utopian. We hope to continue the discussions that we have opened with the book: I would say the book is more of a beginning than an end. I mean, we have a lot of concrete advice and things to say in the book, but most of all it is an invitation to continue exploring neighbourhoods, and the themes of social infrastructure, mobility, biodiversity and urban governance – and, not least, the connections between them!

Through the Oslo Architecture Triennale we have pursued this in the coming year, through a series of conversations with knowledge institutions and cities, mainly in Europe. Furthermore, we have formed the Nordic Neighbourhood Lab, a network with ten Nordic cities, including Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo and others. We're going to look at how the different cities work with urban governance, planning and process design in large scale urban transformations. The idea is to learn from each other across the Nordic cities, and to share this with the world in 2025, at the next Oslo Architecture Triennale.

KOOZ In terms of the Nordic Neighbourhood Lab, what kind of local or civic actors are involved from each of the cities you mentioned?

CP In the lab we have the City Architect or similar public figure from each of the cities as well as a mix of knowledge institutions, like the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen, Form/Design Centre in Malmö and Design and Architecture Norway in Oslo. Also, we include different culture and community actors, urban mediators and civic organisations from most cities. We plan to work with on-going development projects in the cities, linking the private, semi-private and public sector actors. This gets us back to our long-term interest in cross-disciplinary practice, mixing different types of organisations and different types of knowledge environments so they can benefit from each other.

KOOZ We remain super curious to see how it unfolds in the coming years. Christian, I appreciate your time.

CP Thank you!

Bio

Christian Pagh (1975) is Director and Chief curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Before joining the Triennale, Christian was partner and cultural director in the Danish strategic design office Urgent.Agency. He has headed a range of projects within urban planning, strategic design, architecture and cultural development. He is an external lecturer in Copenhagen Business School and holds a master’s degree in Modern culture and Philosophy from Copenhagen University. Christian has written about urban and place development in a number of articles and publications, with a special focus on the social, cultural and artistic aspects of urban development.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.