Dialog in the Museum

Prof. Mark Michaeli spoke of the consequences of social change for the transformation of the built and undeveloped environments. He cited a number of examples to give some insights into his research work, which is concerned with the fundamental question of how sustainable cities can be designed in future. Urban planners play a key role in their design, but it is crucial to understand that “people are happy in cities that they design and shape themselves,” Michaeli said.

There is a great discrepancy between wish and reality in terms of spatial design. In our idealized image, for example, urban and rural areas are clearly demarcated from one another, without fraying settlement edges. The reality, on the other hand, is a system of infrastructure and logistics that is not at all capable of realizing these ideals. But in order to create a more sustainable city with new settlement and spatial structures, Michaeli emphasized, we must deal not only with the city itself, but also with the mode in which the urban space is produced. Moreover, we must be aware that this mode is constantly changing. Technologies such as the smartphone, for example, have fundamentally changed our daily routines.

In a brief theoretical digression, Michaeli outlined the salient characteristics of sustainability. According to a definition by the Israeli scientist Michael Ben-Eli, sustainability should be seen not as a condition, but as a dynamic equilibrium that is influenced by the behavior and demands of the population and by the changing supportability and capacity of the environment. “Transformation researchers, on the other hand, say it is not enough to know the condition we need to achieve; rather, we need to know much more about how to implement a transformation toward this goal.” It therefore all depends on the behavior of those who act and navigate as agents of change, Michaeli added.

Michaeli then gave a brief overview of the history of spatial planning and urban development. According to the older model of “central towns,” which the geographer and urban planner Walter Christaller described in his 1933 publication “Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland,” towns or cities all fulfill a specific function within a large network. Their hierarchical classification as upper, middle and lower centers stipulates that cities are assured certain facilities or institutions, e.g. a university, depending on their function. Christaller’s model, demonstrated by example of the south German region, continued to serve as the basis for urban planning even after the Second World War. By contrast, the architect Thomas Sieverts coined the term “Zwischenstadt” (‘city in between’; see the German-language publication series of the same name, which arose from a research project sponsored by the Daimler and Benz Foundation), which could no longer be explained by the logic of facilities and institutions, Michaeli continued. In these “cities in between,” the space has become so well supplied and equipped that new connections form at the edges, and distant settlements even become entirely detached from one another.

For this reason, he said, spatial development now proceeds differently, since there is no longer a planning framework that provides orientation for the market: “Rather, planning has become the formative and limiting factor of a free market. Individual decisions on the part of users have also become more important. The city as a space of opportunity has disappeared from the discourse,” Michaeli stated. In smart city scenarios, for example, the city has now become a mere backdrop for underlying data streams and service offerings. The spaces and the ways in which we communicate with each other have fundamentally changed.

Sustainable urban planning must adapt accordingly, said Michaeli. On the one hand, he said, the planner’s classic craft is still required, for example when it comes to addressing the elements and structures of the respective regions, while on the other hand, the stakeholders to be addressed must be identified. “For this purpose, the architect has to move in virtuoso style around a Christmas market with a load of mulled wine, in order to find out how the citizens of a town imagine their own future.” After all, he said, what is required is knowledge of the processes relevant to implementation.

According to Michaeli, an important realization is that local perceptions often differ from the results of structural urban planning. Furthermore, change itself has changed: “For a long time, Germany had the great advantage that the whole country was adequately supplied and habitable. But it’s now gradually becoming something like France, where the rural areas are no longer properly supplied; this results in a surplus of attractiveness for the cities – which in turn gives rise to the far-reaching processes of concentration that cause prices to explode in regions such as Greater Stuttgart or Munich and make the cities too crowded.”

At a design lab of TU Munich (2018/19), Michaeli together with some students drew up an overview of typical factors of relevance to rural areas in prosperous regions, for the town of Hüttwilen in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. There is pressure for settlement here, with a desire for single-family houses, but there are no more land reserves available, he said. Dysfunctional old buildings (e.g. unoccupied stores) can be seen in the town centers, along with a backlog of renovation work on old single-family houses. There is also a need for qualification with regard to public spaces and access to the landscape. To make efficient use of the settlement area, the solution involved converting existing single-family houses into high-quality renovated rental apartments for local residents.

With this and further examples from his research projects, Michaeli emphasized that it is always a matter of not only thinking about location qualities for industry or for the facilities and institutions in a town, but of determining the significance of location qualities for simplifying the everyday lives of local individuals. The pandemic, he said, has shown that many people with the option of working from home want to move further away from their actual place of employment, for example for reasons of cost. “We’re currently experiencing a complete transformation in the labor market and in work models. We can benefit from this to make our space more sustainable.”

In response to a question from the audience as to whether society will be populated more by settlers or by nomads in future, Michaeli replied that the tendency to be either a nomad or a settler changes in the course of a person’s lifetime. “In recent years we’ve paid much more attention to the settlers than to the nomads in society.” However, the housing market needs to adapt to the fact that many people want to remain “residentially mobile.”