Operator x AIR – Architecture City

What would cities look like if not money, but shared values were the driving force behind urban development? What could happen if we step away from a narrow monetary interpretation of value and start to observe the city as a dynamic collection of values: ecological value existing in soil, water, air,  plants and animals anchoring the city in its natural context, material value that resides in all the stuff our cities are made of like metal, concrete and wood, the value of ingenuity that resides in the people who live in our cities and can make, remake and change them to fit our needs, ethical and societal values that offer a sense of purpose and a drive to go forward.

Our first guest is architect Jan Jongert, founder of Superuse Studios. His definition of architecture is systemic. It encompasses the whole socio-environmental machinery with the actual buildings as its materialisations. With Jongert we will speak about the mismatch between a linear economy on the one hand, and a circular approach to building and developing the city on the other. It ultimately meant bankruptcy for Jongert’s practice Superuse Studios but – not to worry – they restarted as a coöperative.

Our second guest is Natalia Castaño Cárdenas, director of Urbam, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies at EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia. She worked on the city’s famous social urbanism projects and wrote a book on how art helped transform Medellín’s informal hillside neighbourhoods. With her, we look at the city through a cultural lens: what happens when communities, artists and institutions, rather than investors, shape the city? And what are her observations as this year’s guest urban critic at the Stadmakerscongres.

Previous episodes of Architecture City can be listened to via the Rotterdam-based online radio station and cultural platform Operator Radio.