Anna Grichting - Urbanism and Jazzby MTF Labs | MTF Podcast https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/114-anna-grichting.mp3 Dr Anna Grichting is a Swiss architect, urbanist and musician who’s spent her career using arts and design to create a more beautiful, biodiverse and sustainable world, through co-creative, interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to design projects – especially at the city level. She's also an accomplished jazz singer and recording artist who has worked with musicians all over the world, incorporating different spiritual traditions. @annagrichting on Twitter AnnaGrichting.com Download episode ← Previous episodeNext episode → TranscriptDubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. There’s a lot of talk right now about cities. Cities seem to be the atomic unit of public policy. Smart cities, sustainable cities, social progress cities, cities of culture, industrial cities, music cities. And the ways in which we design and develop cities and public spaces, especially post-COVID, once we are actually post-, are central to initiatives like the New European Bauhaus, the Green New Deal, AI4Cities. Things that ask questions about not just “Where shall we live?” but also “How should we live?”. Now, someone who’s been thinking about city environments from a design, architecture, systems, and social perspective at places like Harvard University and Qatar University, Geneva, MIT, and Vermont is Dr Anna Grichting. She’s a Swiss architect, urbanist, and musician who’s spent her career using arts and design to create a more beautiful, biodiverse, and sustainable world through co-creative, interdisciplinary, and holistic approaches to design projects, especially at the city level. Dubber Dr Anna Grichting, it’s great to have you with us for the MTF Podcast. How are you doing? Anna I’m doing very well, and thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure. Dubber You’re very welcome. You’re described as various things on the internet, primarily as an urbanist. What’s an urbanist? Anna An urbanist is a word we use, I think, a lot in Europe. It obviously has to do with the urban, with cities, with planning, and it’s also quite large because it encompasses all the different scales. And I’m also particularly interested in landscape urbanism. So it’s really this bringing together landscape and urbanism and also architecture and urbanism. And I think, obviously, for a few centuries, we’ve been dividing disciplines. And increasingly, especially now, looking at ecology, environment, climate change, nature-based solutions, it’s even more and more important that landscape… What I tell my students, or even in conferences, is that landscape, in fact, for me is the foundation of any project of architecture or urbanism because we need to start from the ground. We need to start from the topography, from the water, from the biodiversity, from the soil. Soil is very important. So it’s even the landscape aspect which I find very important. And why urbanism? Because in certain countries and disciplines, we tend to talk about architecture. We talk about urban design. We talk about urban planning, and urban planning can be very linked to policy or geography. And so we separate it in different… It can be found in different faculties or different ways of teaching. And so, for me, urbanism is a way of really… That’s maybe more holistic. Dubber Are cities fit for purpose anymore? Anna Fit for purpose? What exactly… Dubber Well, fit for humans is probably really what I’m asking. Anna Yes. Well, it’s an interesting question because, on the one hand, if you listen to UN-Habitat, etc., it’s saying “Well, in the future, we’re shifting from this urban and rural balance to more and more people will be living in cities.”. So there is that focus, and it’s definitely something we have to think about. Even here in Geneva, we think about, very carefully, “Are we going to eat up…”. We don’t have much territory in Switzerland. So “Are we going to eat up all the countryside and continue sprawling, or are we going to densify the city?”. And, of course, there’s all the questions of infrastructure because you need certain densities for infrastructures. But, on the other hand, I feel also that we need to look also more and more and study the rural, and instead of everybody flocking to the city, what do we do in rural areas so that people don’t leave the rural areas? How do we make them more attractive? We have a lot of, whether it’s inner Italy or places even in France, these shrinking villages or cities where people are leaving because there’s not activity, etc. Obviously, now, with digital infrastructure, it’s become… And the COVID has shown us it’s becoming increasingly accessible. I know lots of people now, when we’re on webinars, they’re up in the mountains. I was nearly going to be up in the mountains today, but I wasn’t sure about my internet connection, so I came back to the city. So, for me, I think the question is the balance. And, on the other hand, there’s something quite interesting if… I’m very interested in biodiversity. And because we have this intensive agriculture, we use a lot of pesticides. You’ll actually find, for example, bees, a lot of bee populations. There’s a lot of urban farming in bees. They’re actually healthier in the city because we don’t have this countryside full of pesticides. So we find some of these paradoxes that sometimes maybe the city in some ways becomes more healthy or greener than the countryside because we’re not necessarily doing the right things in the countryside because we’re doing this intensive cultivation, and we’re not really taking care of the soil and biodiversity. So I think we have to rethink all of our structures, generally, yes. Dubber Interesting. I’m surprised by the idea that people are moving to the cities increasingly. It feels counterintuitive for some of the reasons that you’ve mentioned. COVID shows that you can work from home. Broadband is getting better in a lot of places. So it feels like decentralisation would be the primary trend that you would see happening. But you think, despite that, there is a reason that people are drawn to cities. There’s a reason that people want to be near lots and lots of other people. What is that reason, do you think? Anna Probably several. Obviously, there is the economic opportunities that the city is associated with. Now, whether they’re real or not… Sometimes they are. Of course, maybe it’s more difficult to survive in a city in certain ways. In the countryside, it’s easier to grow your own food. Although, we’re seeing now that that’s happening in cities too. And cities like Detroit, which were shrinking cities, people have started actually… All the vacant lots, people are starting to grow food again, so the city is becoming rural again through this shrinkage. So I would say it’s not that obvious, this difference. And I was actually recently working for the Aga Khan Foundation. I’ve been collaborating with them, and I worked for them on different projects. But I was reviewing a project that just recently won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. It was a project for public spaces in Tatarstan in Russia, and it was under the president of Tatarstan. Tatarstan is a very small republic which has… It’s the only republic in Russia that has a president. The others are states with governors. And so they rolled out this project for public spaces, led by a brilliant young lady called Natalia Fishman, and the idea was to build public spaces not just in the cities but also in the rural areas. And the idea was that every space or village or urban area should have good public space. So what was interesting here is that part of this project – it has many different facets, which is also why it received an award – it was also involving a lot of young architects, keeping the young architects in Tatarstan because they all want to leave to Moscow. They all want to leave. The attractivity of the big cities. Making it more attractive to work there by having these exciting projects. She created a biennale for young architects. There’s a whole series of things attached to this. So making it more attractive, creating these exciting projects, and also producing locally. So there was a lot of capacity building. Instead of importing maybe badly designed… Or if we want good design, spending a lot of money to import urban furniture, was actually producing it locally. So you’re creating capacity and jobs. And the other thing is having good public spaces in these villages, small towns, means that young people also start to associate more with their place. It creates an identity, etc. So it’s quite interesting to see how this project of public spaces was also about stopping this migration. Making the smaller towns, cities, also more attractive, and also creating these small industries which provide or make public spaces, maintain them, so that also creates interesting and exciting jobs. For example, one of the producers, I went to see. So I was lucky to visit all of Tatarstan. Either they make agricultural machinery, but then they can also make urban furniture, or they use laser cutting, etc., to make all different parts of this urban furniture, and this also then creates opportunities for youth to then get into these jobs. So it’s just one example that I find very interesting of… It’s urbanism. It’s an urban project on public space, but it’s really addressing this question of “How do we make all these areas attractive and create this urbanity, maybe, or this public space which people
