“Despite the dictum that the telecommunications revolution would eliminate the need for face-to-face contact and make cities obsolete, metropolitan areas today represent privileged locations of firms in the field of new media, internet services, financial-business, design and other forms of knowledge and cultural production. We must not forget urban manufacturing either. This “silent partner” in the urban economy supports other key sectors such as the creative, cultural and health care industries at the same time that it serves as a gateway to social integration by providing important employment opportunities with low entry barriers for people with different cultural backgrounds and qualifications.”
“New York has lost diversity in terms of the sectoral composition of its economy. The project-by-project orientation of its core industries also has particular implications for the spaces of the city, both public spaces and quasi-public, or what I call liminal spaces of informal negotiation and deal-making. It creates a particular kind of urban energy but also a fragmented and contested city, composed of villages and districts.”
“In architecture, we may be witnessing a shift of gear from the pursuit of physical flexibility that represents change to a search for formal qualities that inspire change without imposing it – the kind of resilience found in armatures such as grids, intensities of surfaces and suggested voids. Our risk-society, as sociologist Ulrich Beck reminds us, needs to realize that technological cures are inadequate for many of its problems, caused by technology itself. Instead, social logics and complexities will need to be made more accessible to all members of society. I would like to think of the new outputs in architecture research as a step in that direction.”
“Global businesses now operate very differently from what they did a decade ago. I am deeply impressed by the impact that information technologies have had on every aspect of work. Assumptions of co-location and synchrony no longer correspond with the realities of these businesses, we need a radical change from the assumptions on which the architecture of cities in the nineteenth and twentieth century was based. We have to be inventive in the way we design, deliver and manage buildings. The workplace needs to be prepared for mobility, volatility, permeability and complementarity of the big and small, what is internal to the firm and what is not.”
“New York and other world cities generate on the one hand wealth, knowledge and creativity, but on the other, inequality, segregation and poverty. As much as we need policies to sustain the positives, we need to wrestle with the negative and think of how to get healthcare benefits to workers in a flexible labour force; how to insure minimum livable wages; how to protect the manufacturing jobs that provide entry-level opportunities and are now threatened by the rise in real estate values; how to create mixed-use spaces that also benefit low-income communities.”
