Login or register
Commercial network
In conversation with Pablo Martínez
Pablo Martínez
Architect and co-founder of 300.000km/s
What is the city for you?
We understand cities as artefacts whose purpose is to ensure our collective survival. Humanity would have been fated to extinction if we had not been able to create cities and organise ourselves around them. And it is thanks to this that we can live on the planet.
What challenges do you think cities are facing today?
We are facing three major challenges that connect with one another. Firstly, a climate crisis that is forcing us to adapt cities and transform them into something different to how we have built them until now. We also have a public health crisis, which is related to the climate crisis and is proof that the way cities are organised is harmful for our health. Lastly, we have inequality. We have long understood that inequality is inherent to the urban phenomenon, but actually inequality is simply a mistake of the urban phenomenon. We can make cities that do not generate inequality.
Do you think we need to adopt an ecosystemic approach to urban space?
It’s a mistake to think that we can modify one part of a city and thereby fix it as a whole. We can only intervene and achieve positive transformation in cities if we understand that we have to take action in different areas simultaneously.
It’s important to keep in mind that, although city planning professionals can diagnose, formulate, design and plan, ultimately cities are created by their citizens.
Sandvika Fjord Park
Baerum, NorwayWhat aspects should we consider when planning the city of the future?
It’s important to keep in mind that, although city planning professionals can diagnose, formulate, design and plan, ultimately cities are created by their citizens. So there has to be a compromise between what we professionals come up with and what can be implemented by the city’s inhabitants themselves.
What are the different layers we should keep in mind when planning?
Firstly, we like to understand what scales coincide in a single place. Our project might be located in a city square. Through the lens of that square, we need to be looking at the building, we need to be looking at the rooms inside the building; but we also want to look at the neighbourhood, the city and the territory where the square is located. Our intervention will take place at the confluence of these multiple scales. Moreover, there are also different layers that come together in this place, such as nature, mobility, social organisation or public space.
Is the city a technological creation?
The city is, above all, a technological device. It is made of roads, buildings, sewers, electrical infrastructure. The city is technology. Today, what we may not fully understand is that there are technologies that have become well assimilated in certain areas, but which are still taking root in urban settings. For example, technologies that are based on the use of data and information, which we carry around in our pockets and which we are yet to take full advantage of.
For whom are data and data analysis useful?
All information we obtain from data is useful for decision-making, management and administration in cities, but, above all, they help us to construct new visions of the urban environment, to rethink and reformulate hypotheses on the city itself. Hypotheses that are primarily of benefit to the citizens.
What does this data analysis allow us to predict?
Data is particularly useful for obtaining cross-cutting knowledge. Data enables us to generate multiple versions of aspects that, until now, have been unconnected in the urban sphere. It allows us to understand how something of a particular nature happening in one part of the city can be connected and linked with something happening in a totally different place. This is the vision that allows us to work with data and the technology based on this data.
How can this interconnected data network then be woven together?
The problem with a data network is not its physical consistency. The real problem of a data network is how we manage it. It’s understanding that it is an open network, which may involve multiple parties. That it is overseen by the public authority and that it is subject to accountability. That it can, therefore, be trusted.
Can data help us to formulate new questions?
Data helps us to support the questions that we ask about the urban phenomenon, about the challenges of the future. Data is not the solution. Data will help us to come up with answers. We are the ones that need to be asking the questions.
Data is particularly useful for obtaining cross-cutting knowledge. Data enables us to generate multiple versions of aspects that, until now, have been unconnected in the urban sphere.
Pablo Martínez
Architect and co-founder of 300.000km/s