This week’s interview is with Yiorgos Papamanousakis, Founder and Managing Director of Urban Transcripts, a firm dedicated to exploring the ‘city’ as a complex and evolving phenomenon that should be accessed and discussed across disciplinary boundaries.

Cities and the way we live in and respond to them have been topics of focus in recent years. Widely distributed magazines have added a specific section for the topic in their publications, TED talks explore cities in a separate category and cities are an especially hot topic for industry leaders from the tech scene.

It will be very interesting to see how cities, their transportation links and their residents’ responses to growth will change over the coming years. So it is great that architects can position themselves as experts on this topic more broadly.

Let’s hear what Yiorgios has to say about his approach to making cities by bringing concepts from design and research together with the view of an architect. And how to build a business around it…

I hope you enjoy the interview!

What made you decide to start Urban Transcripts? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

Urban Transcripts is, in a way, a product of the crisis. It was in 2009 when, after all the years of studying and/or working in architecture, I found myself in London at the peak of the [financial] crisis, having just completed my MSc in UCL and looking for a job that no one could actually offer me.

Architecture firms were continuously making people redundant, small offices were closing down – it wasn’t nice and didn’t look it would get any better. So I decided it was the time to make my own job. I didn’t have many options anyway. And London helped a lot because, despite the crisis, it’s a place that gives you the feeling that everything new and different to what you know already is possible.

Why this new thing was Urban Transcripts, was because of what I saw as a growing collaboration and communication gap amongst different approaches and professions that deal with the city. I started UT because I wanted to create a platform that can bring together different disciplines, and people with different professional, creative, or academic expertise, and enable a broader collaboration to solve common problems.

What major problems and opportunities do cities face in the 21st century? And what services does your company provide to create successful solutions for re-shaping the urban fabric?

In the last decade we’re witnessing cities becoming themselves as organisms – an object of research and debate. It is no coincidence that Urban Studies programs in universities around the world are multiplying; even The Guardian has launched a “Cities” section now.

It seems that many disciplines have been regrouped into what appears like a city science. There is in this sense a reframing of problems and issues through a ‘city lens’. And rightly so: when socio-economic problems are seen through this ‘city lens’, architecture and urban design become truly relevant as effective spatial tools through which to address greater challenges.

Challenges such as social exclusion and increasing inequality have a spatial component: it is revealing to look at the evidence from spatial analysis studies on how, for example, poverty and spatial patterns relate to each other.

Therefore, many if not all of the challenges of the city are also world challenges: inequality, social exclusion, unsustainable environmental practices, inadequate access to housing, break-up of local communities as a result of gentrification, loss of the public spaces of the city to private and market-oriented interests.

Further, when we look beyond Europe and North America, large parts of the world are entering urbanization with a remarkable speed: China is the obvious example, with whole new cities being developed from scratch.

This new era of urbanization, while it can aggravate these challenges in an unpredictable way, can equally provide us with an opportunity to make the best use of our urban design and programming tools to have a real impact on society – to change society through spatial design.

I guess this is our ambition as a company: to produce solutions that, by redesigning the structure of space and the way that we programm uses and activities in it, can have a greater impact on urban life and society.

We started our work by bringing together people who share an interest about urban development. Urban festivals, conferences, workshops are the pillars upon which we have based our development. Currently, after expanding our activities to research and design and growing our network of collaborators, we are proposing a 3-fold service for the city based on research, public participation, and urban design.

We aim to fuse expert research knowledge and public participation into the design process and provide urban solutions that are sustainably successful exactly because they are not only grounded in research but equally reflect the interests and visions of community stakeholders and the project’s broader public.

Our services include a) research and consulting, b) workshops and public events, and c) urban design projects and studies. Each project is for us a unique urban problem to resolve, the exact approach is always a unique mix of these three components in response to the requirements and the particularities of the brief.

What clients do you usually work for?

We have a good record of collaborations with local government and academia. Our services are proposed to municipalities and urban developers as the main clients, while we often engage universities and other professional or academic bodies as partners in these projects. However, it may well be that we are developing a research project only with academic partners, for example.

Also, a lot of our early work is self-initiated. Often, it has been us that set up and planned a project and then sought to form partnerships in order to realize it. There are many ways to do things and to engage clients and partners into something, as long as it is as interesting for them as it is for us.

How will technology impact the cities of the future in your opinion?

Well cities are technology in themselves: from large-scale infrastructure projects to the IT systems involved whenever you use your pass within an urban transport system. I find particularly interesting the technological developments in the fields of interaction design when this is applied on an urban scale.

Urban society is in essence all about interactions, between people with other people, spaces, devices and machines that we use to get from one place to another and do this or that thing.

I think technological innovations in this field can have a huge impact on how we experience ‘the city’ in the future, not only because they will create new products or services, but because they have the potential of changing the ways we interact with one another and with our surroundings.

Do you have any advice for “Archipreneurs” who are interested in starting their own business?

An old professor of mine used to say: “show me where the problem is”! I think that in order to create a new business that has real value in terms of being useful to the world and equally successful for oneself it needs to be able to offer a solution to a well-defined problem. So defining the problem is a good beginning in order to start making use of ideas towards a new business.

Then, all the things that you don’t know about running a business: the admin, the accounts, the law, all these great little things, be prepared to become an expert in all of them.

And have a plan! Not so much for following it, but for enabling you to see all the things that you didn’t manage to follow! If there is no plan, you can never measure your actual achievements against what you initially set up to do, so you can’t progress.

Last, faith, not in God, but in yourself and the people you work with.

How do you see the future of architecture? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming architects?

It has always surprised me how rich (and long) architectural education really is and how limited the professional life of an architect can often become. Due to their long and project-oriented training, I think architects are great problem-solvers and excellent visual and verbal communicators.

This set of skills can be applied in many different professional activities: scientific research, consulting, project management, IT solutions design and programming, the real estate industry…

I would like to think that, in the future, architecture becomes bolder in its efforts to shape society and [becomes] less obsessed with beautiful objects. I guess what I’m saying is that architecture – in order to survive as something more than an aesthetic exercise for the privileged few – it has to become relevant for the many.

It can do that only by reaffirming, through its own practice, that designing space is not decorating it with beautiful objects but designing the material support or human interaction.

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*Urban Transcripts is now looking for a business partner to join the company as their Head of Business Development. Visit http://urbantranscripts.org/?p=3590 for more details.

About Yiorgos Papamanousakis

Architecte DPLG MSc ARB

The founder of Urban Transcripts, Yiorgos initiated the company’s work by directing international collaborative projects – exhibitions, workshops, conferences – on the critical exploration of cities (Athens, 2010; Rome, 2011, London 2012; Berlin, 2014). Currently he is working towards the development of Urban Transcripts into a network of experts on the city, whose work encompasses design, research, and public participation.

Yiorgos is passionate about the relationships between the spatial structure of cities and their socioeconomic and cultural life. He trained as an architect in Paris and holds an MSc from The Bartlett – UCL, London, where developed a keen interest in, empirical research and the application of quantitative methodologies on understanding cities. His current research concerns how the configuration of urban waterfronts impacts on the evolution of coastal cities in Greece.

For 2014—2015 he was an architectural design studio lecturer in Umea School of Architecture (Sweden). Yiorgos has been an advisor and a speaker in various initiatives and projects focused on the city (UrbanIxD, Leipzig Plus Kultur), and a reviewer in academic journals (Urban Design International). He is based in London.

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Over the last few decades technology has gone from impacting the way we communicate and work to affecting every aspect of our daily lives. It has started to spill into the physical world and change the appearance and structure of our cities. Architects are no longer free to choose the degree to which they factor in technology in their design processes. Its omnipresence has started to change the way architecture users experience built environment, requiring and expecting an increasing level of responsiveness and interactivity. By putting the power of choice into the hands of ordinary people, technology has forced designers to reevaluate their role and embrace the changes.

Architectural typologies such as multi-family housing, office spaces and urban design have seen drastic changes due to the fast-paced technological evolution. The proximity of living spaces and work, which has marked most of the 20th century, has become a loose concept. Cities are developing and spreading in way that is less dependent on topography and physical connectedness, while our houses are becoming smarter and more energy efficient.

Numerous companies and startups across the globe are recognizing the importance of these phenomena and are at the forefront of a new wave that is flooding city streets. Particularly noticeable is the shift towards the ‘sharing economy’ which allows individuals to become retailers and service providers by cutting out the middleman. Peer-to-peer businesses have crossed over from the virtual world into the physical realm.

Here we categorized the main areas of modern living most transformed by technology and the major companies that channel this change.

#1 – Housing and Real Estate

The “sharing economy” or “collaborative consumption” has had the strongest impact on the housing and real estate market. Similar to Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner which creates no content and Uber, the world’s largest taxi company that owns no vehicles, AirBnB owns no real estate. Instead, it functions as a peer-to-peer online platform which allows people to rent their houses and apartments short-term. By choosing this type of accommodation over hotels and hostels, travelers acquire a wider range of choices, while owners can make profit from underused assets.

A similar scenario is playing out in the work environment. Companies like WeWork provide shared workspaces for entrepreneurs, freelancers and startups by subletting office spaces, along with furniture and Internet. Signing up for an unlimited membership allows people to use WeWork locations around the world and provides an opportunity to chose an environment that suits individual preferences.

WeWork operates by taking out a cut-rate lease on a floor of an office building and reorganizing the space in smaller parts which it then rents out to small business and startups. Because of the higher crowd density-the number of people per square meter-the company boosts its Net Operating Income (NOI), making it easier for them pay higher rents in prime locations compared to conventional companies. This development, connected to the growth of self-employment, telecommuting and freelancing, is redefining the concept of office spaces and threatens to completely overpower large companies in the fight for urban space.

Residential architecture is also being transformed by smart technologies. The introduction of connected appliances and clean energy into both old and new real estate is restructuring the use of domestic spaces. Smart heating systems, energy-efficient thermostats and automatic smoke sensors are among the products offered by Nest, home automation producer of programmable, self-learning, sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-enabled appliances that help save energy.

#2 – Transportation

Billion-dollar transportation company Uber has saturated the private transportation market with on-demand drivers, removing complicated logistics, parking tickets and maintenance hassle from the commuting equation. Hybrid companies like Tesla and Google, mostly operating in automotive and media industries, have already transitioned into different areas of technology.

Google is already testing their self-driving cars, outfitted with cameras and sensors and detailed maps of streets, traffic signals, curb heights and other information required for an unmanned vehicle to operate. It was recently announced that Tesla plans to build fully-functional autonomous cars by 2020, and Uber is planning to buy 500,000 of them.

Meanwhile, Uber has also introduced UberPool-carpooling service that cuts private transportation costs by almost 50%. Commuters are paired through Uber’s logistic engine with other commuters with similar pickup and drop-off locations. By making urban transportation more convenient and less expensive, Uber is making it less attractive for people to buy individual cars and could eventually reduce the number of cars on the road in a city.

Many predict that, because of Uber, millions of people will forgo owning a car in the next few decades. Fewer personal cars would make for less congested, less polluted cities, making taxi cabs, limo services, traffic congestion, accidents and public parking a thing of the past.

#3 – Commerce

eCommerce is slowly removing the need for brick and mortar retail, and threatens to drive the modern shopping mall to extinction. Rising fuel prices, suburban sprawl and worsening automotive traffic increase the rate at which people are turning to online shopping and websites like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and Instacart.

Shoppers can easily find products online instead of dealing with large retail establishments. Reports indicate that over 200 shopping malls across the United States are suffering 35 vacancy rates or higher. Although e-commerce, along with catalogue and direct mail, makes up less than 9% of total retail sales, this new development is expected to create a huge revolution in retail trends over the next decade.

When it comes to the built environment, this would entail the disappearance of an entire architectural typology which has marked the last century. It will also affect inner city areas by putting a great deal of pressure on small retailers. The migration of retail from the physical world to the virtual one will impact the amount of available urban space, creating new opportunities.

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Private transportation and the real estate market may be experiencing the most immediate effects of technology, but this new trend is becoming increasingly important in the areas of urban planning and mass transport as well. Urban priorities are changing through mobility and the introduction of new frameworks for local and regional governance. Project developers and architects are facing new challenges in creating dynamic, evolving places that respond to the complexities of modern life.

What other companies do you think will impact the future of our cities?

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