ASH NYC is a company that blends the world of interior design with property development. In addition to being designers/developers, they are placemakers, and they take their role in impacting the urban environment very seriously: “We are only interested in projects that we feel improve their host community, that make a positive impact on a neighborhood,” said Co-Founder and CEO Ari S. Heckman in an interview with Archipreneur. “We are drawn to renovations of historic buildings, often ones that are vacant or have some kind of undesirable. We find that people really enjoy connecting with a well-adapted historic building.”

I am sure you will connect with their latest conversion – 32 Custom House. The building is a historic landmark erected in 1875 and was acquired by ASH NYC in November 2014. Its bronze ground floor storefront, rope moldings and strongly accented facade demonstrate its High Victorian Gothic architectural qualities, and give it great distinction within the historic district.

ASH NYC has completely re-imagined, developed and designed the residential building, in partnership with Kite Architects and South Coast Improvement Company.  Now it comprises 10 apartments and one retail space on the ground floor. Unique amenities include a virtual doorman, private penthouse roof terrace, city and water views, and original historic details throughout – like two historic stairwells.

“We are our own client on our development projects”, Heckman continued in the interview, “which means that the design team has an equal seat at the table when major decisions are being made.”

And here are the designs, all images © ASH NYC:

Location:

32 Custom House St, Providence, RI 02903, USA

Project Data:

• Architects: ASH NYC
• 1,115 sqm (12,000 SF)
• 5 floors
• 10 apartments, 1 retail space
• includes two historic stairwells, one elevator

The post ASH NYC Re-Developed Historic Building, 32 Custom House, as Their Own Clients appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Igor Marko and Petra Marko, founders of Marko&Placemakers.

Marko&Placemakers is a city design and research consultancy based in London.

Their concept of placemaking is about understanding the city as a living organism, linking the different layers of a city in unexpected ways and creating new narratives to allow curiosity and desire to interlace with the physical space, both existing and new. In this experiential design process, the role of Marko&Placemakers is that of a creator, bringing new ideas, as well as a mediator, linking existing processes and people.

And process – interaction, mediation and communication with groups and people – is the core of the work of the consultancy.

Keep reading to learn how these two architects address social, environmental and economic issues that cities face today.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

What made you decide to found Marko&Placemakers? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

Igor: Our paths crossed collaborating on public realm projects. I had previously led FoRM Associates, an urban design practice. Petra worked as architect at John McAslan + Partners before qualifying as a ‘creative entrepreneur’ to develop her role as enabler and facilitator.

We strongly felt there is a new paradigm in city making, which is about involvement and education of users. While our portfolio builds on a decade of hands-on experience of implementing urban regeneration projects at FoRM, our goal with the new consultancy was to work much more closely with the clients and users in the strategic and conceptual phases of projects.

The initial stages are when important decisions are made with impact on long term design quality and resilience of places. This negotiation process often happens without creative input and doesn’t have a holistic understanding. Form an entrepreneurial perspective this is a niche our consultancy operates in, striving to break generic and mechanical city making processes.

What are the major problems and opportunities that cities face in the 21st century?

Igor: The biggest problems are inflexible and technocratic planning systems, which can’t cope with constant change – a natural state of cities today. Lack of effective instruments of communication; distrust between the citizens, local government and private sector; and ultimately lack of political vision add to the planning conundrum. “Who owns the city” (David Harvey) is a question pertinent to 21st Century urbanisation.

On a global scale, migration and climate change are huge challenges that cities can’t solve on their own – we need to work together as a global community. Transport and mobility remain big issues as cities try to move towards pedestrian-friendly environment while retaining the convenience of cars. Recent transformations such as pedestrianisation of Times Square in New York show that it is possible to reverse the trend from a car-oriented to a people-oriented environment.

On the other hand, multi-million cities are springing up in Asia entirely focused on cars. It is a challenge the global leaders need to address urgently. That’s why it is important that architects have the right communication tools to engage with policy makers about these issues.

What services does your company provide to create successful solutions for city development?

Petra: Our work addresses the overlaps between place, process and people, reaching beyond the physical aspects of design. In this experiential design process, we see the role of the placemaker as that of a creator, bringing new ideas, as well as a mediator, linking existing processes and people. We often work on client side in the strategic phases of projects – helping them to develop the brief and long term vision, as well as a ‘roadmap’ how to achieve this.

We see public space infrastructure as fundamental in city making, especially when creating new urban areas. Public space is the glue in between – an exchange space for people, which helps develop character of a place through joint experiences.

Our work is supported by continuous socio-economic research, which identifies strengths and performance of neighbourhoods in order to help integrate new development as well as supporting the existing assets of the place. Our approach is ‘parametric’ in that each of our projects revolves around its specific challenges. While our core team remains small, we collaborate with a wide network of experts, often beyond the field of architecture and urbanism, such as economists, sociologists, geographers or artists.

How do you create great places? What strategies does your company provide?

Igor: Our ‘signature’ as a consultancy is our way of working – i.e. the process, rather than specific aesthetics or form. Our process can be described through several principles. Firstly, inclusivity and sustainability – not only ecological but more importantly social, understanding the impact of projects on existing and future communities. Secondly, it is the experience a place enables – something that may sound basic but for us is fundamental, such as meeting friends. And finally – communication – without which nothing could happen!

Our approach is about facilitating and negotiating change using design thinking and creative tools drawing on these principles. We believe that successful city making needs to combine both bottom up and top down approach, in order to sustain growth and genuine character of places. This means not only engagement of local people and stakeholders, but also lobbying and negotiating with decision makers to ensure that energy invested into bottom up initiatives will have genuine and lasting effect on the whole community, not just communities of interest.

Who are the clients you usually work for?

Petra: We work for public, private as well as third sector. Our consultancy is part of London Mayor’s special assistance team for High Streets regeneration. Many of the local High Streets which used to be central hubs for the capital’s town centres are struggling with competition from shopping malls and other more popular destinations.

In our research we focus on building on the existing qualities of these places. By engaging the local shop owners and visitors we uncover potential of places which can be often harnessed through simple interventions and support. We have already mapped the London Olympic legacy area and several London boroughs, revealing the people behind the local economy. Our most recent study of Coulsdon Town Centre for London Borough of Croydon will establish the base of a Business Improvement District, which will help attract greater mix and build on the existing assets of the town centre.

Igor: On another scale, we are working on several riverfront masterplans in Central Europe, where we oversee the public realm strategy – so we are working as an intermediary between architects, the client and the municipality. In Bratislava, we are working on the public realm framework for a new city quarter designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The new mixed used development will integrate an existing industrial heritage building which will act as a cultural hub for the place.

Alongside these strategic projects, we have also completed a number of public realm commissions, including a community park and a new public space within an administrative complex. We also enjoy getting involved in projects outside Europe, with successful competition collaborations in South Korea and Singapore, where we were recently shortlisted for a strategic vision for Orchard Road – the central shopping precinct of Singapore – in collaboration with ARUP.

Which one was your most challenging project and why?

Igor: Northala Fields Park in London has been the most challenging, but perhaps also most rewarding project, which fundamentally shifted my thinking about the role of architects. Architects naturally default to controlling up to the last detail. In case of Northala park, we have gone through a two-year participatory process, where locals were directly engaged in shaping the future programme and activities within the new park. Working directly with the users meant that as designers we could always test ideas in discussion with people and make them better suited for their needs.

Our role as designers went beyond the physical aspects to developing a financial model – we used recycled construction waste from adjacent developments. The deposit of this inert waste material generated £6milllion income to create a new topology and programmable landscape at no cost to the taxpayers. Today, Northala is a vital community asset and people actively take care of the park. Coming back after years to see that the park is becoming more and more loved and cared for by the people is what motivates me.

Petra, you have a degree in Creative Entrepreneurship in addition to your architecture degree. From your experience, do you think this is absolutely necessary in order to run a consultancy?

Petra: Since the economic crisis of 2008, the architecture profession has been adapting to the new realities of the industry – lack of investment, unstable political landscape, as well as global factors such as climate change. I found there was little room for discussing these challenges in practice.

If you are working on a tender package of a £40million building, it is all about the detail and delivery. I was interested in the bigger picture – how does a project come off the ground in the first place – how to assemble the best team for it – and how to retain a vision from inception up to completion.

ICCE (Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship) was in its second year running at Goldsmiths when I joined the course in 2009. I conceived of my masters’ as a ‘sabbatical’ to allow me to get out of the ‘architecture box’ and explore the possibility to develop my role as facilitator of built environment.

The learning process at ICCE was very much revolving around each individual student as we were a diverse mix of creative individuals from a wide range of backgrounds from performance, media and music through to architecture and design. It was very much about recognising and fine tuning one’s personal values and reflecting these onto our professional lives; as well as huge amount of practical learning from business planning and time management to networking.

The course Director Sian Prime’s one-to-one approach gave invaluable guidance and confidence to each of us on our path ‘in between’. Many of the people I studied with remain good friends to date and a great network beyond the architecture field.

Alongside my masters’ I also started working for an architect-turn-developer (Solidspace) and gained a glimpse of the development process from the other side of the fence. This was really eye-opening. You start understanding that the architect is part of the process only for a limited period in the middle – with important strategic phase and post occupancy phase on either side. Land acquisition, which in London is the biggest challenge, along with financing, are perhaps two most significant factors determining any new development.

It is not surprising that many architects today act as facilitators of self-built housing projects, in order to gain more control over the building process and thus also the final product and its financial viability. This role requires additional skill sets apart from design and an MA in creative entrepreneurship or even a ‘traditional’ MBA could provide the additional tools that many architecture schools lack.

You told me you are currently part of the new London School of Architecture (LSA) practice network and leading the Unstable City design think tank. Could you tell us a little about this project?

Petra: The London School of Architecture was set up by Will Hunter and his colleagues as a response to the need of a more practice-based education model, which would prepare students for the realities of the profession today. With my interest in architecture education I was immediately drawn to the school and our practice joined the LSA network right at the start. It is a very exciting time with the first academic year nearly completed.

We led the LSA Unstable City design think tank jointly with Grimshaw architects and over the past 6 months our group of students developed ideas around the notion of instability as positive phenomena. Our starting point was that cities are in constant change. We embraced this change and sought to understand London’s instability as an unlocking mechanism for sustainable development.

Our aim was to explore resilient and responsive approach to understand, design and manage the evolutionary balance of London in face of the pressures of the next 25-50 years on the case study of Rotherhithe, a somewhat ‘forgotten’ central predominately residential area on London’s riverfront. The research and proposals from all five think tanks will be published online so look out for news on the LSA website. You can also find out more about the school and its ethos by reading the Archipreneur interview with the founder, Will Hunter.

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

Petra: Become an expert at communicating. Nice images won’t be enough – you need to be able to describe the benefits of your work and the process not only to your peers, but to a range of people from investors through to the users. Promote your work where your clients are – it is nice to be featured in architecture magazines, but these are often followed by architects only.

While architects are an important and natural network you will be part of, reaching beyond the field can be surprisingly rewarding. Get out as much as possible and don’t be shy to ask questions – people who are passionate about their work always have a good piece of advice, no matter how ‘important’ they are. And finally follow your instincts and be true to yourself.

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

Igor: I think it is time for architects to get engaged with politics in order to enact change. Cities today are the most powerful social and economic structures, and while we are in an increasingly digitally networked world, cities are still physical structures and urbanism and politics are inherently interconnected.

Architects default to communicating with each other, but it is vital that the value of architecture is promoted at policy level as well as towards the general public. A good example is the office of Chief Urban Designer in New York City. Any bottom up processes that make cities more livable can only thrive and survive while there is good decision making enabling this from the top down.

About the founders Igor Marko and Petra Marko

Marko&Placemakers is part of a growing wave of new city design consultancy that fundamentally shifts from a product-focused to a process-based urbanism. Their role is often strategic, looking at the overlaps between place, process and people, and goes beyond the physical aspects of design to address socio-economic issues.

Igor Marko is the co-founder and director of Marko&Placemakers. He has extensive experience in advising on strategy and integration of public realm in new developments and major regeneration schemes. Igor has led transformational projects including Northala Fields Park in London, critically acclaimed as an exemplar of people-led sustainability. His experimental approach to urbanism crossing boundaries between art, architecture and public space resulted in visionary ideas preparing the ground for transformation of London’s pedestrian and cycling environment.

Alongside practice, Igor is a passionate mentor, having supervised initiatives for organisations including European Urban Design Laboratory Stadslab and various architecture schools. He is a regular speaker at debates concerning participatory placemaking including forums such as European Economic Congress (Katowice), reSITE conference (Prague) and Changwon Eco City (Korea).

Petra Marko is an architect, communicator and enabler of creative projects within the urban realm. She is co-founder of Marko&Placemakers and believes that sustainable design practice is about combining creativity with hands-on facilitation, mediation and communication. Pursuing her role as facilitator of good quality built environment, Petra completed a masters in Creative Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has been actively promoting research and entrepreneurship through her work, as a member of the RIBA Small Practice Group and as leader of the Unstable City design think tank at the London School of Architecture. Petra has led several High Street and employment studies in the UK and Europe and has been a contributor to numerous initiatives including RIBA Guerrilla Tactics, reSITE (Prague) and Urban Transcripts (London and Berlin). She is the author of Together Alone. Architecture and Collaboration – a book exploring the future role of architects.

The post How to Use Placemaking to Create the City of the Future – Marko&Placemakers appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Tyler Stonebreaker, founder and CEO of Creative Space, an integrated real estate company that transforms buildings and places into ‘housing’ for the most innovative businesses, brands and people.

Tyler started out in corporate real estate and developed millions of square feet of office, retail and production facilities throughout California. But after 10 years of being in the business, he became tired of it. After a sabbatical, Tyler followed his intuition and founded Creative Space in 2009, a real estate company that specializes in working with businesses in the fashion, music and entertainment industries – and mostly for the people he knew.

Keep reading to learn more about place making, from the founder of the not-your-average real estate company!

I hope you enjoy the interview!

When did you team up with your business partner Michael Smith and what are your respective backgrounds?

Michael and I met as kids on the Southern California junior tennis circuit. He ended up going to college in Chicago while I stayed here in Los Angeles. About a decade and a half passed before we ran into each other again, at a reunion of sorts in Santa Barbara. Turned out we were both living in Los Angeles and had similar interests. Michael, as a successful music entrepreneur, and I was just beginning to formulate the conceptual framework for Creative Space. Initially, Michael acted as an advisor. Within a short time he became a client – and then eventually a partner. Although he’s no longer active in day-to-day affairs, he still plays an influential role for me and for the company.

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

I had spent my entire career in real estate but never really felt that developing generic “spec” buildings for hypothetical customers whom I didn’t have any real connection to was a worthwhile way to make a living. As time went on, my personal and professional lifes became more and more separated – to point that I was super unsatisfied, and decided I needed to make a change and leave the real estate business altogether.

So I took a sabbatical in the mid-2000s, with no plan to ever return to the business. Then, after spending about a year traveling and wandering the boardwalk between Venice and Santa Monica (where I lived at the time), I had the proverbial light-switch moment while drinking a cup of coffee at a local café near my house. Two film producers sitting at a table next to mine were talking about a building they wanted to invest in.

That triggered an immediate “duh” moment: most of my friends worked in the entertainment industry here in LA and they all needed real estate for their businesses. Why not build a company to help them? I set out to build a business that would help my friends develop offices, studios, production/post facilities, etc.

In Creative Space’s manifesto it says, “It takes a coffee shop to build a village”. What’s your secret to creative urban placemaking?

Understand first and foremost who and what you’re building for, and make sure you respect the community(s) you’re impacting. Ironically, the local community is most affected by real estate decisions, but rarely are those decisions made by or for the local community.

At Creative Space we’re not curating or speculating or developing buildings for “people” based on demographic studies or Pinterest boards. Rather, we’re facilitating real estate for the people we know and respect. As a result, we feel a personal connection to our clients, and our respect for the local communities we work in leads to better outcomes.

Among your first clients were Handsome Coffee Roasters, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Counter Culture Coffee. What does it take to create great places?

Fortunately for us, we have amazing clients who make these places great. Our job is to facilitate and support them with an integrated real estate team and process.

What clients do you work for now?

We work with a varied mix of clients and projects, ranging from an art center for Hauser Wirth & Schimmel through a 67-room boutique hotel for Grupo Habita to a multi-facility expansion for Tartine Bakery.

Your company handles marketing, development, architecture and other aspects of the realty process. How many people do you employ and what kind of professional background do they have?

Our team’s collective experiences, backgrounds and interests are the foundation of the company. From my previous time in institutional development and investment, what I knew was that most real estate companies employ a very narrow group of mostly finance- and sales-related people – especially at the decision-making level – who often have very little technical knowledge of how buildings actually work and function.

We decided to put architects and engineers behind the wheel, so to speak, as the developers/producers of our projects. Under their direction, we offer all of our projects/clients a full range of real estate services. We produce a very high volume/range of outputs throughout LA/SF/NYC with a small, highly focused team (10 people in 2 offices) who harness today’s leading productivity theories and technologies.

To us, it’s not about how many people we have or how much money we’re making or even what articles are written about us; rather, it’s about doing work for the people/businesses we believe in, and in making a relevant and sustainable impact on the cities we live and work in.

Another statement from your manifesto says, “Repurposing is the new building.” Do you build at all, or is architecture a commodity you buy in?

There is a component of building/construction on almost every one of our projects but, generally speaking, most of the building/construction we do is through adaptive re-use. Our first Creative Space project was a ground-up 100,000sf Gold-LEED certified, 100% solar powered corporate headquarters and manufacturing facility for a contract furniture brand located at Hawthorne Municipal Airport. The property itself is part of a former Northrop Grumman aerospace manufacturing facility that was reimagined through a brown-field redevelopment, eventually becoming home to SpaceX and Tesla.

Since then, most of our work has involved adapting existing structures for commercial use and more recently for residential use as well.

Is your business acting as a service developer for companies or are you also taking on the trader-developer role? Are you also buying land and property, which you then develop and sell?

From day one, our core objective was to advantage our friends by helping them source and develop great buildings/locations around Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. At the end of the day, the market is placing the highest premium on things that are unique and special. But over time we’ve learned that there isn’t just one way; in fact, there are almost an infinite number of ways that unique and special buildings/locations are sourced and put together.

Thus, we view everything we do through a simple lens of inputs and outputs driven by our client’s needs, and we are constantly focused on improving how the inputs we utilize lead to better outputs. The fact that two roads can lead to a single destination just as one road can lead to more than one destination is something we keep in mind with everything we do. In terms of how we’re compensated, we are very adaptable. Sometimes we are just paid flat fees while other times we invest capital alongside our clients to acquire/develop projects.

More recently, we have been focused on investing in many of our clients’ businesses as well, as we see it as a natural way to better align with our clients on a long-term basis (plus it’s a smart hedge against the cyclical nature of real estate markets). We don’t speculate in neighborhoods trying to trigger hyperinflation to make a quick buck via arbitrage or get in the way of great things happening for the sake of it “just being the name of the game”. That is unfortunately how most of the real estate industry operates.

We believe that the primary customer of real estate (i.e., the tenant) should always be at the center of the equation and the real estate industry should be squarely focused on providing their customers with what they need and want. However, tenants are at best a means to an end in most landlords’ eyes, with customer service viewed primarily as a cost (which, coincidentally, is generally passed through as an operating cost that is then paid for by the tenant).

Hence why it’s been so easy to build our business from the start – because the only thing we set out to do was to deliver what we knew our friends (and most people, for that matter) wanted – great real estate and great customer experience!

For architects who know very little about real estate development, how would you break down the process of getting their first project off the ground?

We think the best place to start is by understanding what people want from their real estate. Getting the first project off the ground can be a lot easier to say than do, given the technical knowledge and experience required, although if you understand customer needs, most of the (real estate) process can be outsourced to a variety of service providers that have the knowledge/experience required.

Most people seem to start on either the residential side and/or on small commercial remodels, which I think is wise. We just happened to have the capabilities and experience of developing millions of square feet of mixed-use projects in our previous corporate lives so we could develop a 100,000sf corporate headquarter project right out of the gate.

In that specific example, the owner/client was a close friend and he very much liked the idea of getting the benefit of our experience/capabilities while at the same time working with a new company focused on building towards the future.

How would you finance a project in its first stages of development? Any tips on how to manage it?

That’s actually the part we hate most about the real estate industry and development/investment business. More specifically, that is the $$$ part of it. Capital, in our opinion, gets in the way more than it helps.

From day one, Creative Space was focused on developing projects that were not speculative in nature. Thus, the capital side of things has never been something we’ve had to worry about as projects are funded based on cash flow and partially or fully occupied buildings, rather than a speculative basis through acquiring vacant or underutilized property to try and turn around by “adding value” and then selling for a profit.

My tip on this topic would be to either start with your own money (if available) or figure out different ways to finance projects based on a sound business plan, as money tends to find great deals.

What is your marketing strategy for pre-leasing spaces?

Great buildings/locations lease themselves (except when the economy drops into recession – then nothing really works). Since we work primarily with businesses, there isn’t much of a need for a marketing strategy. That being said, when property owners/investors (who we work with from time to time) ask us for business plans to help them acquire/reposition/lease a property, we start with understanding who would want to be in that property/location and then just speak directly to them.

We still apply our core strategy of advantaging our friends only; we head further upstream, so to speak, to make sure property owners don’t screw up their properties, and calibrate them to be great landlords in order to attract and service the desired audience (which in most cases end up being our clients, so marketing for us is perhaps a bit different than the traditional real estate marketing approach most people are accustomed to).

Great architecture and marketing materials will help, but not if the building/location sucks and/or if the landlord is un-calibrated. Also, because the real estate industry has gone head-over-heels for anything with the word “creative” in it, we’ve quickly moved away from the concept altogether (short of our name, which is not in reference to physical space anyway).

Buildings can certainly enhance/affect behavior, but buildings themselves are not creative; people are. So if landlords want a “creative” building, put creative people in them. Otherwise, the use of “creative” in real estate should go the way of disco.

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

Focus on your personal knowledge/capabilities and listen/respond to the underlying needs of the marketplace. Everything should follow from there.

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

We think the more that technology replaces humans, the more important human activities and connections become. And, until we can figure out how to live as humans in cyberspace, we’re going to need to continue to live our lives attached to the ground in some form of shelter.

Kidding aside, we think there are so many important applications of architecture/development to address mankind’s needs. A lot of the things we’re worrying about today will seem trivial as the fundamental problems facing our world, from global warming to economic inequality, become more and more of an acute reality. With those challenges there will, of course, be major opportunities. Just different, perhaps, from what we’re all used to.

About Tyler Stonebreaker

At heart, Tyler is a creator. He was immediately determined to acquire, harness and utilize the tools required to build big things. After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Southern California, he went on to develop millions of square feet of office, retail and production facilities throughout California.

After 10 years in institutional real estate development and investment, it became clear that the world was moving in an entirely different direction, and Tyler followed his intuition and founded Creative Space in 2009 to better connect the cultural world to real estate.

The post How to Create Great Places – Tyler Stonebreaker on His Real Estate Company Creative Space appeared first on Archipreneur.

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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