According to the ECI ranking, Milwaukee (USA) is one of the most livable cities in the world. The assessment took into account parameters such as stability, healthcare, culture, environment, and much more. In your opinion, what makes a city livable?
Raimund Holubek (RH): Key factors include a good mix of social classes, but also the intelligent use of space and the overlapping of diverse functions, with urban open space also playing a significant role.
Gregor Gutscher (GGU): It's all about identification and tradition. The Milwaukee Bucks are a pretty good basketball team, just like SGE here in Frankfurt. People identify with them. And you can achieve the same thing with places or with spatial quality.
Holger Meyer (HM): What are we looking for? We are looking for places with character. Cities that we like, urban spaces that we enjoy and feel comfortable in, and that are visibly and clearly shaped by their historical development. Unfortunately, we have lost such places in many areas.
Is the increasing uniformity of city centers and urban development also a problem?
HM: Unfortunately, city centers are becoming more and more similar, more and more interchangeable. This is largely due to the standardization of retail—chains everywhere. I see the same offerings everywhere, and everything looks the same. This means that the individual charm we are actually looking for is lost.
But architecture has no influence on that.
HM: No. But here, too, COVID-19 is accelerating developments that were already underway. However, this offers considerable opportunities, as most cities do not yet have answers to what should happen when this uniform retail sector becomes distressed.
You have now founded a new unit called "holger meyer urban." What is its goal?
RH: Our living spaces are subject to constant change—we have to and want to face up to that. Carl Fingerhuth once said: "Urban development and urban planning can be viewed like a film that is constantly being updated, while the individual buildings are like individual frames. They are exchanged and are flexible." As a planner, you have an influence on the story, similar to a director, and take on a certain responsibility for its development. I think that's a very good image of how we see ourselves, or how I see myself as an urban planner.
HM: To stick with the image: "holger meyer urban" is the film and "holger meyer architektur" is the individual scene. The focus of the individual frame, the building, is shifting noticeably to the environment and the structure of the city. There are overarching social issues that are driving this: for 15 years, we have been dealing with an incredible technological process, which we are now making usable for ourselves under the keyword "smart city." And we are moving from a car-friendly city to one with completely new mobility structures. We want to face this change with "hmu."
So, does that mean that holger meyer urban no longer thinks in terms of buildings, but rather in more complex terms of neighborhoods or districts, or perhaps even larger dimensions?
RH: When you're working on a planning task on a larger scale, you have to consider the context in which such a project is situated. Responding to the conditions of the location, picking up on existing features and structures, and further developing and integrating certain aspects often leads to concepts with new identities that are more sustainable because they continue the history.
GGU: Urban development is also about "storytelling."
Storytelling? Can you give an example?
GGU: Take the Werksviertel district in Munich behind the Ostbahnhof station, for example. Here, work, housing, and life are interwoven in a unique way, partly because the existing buildings there have been cleverly integrated into the project. The existing buildings there range from an armaments company to a food wholesaler, not to mention the temporary cultural institutions. Different social classes and functions are mixed together in a space with good infrastructure. For many urban centers, this serves as a model.
HM: In the future, we want to develop and implement our ideas on different scales—a good urban planner is not necessarily a good architect, and vice versa.