Pedro Ortiz is currently a Senior Urban Planner at the World Bank, Washington DC. Previously, he was Deputy Director of the Council of Architects of Madrid and Director of the Institute for Urban Renewal, a joint venture between the public and private sectors in Madrid.
He was also the founder and Director of the Masters program of Town Planning of the University King Juan Carlos of Madrid.
Pedro Ortiz was a Partner of the Planning Consultancy firm of Arop&As where he served as an advisor to the Regional Governments of Navarra and Murcia in Spain as well as many others around the world, in addition to several engineering and development companies including Intevia, SA, Institute of Transport Engineering and Roads, the Centro Superior de Arquitectura, Camuñas Foundation.
Ortiz is a former elected Mayor for Madrid’s Central District (Distrito de Salamanca) (1989-1991). He is also a member of the Madrid’s City Council (1987-1995) where he was responsible for Urban Prospective (1993-1995) and for Culture (1991-1993). He served as Director of the “Strategic Plan for Madrid” (1991-1994). He was also Director General for Town and Regional Planning for the Government of Madrid Region and the author of the “Regional Development Plan of Madrid of 1996” and the “Land Planning Law of 1997.”
Tell us about your book “Art of Shaping the Metropolis”
Metropolises are new phenomena with which we do not know how to deal and we are making a mess. Most books about metropolises only describe those messes and, at most, make some wishful thinking about how they should evolve. This book articulates the problems and provides solutions for how they should be resolved by implementation at different scales, metropolitan, urban and urban design. http://www.shapingthemetropolis.com/
India needs a lot of it. India has 13 metropolises over 2.5 million inhabitants, some of them future world mega-metropolises.
Every day 50.000 people move to cities in India. The administrations, and the politicians in charge, have the responsibility to provide the means for serviced land for these people. That is if India wants to avoid a sea of slums that will take 300 years to solve. Europe is still struggling with the early 19 C. uncontrolled urban expansions. http://www.pedrobortiz.com/display-articles/listforcity/city/160
What are the factors and components we need to focus on to ensure a good quality of life in cities?
Metropolises are composites of cities. You must manage each city correctly but need a policy for their interaction.
– First, you need to understand the metropolitan structure or the ‘Mental Map’. It is really an “acupuncture chart” for the metropolis. It’s knowing the role each point of the territory plays and its affect in the totality.
– Then, you can either select the points where your projects will have an overall beneficial effect, as the TOD centralities, or you can define what any project, wherever located, must do to play the role it should.
The chess game analogy is useful. The metropolitan scale (1:50.000) and the urban scale (1:5.000) are very different. There is a lot of experience for urban scale issues. Not for metropolitan. We have to build up that experience. http://www.pedrobortiz.com/
In India & Mumbai context, how does Metro-matrix model address urbanization and growth issue?
The Metro-Matrix provides the ‘Mental Map’ at a metropolitan scale. Here is the Mumbai’s. Mumbai’s role is so important at national scale that it affects and is affected by larger territorial structures, as is the case the ‘national diagonals’. I have not seen this reflected yet in the analyses or proposals for metropolitan Mumbai.
Mega-Mumbai has a very well defined structure that is parallel to the sea and reflects the topography. The ‘national diagonals’ crisscrosses the basic structure. The bay introduces a vitalizing disruption.
Once you understand Mumbai, its priorities for green and gray infrastructures as well as socio-economic development become clear.
http://www.pedrobortiz.com/display-articles/listforcity/city/198
What is your message to an upwardly mobile middle class consumer who associates low-density, auto-oriented lifestyles with positive aspirations of economic success, security and prestige?pedr
I understand the social need to represent accomplishment by adopting the worldwide success image influenced by the detached single-family house of the ‘American Dream’. But, I believe there are better ways to accomplish this goal without harming the environment, fellow citizens, your city and your country. In America, younger generations are rejecting that dream. They are choosing to live nice apartments in the central city that is filled with services.
I would suggest to Mumbaikars that there are other ways to exhibit success and social prestige. Why not opt for penthouse apartments with outstanding views near a commuter train station? Instead of three cars you will only need one… and two bicycles!
How can technology shape the new metropolis?
Technology multiplies economic output and the main result of technology is wealth. Wealth expands the city with a multiplier effect. Mega-Mumbai is doubling in size every 23 years. You must plan for this growth. Is Mumbai responding to this challenge?
The other effect is in the use of space, change in trip patterns and the change in activities and uses. This phenomenon has been taking place for centuries, e.g., water mains, electricity, phones and cars. We will adapt as we experience those needs, as we have done since Krishna’s Dwarka.
I am concerned by the ‘smart city’ buzzword. Commercial firms try to sell technological gadgets as a panacea. Politicians and uninformed citizens buy them as the miracle solutions they are not. This isn’t a new phenomenon and in “Wild West” of the U.S. they were called medicine men.
I rather like to think of ‘intelligent cities’. These cities first analyze their problems, the various interwoven factors involved and what is needed to address the challenges. Then, they choose among the technologies available and select the ones that will best address adequately the problems.
How do you educate and engage the community in a meaningful urban planning dialogue?
You do that with “Collective Intelligence”. This requires social resources, which are not human resources. The two complement one another. Human resources are accumulated knowledge such as data banks. Social resources are the way humans interact. They are value systems. They are programs. Human resources can be acquired with education that is time and money. Social resources are value systems, a win-win fair-play attitude, for instance. And you only acquire, change that, with a common effort, a collective effort, for a long time. That is Collective Intelligence. Some cities have it (Medellin, Curitiba). Others don’t
Share a story/example about a great model for greenfield cities?
These good-news stories aren’t about new towns. Why? Because new towns lack the sense of place given by a historical heritage. They are like the artificially build Esperanto language contrasted with our traditional languages built and developed for millennia. They are rooted in our subconscious and have subtleties the Esperanto doesn’t.
The best greenfield cities are the ones that expand an existing city. There are many 19 C. success stories about responding to urban explosion, for example, Barcelona, which was planned to be able to grow by 15-fold. One hundred and fifty years later, it is still growing predicated on the city’s needs.
Metro-Matrix planning does this for metropolises of a new dimension: TOD acupuncture on existing nuclei along a mental map chart. You can respond to needs 15-fold, instead of producing uncontrolled disjointed incrementalist chaos as we are doing now.
