Interview with Bernardo Secchi

Bernardo Secchi is internationally renowned teacher, practitioner and theorist of urban planning. Interviewers: Anneke Bokern (journalist, Berlage Institute), Martino Tattara (architect, teacher at Berlage Institute), Fabio Vanin (architect).

 

AB: Mr Secchi, you’ve not only designed the Grote Markt and the area along the Dijle river in Mechelen, but, among other projects, also Theaterplein and Spoornoord Park in Antwerp and the Grote Markt and cemetery of Kortrijk. Why do you have so many projects in Belgium?

BS: In 1989 I was in a jury in Antwerp. Afterwards Leiedael-director Karel Debaere, whom I had met there, called me and asked me if I’d be interested in participating in a competition in Kortrijk. At the time I didn’t even know where Kortrijk was. He came to Antwerp, picked me up and we visited the site of the Hoog Kortrijk competition. The area was very interesting. So I decided that I wanted to do this project. We participated in the competition and we won. Our competitors were bOb van Reeth, whose project I really didn’t like, although we’re good friends, Stéphane Beel and Rem Koolhaas. I have to say that Koolhaas’ project was better than mine. But we won.

After that we participated in several other competitions in Flanders and we won many of them. Of course you can’t win every competition, we also lost some. In some cases I have to say that it was a pity. But we won many competitions in smaller cities. It taught us a lot, for example the importance of these small cities.

AB: You mean that you learnt how important they are within Belgium?

BS: Yes. Very often when I’m in one of those smaller towns, I think how very right people are to live there and not in the centre of Brussels or Antwerp.

By the way: I want to write a book about my projects in Flanders. Because I think that all the projects which we did in Flanders, whether they’re realized or not, demonstrate our interpretation of Flanders as a network of smaller cities.

FV: What we’re trying to do with City Visions is to find out what such mid-sized European cities have in common, because this could also be the common ground of the European city in general. We have defined three aspects: public space, density of infrastructure and housing. In your Flemish projects, you mainly deal with public space, but your public spaces often aren’t what’s classically considered a public space. Like a cemetery, which has a specific function and is enclosed. Do you think that the notion of public space needs to be re-defined in the contemporary mid-sized European city?

BS: First of all, I think that a characteristic of mid-sized cities in Europe is the importance of public spaces. Their character might have changed, and there are many new types of public spaces, but they have always been important. What I try to do with my designs is to transform a space which usually isn’t considered public into a genuinely public space, a space in which people meet. If you go to the cemetery in Kortrijk, you will find people who go there by bike and use it as a park. And look at the Spoornoord Park in Antwerp: what everybody told me before was that if immigrants use it, the Belgians wouldn’t use it. But on the contrary, everybody is using it now. People even go there to get married! I think that that’s how we have to approach urban projects. The whole network of public spaces has to be organized. The difficult thing is to make mayors and municipalities understand this.

MT: I think that your usage of the expression ‘urban project’ might create some confusion. Some people may think that it means something like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Could you explain what you mean by ‘urban project’?

BS: It’s a misunderstanding that has its origins at the beginning of the eighties, when we started to design a different kind of projects for the city in Europe. Punctual projects were created, meant to modify the image of the city. The eighties and the nineties were a period when this strategy was adopted by many cities. A lot of architects thought that it meant freedom for them, that they could finally do what they wanted, that urbanism was dead. I think that the problem was a certain arbitrariness. Why this project and not another one? Why this area of the city and not another one? As soon as you develop a strategy like this, you discriminate and you introduce a discontinuity in the city. So how do you legitimize it? That’s why I think that we can’t only design bottom-up, but also have to design top-down. We have to think of the architecture of the city and not only of the building. We have to extend our architectural vision of the city, which doesn’t mean that we have to deny the importance of single projects.

FV: Isn’t it difficult to control the legitimization of those urban projects? After all, for every strategy, there’s a complementary strategy. Do you think that we could move towards a utopia again? Maybe not like in the sixties, but in a more critical way, by thinking about prototypical cities?

BS: No, no, no! I don’t think it’s possible to come back to a common language or system of architecture. My utopia is that architects and urbanists will find a way of agreeing with each other. I don’t think that we should repeat the systemization of the sixties.

AB: Do you think that smaller cities offer more possibilities for realizing this utopia than metropolises?

BS: Yes, definitely. You can’t start something like that in Paris. You can’t change a city of several million inhabitants within just a few years. The problems are so big, so complex, they’re difficult to solve. In medium-sized cities you have more opportunities, and especially in a situation like Flanders, where there are many of these cities. It would also work in the Randstad in Holland. It’s still possible to move things in mid-scale cities.