Question. Do you realize that contemporary populism is given an anti-urban meaning? We say that people vote for Trump because they hate the rich urbanites of New York, that the yellow vests are against Paris, that Orban poses a dilemma Hungary against Budapest...
Answer. I agree. There is a sense of political conflict between capitals and the countries surrounding them that is increasing. This has been clearly seen in Poland, where it was the cities that voted for Tusk. However, I believe that deep down, it has less to do with a rejection of cities and more with people's fear of losing control over their lives. Many people who vote for Trump fear that the elites of New York will leave them behind. Because it is true: cities leave people behind, even within them. There are increasingly wealthier and more sophisticated central neighborhoods while others are left behind. When something improves in them, it is immediately seen as gentrification, as an expansion of the center that leaves more people behind. Contemporary populism has many layers of meaning, but one that interests me here is the fear of not having control over life. Things happen too quickly, change too radically. People fear losing their identity, living in a world where everything seems the same and a bit false, where neighbors arrive speaking a different language... There are more changes than people can assimilate. What discussions have dominated the center of public debate in recent years? Gender policies. Well, I know several people who have changed gender, I do not think this is a nonexistent problem, but it is a very difficult issue for many people who do not have direct experience with transgender individuals. And those people feel they are losing control over the public sphere.
Q. Your parents lived in Berlin, London, Munich, and Genoa. Did they have a critical view of the cities they lived in? Did they used to talk about what they liked and did not like about London?
A. That has a long answer.
Q. Go ahead
My father was not exactly a philosopher but he was the man who worked with and for the philosophers of Berlin in the interwar period. Walter Benjamin, for example. I do not remember him ever saying a phrase like "I like this city because...", but I am sure he liked big cities because he saw them as a place where connections were made. Those connections were his way of life. The idea of cosmopolitanism also appealed to both of them. When they moved to a smaller place in Italy, they felt it as a retreat.
Q. Did they enjoy living in seclusion?
A. Yes, but it was something else. I go back one generation. My grandfather, whom I did not know, was a chemist and also an opera singer. His voice was a bit low to be a tenor and a bit high to be a bass; he was somewhere in between... He spent his life traveling with his family, so my father completed his studies without going to high school. And that marked him, he was always a loner. But he was born in 1899, so his world was that of the Weimar Republic. There is an article about my father comparing Berlin in the 1920s to the counterculture of the 60s. The same sexual liberation, jazz, nightlife, jobs coming and going, people living on borrowed time, the feeling that something was changing... And he, that solitary boy, was in the middle of that world, one of the people connecting others. He played the piano in clubs, was friends with Tristan Tzara, was in all kinds of trouble...
Q. And did he carry that nostalgia for that place forever?
A. He had six children, he would never have used the word "nostalgia". Too many tasks and too much trouble. But I do believe that England never fully satisfied him, did not live up to its promises. The story of their emigration was tough. My parents arrived in England with no money, with children, in a world at war... England was suspicious of them because they were Germans and confined them to the Isle of Man. It turned out to be a great experience because he reunited with the best thinkers of Germany who were also confined... Kurt Schwitters portrayed my father, you can look it up as The Philosopher Haral Landry.
Q. And you? Did you have an idea of the kind of places you wanted to live in at 22?
A. I was born in London and lived in Hampstead, a very beautiful and quite posh area of the city, although we were intruders. A public program placed us there even though we were poor. Later, we were given an apartment in a large social housing development. I remember being very aware that there were streets I should not cross because they belonged to others. So, I had two very complementary experiences in London... Then we moved to Munich, which was an interesting city at that time because Berlin was blocked and Munich was the cultural capital of the American-controlled zone in Germany. It was the cultural hub of Germany. Jimi Hendrix smashed a guitar for the first time in Munich. I was very involved in the art world: Rauschenberg, Warhol... They all passed through Munich. So, the story of my father repeated itself: life accelerated at my doorstep, and I was there. Additionally, I had older sisters, and the Germans saw me as an English boy. That gave me prestige. I lived in a very nice neighborhood, but there was a psychiatric hospital in the area, and they released patients onto the streets. Some of them were fascinating, some women were very attractive... And that happened in the most pleasant landscape you can imagine, similar to the type of houses seen in Brooklyn, with trees on the streets... I think what stayed with me from Munich is the idea that there is a right balance for cities, they do not have to be gigantic to offer the cosmopolitanism that makes them worthwhile. There are cities I have loved like Istanbul, but they have grown so much that they are now ungovernable places, where it is impossible to plan any action that has a real impact.
Q. When I arrived in Madrid from my birth city, I loved the cultural sophistication of the capital: cinemas showing French films, bookstores, museums, elegant people I could relate to... Today, I suspect that my friends in my city have the same access to culture, dress the same, and have very similar keys to mine in Madrid.
A. That is interesting. What makes a not-so-large city attractive to live in? I curated an exhibition in Sicily on this topic five years ago. It had five rooms, each dedicated to an idea. The first one told us that we want something distinctive in cities that anchors us to them, we want them to be a specific place and not just any place. The next room told the opposite: we want the city to make us feel connected to the world. This includes being able to watch French films, yes, and take a train and reach another place. The third room was called Alimento y naturaleza, Nourishment and nature, which sounds better in English. It referred to the subsistence needs that cities cover for us. The fourth was called Ambición y oportunidad, which is possibly the one that explains why you came to Madrid. The city is the promise of fulfilling our aspirations. And the fifth was called Inspiration and evocation. Sometimes, cities lead us to want to transcend. I was in Madrid after the attacks of 2004. I visited Atocha station, and the garden at the entrance seemed to me a place that conveyed something elevated in mourning... Today, I would add one more room, an idea of innovation. A city is attractive to us if it offers new ways to address the common good. Sometimes it seems like the world is falling apart. We need our cities to try something that makes us feel that generosity and kindness exist. In gigantic cities, this is very difficult to achieve. The city is based on encounters between people, also on chance encounters. In a city of 12 million inhabitants, are they possible? When my friend Carlos Moreno talks about the city of 15 minutes in Paris, he is not only talking about energy efficiency, he is also talking about promoting encounters between people.
Q. In 1968, you were 21 years old. I would like to ask about May 1968 and the city. On one hand, it was the most urban revolt imaginable, and on the other hand, in the aspect of cobblestones and the beach, there is already an idea of the city as the place that alienates us.
A. I wasn't very politically inclined in 1968. I was more interested in women, going out at night, and art. The first major student riots in Europe happened in Munich in 1964. Some guys started playing the guitar in Schwabing, the bohemian area of the city, the police removed them by force, and the next day thousands of students protested. I didn't want to get too involved in that topic; I wanted to be left alone to live my life. The people who were five years older than me and became communists... I wasn't very interested, to be honest. But something must have stayed with me because my work, after a few years, changed when I landed in a building in London, an old KitKat factory, where there were a thousand more or less activist associations, and I discovered that what I was good at was connecting them and making sure they had a voice. And that's what makes me part of '68, right? That's where the idea of creative bureaucracy came from. I don't know if I'm answering your questions.
Q. No, but it's okay.
A. You had asked me about '68 and the idea of the city... For me, in 1968, the city was a source of excitement. It wasn't a problem; it was what I needed to live fully. But I think I already sensed that the city I desired was one that would allow me to feel a part of its life. I felt that way in Munich; not in London. Vanity exists, we must not ignore it. In Berlin, I have been able to enter the clubs everyone talked about, I could enter Tresor, for example, even if it was just to discover that I was the oldest at the party and leave. But that made me feel part of the city. I studied in Bologna and felt that way. And in Bilbao, where I worked... They are not perfect cities, but they invite you to think that we can mean something. That doesn't happen in a megalopolis... In reality, we began to perceive the sense of urban decay at the end of the 1980s when I started with Comedia. I had worked at the European Commission. I visited Liverpool, Sheffield, Glasgow... Everything was falling apart before our eyes. Some cities had their culture and potential. In other cities, there was nothing to hold on to. Conflicts with immigration began, Indian ladies who didn't speak English... I suppose we started preparing projects. We realized a bit late. Or at least, we started acting a bit late.
Q. Could you compare the reasons for discontent in cities in 1975 with the reasons for discontent in cities in 2025?
A. In 1975, at least in the UK, there was not yet a great urban discontent. The Welfare State was working reasonably well. It broke down a bit later. There may have been discontent with the landscape of brutalist architecture... Today, it seems like an attractive architecture, but people in 1975 felt that someone had disconnected from them, that their expectations and the things they liked had been forgotten. Do you like Rem Koolhaas? I'm sure you do.
Q. I interviewed him once, it was terrible, and it weighs on me.
A. I had a public conversation with him. I went to greet him, and he became rigid. Then I remembered that I had written an article titled Is Rem Koolhaas a genius or an idiot?. I suspect he didn't understand that ambiguity. I guess there's something broken in him. I don't know if it comes from his childhood in Indonesia or where. There's something dysfunctional that prevents him from understanding people, seeing them in their human condition.
Q. And your theory is that the same happened with the architecture made in 1975?
A. Yes. I think there is a lot of beauty in that architecture, but there is something wrong, a profound misunderstanding of how personal relationships work. I think of Koolhaas and wonder: does he like people? I doubt it. Can good architecture be made without liking people?
Q. And the discontent in 2025?
A. It has to do with the direction capitalism has taken and the colossal difference between the rich and the rest of the city's inhabitants. The other dissatisfaction is that it is increasingly difficult to communicate, we are becoming more invisible to each other.
Q. Is loneliness in cities more distressing now?
A. Loneliness is a pandemic recognized by the World Health Organization. I make an effort to go to the local products market in my town every Saturday, go to the same café, and pretend with a friend that we are in a literary salon from the 1920s. I ask the gentlemen selling strawberries at the market how they are doing... They may think I'm crazy, but they take it well as long as I don't ask about money. Why do I do it? Because I also need to feel part of an 'us,' of something bigger and more authentic than my individuality. Cities need spaces that foster such encounters, that make us feel that we belong to an 'us.' We don't need to connect intimately, but we need to know that neighbors exist. By chatting with the milk seller at the market, I discovered he was a teacher, and now we talk about other things. In contrast, my nephew has health problems and lives in deep and distressing loneliness. And my daughter has a friend who lives in isolation and a terrible emptiness that has led to drug use. It's not exactly loneliness but isolation that I see.
Q. The word authentic came up... Today, any burger chain imitates the aesthetic codes of urban bohemia. How to differentiate the creative city from its replica?
A. Authenticity is impossible to define in one sentence. I believe authenticity comes in overlapping layers. When we talk about aesthetics, which is the word you used, I think of the image of places where there is coherence and readability. They awaken a part of fascination in us and bring close rich and complex experiences but also leave something open to our decision.