Patrik Schumacher on the Future of Cities- Power, Politics & Density
In Episode 25 of Talking Place, the Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects makes the case that most of what the built environment says about placemaking is wrong.
Cities have always been economic engines, cultural ecosystems, and social sorting mechanisms. What is new is the gap between how we talk about them and how they function.
In a recent episode of the Talking Place podcast, Patrik Schumacher, Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, offers an unvarnished view of how cities actually function, and why many of today’s placemaking orthodoxies may be undermining the very urban vitality they claim to protect.
Patrik is the Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, a practice behind some of the most recognisable buildings in the world. The MAXXI museum in Rome. The DDP in Seoul. The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku. Galaxy SOHO in Beijing. He is also a recent recipient of the European Architecture Award and one of the most outspoken architectural theorists of his generation.
Rather than reach for the familiar language around inclusivity, sustainability and identity, he reframes the conversation of city making around choice, differentiation and productivity.
Placemaking Has Become a Buzzword
The term placemaking is everywhere. Developers use it. Councils use it. Consultants use it. In the process, it has lost almost all meaning.
What Patrik argues is that the problem is not semantic. The drive to make places work for everyone, to offend no one and exclude no one, produces spaces that are predictable, stimulation-free and ultimately forgettable. Specificity is not the enemy of good placemaking. It is the precondition for it.
"Inclusiveness is a false ideology. Placemaking needs to be decoupled from it, so you have an element of exclusivity to be actually a place, rather than the pretence of a place."
This is not an argument for physically keeping people out. It is an argument for designing with intention. A place that tries to be everything for everyone often results in spaces that mean very little to anyone.
Inclusivity vs Identity
Schumacher argues that placemaking has become entangled with an ideological demand for inclusivity: the idea that every space must serve everyone equally.
The result? Places that are generic, conservative, and oddly disengaging.
Great cities thrive on difference. Soho is not for everyone. Nor is Canary Wharf, Shoreditch, or Mayfair. Their success lies in specificity, cultural, economic, and social. They attract particular groups, activities and cultures. They create conditions where certain interactions are more likely to happen, not by accident but by design.
Patrick's argument is that when inclusivity becomes the dominant design brief, it flattens that specificity. The result is a kind of spatial neutrality that lacks meaning. Spaces that everyone can technically access and nobody particularly wants to go to.
Strong places are defined by difference. That is not a contradiction of urban life. It is how urban life works.
Community Does Not Happen by Accident
Too much development still assumes that community appears once enough people are placed near each other. Fill a building, hand over keys, add a coffee machine, and wait.
Patrick's position is that community does not emerge from proximity alone. Putting people in the same building does not make them a community, any more than putting people in the same room makes them a team. Community is an outcome of curation, shared intention and genuine alignment of interest.
ZHA has been developing what he calls community forging tools for residential design. Participatory design processes that work, in his analogy, like a dating site. Future residents or tenants register what they are looking for, what they offer, who they want around them. The community forms around the design, rather than after it.
"Curating the community using technology is like creating a dating site… you register, you share what you're looking for, you can choose your space. And then somebody else can say I want to be part of this."
He cites Second Home in London as a working example for community building in a commercial context. A workspace that curates its tenant mix so firms with mutual synergy end up next to each other. Tech companies that want to be adjacent. Creative businesses that benefit from proximity. The result is not just a well-designed building. It is a productive ecosystem that generates value well above the square metre rate.
A building is not a community. Proximity is not belonging. Density is not connection.
Developers who understand that can build places people stay loyal to. If you are just filling space rather than forging community, you are almost certainly leaving value on the table.
The Case for a 30 Million London
Patrik loves London. He says without hesitation that it is the greatest city in the world. The depth of talent across industries. The connectivity. The cultural offer. The ability to pull and keep the best people from everywhere. ZHA, he argues, could not exist in any other European city. Not even Berlin.
And yet he is critical of the city's resistance to grow into what it could be. Few topics provoke more anxiety in urban debate than density. Yet Schumacher makes the case that density is not a threat to the quality of urban life; it’s indispensable.
"They have carpets of two-story housing, it's a waste, spreading out London. This could be densified massively… You could double and triple the density. You could also be easily a 30 million city."
The issue is not scarcity of land. Vast stretches of underused low-rise housing sit within cycling distance of global financial and creative hubs. International capital is available and ready to deploy, yet they are being blocked as the rules are prohibitive. Height restrictions, under-utilisation, and territorial protectionism lock cities into inefficient, low-density patterns that serve incumbent landowners rather than the people who need homes.
Beyond density, the conversation also touches on how spaces are designed to facilitate interaction. Schumacher emphasises the importance of movement, proximity, and visibility.
Walkable environments. Layered public spaces. Overlapping programs.
Places where people don’t just pass through but encounter each other.
Good urban design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about choreography.
Housing Standards and the Illusion of Protection
When people cannot live close to where they work, when commutes stretch for hours, when space becomes a luxury rather than a baseline, the entire system loses productivity. That is not a side effect. It is the consequence of a planning system that has confused protection with restriction.
When asked directly whether the UK will hit its 1.5 million homes target, his answer is immediate.
"Of course not. We need a kind of full-on libertarian revolution in the built environment. These rules are insane. They're just destroying value."
Housing scarcity in London is not inevitable. It is produced. When cities fail to build enough homes, they are not preserving the quality of life. They are rationing access to it.
Minimum space requirements, rigid unit mixes, and prescriptive regulations are often defended as safeguards of dignity and quality. Patrik's argument turns this on its head. These standards reduce supply, inflate prices and strip people of choice.
Well-intentioned policies end up making cities less liveable for the very people they claim to protect. Small, well-designed homes with shared amenities are banned. Overcrowded flat shares become the only viable option for anyone who wants to live near their work.
What is missing from the debate is respect for individual choice. Cities flourish when they offer genuine diversity in how people can live, not when planners impose a single vision of how they should.
AI, the Metaverse and the Future of Design
ZHA has been training custom machine learning models, integrated directly into Maya and Rhino, on their own completed projects. The goal is not to generate images. The goal is to teach what Patrik calls tectonism. Structural rationality. Fabrication constraints. Material logic. The difference between something that looks like architecture and something that can actually be built.
"We're training models and we're trying to teach tectonism to AI… you have structural rationality, topology optimization, fabrication logics, and that really works. It really works very well."
They generate their own training data from completed projects and calibrate how much output draws from their own work versus the general model. The prompting injects controlled variation, what he describes as mutation.
Tools that imitate surface aesthetics are interesting for a week. Tools that improve actual capability can reshape how practices work. The firms that thrive over the next decade will be the ones using AI to solve hard problems, not decorate presentations.
The metaverse, meanwhile, offers new possibilities for collaboration and community formation. Not as a substitute for physical cities, but as an extension that allows people to meet, design, and organise spatially rather than through flat interfaces. Patrik sees it as a better version of what we are currently trying to do with Zoom and email. More real-time. More spatial. More like actually being in a room together.
For architects and place strategists alike, this points toward a future where design is less about fixing outcomes, and more about creating frameworks for emergence.
Cities as Living Systems
If there is a unifying thread in Patrick's thinking it is this. Cities are not infrastructure projects. They are living systems that thrive on exchange, difference and density, and deteriorate under over-regulation, ideological simplification and fear of change.
The tension between openness and specificity, between access and curation, is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be navigated. The question is whether the people shaping cities are willing to navigate it honestly, or whether they would rather hide behind language that sounds good and produces nothing.
There are no easy answers. But there is a clear challenge.
If we continue designing cities to be everything to everyone, we risk creating places that ultimately stand for nothing.
For those shaping the future of cities, architects, developers, cultural leaders, and policymakers, the challenge is not to make everything the same, but to allow places to become themselves.
And in a world where cities compete for talent, attention, and relevance, that might be the biggest risk of all.
That requires courage, clarity, and a willingness to rethink long‑held assumptions.
And perhaps, most of all, it requires giving cities back the freedom they need to function.
Listen to Talking Place Episode 25 with Patrick Schumacher — available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major streaming platforms.
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