025 - Future of Cities- Power, Politics & Density with Patrik Schumacher
Patrik Schumacher, Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, on placemaking, inclusiveness, density, AI, the UK housing crisis, and why London has the potential to be a city of 30 million.
Patrick Schumacher, Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, joins Talking Place for a conversation that challenges some of the most settled assumptions in contemporary placemaking and urban design.
From the claim that inclusiveness undermines rather than strengthens place identity, to the argument that London should house 30 million people and that the UK planning system is structurally incapable of delivering the homes the country needs, Patrik makes a case for a more specific, more curated and more ambitious approach to the built environment.
The conversation also ventures into the frontier of AI-powered architecture - not the image generation many are familiar with, but the deep technical work ZHA is doing to train machine learning models to understand structure, tectonics, and fabrication logic. And it closes with Patrik's vision for ZHA's Metrotopia: a virtual city that may reshape how communities form, how conferences run, and how architecture is experienced.
This is a conversation about cities, design, political courage and what the future could look like if we stopped thinking small.
Challenging, sensational, and dramatic - this is Talking Place at its most provocative.
Topics covered
• Why place must be specific — and why generic spaces fail everyone
• The tension between inclusiveness and meaningful places
• London's untapped density potential and the case for a 30 million city
• Community as curation: the 'dating site' model for residential development
• The UK housing crisis — planning as the core obstacle
• How ZHA is using AI beyond image generation: teaching tectonism and structural logic to machine learning
• The Metaverse as the next frontier in architecture, community, and spatial design
• What future architects should be training for
About our guest
Patrick Schumacher is Principal of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and one of the leading theorists in contemporary architecture. The author of the two-volume treatise “The Autopoiesis of Architecture”, he is known for his unapologetic advocacy of parametricism and free-market urbanism. His latest book, ‘Tectonism – Architecture for the 21st Century’, was released in 2023. His current research and design interest is focused on the metaverse and the integration of real and virtual communication spaces. He received the European Architecture Award in 2025.
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