Carlo Ratti:

On The Cities of Tomorrow

Bartolomeo SalaI would like to start by asking you about the theme that brings together the various strands of the current Venice Biennale Architettura, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., and that’s the idea of intelligence. There might be no term that’s more fraught at the moment, nor one that, as of late, might be subject to a kind of narrow-minded reductionism.

The Biennale doesn’t reject a data-driven approach or the potential of AI, of course. However, it does gesture toward an integration with other forms of intelligences, be they human or nonhuman. Could you tell me a bit more about the thought process that drove the curatorial approach?

Carlo RattiIt’s exactly what you said. At a time when people tend to think about intelligence in a very reductive way—in terms of AI or ChatGPT or whatever—we thought it was important to look at the multiplicity. That’s also why we choose to include the word in its Latin root. Not only does the word “intelligens” combine Italian and English into one word, but also it has this interesting thing that in its ending it contains the word “gens”—that is, people. Again, it’s about multiplicity. There’s a lot of people involved, so there are many forms of intelligence coming together.

BSI wonder if the story arc of the Biennale doesn’t mirror that of your career. You are the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, and your work as an architect as well as an academic has long been dedicated to how the harnessing of data can deliver cities and urban spaces that are more efficient, sustainable, and user-friendly. At the same time, some of your recent designs—I am thinking of the canteen with grassed-topped roof you completed in 2024 for the Italian tomato company Mutti, near Parma—try to work out a new harmony between natural and built environments with concepts such as circularity and no waste.

Where does this evolution come from? Was it something organic (no pun intended), or was there a specific “aha” moment?

CRTo be honest, I would disagree with that reading. If you go back even almost 20 years, to the time when we did the Digital Water Pavilion at the Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, that project was about digital but also natural elements. In the very same year, we actually designed a project in Milan, the Trussardi Café. It was about bringing nature to the center of Milan, to the Trussardi Café and fashion house, with one of the first projects in Italy by Patrick Blanc, the French botanist who created “green walls.”

So, for us, data was always a way to look at the city in a biological way. In a biological sense, data allows us to see the city as a living organism. This was there from the beginning. And then there are other projects we have done over the years. For Milan Design Week in 2018, we designed Living Nature, a garden pavilion where all four seasons coexisted at the same time. That was also putting together the two things—natural and artificial. So, the biological analogy has been with us from the beginning. Simply, some people got so excited by the technological side of what we do and put us in that bucket.

The idea of “collective” is also something we have explored in one of my first books, Open Source Architecture, whose first edition was published by Thames & Hudson in 2015. All three types of intelligence—natural, artificial, collective—have been threads at the heart of Carlo Ratti Associati since the start. As to how this ties in with the first part of your question—that is, how my practice informs the current Biennale—the latter is a much broader endeavor. It, of course, has links to my past projects, but at the same time—because it is concerned with nature and climate change—the Biennale explores a much broader array of things.

BSSpeaking of climate change, in interviews as well as the curator’s statement that welcomes the visitor at the entrance of the Arsenale, you stress the point that if architecture so far has focused on mitigation—that is, devising strategies to reduce our impact on the climate—it is now time to focus on adaptation.

This statement on its own seems to point to the sort of technosolutionism that Andreas Malm criticizes in his book Overshoot—i.e., the idea that climate breakdown is inevitable, so we had better make peace with that and buckle up until some future carbon-sequestering technology comes along. In reality, I don’t think you suggest anything of the kind but, again, a sort of integration between the two. How do you see mitigation and adaptation work together?

CRWell, that’s just a matter of fact. We still need to do mitigation, of course. However, when you see the data coming, which is quite concerning in terms of rising temperatures and climate, as well as what is happening in many countries which are not trying to mitigate anymore, then what you need to do is do what architecture has been doing from the beginning.

I don’t think, again, that there’s anything especially technologically driven in this. Abbé [Marc-Antoine] Laugier says that the first example of architecture that tries to adapt to climate is the primitive hut. He writes this in 18th-century France, but he looks at architecture that humans were doing at the very, very beginning. For him, that’s the origin of architecture. So adaptation is not necessarily a way to use technological solutions. In many cases, it can be about nature-based solutions. But yes, you just see that the data tells us that the planet is changing—has changed—and that has to be something to take into account. As architecture always did.

BSTechnology—be it AI, robots, or dreams of outer space—features very prominently in the Biennale. An equal attention, however, is given to low-tech, low-impact solutions. At the entrance of the Arsenale, the visitor is welcomed by “A Circular Economy Manifesto,” in which you affirm to abandon a “take, make, dispose” approach in favor of a “built environment [that] can coexist harmoniously with our planet, by eliminating waste, circulating materials and regenerating natural systems.” Many of the national pavilions that seem to have struck a special chord have a similarly ecological ethos about them and try in different ways to make the most of what we already have—the intelligence of plants and bacteria, but also traditional building methods, vernacular materials and techniques, and the like.

The critique that is often made against these sorts of ideas is their scalability. What’s your opinion on this? Is it a matter of cost and comfort, or the fact that they clash with a growth-led economic logic?

CRI don’t think it is one size fits all, so to speak, because each of these projects has different scalability. But we should bear in mind one thing.

Since its birth, the Biennale traditionally has been a snapshot of what architecture is doing. I think that’s totally outdated. You can see snapshots in real time everywhere—on Instagram, on TikTok, in online magazines. This means that the Biennale needs to change. It has been changing, but this year we are pushing the boundary probably even more. It is about it becoming a lab. When you are doing a lab, you start by trying out everything. Scalability is something you might have in mind, but that happens outside of the lab. I even wrote this in my curator’s statement. Some projects will be more successful than others in scalability. However, it is still good to try everything, because sometimes when you have tried something out, you find a different way to scale up. You find a different way to have impact.

This Biennale is a lab to generate knowledge, and the way I see it, this is the only reason for a Biennale to exist in Venice or elsewhere today. I know that some of the exhibitors are trying to turn their experiments into startups. There are many methods in order to scale up innovative ideas. So even if we show something that we know today might have difficulties, I think it is still okay to show it because a lab should look to maximize the variety of experiments. Only later we can see if maybe there’s something we didn’t think about and see how it could scale up.

BSSome critics didn’t like the open curatorial approach, the fact that rather than a tightly selected retrospective it was more of an open call. Personally, I thought it was deeply coherent with the bottom-up, network-centered vision you foster in your practice and what you have just described—that is, the current Biennale being a laboratory or an incubator able to foster unexpected chain reactions and generate innovative ideas. 

CRThe idea of openness has fascinated me for a long time. When I was a student at Cambridge, I did a number of things with Umberto Eco and his Opera aperta (The Open Work). The idea that something keeps on evolving has always been a big inspiration for me. At the Biennale, some people loved it, some people hated it, which is what a Biennale should do: It should provoke a conversation.

Of course, if your idea of a Biennale is to be like a moment exhibition, you don’t do it with an open call. But if it is a lab, a lab is always open to ideas and suggestions that could turn into beautiful new discoveries. It’s the key principle of any lab—especially an interdisciplinary lab—so the open call is almost mandatory. You have to get as many inputs as possible and then bring them together to create unexpected new ideas and collisions. Collision is, again, important. It goes back to the idea of the Biennale as a quick, static snapshot of what somebody might consider the best, most relevant architecture at the moment, which I think is useless, or something that’s dynamic and yet to be finished—what Umberto Eco would have called an Opera aperta.

BSIn one of your last books, Urbanità, a riff on the idea of city through 14 reports from 14 different metropoles, you make the case that, likewise, a city is not just the sum of its physical buildings but something more like a networked superorganism that’s shaped by the hive mind of its citizens. Less clear is how this idea—which is at the heart of your practice—can be harnessed into a kind of urban planning that is more democratic and bottom-up. How, and to what extent, do you think common citizens should be included in the design process?

CRWell, you can do it in many different ways. There is a vast literature that goes back to the ’70s where people try to do a lot of participation. I am thinking of figures such as John Habraken or Christopher Alexander. I think there are two dimensions to this. The first we were actually discussing with John Habraken in my book Open Source Architecture, and it is about how to use new networks in order to facilitate the design process of the design team and also outside with citizens. And then the other dimension that I believe is very important but that was overlooked at times in the past is how we can incorporate different types of feedback.

Not everybody is trained in the same way. This is what killed very important experiments of participation, such as Alexander’s Oregon experiment: People eventually lost interest because many of them were not necessarily trained in the discipline. What we did in Pristina [in Kosovo] for Manifesta 14 three years ago was to engage people at different levels, look at broader nature and see how it responds. You don’t need to have everybody at the drawing board. But actually, the important thing is to get feedback, which also is what nature does. And if you get feedback, that comes in many forms. People can participate just with their feet, by simply going to a place and thus showing that they like it. So that’s the thing.

BSTo wrap up, a slightly lighter (but capitally important) question: What will the city of the future look like, in your opinion? Is it even a question worth asking given the fact the city is itself an ever-evolving aggregate of different kinds of intelligence—natural, artificial, collective—and therefore necessarily “site-specific”?

CRI think the key point to bear in mind is that basically the human population is about to peak. In most countries, it has peaked. In many countries, it is declining. So it follows that we don’t need to build any more cities; we just need to reinhabit what we already have.

The amazing thing is that we still live in buildings that were built hundreds, even thousands of years ago. If you think about Rome or think about Split in Croatia, they were built in Roman times, and we still inhabit some of those buildings. So I don’t think that the city—the physical city—will change much for two reasons. One is that we don’t need to build that much urban fabric anymore—and that’s good news. And then, in most countries, it is just easier to reinhabit what we already have. And we have been doing that for thousands of years.

So I think the city of tomorrow, physically, will look quite similar to the city of today. But I think what will change a lot is more the way we live it. Just think about the massive change we experienced over the past five or six years, not just with COVID but in how we work, how we get dinner delivered, how we meet in space, how we navigate it, how we get information. All these dimensions of urban life have changed immensely in just a very short time. I don’t see a Blade Runner kind of setting coming anytime soon. What I see, however, is big changes in the way we live. Not to the urbs—the physical city—but to the civitas—the way we experience it as its citizens.