Chile and Argentina have almost 90% urbanization. In Europe, where I live, we are 77% urban. This growth went hand in hand with a large high zoning process. In the western part of Paris, in 1962, La Défense was created, the largest business district in Europe with more than one million square meters. At the same time, there was a fragmentation that separated living and working locations. The edge of the Seine was transformed into two high- ways to link the east and west and created traffic jams: in the morning on the way to work, and in the afternoon on the way home. The origin of this growth was in 1920 when large buildings and high- ways appeared in Chicago. The city had a male gender, which correspond- ed to the vehicle. Women hardly existed socially: they were at home, they had no right to vote, they had no right to smoke. In 1933, the Charter of Athens took place, led by Le Corbusier. In 1929, he was in Buenos Aires and said: “How is it possible that, in this city, every 300 meters you have to stop the car to wait for another one to pass? We need cities to go fast and go far”. Le Corbusier's functionalist constructivist movement created infrastructures that became deep wounds in the cities. In the 1980s, an anti-zoning movement appeared that wrote the Brussels Declaration, anti-Le Corbusier, and said: “We need multipurpose neighborhoods, proximity; we need public space to be reclaimed for the people; we want functional polycentrism, proximity stores, schools, sports centers”. This movement faces what used to be called “the bruselization”, which are the towers that emerged and razed the neighborhoods to the ground. That movement did not succeed. When I ask now: do you know the book about the 1980 Brussels Declaration, the one by André Barey? You do not know it. That book did not succeed because the city model was based on functional separation. Business districts, towers that need elevators, lighting, and ventilation, and their economic model: company restaurants, parking lots, etc., have arisen. Multiple business models intersect and it is in the interest of those who want this urban planning process to last. Le Corbusier probably never imagined that this revolution would take place, but the germ of zoning functionalism entails this functional separation. Sixty years later, the economic model of La Défense is dead; its unemployment rate has reached 18%. We are closing a cycle that can be marked as originating in the Athens Charter and that today needs to move on to another stage, not only conceptually but also in terms of urban transformation. We see this through the success of the polycentric proximities concept that creates a new business model for the same actors, both architecturally and urbanistically, in this polymorphic and polycentric vision of the city. Fernando Marín R In our case, people were leaving downtown Santiago after the social unrest of 2019, with the pandemic and teleworking. How could it be restored so that people can reoccupy it and it can be reclaimed? Carlos Moreno R The reflection of 2024 is that the monofunctional neighborhood business model is exhausted. Climate change is anoth- er element that comes into play, particularly after the United Nations Climate Change Conferences in 2015 and 2021, because there is great sensitivity to the issue of global warming and these neighborhoods themselves are energetic. On the other hand, they require long distanc- es to be traveled, with transportation being the first contributing CO2 generator. We are living at a tipping point. A minute in which we must see where we are going. Soledad Miranda R Has any place been identified where it is possible to change the model? Carlos Moreno R The case of Buenos Aires is notorious. Horacio Ro- dríguez Larreta was head of the city government during Covid and he said: we have to change the urban planning code of the micro center to offer a mix of uses. He grasps the importance of this paradigm shift and launches a process to save the empty micro center. I visited one of the
He arrived in Paris 45 years ago, began applying his mathematical training to infrastructure solutions, and from there developed his urban planning proposals. He has been a researcher for decades and practices at Sorbonne University. He is also the scientific director and co-founder of the ETI Chair (Entrepreneurship - Territory - Innovation), a laboratory dedicated to enabling solutions for sustainable and inclusive cities. In 1989, he acquired French citizenship and in 2010, he was named Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor. He holds other international awards such as the 2019 Prospective Medal from the French Academy of Architecture and the UN Habitat Scroll of Honor 2022, dedicated to those working for sustainable urbanization. He is the author of several books on urbanism and the creator of technological systems with industrial transfer. His TED “Countdown, the 15-minute City” has almost 1.5 million views and has been translated into fourteen languages. He was in Santiago mid-year and took part in a conversation with AOA magazine to talk about the reasons that brought him to our country… –My presence in Santiago is linked to a strategic reconfiguration project called “Eje Nueva Alameda” that has been in the making for some time and has been accelerated under the impetus of the Regional Government,” he says. After various conversations, Governor Claudio Orrego has asked me to introduce the concept of multi-service proximity in the seven to eight kilometers of Nueva Alameda so that it is not only an infrastructure with more bicycle lanes but also has a connotation of what we call social infrastructure. That is to say, infrastructure for meetings, creation, and cultural activities. To this end, I have launched a project with my team at Sorbonne, the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Chile, and Tecnológica de Monterrey, to make a geospatial diagnosis and build high-quality indicators for the entire area, using our proximity meth- odology. I came here to present this and show the opportunities, the shortcomings, the difficulties, the grey areas... and, at the same time, to encourage the team that has been created here. PROMOTING A PARADIGM SHIFT Yves Besançon R For many years, Chair ETI, where you are the scientific director, has had links with supranational organizations. What is the basic idea behind all these relationships? Carlos Moreno R The concepts we have developed - “the fifteen-minute city”, and “the half-hour territory”- have become global concepts. We have a strategic alliance with UN-Habitat, which is the cities division of the United Nations; with C40, the World Metropolis Climate Orga- nization - of which Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Lima, Sao Paulo, Bogota, and others are members - and with the World Association of Medium and Small Cities, which is called UCLG: United Cities and Local Governments. We have integrated colleagues from Latin America at Sorbonne and my idea is to promote a change of paradigm on how to give cities a nuance oriented towards polycentrism, multi-services, social infrastructures, urban regeneration, functional polymorphism, multi-use of places, and so on. At other times, I had a strategic scientific advisory activity with the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, which I have now put aside to devote 100% of my time to this activity at Sorbonne. Yves Besançon R We know that the mayor was re-elected (2020-2026) based on the 15-minute project. That is related to your proposal to leave behind the Athens Charter and move more towards the 1980 Brussels Declaration. Our readers - architects and urban planners – would be very interested to know why you say that. Carlos Moreno R A century of global urban development (1923 to 2024) is a good period to step back and see what has happened during that time. The first thing has been the accelerated development of cities. I left Colombia 45 years ago. At that time, 30% of the continent's inhabitants were urban and 70% rural; today this has been reversed. Countries like
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