WHYY
By
Vishaan Chakrabarti (Courtesy of Bret HartmanTED)
Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti is explaining why he doesn’t think the pandemic will drive people away from cities from a remote office that appears in his Google Meet video to resemble a Finnish sauna.
“Cities and density did not form out of economic necessity. That is an idea that economists and technologists have been trying to foist on us for centuries,” the founder and creative director of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism and dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design says.
He gazes at the screen, wearing a black mock turtleneck sweater, and ticks off ancient cities that formed for spiritual or cultural reasons.