Mitchell Joachim

Co-founder of Terreform ONE; Associate Professor of Practice, New York University (NYU), New York, NY, United States.

Mitchell Joachim is the co-founder of Terreform ONE and associate professor of practice at New York University (NYU) where he also held noteworthy leadership roles as a university senator and co-chair of Global Design NYU. He has won many awards including the Lafarge Holcim Acknowledgement Prize and Time’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities. He is a TED Senior Fellow and has been awarded fellowships with Safdie Architects and the Martin Society for Sustainability at MIT. Joachim has been featured in numerous articles and has co-authored four books: Super Cells: Building with Biology (Ted Books, 2014), Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014), XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design (Actar, 2016) and Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities (Actor, 2019). His design work has been exhibited in numerous locations including MoMA in New York, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, The Building Centre in London, DAZ in Berlin, OCAD in Toronto, NAI in Rotterdam and Seoul and Venice Biennale.

About Norman Foster Institute

The future of our society is the future of our cities—they are our greatest invention. This course, in a time of climate change, is addressed to those who wish, through practice or education, to improve the quality of life in cities worldwide. In that spirit, the course will combine practical on-site experience with academic inputs from the Norman Foster Foundation’s network of international experts. These range from university professors and scientists to planners and property developers.

It will start with tools and skills that can be used to address wide-ranging issues for cities. For instance, leadership, advocacy, communication, presentation, diagramming, mapping, and the understanding and interpretation of data. This approach could be applicable to cities from Asia, the Middle East, South and North America to Africa, Europe and Oceania as well as informal settlements and suburbia.

The use of objective criteria is critical to evaluating the performance of cities and charting moves to improve their quality of life and reduce carbon footprints. There are many metrics in addition to the ones that have been created for this course. Notable are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations (UN). Mindful of my role as Advocate of the UN Forum of Mayors, these SDGs will be linked into the curriculum.

However, there is one criterion that is subjective, defies quantification and therefore does not find its way into any of the metrics and that is the aesthetic dimension of a city—its visual DNA. This might be the colourful dynamic of an Asian city, the Renaissance order of a classical European city, the gridded verticality of Manhattan or the picturesque alleys and plazas of a city rooted in a mediaeval past. The identity of a city is also linked to its history. These issues will be addressed in the course.

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A major part of the curriculum focuses on three pilot cities that scholars will visit to engage directly with their planners and managers. For study purposes, areas will be selected in each city to raise awareness of the issues that affect the quality of life for those who live or visit there. This small number of well-defined project assignments will be addressed by the scholars working on site and in the studio, either in teams or individually. In this multidisciplinary approach, the scholars will process evidence using the most up-to-date digital tools.

In this first edition of the course, the pilot cities will be European, although the methods will be adaptable to other kinds of cities worldwide. Towards the end of the year, the scholars will present their findings to the city administration and here there will be an emphasis on advocacy and presentation skills. The lessons from these real-life experiences will be documented by film and other media, culminating in a public event. On the basis that historically cities learn from each other, it will be important for the scholars to explore the relevance of their conclusions in the wider context of global cities.

This combination of the best of academia with practical hands-on experience in the field distinguishes this course from others. However, my Co-Director Kent Larson, Director of the City Science Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and I felt we should further set it apart by defining our criteria for a new model of the city—this could be shaping an existing city towards a more sustainable future or guiding the creation of a new urbanity. If this is the long-term objective, then the individual pilot projects would be incremental short-term steps towards the same eventual goal. Prof. Larson and I worked together to present that vision as the following Vision Statement.

Mitchell Joachim

Mitchell Joachim

Co-founder of Terreform ONE; Associate Professor of Practice, New York University (NYU), New York, NY, United States.

Mitchell Joachim

Co-founder of Terreform ONE; Associate Professor of Practice, New York University (NYU), New York, NY, United States.

Maria Vassilakou

Founder, Vienna Solutions; Former Vice Mayor, Vienna, Austria

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London, United Kingdom

Tim Stonor

Managing Director of Space Syntax, London, United Kingdom

Stuart Smith

Director, Arup, Berlin, Germany; Board Member, Holcim Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland

Gil Penalosa

Founder and Chair, 8 80 Cities, Toronto, ON, Canada

Peter B. de Menocal

President and Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Falmouth, MA, United States

Sarah Kenderdine

Professor of Digital Museology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Laila Iskandar

Co-Founder, CID CONSULTING; Former Minister of State in the Government of Egypt, Egypt

Frédérick Bordry

CERN Honorary Member, Special Advisor to the CERN DG and Former CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland

Luis M. A. Bettencourt

Inaugural Director, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States

Joseph G. Allen

Director, Healthy Buildings Program, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States

About Norman Foster Institute

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José María Michavila

Trustee, Norman Foster Foundation; Former Minister of Justice, Government of Spain, Madrid, Spain

Francis Kéré

Founder, Kéré Architecture and Kéré Foundation, Berlin, Germany; Advisory Board, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Ian Goldin

Director, Oxford Martin Research Programme, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Elena Foster

Founder and CEO, Ivorypress; Vice President, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Óscar Fanjul

Vice Chairman, Ferrovial; Former Chairman and CEO, Repsol, Madrid, Spain; Trustee, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Beatriz corredor

Former Ministry of Housing; Non-executive Director, Red Eléctrica, Madrid, Spain

Vishaan Chakrabarti

Founder and Creative Director, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), New York, NY, United States; Honorary Trustee, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Shigeru Ban

Founder and Principal Architect, Shigeru Ban Architects, Tokyo, Japan

Alejandro Aravena

Executive Director, ELEMENTAL; ELEMENTAL Copec Chair, Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Jury Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Chicago, IL, United States; Advisory Board, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Deborah Berke

Dean, School of Architecture, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States; Jury Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Chicago, IL, United States; Honorary Trustee, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Edgar Pieterse

NFI Provost

Founding Director, African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Dava Newman

NFI Honorary Dean

Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, United States

Norman Foster

NFI Co-Director

Advocate of the United Nations Forum of Mayors; Founder and Executive Chairman, Foster + Partners; President, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain

Kent Larson

NFI Co-Director

Member of the Advisory Board, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, Spain; Director, City Science Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, United States