With over thirty years of experience authoring and implementing visionary urban architecture, Vishaan Chakrabarti is the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, where he leads the firm’s growing global portfolio of cultural, institutional, and public projects. Chakrabarti is also the author of the book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America and the upcoming The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy, as well as a widely read guest essay for The New York Times titled “How To Make Room for One Million New Yorkers,” which presented a blueprint for housing more than 1.3 million New Yorkers without radically changing the character of the city’s neighborhoods or altering its historic districts. He previously served as Director of the Manhattan Office for the New York Department of City Planning during the Bloomberg administration.

Chakrabarti will visit Providence on Sept. 18 to give a presentation titled “Getting to Goldilocks: Housing Communities, Building Neighborhoods, Preserving Nature.” Chakrabarti argues that architecture, and more specifically “connective design” — defined as conscious work by designers to forge deeper bonds across society at every scale — is key to addressing some of our most pressing challenges from climate change to political division to technological dislocations to the housing crisis. 

We decided to sit down with Chakrabarti to discuss his work, strategic density, and more. Below is a transcript of our conversation with Chakrabarti. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to become an architect and urban planner, and why do you love it?

I grew up with my immigrant family on the outskirts of Boston. My dad was a scientist, my mom was a classical singer and a librarian, and we did a lot of traveling on a shoestring budget when I was a kid. I just always loved cities and their architecture. I found it incredibly compelling that millions of people chose to live like this and it’s just been my kind of passion since then.

In your New York Times guest essay, you illustrate how housing can rapidly be added to an already dense city. I was curious in terms of sustainability, how does adaptive reuse of existing structures versus new construction factor into that equation? What about the environmental costs of new construction for this necessary housing?

I’m a big fan of adaptive reuse. Our Domino Sugar Refinery project is a big adaptive reuse project here in New York. There are going to be a lot of adaptive reuse questions around especially old office buildings of whether they can be used for housing. Some can. Most of them have very deep floor plates and so forth that make it very difficult and expensive to use for housing. There are great examples of old manufacturing buildings that have been used for lofts and things like that. So I’m all for it, wherever we can do it, my gut instinct tells me, though, and years of experience told me that it’s just not going to be anywhere near enough to meet the demand. 

What we have to think about instead is not just adaptively reusing buildings, but adaptively reusing the entirety of the city. That cities have all of this latent infrastructure — parks, transit systems — and yet, so many of them, even big built-up cities like New York, have actually a lot of available land, so you’re leveraging the embodied energy it took to build all the infrastructure for the city by building more housing in the city and in existing communities, as opposed to building sprawl. So I think the idea of adaptive reuse is a broader idea, not just adaptively reusing the building, but adaptively reusing the city.

How do you balance input from folks who might be suspicious of density and input from folks who believe it doesn’t go far enough? How do you incorporate community engagement into your process?

So we do a tremendous amount of community engagement in everything we do — we do it in person, online, in all different methods. What I really look for are the people who are coming to the question in good faith, who aren’t just going to have a knee-jerk reaction that all new housing is bad, all new neighbors are bad, but instead are really looking to understand, what are you trying to build in my community? And I think that is a totally legitimate question for people to be asking, right? 

And part of why I did The New York Times article was to explain that all density isn’t the same. There’s scale, there are different materials, materials of different construction methods, and that all results in serving very different kinds of people who have different needs. And I think if you approach it with that kind of respect and with an ability to engage, not just with words, but with visuals, that really helps guide people and educate people. I think what ends up happening is you do get a lot more community support, and then there’s going to be people who are going to fight you no matter what, and we have to be very, very careful about those people, because what are their true motivations? Are they just maintaining their personal home value? Is it because they don’t want neighbors who look different than them? You know, not all community participation and engagement is driven by wholesome motivation, and I think we have to be careful.

How do you and other planners think about maintaining a neighborhood’s character during change? Whether it be gentrification, rising costs, or displacement, how can you bring amenities or add housing stock to a place while maintaining that neighborhood’s community feel?

A lot of times we look at what’s there already and to me, this is about being much more than contextual. It’s sort of amplifying existing stories and narratives and weaving them into new stories and ideas about the future. And so I think part of why people are so skeptical is that a lot of the 20th century, [urban planners] tore down entire neighborhoods and rebuilt out a whole cloth. It was an act of erasure. And to me, what we do now is much more an act of weaving, where we look at what’s there, right? And we use this idea of, it’s a big fancy word, palimpsest, which means the layering of history, where we add new layers without subtracting the old ones. And so you get this kind of rich tapestry of old and new. Jane Jacobs talked about this, and how it adds vibrance to a place. And so when I look at projects like Domino, I think of it as pulling history forward into the future.

Much of your work has focused on New York City; how do your ideas, plans, and thoughts about connective design and strategic density map onto cities of different sizes and scales?

The majority of PAU’s work isn’t in New York. Most of our work is in the sort of industrial Midwest around the Great Lakes. So we’re doing work in Cleveland and Detroit, downtown Niagara Falls — cities that I think have some parallel histories to a place like Providence, in terms of having a glorious industrial past, then a kind of bleak period of deindustrialization, and now are in a point of recovery, often very contingent on institutions like higher educational institutions like Brown and RISD. Sometimes it’s about government action. Sometimes it’s about hospitals, what they call “eds and meds,” as a strategy. To me, the lessons are always the same, regardless of scale. 

If you were talking about Jane Jacobs, I mean, she had four elements that make a vibrant city, right? She talked about density, mixed-use small blocks, and the mixture of old and new. And I think those things hold whether you’re in Paris or New York City or Providence.

There aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions. You have to go and look at a place very carefully and read before you write. But at the same time, there are philosophical similarities in approach in terms of understanding community engagement and how you read the design of a place. What are the economies that are thriving? What could be the economies of the future, and what do people want? We don’t have to build the same housing in New York that we build in Providence or that we would build in Cleveland. There are ways that you can read context and make it very clear that this belongs in a place. So with all of our work, we try to design things, and this is where it goes from planning to architecture. We try to design things that could only be in the place where they’re sighted and can’t just be generic things for anywhere. And I think that’s very, very important in terms of how you amplify that sense of palimpsest in place.