CEO AKZO NOBEL RON BUCHNER "You need to bring in the human aspect
early"
AkzoNobel CEO Ton Buchner on how his company is
working on making cities more colourful
If you stand on the Copacabana beach with your
back to the water, you'll see a very colorful favela on the mountainside
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi is drumming
up inter national support for his 100 smart cities programme, the world has
started doing a re-think.Ton Buchner, CEO of the ¤14.3 billion AkzoNobel,
believes cities have a cyclical life and the human aspect is as important as
the functional. The paints-to-specialty chemicals conglomerate has been
partnering with the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities initiative
and Buchner believes city planners need to bring in the human aspect early. In
a conversation with CD, the 49-year old Dutchman spoke about the growth of
emerging economy cities, the importance of local participation in city improvement
projects -and the impact of colour on our moods. Edited excerpts:
What is the human cities initiative about?
Urbanisation is so fast in many countries that
people are driven only by the functionality -how do I get roads, how do I
collect waste, how do I get the buildings.When you go there, you have a
copy-paste environment. People are so focused on the functionality that they
forget the human aspect. People leave cities because they don't get a home
feeling, they don't feel connected to the environment that they're in. We've
teamed up with many others for this initiative because this is not something
you can do alone as a company.
What exactly is AkzoNobel doing to make cities
human?
We have six pillars in the initiative. The first
is colour, which has a direct connect to humans. But the heritage part is
equally important for making an urban area tick. People want to go to a
location where they can connect emotionally. In some countries, it is temples;
in others, it's general squares. Protecting the heritage is very important to
the human aspect of any city. By making infrastructure look good you can make
it a connector into society. That brings us to the third pillar
-transportation. These are the pillars where AkzoNobel products get applied.The
other three pillars fall in the social responsibility bucket: education, sports
and sustainability.
You are actually adding colour to cities?
We have anthropologists, psychologists at work
on the impact of colour on the mood of human beings. Some colour combinations
are soothing, some are aggressive. That is why we support heritage. We don't go
and do up the heritage sites all by ourselves. We ask the population in the
areas where our help is sought. The communities bring us feedback and we say
we'll only do it when the community participates.In Brazil, you have a lot of
these favelas (slums) that have come up over the mountains in big cities like
Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. We've asked the people to do something with the
central squares so they becomes more attractive meeting places.
While we were at it, we also wanted local
volunteer painters. It was an economically backward area, so we educated the
painters. These painters then became craftsmen who were selling to their
neighbors, and created a totally colourful mountainside.Today, if you stand on
the Copacabana beach with your back to the water, you'll see a very colourful
favela on the mountainside. We have also gone to villages in South East Asia,
where we've come across dilapidated temples. Together with locals, we've turned
them into meeting places. We have re-created the emotional connect that was
there in the past but disappeared.
How are you partnering with the 100 Resilient
Cities program under the Rockefeller Foundation?
We committed to select four cities with them.
The Foundation has been very strict in selecting the cities. When we signed,
they had 25 cities. At the moment, they're barely making that up to 100. After
selection, they gauged from the citieswhat they wanted.
Mayors of the cities apply tothe Rockefeller
Foundation and say they want to work with AkzoNobel in re-creating a part of
the city, or a neighbourhood. People have asked us to come to Athens, for
example.We will choose one city each in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
How do you build resilience into cities?
Resilience has many aspects. The buildings
should be able to withstand an earthquake, for example. On the other side of
the scale, there's a lot of cities that have problems with social cohesion. We
don't do construction for resilience of earthquakes, we don't do the dams for
the flooding but we talk about the human resilience piece low crime rate,
sports. There's a social fabric disconnect in some of the cities because the
cohesion wasn't strong.That's human resilience.
Where do you see human cities fitting in to the
Indian context?
I've spoken to a big group of mayors in the
World Economic Forum and several of them were from India. They told me the
speed of urbanisation is something very difficult to keep up with in India.
Mayors in the growing economies say we need affordable living spaces, we need
the infrastructure. While it is very important to be fast with physical
infrastructure, you may want to also think about the human connect part.
India's Prime Minister is talking of setting up
100 smart cities. How does that gel with the human connect aspect?
Functionality has to be the priority and the
human part must beintegrated early in the discussion. We are injecting it as
early as we can. Most mayors focus on the functional aspect but some are
turning around. If you first go functional and then try to make it human, then
it gets expensive. So you need to bring in the human aspect early.
|
moinak mitra
|
CDET29MAY15
No comments:
Post a Comment