The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #68

“Co-opetition” and the honest city – what urban regeneration should and shouldn’t be

Guest: Haris Piplas

August 4th, 2026

Overview

Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was.

Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His argument is that the way the built environment carved itself into separate professions last century has left none of them able to do the actual job. Transforming a place means understanding law, media, budgets, referenda and human psychology, and no architecture school teaches any of it.

Haris Piplas designs and coordinates the transformation of cities, and he is unusually blunt about how little of that work is design. He is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer in Zürich and a lecturer at ETH Zürich, with a training path that runs from landscape architecture in Sarajevo through urban design in Berlin to a doctorate in architecture in Switzerland. That route was deliberate. His view is that the built environment fragmented itself into professions during the 20th century, and that none of the resulting job titles equips anyone to actually change a place, because changing a place means negotiating law, finance, media, community leaders and geopolitics long before anyone opens a drawing file.

The evidence he keeps coming back to is his own childhood. Sarajevo in the 1980s was a prosperous Olympic city and a genuine crossroads of religions, scripts and music, sitting inside the non-aligned experiment of Yugoslavia. What happened next, and what was built afterwards with a flood of well-meaning international money, became the subject of his doctoral work and remains his sharpest illustration of what goes wrong when investment arrives faster than coordination. He now applies those lessons in Ukraine, working with the National Union of Architects on recovery that will still be functional in forty years rather than merely repainted.

The conversation moves across the Commit to Green project and its contaminated and landslide-prone European sites, the awkward truth that gentrification cannot be designed away, the case for participation and gamification against top-down arrogance, and a defence of buzzwords like smart city on the grounds that a vague word that gathers people is more useful than a precise one that does not.

It closes on football tactics as project management, a childhood memory from a refugee camp, and Haris explaining, without irony, that he does not believe he has competitors.

Episode Teaser

Haris Piplas argues design alone cannot rebuild a city, and explains what urban regeneration owes to geopolitics, money and people.

Biography

“…It’s almost too arrogant to think that through design you can change…”

Dr Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer in Zürich and a lecturer at ETH Zürich, where he holds a doctorate in architecture and urban design. He studied landscape architecture at the University of Sarajevo, took a master’s in urban design at the Technical University of Berlin as a DAAD scholar, and researched at Politecnico di Milano before joining the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zürich, where he directed the Reactivate Sarajevo urban transformation project. His portfolio spans climate adaptation strategy in Mannheim and Basel, neighbourhood transformation in Berlin, a smart city and urban innovation strategy for Jakarta, sustainable urban development advisory for six Indian cities, urban renaturation across eight European cities under the EU-funded Commit to Green project, and the comprehensive recovery of Ukrainian cities. He curated the Sarajevo Now pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, co-authored the Global Urban Toolbox and City Action Lab, and has advised UN-Habitat, the Davos Baukultur Alliance, GIZ and IPBES.

What connects all of it is a refusal to accept the job description. Haris grew up between Sarajevo and Berlin, two cities that experienced the end of the Cold War in almost exactly opposite ways, and that upbringing left him convinced that a place changes through politics, money, media and stakeholder interest at least as much as through design. He describes himself as a bridge builder, and he means it structurally rather than sentimentally: much of his work is the unglamorous business of helping two cities, or two ministries, or ten consultants, work out what they can usefully do together. He teaches at ETH Zürich and HFT Stuttgart because he thinks the next generation of designers needs to learn the things architecture school leaves out, and he argues for horizontal authorship in an industry still organised around single names. His current attention is on Ukraine, on the Western Balkans, and on the question of how blue-green infrastructure gets built in places where the ground is contaminated, the housing is informal and the budget is finite.

Quick Summary & Highlights

  • The 20th century invented professional boundaries our cities cannot afford Architect, urban designer, urban planner, environmental planner. Haris argues these divisions were drawn for administrative convenience and now consume the time and goodwill that transforming a place actually requires.
  • Sarajevo never lacked money, it lacked anyone curating the money Global investment arrived after the war without any change to a planning framework built for a socialist state. The result was malls where green space used to be, and a city harder to live in than before.
  • The single-name genius architect is a marketing fiction worth retiring Behind every building credited to one surname sits an office of hundreds and an intern who was still drawing at 3am. Haris wants authorship horizontalised, and thinks AI tools make that easier rather than harder.
  • Buzzwords are useful precisely because nobody agrees on them Smart city, 15-minute city, sustainable city. Haris has no patience for arguments over the definitions and a lot of enthusiasm for what the words do, which is put twenty thousand people who would otherwise never meet in the same building.

Resources Related to the Episode

Key research and publications

Projects, tools and methods

Organisations, platforms and initiatives

Cultural, fun and travel references

Episode Chapters

(Chapters are embedded in the episode for quick access, click this to expand and view all chapters and time stamps)
  • 0:00 Intro
  • 1:59 Guest Intro and The Urban Forum
  • 4:23 Drees & Sommer & a little bit of Zurich history
  • 9:44 The fallacy of 20th century hyperspecialization
  • 14:37 Growing up in Sarajevo shaped Haris’ drive
  • 18:48 Urban Regeneration: what it should and shouldn’t be
  • 25:56 Geopolitics, stakeholders and scaling up urban regeneration
  • 35:10 Baukultur, Inclusivity and the Blue-Green Infrastructure
  • 43:15 Co-op-e-tition and horizontalizing authorship
  • 49:54 AI and the Smart Cities Movement
  • 54:59 A collage of Haris’ project work and “bridges”
  • 1:06:23 Heading in the right direction?
  • 1:08:34 What excites Haris about the future?
  • 1:10:40 Q&A Start
  • 1:10:50 What does innovation mean to you?
  • 1:12:45 Key Moment, Book, Person
  • 1:17:08 Time Management
  • 1:20:52 Favourite childhood memory
  • 1:24:31 What would you most like to be remembered for?
  • 1:28:17 Where can people find you?
  • 1:29:54 Final Message
  • 1:31:33 Outro

Connect with Haris Piplas

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Credits