{"id":2532,"date":"2026-07-20T10:59:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/?page_id=2532"},"modified":"2026-08-03T19:11:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T19:11:50","slug":"068-haris-piplas","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/index.php\/podcast\/068-haris-piplas\/","title":{"rendered":"TGC Podcast Episode 068 – Haris Piplas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #68<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

“Co-opetition” and the honest city – what urban regeneration should and shouldn’t be<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Guest: Haris Piplas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

August 4th, 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Z\u00fcrich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Z\u00fcrich. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Z\u00fcrich and a lecturer at ETH Z\u00fcrich, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Episode Teaser<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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