Henrik Valeur

Henrik Bjørn Valeur (; born 13 October 1966) is a Danish architect-urbanist, founder and creative director of UiD (Denmark) and UiD Shanghai Co., Ltd (China), curator of CO-EVOLUTION: Danish/Chinese Collaboration on Sustainable Urban Development in China, which was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2006, and author of the book India: the Urban Transition - a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which is based on his experiences teaching, researching and practicing in India.

Early life Henrik Valeur was born in Denmark in 1966 to visual artist Mogens Valeur and fashion designer Birgitte Valeur. His grandfathers were both civil engineers. He grew up in Tibirke (Tisvilde), a small village located to the north of Copenhagen, and studied architecture with Enric Miralles at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Barcelona and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen, from where he graduated in 1994. He then worked briefly for Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.

Career Denmark, Sweden In 1995 Henrik Valeur started out on his own making competition entries of which a few were awarded, including a proposal for a new entrance to Copenhagen Zoo and for a new university on Amager (U97), following which, in 1997, he founded UiD, a networking urban consultancy. The Danish architecture critic Allan de Waal commented:

“These are radical attempts at a new architectural practice, but almost de-illuminated. At first sight the quotations out of context or the mischievous clippings on the walls critically turn their back on the subject of architecture, away from any architectural core. But it is there! Floating somewhere in between text fragments, photos [...]”.

With Swedish architect and comedian Fredrik Fritzson, he initiated CoMa in 2001 – a research project about the newly formed Øresund Region, centered on the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö, hence the name CoMa, and the urban regions of Los Angeles and Pearl River Delta/Hong Kong. The project was based on a “diagnosis of society as a multicultural society. his diagnosis becomes the frame for conceiving a new regional strategy that crosses the national borders of Denmark and Sweden, using urbanism as an integrating force”.

CoMa was exhibited, in the format of a multimedia installation, at Form/Design Center in Malmö in 2002 and at the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen in 2004. In addition, the team organized a conference about the Øresund Region and contributed a sound installation to an international group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde.

For the development of Trekroner East in Roskilde (2002–03), Henrik Valeur organized a workshop with groups of young architects, artists and representatives of various interest groups, the municipality, local citizens and experts, who worked together to design the landscape of this new part of the city - prior to the design of the buildings, thus making it a practical example of landscape urbanism and of a participatory and collaborative planning process.

During the early 2000s, Henrik Valeur and Fredrik Fritzon developed a series of planning tools intended to make planning processes flexible and inclusive. These tools, which include the 1:1 Sketch Model, the 4D+ Model and the Change Design Model, were demonstrated and discussed at a fair-like idea shop, which they organized for the 6th European Biennal of Towns and Town Planning in Copenhagen in 2005. Several young Danish and Swedish architecture offices participated in the idea shop, which was entitled A New Future for Planning – Young Architects Show the Way!

Henrik Valeur and Fredrik Fritzson's ideas of planning were implemented in the development of Musicon in Roskilde, for which they made the structure plan and the process manual, based on a scenario game and role play with local stakeholders. Roskilde Municipality was awarded the Danish Urban Planning Award in 2012 for the "exceptionally creative planning" of Musicon.

China Henrik Valeur was appointed curator of the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2006. He traveled to China where he met with universities and city administrations in several of the biggest Chinese cities. Based on the conversations he had with people there he conceived the project CO-EVOLUTION - Danish/Chinese Collaboration on Sustainable Urban Development in China in which young professional Danish architects and architecture students would work together with professors and students from leading Chinese universities in the cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Xi’an. The curator and his team wrapped the exterior of the Danish Pavilion in a green scaffolding, often seen on Chinese construction sites, and conducted a research project on problems and possibilities related to the processes of rapid urbanization in China, which constituted the background story of the exhibition, literally in the format of billboards mounted on the interior walls of the pavilion, with the project proposals developed by the four teams placed as free-standing installations in space. CO-EVOLUTION was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation by the jury of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition, Richard Sennett (President), Amyn Aga Khan, Antony Gormley and Zaha Hadid, who said:"We salute the creativity, intelligence, and generosity of the Danish pavilion".

Henrik Valeur was himself a member of the jury for the 7th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2007. That year he also founded UiD Shanghai Co., Ltd in China which included examples of Danish experiences with sustainable urban development and projects by students from Tongji University and was exhibited at Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center.

Among the projects Henrik Valeur created while living in China was the Bicycle Tower, a design for vertical bicycle parking developed jointly by UiD in Shanghai and Malmö, and exhibited by the City of Malmö as part of the Urban Best Practice Area at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

India Henrik Valeur in a discussion with the Chief Architect of Chandigarh, Ms. Sumit Kaur, on the Car Free Sector Proposal, at Chief Architect's Office in Sector 9, Chandigarh

In 2010 Henrik Valeur gave the Le Corbusier Memorial Lecture in Chandigarh, in which he noted that:

“The problem with modernist architecture is not only that it tries to erase the past; it also obstructs the future!”

In the following years he worked with Indian students and researchers, activists and bureaucrats, developers and entrepreneurs, and participated in public discussions about the urban transition of India. His book India: the Urban Transition - a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which is based on his teaching, researching and practicing, primarily in Chandigargh in North India and Bangalore in South India, was published in 2014. "The book contextualises city making as a complex highly political process and contends that it is the Indian city that can truly be the landscape on which the idea of India, with its diversity, flourishes".

The Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, Professor and then Chair of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University, called the book “an important contribution” because of its “fine grain reading of issues in the Indian city” and its “attempt to connect so many dots to make sense of the moving targets we encounter in Urbanism in India".

One of the projects featured in the book is a proposal to make one of the sectors of Chandigarh car-free. Though initially commissioned by the Chief Architect of Chandigarh for the new master plan of the city, the proposal was not realized despite the fact that the Punjab and Haryana High Court subsequently directed the City Administration to make one of its sectors car-free.

A project for the businessman and environmentalist Kamal Meattle uses natural ventilation and “growing fresh air” with plants in a vertical greenhouse to improve indoor air quality in an office building.

Other projects include a proposal for vertical kitchen gardens in a colony of rehabilitated slum dwellers in Chandigarh, developed in collaboration with a local NGO, and a proposal for self-built low-cost garden flats for current slum dwellers in Bangalore, developed with a local developer. In Chandigarh the lack of open space in the colony led to the idea of placing community kitchen gardens on top of each other. The reasoning for both projects, i.e. to provide poor people in urban settings with opportunities to produce their own food and to create their own dwellings respectively, owes a debt to the Indian economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach.

With experiences from both China and India, Henrik Valeur asks whether India can “use urbanization as a driver of economic, human and social development like China has done?”

Concerns Natural environment

According to Henrik Valeur, city and nature should be mixed. Ten years later, in another feature article in Politiken, he used Fredens Havn (Harbour of Peace), a spontaneously evolved and self-organized floating settlement in the central parts of Copenhagen, as an example of climate adapted living in the city.

The book India: the Urban Transition (2014) provides a number of proposals, including the revitalization and integration of an existing system of water canals with a new network of pathways for pedestrians in the city of Bangalore, Henrik Valeur has voiced concern about the concept of smart city floated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India. According to Henrik Valeur the "concerns related to the concept of smart city have to do with the issues of control and surveillance, the risk of corruption, misuse and mismanagement, and the prospect of smart cities becoming exclusive enclaves for the rich".

Henrik Valeur introduced the concept of co-evolution in architecture in 2006 as curator of the project CO-EVOLUTION: Danish/Chinese Collaboration on Sustainable Urban Development in China for which he asked four young architecture offices from Denmark to work together with planners and researchers from four Chinese universities to answer the question: "How can China proceed with its ambitious project to improve living conditions for its population without exhausting the very resources needed to sustain a better life?"

Henrik Valeur later argued that: "As we become more and more interconnected and interdependent, human development is no longer a matter of the evolution of individual groups of people but rather a matter of the co-evolution of all people". In the English translation of the article the term “development urbanism” appears for the first time.

In the book India: the Urban Transition - a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which can be seen as a "call for action to everyone who wants to make a positive and concrete difference to the urban environments of developing societies", Said Henrik Valeur: “There are obviously too many unresolved problems in our cities today, but my point is that many of these problems can be solved by very simple and inexpensive means. Smart technologies are rarely necessary and may, in fact, create more problems than they solve”. The Nykredit Encouragement Prize, 2004.