The Demolition Drama

📺 Video Information

**Channel:** HouseEurope! • **Published:** Mar 17, 2025 • **Views:** 754 • **Duration:** 31:15

📝 Description

Please spread this important post we need YOUR HELP saving all our homes 🏠👉 www.houseeurope.eu/

The European Citizens´ Initiative HouseEurope! needs 1 million signatures to stop the ongoing demolition drama in Europe. The demolition of existing buildings is as outdated as food waste, animal testing and single-use plastics. Currently, the construction emits 38% of all CO2 in the EU. We need new EU-laws to make renovation and transformation more easy, affordable and social. It takes less than two minutes to vote. Every house is a home.

Watch and Learn: The Demolition Drama 🏗️

“The Demolition Drama” uncovers the harsh realities of speculative practices in the real estate industry. From vacant buildings left to decay to the relentless cycle of demolition and new construction, this film explores how these practices prioritize profits at the expense of communities, sustainability, and social equity.

Discover why renovation—an economically, socially, and environmentally beneficial alternative—is often overlooked. With only 1% of Europe’s buildings renovated annually, it could take nearly 100 years to address the building stock—far beyond the 2050 climate goals. This documentary reveals how embracing renovation could revolutionize urban development, creating a thriving market for architects, builders, and policymakers committed to sustainable progress.

Through compelling analysis and urgent storytelling, The Demolition Drama challenges viewers to rethink the future of urban development and join the call for a renovation wave across Europe.

🏡 Watch now to learn how we can create greener, more sustainable cities for everyone. 👉 Visit www.houseeurope.eu/ for more information 👉 Follow www.instagram.com/houseeurope.eu/ on Instagram 👉 Donate at www.betterplace.org/de/projects/137424-haeuser-renovieren-statt-abreissen-fuer-die-umwelt-und-deine-nachbarschaft

#demolition #drama #change #architecture

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Year: 2023 Author(s): Olaf Grawert, Alina Kolar Team: Severin Bärenbold, Franziska Gödicke Contributor(s): Ann Pettifor, Aris Komporozos-Athansiou, Joanna Kusiak, Enlai Hooi, Tamara Kalantajevska, Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Oana Bogdan, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Ruth Schagemann

📹 Video Transcript

[0:00] [Music] [Music]

[1:02] [Music] so the point about land is that it's finite I think it was one of the Marx Brothers who said we don't make us anymore so there's a finite amount of land within an International Financial system where there's an infinite almost infinite supply of credit right and so if you want to know why the price of land has R risen then you have to look at the financial system and you have to look at the amount of money the wall of money money that's aimed at this thing which is the finite resource called land

[1:34] when you throw money at something finite everyone knows the price goes up right the thing about this fite land is that it's not just a property for someone to live in or to work in and that might increase in value it is also collateral right you can take this property you can buy this property you can throw money at it and pay a huge amount of money for it and then immediately you can use it as collateral to borrow even more money if you are a private Equity Firm a Wall Street Bank a hedge fund or an asset management fund and that is why land and housing and property is now so important

[2:11] to the finance sector the finance sector can't manage without it because the finance sector needs collateral you can't borrow money unless you can show that you have collateral that could you be used in case of default and so property is a wonderful thing for that purpose and so here in Britain we have a wall of global money coming from Russian oligarchs coming from Chinese oligarchs coming from Nigerian oligarchs coming from Wall Street Banks mainly Wall Street Banks aimed at the tiny Island that is Britain and the fin ni amount of

[2:43] land and so what we have house prices and property prices going through the roof so the build environment is one of the most valuable Assets in today's globalized speculative economy that is part of a bigger story that has been unfolding in finance capitalism over the last many years this is something that shows in particular the role that Finance has been having in our lives the way in which it has been shaping our lives and our understanding of who we are how we relate with the world around us and of course how we inhabit the

[3:15] built environment how we create it how we adjust it to the needs of the market Finance is this very powerful force that through its speculative logic is the driving force behind real estate assigning value through uh markets onto Goods onto material Goods I think when we talk about value Creation in the city um then the biggest question is where does the value of land of Urban Land ultimately comes from and if you ask people who buy

[3:47] and sell real estate they will tell you there's three things that contribute to the value of land in the city location location and location of course uh we know it right we know that it is about what is close and what is far that um makes the land so pricey in the city but then if we take one more step back and ask where does this value of location comes from then of course it is collectively created by people in the city I think that's the biggest fraud in

[4:18] in the real estate speculation that you take value that is collectively and historically created by people in the city then you try to extract it in in the end um from the very people who created it by the term financialization I refer to the process by which the forces and the imaginary of Finance the imaginary of markets has become an integral part of our everyday life across the social domain the

[4:50] political domain even the intimate domain our everyday lives are now shaped by the priorities of financial markets what this looks like in any on any given day is that we wake up we take our uh very small family personal uh work decisions according to the logic of Finance we see things as a constant process of balancing risk and opportunity the most obvious uh impact there is that we no longer merely associate the built environment with

[5:26] fulfilling a basic need for housing um for the Safety and Security and the comfort that this can provide but we we see it as an investment that is a a very important impact of financialization that is not just real estate actors are seeing our houses as an investment opportunity but we Everyday People everyone in society at the moment has an intuitive understanding where they sleep is not just material it's an asset if

[6:01] all of this is the outcome of a speculative game and we've increasingly all of us we understand ourselves as members as partners in that speculative game then there are some profoundly alarming consequences there the real tragedy of this conspiracy by speculators real estate developers is that they're doing it in secret and we know nothing about it we are not interested on the whole in the way the financial system operates uh we are preoccupied with day-to-day Affairs we worried about sex we worry about relationships next door we worry about

[6:38] immigrants we spend a lot of time worrying about immigrants and so we happily forget about and exclude those speculators and those real estate developers who are planning this moment to destroy the very fabric of our society so they can make more money because if you if your land is finite the only way you can keep reinvesting it and keep generating returns is by destroying it and starting again is everything in the city up for demolition I mean potentially yes because if we approach uh the land and the City from

[7:09] prud the speculative lens then of course the biggest increase in value is through this constant Demolition and rebuilding and if you look at American cities if you look at the history of New York that's pretty much what happened and how the value was created now in Europe for years it was a little bit different but through the financial ization and globalization of economy um Europe was also pulled into this cycle of Demolition and and creation this phenomenon is happening because economists mainstream Orthodox economists have dictated this sort of

[7:45] policy um and it happens at two levels on the one hand the E economics profession and it is incredibly ideological it's so wrong to think of Economics as a science it is a social science and it's very ideological um and the the the the main thrust of today's economics is liberalization it's neoliberal economic theory on the one hand on the other hand economics dictates that actually there is no problem for the environment and it becomes a game of minimizing risks into a broader speculative Market in order to

[8:16] attract the right Investments that would allow you to survive as a Housing Association as a housing uh structure of course this is an argument that many have made this leads not only to theoretical problems or to housing difficulties but also to disasters like the Granville Tower collapse and the fire in in London a few years ago there you have a really palpable example of how the the logic of financial speculation and the integration of real estate leads to the actual loss of life

[8:50] not only to the degradation of livelihoods of residents but to the actual loss of life the economics profession are the you know those men are the guilty men uh they have driven both this the financing of our architecture of our urban planning H and also you know of our residential homes

[9:21] [Music] the architecture industry has uh it's a habit it's a long running habit of architecture as service to Capital and it's it's often packaged as a service to common good in the popular media but if

[9:56] you take an architect like Patrick schimak his fantastic because he's absolutely clear about what the architect's role really is in that sort of sector of Commerce and but in most of the architectural discipline we are trained on one hand to be the sort of handmaiden of capitalism and and consolidate wealth at the expense of many other things and to be the cultural excuse if you like for um a lot of ecological and social damage it's very very clear that there is a a repeated and repeated practices that are never requested and that always bring the same

[10:33] U assessments and the same results and we observe that when we studied carefully this uh French national policy that first it's uh always uh the principle to say that what is old except the historical is not good anymore so because it has a lot of problems second that renovating is more expensive than demolishing and rebuilding uh third that uh the the people they prefer to to live in new places and but if you consider

[11:04] all of this uh very carefully all this is wrong totally wrong we often get the situation where a developer wants us to demolish a building because of their calculations of how much it would cost to demolish and build new versus renovate and when you step into that case if the the structure on square meters is anything similar to what will be demolished in the first place you find that all of the extra cost all of the extra cost is actually an estimation of risk that has not been analyzed and a process of building that has not been

[11:38] estimated one of the things that should be changed also that uh until now uh the environmental performance of a new building in CO2 and so on uh was counted without taking in account the history of the place and if a building has been demolished before so it was always extremely positive but if you if you place in the in the balance uh the cost CO2 cost of demolition of a building then the balance will move in so it's

[12:08] also thing that should be changed that you should account the history of the of the place developer or um anyone estimating the costs of transformation looks at these costs they come into two factors one of them is the unknowns uh of what you might find if you you know demolish something you might find as bestos or some kind of strange structural situation that you that you didn't expect and the second one is about the cost of Finance uh because we

[12:39] have a whole system that is very comfortable with financing new build because of the guaranteed return on investment but uh because of the perceived risk um Finance is more expensive I give you an very simple example that all of us have already been witnessed if in the city center especially here in bastel where literally every square meter is already already built you have to build on the build almost always and if you start in a competition with 10 people uh 10 groups and the developer or the one who

[13:12] the out loable doesn't say listen you have to use this um pre-existing garage or whatever it is to build a tower or to build whatever on top then you're lost you're so to speak because the developer will always go to the ones that offer more uh F you know to generate money so that's not a law but that's a potential and you have to prepare the field so the potential is there because all Architects can deal

[13:43] with pre-existing structures if they are not in danger to lose eventually against some other project which is for the developers simply spoken more um promises more profit and we also saw it also hand inand with what we call build on the build so it's also tightly connected to what happens to the landscape and to the territory as a whole so it's not only let's keep old structures or keep as much as possible but it's also to keep the structure because building new you do it on a

[14:19] let's say on a new land and to leave that land as nature or as much nature as possible is tightly linked to this um same um let's say imperatives I would go further in this and see uh not Theon should be allowed uh except you prove that nothing uh uh nothing can be done because in fact the calculation you can uh always make them good so I think it it should be a principle no demolition no AR wrenchman [Music]

[15:38] [Music] and we all know that together with agriculture the construction sector is the biggest uh emitter of CO2 all the buildings that we see around are actually storages of CO2 once upon a time a lot of of CO2 uh was emitted in order to for these buildings to be built one of the biggest problems that I see today is that the construction sector is not um evolving

[16:12] according to the needs of people this construction sector is an entire ecology it is made of Real Estate Investors financing budes Regulators Architects contractors real estate again and then potentially user and all of that is this Ecology of construction within the construction industry there is debate about how much of this 40% is really related to construction and how much is related to use all in all it's 40% the roles of these actors of these construction industry actors are divided but all connected to one another I like

[16:43] to call this a chain of space production like you would think of a commodity chain when you demolish a building many things happen so first of all you lose all the CO2 that was consumed to build the the the the original building then you have a huge amount of trucks that have to move all the debris but it's it's incredible if you if you think of it so the traffic will be congested then you have fine dust particles and Belgium is one of the countries in which this phenomenon has been studied and it has been proven that

[17:15] all these fine dust particles that come from traffic and from um demolition they affect your lungs uh and especially in children so you have health issues that are caused by uh by demolition when a building is demolished usually what it is replaced with is not to the benefits of the people who were occupying the previous building and in that sense the city loses uh its kind of social mixity um diversity and you know more generally the kind of uh heterogenity

[17:47] that makes them desirable which means that by extension demolition is an antisocial phenomenon if I can sum up all the crisis um with which we are confronted I would say that the sum of all of them is the fact that we reached the limits of a system so the main problem is that actually things that have a huge value they cannot be um evaluated there is no price they don't have a price of course this is speaking about the excruciating working condition that so

[18:20] many of our colleagues find ourselves in the kind of very heavy patriarchal way that architecture is being practice is today uh under the tremendous pressure of the economy Unfortunately today we are not paid for the value that we generate as Architects we are paid for the time we spend to produce the deliverables that are necessary in order to get the building permits get the dosier for the contractors to to make a bid to build um the the project this is

[18:53] about revolutionizing construction rethinking entirely how we Assemble all these elements for instance are they assembled in a way that they can be disassembled of course but also thinking about how a construction detail will be taken care of think about a window for instance are you able to clean that window are you able to repaint that particular piece of the house different depending on how it's built and things like that so revolutionizing construction also means by Design [Music]

[19:28] h [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

[20:08] it is to to to to to think better to be more intelligent in the way you you you do you build you reuse you add to to existing situations but this ambition is absolutely necessary and for social housing or for any housing this question of affordability uh what is the best way for a building to be sustainable I think it is that it is generous it is only because we are making these standard buildings everywhere or we repairing in

[20:38] a standard way that that's finally these buildings they have no interest have no excitement they creat no pleasure to be to live in and finally after 10 years after 20 years they they they are unsuccessful anymore how do we make it attractive as well to other economic economy players you know other Industries the ones who do the service the maintenance maybe we are kind of blind to people who've been in the market all the time and now are deciding but maybe there are other players who are just waiting to jump in you know

[21:11] exactly the maintenance companies or like the ones involved in the transformation it's quite interesting now with all the resources and all the materials getting so expensive but it's this moment of Stillness where you actually have an opportunity to start to rethink it and um there's an incentive in the clients to do it so in a funny way it makes many of our practices obsolete because we're like well all machine for new construction 80% of of the work we've done is somehow a conversion but the Tate for instance you

[21:42] know is very special in so far that what we use is not only let's say being reused and has a new Beauty ideally because you see an an old uh beam or you expose a uh and other industrial structure but we invent something in that we take away the floor and make that open up that space we invented a public space and that's that's in fact a new project but in fact we haven't done

[22:16] anything we just removed a little bit something it's like a surgery and that's almost the ideal case of a conversion and a reuse of a structure I think with regards to like this relationship between labor and resources there's almost a direct parallel even in the energy sector there's a lot of lobbyism and press about how many jobs will be lost if a Coal Power Plant goes down um there's never the equivalent study as to how much many jobs are created if if it's distributed energy creation like wind or solar or whatever and the

[22:49] because the answer of course is that when you have this distributed um uh intellectual labor or distributed uh construction then you of course are in a system which demands more uh local capacity and demands more human capacity uh for the same value um and that and that's because um centralized power just like centralized Building Systems and techniques are specifically designed to increase profit by reducing labor that's

[23:22] that's the whole game of new construction everybody's dealing with the same materials what they're optimizing for is how much you can squeeze uh labor out of the equation in terms of the cost and the question for me is simple when you have one mean one flat one block one one slab when you have one you demolish one and you rebuild one at the end you have one if you have one and you just have

[23:52] ADD half of one and at the end you have 1.5 you spend less you have more and this is also the what is related with ambition and not and escaping from standard producing better spaces for people it's not luxury spaces it is just uh to to find the way by working with less to give more at the end should be

[24:22] very clear you have so many plenty of Architects that are able to understand the building as they are to see what is missing there what how they repair that how they transform that what is the capacity of transformation [Music]

[24:57] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so the question always becomes who's going to pay for this right it's really strange nobody asks that question when

[25:27] we go to war nobody asked that question when we have a pandemic and we have to nationalize the economy and we nationalize the economy we've nationalized capitalism and nobody battered an it at the height of the pandemic in April 2020 the banking system collapsed it was catastrophic it was as big a collapse as in 20079 people have forgotten about that and what bailed them out central banks taxpayers ultimately right so we know know that we can do these big

[26:00] things we can Finance it why because money is just the social construct it's a promise to pay if the bank gives me €300,000 I promise to pay them back and then those €300,000 Euros go into the circulation in the economy and then we lose sight of the fact that the way it was created was through this promise and it's a social thing we can change those promises so um we need to understand that money is something that we invented as human beings to enable us to undertake transactions we've got to make it work for us instead of us working for

[26:36] money

[27:21] what would happen if the entire labor force which is currently used in new construction would be re-rooted into renovation well instead of the 120 years that it will take for the entire housing stock of Switzerland to be renovated it would take 12 which I think speaks of how Reinventing our construction industry is never about losing jobs and never about destroying existing trades but about re-rooting them into a

[27:53] virtuous construction industry so if we look at the problem the problem of the demolishing buildings the other way around and see the keeping of a building uh being stimulated financially then for instance in Belgium we do have a difference in vat uh vat when you renovate is 6% uh V when you build something new is 21% so of course there is an there is an incentive

[28:53] renovation wave renovation wave and to be honest my experience is that a lot of investors and a lot of entrepreneurs really would like to have those incentives would like to work sustainably they they're like you and me they too have a conscience really and so

[29:28] if we gave them incentives to do the right thing which is keep this building make sure that we reuse it effectively and use it for housing rather than destroying it and giving it as an asset to a global bank we can think of solutions that deploy the daringness the openness the um the radicality of speculation with what we already have [Music]

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