Përparim Rama came to politics from architecture. Trained in London, with two decades of practice across the UK, Switzerland, and the US, he was invited to run for Mayor of Pristina in 2021, and won the election with a promise to improve the urban environment. 

We sat down with him late last year in Venice, after a design to transform a derelict Pristina brick factory into a hub for art, technology, and gastronomy had just been awarded a Grand Prize at the Holcim Foundation Awards.

How does your architectural training translate directly to the office? 

Being a mayor is an extension of what I used to do, at a different scale: the city. It gives me greater power to know that I come from architecture and urban planning and understand how the city works across multiple layers. Pristina has to have its own unique character, its own emotion, that makes people want to be there, live there, create there, innovate there. How do we create a city that empowers people? This has been my mission.

Why do architects make good mayors? You're one of many architects to take this kind of office. 

Architectural education encourages you to work in teams and to consider multiple factors. You bring all these parameters together to create a product that works for the client. In city-making, it is a similar process: thinking creatively, thinking outside the box, and resolving difficult tasks within a limited time, budget, and political will.

For young architects, planners, and anyone interested in city-making — where do you see the opportunity? 

I was never interested in politics. But I was invited to run for mayor, and the exciting aspect for me was transforming the city from an urban-planning perspective. I showed a vision that people aligned with and voted for. I encourage students of architecture and existing architects to get involved as much as possible in politics, because that is where the true power is. 

A new film series from the Holcim Foundation opens in Rotterdam — a city that has turned its relationship with water into a model for adaptive urban planning.

Here, 85 percent of the population lives below sea level, and water management is woven into the urban fabric.

The short documentary features three voices shaping how the city thinks about flood resilience: Henk Ovink, Executive Director of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water; Saskia Van Stein, Director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam; and Winy Maas, Founding Partner and Principal Architect at MVRDV.

Together, they explore how Rotterdam is turning water into a design opportunity — from public squares that double as stormwater reservoirs to a new cultural landmark rising on land reclaimed from the sea.

The Holcim Foundation and Arup, one of the world's largest engineering and design consultancies, have co-published Leadership through Interdependence: Enabling the Future of CityMaking — a report offering cities, design practices, and planning departments a transferable methodology for navigating uncertainty.

The report was shaped by the Foundation's 2025 Emerging ChangeMaker cohort: 14 early-career architects, engineers, and planners from MIT, Cornell, UCL, Delft, the University of Sydney, and UNAM.

At a week-long workshop in Zurich last December, they mapped the forces most likely to reshape cities through 2035 and built three scenarios to stress-test projects and policies against.

These scenarios and further reflections anchor the full report: why cities must be understood as interconnected systems, why lasting policy reform depends on cultural support, why planning must center on historically underrepresented communities, and why leadership starts with self-awareness before it scales.