CityMakers Voices No.7 - Alice Charles

Charles believes a sustainable city vision can't be fully realized until it is broken into manageable projects that can be properly governed, financed, and built. She also believes Europe already has the fastest answer to its housing crisis: vacant, derelict, and underused buildings that can be converted in a fraction of the time it takes to zone, plan, and finance new homes. 

Charles is the latest guest of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation gathering the people whose decisions shape the cities we live in — mayors and architects, planners and patrons, financiers and engineers — for open discussion on the work of building better urban environments. This conversation took place at the Holcim Foundation's 2025 Forum in Venice. Here, Charles shares what she's learned from a career spent city-making.

You've worked across government, the World Economic Forum, and now Arup. What first drew you into urban planning?

I have a sibling with cerebral palsy, and I was naturally interested in trying to create a more inclusive and accessible built environment. So I started in urban regeneration in London, then went back to Ireland and continued in consultancy, building new communities and developing city plans. Then the Great Financial Crisis hit, and over 10 years I served as an external board member of the National Asset Management Agency, working through a period of poor development. It shaped me, because I saw the consequences of bad decisions.

You work with an enormous range of stakeholders. At what scale can you actually get things done in a city: the building, the neighborhood, or the whole city?

I've worked at all scales, from the building to the entire city, and each matters. At the city scale, it is about setting the long-term vision. Where will this city be by 2050? We're working with a major European city on exactly that: how it can decarbonize, provide housing, be resilient, and enhance nature as it moves towards 2050. You can have impact by working with critical stakeholders and communities to create that vision.

But the vision means nothing if it doesn't break down into transformative projects. What are the critical projects you need to take forward over the next number of years if you're going to transform the city? All too often we create a vision and don't think about the reality of implementing it. We don't think about the governance structures we need, the capacity building, the partnerships with the private sector, the financing, and what has to happen to make those projects bankable.

So where does implementation actually happen?

Some cities find the gap between vision and implementation too wide, so they go to the district level. C40 has a program called Green and Thriving Neighborhoods, which we've been lucky to support, and that is exactly this: your vision for the city seems too complex to tackle at once, so how do you drive change district by district? Barcelona drove its transformation that way, breaking the city into 13 parts and working at that level. The big picture was there, but implementation happened at the district scale, because taking it on across the entire city is just too much.

And at the scale of a single building, like the one we're sitting in at the Procuratie Vecchie?

In Europe, many buildings in our cities are vacant, derelict, or underused, and many of them are heritage buildings. We are sitting today in a building that is an Arup project with David Chipperfield, a remarkable restoration. Addressing climate change in the built environment means tackling embodied carbon as well as operational emissions, and our vacant and derelict buildings offer so much potential there.

Equally, we have a housing crisis. People talk about building new homes, but that takes a lot of time. You have to zone land, create master plans, get planning permission, get finance. In essence, you're talking about 10 years, and we have a crisis right now. Some buildings are ready to be converted right now, and we can do it much faster. Over the next number of years in Europe, I'd like to see us get serious about our vacant and derelict buildings and drive brownfield urban regeneration.

How do you get the public invested in their neighborhoods changing? 

When you're driving development within a community, consultation is vital. Often, the loudest voices, and those with the most resources, are heard more than those without a voice. So you must go out of your way to find the people who don't normally turn up at a public meeting. I love doing consultation with kids. They are free thinkers; they see problems as they walk around, and they have solutions, which they'll draw you in little pictures. The elderly, the disabled, women in certain communities who may not come to a public consultation: you find where they congregate and you go to them. The last time I was in this building, social entrepreneurs were meeting, a refugee group was meeting, and kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods were meeting after school. A place like this is where you consult with communities that otherwise aren't engaged. If you hear from all voices in society, loud and quiet, you deliver much better development.

Where do you see the opportunity in city-making right now?

We're in Venice, so Venice provides hope straight away. It has been threatened so many times and yet it adapts and survives. That is the opportunity we have as humanity. Yes, we have a climate crisis, and we have to change faster than ever before, but we have always adapted.

We also have a housing crisis, and the opportunity is to stop making housing political, stop the financialization of housing, and remember that we all want somewhere to live. We need to look at it holistically: understand why we got into this problem, gather the data, diagnose it, and collectively form solutions. That means working with communities, policymakers, planners, architects, engineers, financiers, and developers. On climate, we need to start talking to insurers, because they don't just insure the assets in our cities; they are some of the world's biggest real estate investors. They own many of those assets, so they have every reason to co-create the solutions for resilient cities. Constructive dialogue, or radical collaboration, if you want to call it that, drives change in our built environment.

This interview is part of CityMakers Voices, a conversation series from the Holcim Foundation that gathers the thinkers, designers, and decision-makers whose work shapes the cities we live in. They form part of CityMakers, a new resource focused on the people, places, and programs revitalizing the urban realm.