Hyper Cities with Winy Maas

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast ventures into one of the most expansive propositions in contemporary architectural thinking: that everything is urbanism. Drawing from Winy Maas's 2019 guest editorship of Domus, theconversation explores what it means when the city is no longer a bounded object but a total condition — absorbing climate systems, data networks, food production, finance, and human behaviour into a single, planetary field of design. The discussion moves through the long arc of MVRDV's data-driven and speculative work — from Metacity/Datatown and Pig City to FARMAX and KM3 — tracing how architecture shifted from describing objects to modelling systems,using data not as neutral optimisation but as a critical tool to expose contradictions and test urban limits.

The conversation also tackles the concept of Biotopia — a future where buildings operate as living ecosystems — alongside the transformation of infrastructure into culture, asseen in projects like Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. Threading through each of these themes is a consistent tension: does the expansion of architecture's scope intoecology, biology, economics, and atmosphere empower the discipline or risk dissolving its capacity to act and resist? The episode closes with a preview of Sky City, a project developed through The Why Factory currently being co-taught as a studio at RMIT University in Melbourne, which asks what urbanism becomes when the sky itself is treated as a designed, contested, and algorithmically governed urban layer.

Winy Maas is a Dutch architect, urbanist, and co-founding partner of Rotterdam-based MVRDV, established in 1993 alongside Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. His leadership has driven many of the office's award-winning projects, including Rotterdam's Markthal, the Tianjin Binhai Library, and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen — the first publicly accessible art depot in the world. He is also the founder of The Why Factory, a research laboratory dedicated to speculativeurban futures, and holds professorships at both MIT and TU Delft.

 Check out the references from this episode.