Written by Will Jones
For much of the last century, cities have been treated as problems to solve due to too much congestion, a call to make them more efficient, or the new craze of sustainability. Each issue is framed as a variable that can be optimized if the right system is applied.
For Paolo Testolini, the work begins elsewhere. Placemaking, in his view, is not a technical exercise but a relationship. “Placemaking unfolds over time, shaped by memory, movement, and lived experiences,” he shares.
As Director of Urban Strategy & Planning Leader for ERA-co, Testolini leads the firm’s global urban design and masterplan studios, overseeing projects that span Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. With more than two decades of experience in architecture, urban planning, and environmental design, his approach integrates evidence-based methodology with sustainability, placemaking, and narrative clarity.
Today, much of his focus is on large-scale masterplans in the MENA region, including megaprojects across Saudi Arabia, where the pace of development is matched only by the ambition behind it.
Designing with time, not against it
To design a place, Testolini suggests, is to enter into dialogue not just with space, but with time itself. Cities are formed at the intersection of both. Geography offers limits and possibilities, but time allows patterns to repeat, adapt, and mature. Historically, towns did not appear fully formed; they accumulated. Paths emerged from use. Edges softened through repetition. Meaning was inscribed gradually.
That slow intelligence is increasingly difficult to preserve. Contemporary development often privileges speed and efficiency, compressing timelines that once allowed places to learn how to behave. The rise of AI-driven planning tools has intensified this compression. When space is treated as something that can be resolved instantly, it is effectively removed from time.
What is lost is not performance, but depth. Environments may function, yet struggle to age with grace. They perform well in models while feeling detached from lived reality.
Human life does not simply occupy space. It unfolds through lived experiences (walking, pausing, gathering, returning, etc.). When those temporal layers are ignored, cities may work, but they do not endure.
Learning from the city as an interface
Long before digital models existed, cities were understood through experience. In the 18th century, Giambattista Nolli offered a way of seeing Rome that remains instructive today. His famous map did not merely document buildings and streets; it revealed how the city could be entered, crossed, and shared.
By giving public interiors the same visual weight as streets and squares, Nolli dissolved the boundary between inside and outside. He mapped interfaces rather than objects. Thresholds mattered. Transitions mattered. The city emerged as a network of relationships rather than a collection of forms.
Seen through this lens, urban space offers itself in layers. To the body, it provides shelter, scale, and rest. To movement, it offers choice. To encounters, it creates moments where trajectories cross. And to memory, it provides repetition (or rituals) that anchor identity over time.
Organic grids endure because they record countless decisions made by people living their lives. They hold time rather than resist it.
A more careful use of intelligence
For Testolini, the future of placemaking lies not in rejecting AI but in reframing its role. Used carefully, technology can learn from organic complexity rather than flatten it. It can read patterns of movement and pause without erasing character. It can highlight where access could be improved without stripping places of their memory.
In this approach, efficiency does not replace empathy. It emerges from it.
Cities can move reliably while still allowing wandering. They can function at scale while remaining open to ritual, chance, and human unpredictability. The goal is not control, but continuity.
Ecosystem thinking asks designers to listen before acting. It treats placemaking as an ongoing relationship rather than a solved equation. In a moment defined by accelerating technologies and compressed timelines, that posture may be the most forward-looking strategy of all.
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