Sustainable Infrastructure
E9 - Rainier Valcarcel, Discipline Director, Cities Infrastructure @ Buro Happold
Buro Happold designs some of the world's most ambitious city developments. From London's dense, centuries-old core to blank-canvas megaprojects in Saudi Arabia, its infrastructure teams sit at the point where climate resilience, mobility and carbon targets stop being separate conversations and become one design brief. Rainier Valcarcel has spent twenty years in that brief. He started his career in South Africa, moved to the UK eighteen years ago, and now leads Cities Infrastructure at Buro Happold, working across projects from Kingston's Mini Holland cycle scheme to Riyadh Expo 2030 and Qiddiya. What changes between those projects, he argues, isn't the ambition, but the inherent constraints. In this episode, Rainier explains why retrofitting a historic city and designing a greenfield one call for opposite instincts, why reducing carbon on a project is usually the same exercise as reducing its cost, and why the wadis of Saudi Arabia and the drains of London are solving the same problem.
