[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":9},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-bio-thomas-sevcik":3},{"bio":4},[5,6,7,8],"Thomas Sevcik is a Swiss strategist who works on what a place is for before anyone draws it. He co-founded arthesia with Annette Schömmel in the mid-1990s and has run it since as a Zurich firm that develops strategic narratives for companies, cities, states and what it calls special situations. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, and he divides his time between Zurich, Panama and Los Angeles.","His subject is [urbanism](\u002Ftopics\u002Furban-design) approached as strategy rather than as design, and the results are easier to recognise than the label. Volkswagen’s Autostadt in Wolfsburg, the corporate theme world that opened in 2000, was built on a content concept from his firm. The Circle, the airport city at Zurich Airport, grew out of an idea and a strategy he led from 2006, modelled on the mixed grain of Zurich’s old town rather than on an office park. The development strategy that fourteen municipalities around the airport share under the name New Zurich is his as well.","His reading of where cities are going is the part that overlaps with Free Cities. He argues in the Swiss press that the city as a model for integrating everyone has run its course, and that the successful ones are turning into special zones with their own economies and their own rules. He has put the same question to his own country in print: whether Switzerland is still a small state or already a [city-state](\u002Ftopics\u002Fcity-states-today).","For the Foundation he wrote the two Tales From Cities pieces. The first asks how a city in the [metaverse](\u002Ftopics\u002Ftechnology-in-new-cities) would be masterplanned once time, space and gravity are optional, and sorts the answers into two spacetime models and three design strategies. The second is about sixteenth-century Antwerp, a de facto city-state with the world’s first modern stock exchange, free enough that a ship could be insured against a Dürer, and about the envy that ended it. He also teaches narrative environments at Central Saint Martins in London, lectures in Hong Kong, and writes regularly for the NZZ and the Schweizer Monat.",1789881467283]