Pete Buttigieg calls on architects to lead at a "delicate time" for America

Pete Buttigieg, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, joined AIA President Evelyn Lee, FAIA, NOMA, on the mainstage for a lively discussion on Day 2 of AIA’s 2025 Conference on Architecture in Boston. 

“I’m always happy to be surrounded by architects, ever since my mayor days, so I think it’s going to be a great conversation,” he said to Lee and the assembled crowd. 

Read on for insights and key takeaways from the discussion. 

Technology and cities

Buttigieg, who served as mayor of South Bend, Ind., from 2012 to 2020, told Lee that he made sure to populate his administration with people with a background in architecture, knowing that “some of the biggest challenges for our city had to do with what our relationship to our own spaces was going to be,” he said. As a post-industrial Rust Belt city, South Bend needed to creatively repurpose spaces and buildings to continue to meet the needs of the city and its residents.

Lee asked Buttigieg for his thoughts on the potential of AI and smart city technologies to allow rural and smaller communities to be more connected and make better-informed decisions. 

“I think, for smaller and less-resourced communities, there’s the most promise, as well as peril, for new technologies that are emerging,” he said. He used the example of Zoom, a technology that is already allowing city officials to democratize the ways in which they communicate with the public.  

“These technologies will not automatically be good or bad,” Buttigieg said. “They will be good or bad for different people, based on their choices. These aren’t technical questions. They’re policy, and they’re questions that I think policy makers need to pay attention to.”

Buttigieg emphasized that data relating to urban infrastructure—including things like car fatality statistics and traffic patterns—became even more important in his decision-making as he moved from local to federal policymaking. 

“I’ve always said, if I’m going to get beat up over something, I at least want to get beat up over something that’s true,” he said, to laughter and applause. “Getting information that we can access, that we can use, is important.” 

Equity

Buttigieg touched on the potential for city and community infrastructure to divide people as much as it connects them. 

“The simple fact that there is a phrase in American English, ‘wrong side of the tracks,’ tells you everything you need to know about the capacity for infrastructure, which is supposed to be about connecting, to also be something that can divide,” he said. “I was taken aback by the level of resistance to my mentioning this during my time as secretary, mostly because I thought it was an obvious enough thing that I didn’t think it would be that controversial.” 

In discussing his work on infrastructure interventions from Buffalo, New York, to Miami, Buttigieg said, he and his team found that “we could improve the texture of the entire community and address some particularly huge inequities.” Of a community in Philadelphia’s Chinatown that had been separated by the Vine Street Expressway, finished in the 90’s, Buttigieg said, “It was something we could act on, and we funded a project to knit those communities back together.” 

The power of architects in this particular moment

Throughout the conversation, Buttigieg was adamant that, despite the challenges of our current political moment, maintaining our collective hope for the future is vital.

 “We all know that we’re now in a moment where so much of what we got used to, institutionally, is being torn to shreds,” he said. “We need to bring as much imagination as possible to what we do next.” 

The ways in which architects will be important in shaping what comes next, he said, lies in facilitating connections and making change at the local level. 

“I’m convinced, in our moment, salvation comes from below,” he said. “And the work of our architects is exquisitely local.” 
Despite the importance and urgency at the federal level of the conversations that shape communities, he continued, “There is something even more urgent and kind of close to the bone right now that architects can do something about. And it has to do with the fact that we’ve got to come offline in order to be better people, and in order to be a better country.”

Architects, he said, curate spaces where people deal with each other in 3D, and have the power to shape interactions that are now more important than ever because they get us out of the online spaces that corrode our sense of trust.

 “Architects are the stewards of those overlapping circles of belonging,” he said. “You are, collectively, an incredibly important force at an incredibly delicate time for life in our country. … [Your] work can be conducive not just for better energy efficiency or housing affordability, but to better levels of social trust.”

Katherine Flynn is Director, Digital Content, at AIA.