 Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Dayan Sujic and I'm the co-chair with Hassan Karaman of this afternoon's first session. And in contrast to this morning when we had a close analysis of economic futures, of money supply, of numbers, analysis, data and networks, I think this afternoon's session might be a rather more discursive one in which we try to use the techniques of writing, of observation, of storytelling to try to come to a more elusive appreciation of the essence of what a city is. And we'll start with Richard Sennett, who needs an introduction. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. I was only in Istanbul once before in my life and I went straight from the airport to an office, to a hotel room, to an office and back to the airport. So this is a wonderful experience for me. I thought I might say something to you about the cultural side of the Urban Age project. This is a project that began with an interest in the relationship between visual design, architectural design, concrete planning and social and economic life of cities. So the impulse that we had when we started the project was to look at the relationship between the visual and the social. And also when we began the project and as it's continued in its evolution over these nine years. We've been interested, not simply to gather data but to evaluate the data that we've found. And I guess I could begin the remarks I wanted to make to you tonight, or this afternoon, which is really about community, by saying that I think it's fair to summarize the reaction of many of the professional urbanists that we've met around the world. By concluding on this, about the issue of judgment that what is a real issue for us is the split between quality and quantity. That is, as you've seen all morning, the world is in a process of explosive quantitative growth. The question we've asked ourselves is whether that explosion in quantity has improved either the physical environment or the quality of life. We'll talk tomorrow a little bit more about the quality of the built environment that's resulted from this great quantitative explosion. I think you've had a foretaste of it in some of the earlier talks this morning about discussions about homogeneity, the impulse of global capitalism to reproduce itself in the same sort of visual forms, architectural forms, no matter where you are, so that you could be in Istanbul or Des Moines, Iowa and the environment looks the same because it's been paid for and organized in the same way. What I want to focus on is an issue about quality of life and I want to focus in particular about the issue of communal life. The argument that I think could be drawn again from the places that we visited and particularly from the conversations that the members of the urban age team have had with the planners, architects, people who work in the community organizing is that the forces that have developed the city at large have threatened the quality of community life. That is to say that there are certain essential aspects of creating urban communities which have threatened by urban development. Now, in a way, this is a platitude. This is the monster of capitalism threatening the poor people on the ground who can't resist development, segregation, eviction. All of these things are true. But it raises a question about what we mean by community itself. And one of the conclusions that I've come to over this last nine-year period is that we have to take on rather new ways of looking at what community means and what good communal quality is about than we've been disposed to in the past. A lot of the thinking of left-wing urbanists and I'm going to include all of you in that and at least the center left, but I hope you go even farther to the left, has been to celebrate the virtues of community based on forms of identity which are in turn based on family life. That is to say, to see community as a kind of form of familistic experience. That people have a kind of a mind-shaft which is close, they understand each other, they know about each other, they feel intimate with each other. These are very familistic values for community. And often they're rooted as the sociologist Herbert Gantz once called urban villages in a sense of extended family. The basic idea of it is that intimacy, the feeling of intimacy in community basically allows you to bond with other people. Now I think this version, this identity-based, familistic version of community is going out of date in the modern world. And I'm going to explain to you some of the sociological forces that have put it out to date or else I'll enumerate them. One of the striking effects of urbanization in the last Good Heavens, I only have five minutes more, I've just begun. Stop. Oh, you're just preparing. He's a terrible person. Is that the organization of nuclear families has radically fragmented. Part of this is biological, that people are living to a much, much longer age than they have lived before. One of the consequences of that is that large numbers of people are living into an old age where they live alone. At the other end of the life cycle, young people are starting families later and they're spending their 20s increasingly in more temporary relationships which are not going to be those of their eventual life partners if they have them. One of the results of this that we see in cities of this taking apart and fragmenting of the old nuclear model is the growth of large numbers of people living alone. I'll give you some statistics about this. In Paris, 39% of the population are classed as celebité. That doesn't mean they're celibate. It means they're living on their own. And if you look at people over 65, 82% of the Parisian population is living on their own. The figures are a little less for New York but pretty comparable. And figures for Tokyo, the city we haven't visited are off the charts on this. The experience of being alone is something that is occupying both the 20s and the post-65s of most people's experience. And so far as we can tell from the data we have, the more people live in larger cities, the more likely these correlations outside the nuclear family are likely to occur. It doesn't mean that people stop loving their fathers and mothers. But it means, for instance, that among migrants who are sending money at home, that they feel increasingly comfortable without that kind of financial support at a great distance. Something the EU has been able to chart with both Polish and Czech workers. The notion of being able to play a part in supporting a family is increasingly disaggregating itself from proximity to them. So this is a fundamental change in the basis of community, which is that people are less bonded intimately to each other. And it creates an entirely different logic of community design. For instance, things that we look at as ephemeral, like the provision of places to sit, street furniture. Most planners don't pay much attention to its kind of decor. Our not mere decor if you're 75 years old. The only way to get out of the house and if you don't have much money is to go sit outside. For you, the most important act of urban design is having a place to sit that's sheltered from the rain that gets you out of the house. Similarly, if you're a migrant far from home, the location of community for you is likely to be an internet café. Again, a kind of almost invisible form of community life. They're everywhere. They're not really subject to any kind of theorization about or practical design about how they should be built. The same thing is true of clubs, of bars. I'm just going to remark in this context that smoking bans, which will make you live individually longer, or healthily, I happen to be an addicted smoker, are basically destroying one of the basic forms of communal bonding in big cities, which is going to a pub or a café having a cigarette and drinking. That is, if this was a scene of sociability that's being taken apart for the sake of longevity. And there are a host of these kinds of changes in what we consider important in the design of communities that follow from the transformation of community life into something which is not e-familial, not anti-family, but something in which people's bonds in cities require that they be bonded to strangers. In the paper I gave you, and now I will go much faster. I talked about the issue of hinged cities, and I have to say this is not original to me. The phrase was invented by Fernando Brodell to make a contrast between the cities around the Mediterranean in the late medieval and early Renaissance to the Hanseatic cities of Northern Europe. And the contrast is a very simple one. In the Hanseatic cities, people traded with each other, but they kept strong communal bonds of family at home. Whereas in what he looks at as this set of hinged cities around the Mediterranean, there's much more mobility and there's much less bonding between people leave their families and leave them for long periods of time. Okay. And that old contrast continues today. The UN has recently done a set of studies about the southern rim of the Mediterranean world about what young people in their 20s do. And these are people who look at migration as an opportunity, not simply to get more money, but to make a new life for themselves and make a new selfhood by leaving their family domains. That is, they're conceiving of a way of using migration to acquire a kind of subjectivity which applies to them and all. So the point I'm making here is that hinged cities intersect with the change which is both biological and sociological in the meaning of being a member of a community. They are the kinds of places from what we know from UN data and it may become to be true for you as well in which people use the city as an opportunity to do work on their family lives, work which reflects on that. And doing that work requires a different kind of design of local places than we've envisioned before. I'm not arguing to you that what we give up is the emphasis which most planners have had on housing. But even in this domain, how we think about housing has got to take on an entirely different character. Designing houses for a nuclear family of two adults who marry and never divorce and have two to two and a half children is designing for a minority. Designing housing for people who live if they're elderly for 20 or 25 years alone requires something else. They want stimulation, they want to be outside, they don't want to be prisoners of the house. It means designing very large houses for people in their 20s who haven't the money to survive in most capitalist cities by renting their own apartment. So even in this traditional area in which planners have thought that they would strengthen community, we have to break the family model that has influenced the way we think about the kinds of physical infrastructure we provide in terms of a place to sleep. And we have to put much, much more emphasis on the outside in the kinds of amenities that allow strangers to have rather weak bonds with each other, bonds which will not last a lifetime, bonds which don't lead to intimacy, but rather create a more passing and temporary experience of being in community. If I had to sum up, and I do have to sum up because it only got two minutes, what I want to say to you about this, it's that the contrast I'd make between the mindset of the bankers, government officials, I mean no offense to anybody here, other people who control the dominant culture of the city, is that for them, they're creating places which are rigid. They have rigidly defined functions. Those functions are laid out rationally, often tied to investment patterns, corruption of course, but it's a city that is extremely well articulated. You know what you're doing, where you are. For the kind of community planning that I think we need to do in the conditions of our own time, which resists that, is something which recovers the notion of the ephemeral, the temporary, as meaningful in people's experience. And that means a less determinate, more flexible and more informal in the experiential sense of creating urban space. So for me, being here, it seems to me that you in a way as a place which is a hinged city, which is a place which is contained so much flux and change over so many centuries, may actually provide a kind of laboratory for studying not just the past, but the future about how it is that one actually creates a community life among strangers who will meet, leave, and change. People who will never have the bounds of intimacy. People who will never understand each other. And I hope that's a prospect that we can discuss in the course of this meeting. Thank you very much.