 I think we'll make a start. Thank you very much for coming this evening. Before I introduce our very distinguished speaker, I'd like to introduce this speaker series. I'm Diamond Ashiyagbor, and I'm a Professor of Labour Law at Sirass, University of London, and together with Dr Angela Halder, over here at the front, we are sort of putting together this lecture series, a speaker series on telling stories about law and development. Because we, from our respective disciplinary backgrounds, Antares, an economist, and a lawyer, and I'm just a lawyer, we thought that there were much more perhaps more interesting, but slightly broader ways of thinking about law and development than just from a legal or perhaps even from an economic perspective, which is why we've invited academics from other disciplines, but also non-academics such as filmmakers, who've thought about issues raised by the question of development, and development is something we think of as a process which is occurring, has occurred, and carries on occurring, in states which are aspiring towards, moving towards, or are marked with economies. Just to give you a sense of what we understand by this broad notion of telling stories about law and development, our most recent speaker in this series was 13th February with Professor Saskia Sassan from Columbia University. Her topic was at the systemic edge where our conceptual categories break down. Earlier speakers included Professor Achille Bill-Gramey, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and his topic was why does liberalism find it so hard to cope with identity. Another earlier speaker was Professor Rajiv Bhagava from the Director of the Centre for the Study of Development Societies in Delhi, and his talk was on the crisis of secularism in India. So, to introduce our speaker this evening. I know a lot of you already know Professor Senator Fatwar at a class that he was holding today. Professor Senator Centennial, Professor of Sociology at the Law School of Economics, as well as University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His scholarly writing centres on the development of cities, the nature of work in modern society, and the sociology of culture. In particular his work examines how individuals and groups made a social and cultural sense of material facts about cities in which they live, about the labour they do, particular relevance to those of us across so many disciplines, geography, those of us who are interested in the adult environment, those of us like me, labour lawyers. He focuses on how people become competent interpreters of their experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His first book, The Uses of Disorder, looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. Most more recently Professor Senator explored positive aspects of labour, including the book The Craftsman, which I'm sure many of you will know. Together the rituals and pleasures and politics of cooperation and a third volume in that trilogy will be The Open City, which will appear in 2016. Amongst many prizes and acknowledgments of esteem, Professor Senator has been winner of the Hegel Prize awarded by the German city of Stuttgart and also awarded the Gerdde Henchor Prize. So tonight's lecture will be on the question The Edge, Borders and Boundaries. So I'm just going to give it away so I can also see the signs. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for inviting me. Can you hear me? I should say that I've left America and I've come to Cambridge. I am visiting professor of urban studies here in the architecture school and I'm delighted to be here so far. Who knows? What I'd like to do tonight is a kind of experiment. I am writing a book about, which basically is a kind of application of open systems theory to urban design. Quite a technical book. One of the big issues in it is about the notion of border conditions within the city, where differences meet, either functional differences or racial differences and so on. So I've been come quite, and this is as I'll try to explain at the end of the talk, is a kind of central problem to boundary conditions or a central problem to open systems theory. But the experiment that I'd like to try with you tonight is to present to you the spatial conditions of an edge and think with you, since you're lawyers, many of you, about what this edge condition means legally about national boundaries. That is, can we scale up the kind of discussion I'll present to you from the urban to the national in terms of edges? Is that clear? I can present to you the urban material, the discussion about whether this scales into our thinking about national borders and boundaries. It is a question whether it applies or not. It is a question I hope to discuss with you. To set this discussion edges in context, I should say that for urbanists, particularly for urbanists, American urbanists, this is a deeply, deeply compelling subject because it deals with segregation. A physical segregation of people who are different. And as I say, for Americans, particularly grinding and painful because our cities have a strong and lasting legacy of racial segregation. So that the question about whether different people can live together without segregation is for us urgent. It's urgent I think in Europe increasingly as well. I don't know how many of you followed the Pighita marches that occurred in Germany and occurred all over in Germany, but I guess there was a Pighita march here or wasn't it? And basically these are marches to get Muslims out of Europe to say that the clash of values means that Muslims should be expelled beyond the borders of Europe. And there were a bit about them because it's quite interesting. The biggest of these marches was in Dresden in January. It had about 25,000 people. And before the march occurred a couple of weeks before, the Spiegel had done an opinion survey and found that about 30% of the German public also believed that we Germans should never have let Muslims cross our borders and that they should leave. Which looked like our familiar friends from the 30s back again. In fact when the march occurred the only place in which it had a lot of people wasn't Dresden. When they tried to stage these marches elsewhere there were huge numbers of counter demonstrators against Pighita. The opinion polls turned out to be faulty. They're always faulty. This is a secret about sociology. We don't let out usually but they're quite unreliable. But the most interesting fact about this was that few of the people who were marching in Dresden actually lived close to Muslims. In other words this was a march about people whom they didn't know first hand. And in Dresden is indeed in places where the expulsion of foreigners is strong the actual day to day presence of them tends to be weak. That is to say that segregation has bred this fantasy of the other who cannot be integrated. On the reverse side of that is findings done by Robert Putnam and his group at Harvard. Which have argued that toleration for groups that differ is stronger the stronger you live away from them, farther from them you live. Which seems to be exactly counter to the Pighita finding that you don't live with strangers and fantasize about it. But the hidden and Putnam isn't recommending this he's just observing it's a pretty robust study. That liberal attitudes towards blacks, Muslims, poor people, big deal in the United States and Latinos. The tolerant attitudes seem to develop the farther away the lack of contact there is. The connection with Pighita is the notion that in both of these forms the idea has been naturalized. The people who differ cannot live together. In other words segregation has been naturalized either in the ideology of this very right group or in the seeming liberal formation. So that is a background to thinking about edges. What kind of edges could deal with this sociological problem? If at all are there ways to configure the edge condition within a city so that you denaturalize the idea that those who differ cannot live together. You understand how I'm setting this up? I'm going to show you, I'm very low-winded and I have 40 minutes so I'll try to do this as fast as I can. I want to leave room, water room, discussion. Some thoughts I have about what kinds of edge conditions could address this sociological problem. Can you all see this? Can you see the small type? So the different distinction I want to make here fundamentally is between borders and boundaries. Between an edge condition, the border, which might address this sociological problem, and an edge condition, the boundary, which naturalizes difference. I'm going to start in a way that's probably very surprising for you by recurring to the natural world. When I taught at MIT, I got interested a long, long time ago. When I taught at MIT, I worked with a group of biologists who were also interested in edge conditions. We did studies, or they did studies, and I stripped them of their knowledge and reconverted it into trying to understand at the cellular and at the environmental level what natural borders and boundaries would be like. I'm just going to show it so that the first thing they're looking is at a cell membrane, which has a border, and the second thing has a cell wall. I'm now going to explain to you what this means. A membrane is not open. A membrane combines, as in this plasmon membrane, two conditions, porosity and resistance. That is to say, it's not a structure in which the natural materials are just flowing back and forth to each other. There are all sorts of built into our, both DNA and RNA, algorithmic-like processes whereby the cell tries to retain valuable nutrients, but is porous to excreting them when necessary or taking nutrients in. This should be a kind of metaphorically resonant fact for you. That a border which allows difference, in this case natural differences to occur, is not open in the sense that there are no gates, but that is a membrane condition in which porosity and resistance are combined. In cellular life, they're in equilibrium. Through the city, you know it. A cell wall is something where retention rules porosity. You have to forgive my drawings here, but if you look at the difference between this membrane visually and the cellulose fiber, which is a wall, you can see what that means. The grand positive bacteria has a very loose structure, but nonetheless a structure which permits this to occur. Whereas the cell wall is a much more tightly woven fabric to go back to where some of us. So that in the construction of the edge at the cellular level, the issue is how tight are the elements drawn together. And this also has enormous implications for form. Now you can, I'm not going to skip this, it's too enticing, well it's so enticing. What you should know is that all cells can switch from a border to a boundary condition. And that's unnatural in the cell. Now we're going to shift from the cellular level to the ecological level. And we had some wonderful discussions about this. An ecological border is something where, for instance, the shoreline meets the water meets solid land. Or in water, the different temperature layers in the water. It's here where you get this combination of porosity and resistance. This is where species tend to feed off of each other. It's where the pace of evolution is the fastest. It is, in other words, a zone where biological activity, it's alive. In a way that in the center of these ecological layers, there's not as much activity. In other words, the edge is the live condition in ecological border. A hedgerow is a common refer for you of all of this. The hedgerow is a created border. There's lots of wildlife as the figs that separates do now. Whereas, and this is my favorite slide I'm going to show you tonight. A boundary is like a tiger border, a tiger boundary. We made these maps. This is where tigers have principal boundaries in Southeast Asia. All established by the tiger is droppings and urine. It's keep away, keep out of here. The thing about these tiger boundaries that's generally true in the boundary condition is that it's an area of low activity. That is, there's less life at this edge than there is in the center. Just to sum up this natural recourse. The model of a border is a membrane which combines porosity and resistance in equilibrium. In ecological terms, a huge jump in the scale obviously, but the same principle is applying that the membrane, the border, is a place of heightened biological activity compared to the center, whereas the boundary is a place of lessened activity compared to the center. What does this have to do with cities? It should be a nice urbanist hanging out with people studying tiger droppings. I'll show you why. This is the Israeli security wall. You have to forgive my photograph is slightly out of focus because I was being traced by an Israeli. It's not so bad actually. Now, the interesting thing about this, it was on the other side of this wall. On this side of the wall, the security wall works as a border. Because of the shade that it affords, people have come to use it, they're 20 feet high. You know what they are, these concrete slabs which are 20 feet high. It's very, very high quality concrete. It's X6 concrete. They're there for good. They have these feet on either side. They're quite easy to manipulate because they're designed in section so that they can be picked up by specially designed forklifts. They're moved around. But on this side of the security wall, you have a border because of the shade. People come there to run in formal markets. Whereas on this side of the same security wall, you have a boundary. In other words, here, the creation of these walls ironically has created a space for increased economic activity because it's in shade. We're here, it's deadly. These roads are only meant for tanks. No people allowed. So that is one beginning point of understanding about how something can function as a boundary or a border. An interesting thing about this for us as urbanists is that the wall itself, as you can tell from this, the wall itself doesn't dictate the usage as a boundary or a border. And in the history of urbanism, walls actually served as border conditions. This is Avignon. This is where prostitutes, Jews, some few Muslims and political refugees lived in Avignon. The wall became a place in which people lived. And although it was meant to be an absolute boundary in terms of tank taxes, in fact, it's a colonized space wall in most medieval cities. Which functions as a border. The same thing is true, I'm so sorry to show this, about Ishtar Gate in Babylon. I think Peterson drew this. This is all an inhabited edge. It's the kind of thing that today people are trying, not this wall, but things like this are being destroyed today by Ishtar. But the idea here is that you have a degree of permeability and resistance that's combined. An absolute boundary condition in all modern urbanism consists of trapped walls. And this is, I have to say, this is a photo I took from a helicopter. I was so afraid, I'm a terrible coward. I was so afraid that the helicopter would drop. But I did manage to get this. It's quite interesting. This is the famous slum in Caracas, Venezuela, which is cut by these three lanes of traffic each way from the middle class part of Caracas. This was done on purpose. The only gate is this little thing. You can see that bridge over there, from which the maids cross from the Shantetowns and from the Bafio into servicing the flats and then move back at the end of the day. This is an extreme condition of the way in which we've erected boundaries in the city. We've done it through motion. There are even a set of planning guidelines about how fast the traffic has to go in order to separate communities. I mean, they're horrible guidelines, but there are calculations of when does traffic move so fast that it's no longer possible to navigate the distances. I pressed the wrong button. This is part of Addis Ababa that I worked at as a planner. This is a covered market and also a lot of Shantetown things here. To make motion into a border, we put in an enforced here a 25-mile traffic speed limit. This is still a place of an incredible number of buses. It should be a boundary, but the fact of slowing the traffic down and it was enforced in the first few years meant that it functioned as a border. Another familiar boundary condition is horizontal and vertical. This is in Shanghai. There's an absolute divorce between this quite wonderful ground plane, which is the public realm supposedly, and the people in the flats. You can see it because this is a hot afternoon and there's nobody in the pool. That's typical of the uses of all of the so-called public space. There aren't any people there because it's very laborious to get down in an elevator to that, so that it's another measure of boundary condition. This finally, to make a motion of this, is the absolute edge, which is that fence. What you have here are more barrio. Here are not middle class, but upper class people, each of whom has their own private swimming pool. They look from that swimming pool. This is the revenge of the masses. They look from their swimming pools. They can look over this endless spot, which was never meant to be. The barrio was pushed further and further and further. How do we go about creating, turning omnis into boreis? This is a project I did in East London, which every summer dumps a lot of sand into a parking lot. It turns a place which would otherwise be baking hop, which is an academy parking lot, into a beach without water. Instead of the outside being divorced from the inside, it becomes usable as a kind of medium. Here's another kind of border. This one is more about the process of development, more telling. What there is is a functional, the first stories of these low shack buildings are workshops or market stalls and the top shops where people live. This is a highly efficient, happy, doesn't it, but it's highly efficient. It means that people can do childcare during the day. It actually uses very little, it doesn't need much infrastructure to work with UN-built sewage line, which just lies down in the centre. At the end is a project which I've shown you before, which is a disastrous attempt to rectify this slum by putting people in nice housing. But the border condition here is both vertical and horizontal and it's functional. You don't separate work from housing. You put them as close together as possible. Here's the other side of that street. This is worth dwelling on at some length, which I'm afraid I'm going to do. This is a little farther down the street where two becomes five stores, but it's still the same. The important thing about this image are the railroad tracks here. Over here is the school. For the people here, this isn't on the same street, it's three streets over here. Anyhow, the same idea. The school is here. The kids have to go to school by crossing this railroad track. You can see this is quite a considerable rail infrastructure. There are lots of sometimes very fast-moving trains. The thing about this is that those trains are irregular. I don't know if any of you have travelled extensively in India, but if you have, you will know that a timetable is really an idea rather than an indication of what's of reality. For the kids, what happens is that this border is informalised because of the irregularity of these trains coming and going. What happens is that they've developed a whole set of communal rituals about people who are scouts looking out for when the trains are coming. The teachers rely on these scouts to take kids, little children back and forth. There's a kind of inductive searching of the neighbourhood of its daily condition that goes on here also, which has bound people outside the school. It's dangerous to go to school. For that reason, there's a lot of collective work to deal with this irregularity, of crossing this enormously complex junction. The reason I show this to you other than it's quite a moving thing is that the notion that efficiency and border conditions go together is wrong. A border tends to be irregular, human borders. As well as porous, the two go together. The result of that is something that develops kind of street smarts in kids, even though it's highly dangerous. Here's another kind of border I don't want to talk to you about that. This is the drug market in Johannesburg. An informal border composed at the edge of the city where you can either buy heroin or wonderful potatoes and onions. In fact, you can go from one of these cars to the other to your Sunday shopping. But this is a kind of informality of function. The really interesting thing to me about this whole issue of informal which is an edge problem for moving from the membrane or the border condition of the boundary is embodied by this image. What you have here is three stories. Ground plan first and second floor. On the ground plan, this is a completely informal border condition. There are just people selling things that have fallen off a truck and they sell them on the top of cardboard boxes. If they're successful, they tend to move up a thing where they're organized in rows and people have a clientele that likes the stolen goods or great goods that they have. It's a somewhat more ordered space. If they're even more successful, they move up to the second story in which there are four-by-eight cardboard walls that are made so that everything is formalized. You have your clientele and your clientele doesn't meet you over a cardboard box, but in conditions that we would think of as a store. What's important about this is that the informal is not a steady-state condition. It goes both ways. People who go broke can afford the second story can move down the first or the ground floor. Economically, the border condition and the boundary condition are just in a way like those grand-positive and negative cells that I showed you. This is not a steady state, and the question in development usually, this is what I show this to you, is how to go from the ground floor to the second floor, which is also to increase inequality. There are very few people on the second floor and lots of people struggling on the ground floor. It's a complex image that I wanted to present to you. This is what's called a focus stage. This is an outdoor school in Mumbai. The thing about when we call a focus stage like this, is that this is in fact quite a used road. These children have to learn how to negotiate this boundary condition. Never step into the street. They can only move forward. There are monitors to make sure that they never actually fall into the street. Now, I'll tell you how borders become boundaries in urban design. That's the UN project that I showed this to you. I showed you before Dharavi, which is here. It's an incredible slug. It needed to be modernized. So, the UN and the World Bank, not my part of the UN, let's build some new housing here. It looks beautiful, doesn't it? It looks gorgeous. This is the two days after it opened. So wonderful, so clean, so sanitary. Now look what its actual state has become. Why has this happened? It's because this design means that you can live here, but you can't work here. There are no people. You can't do basket weaving, or raiding onions, or other kinds of very simple things in the space, and even if you could, who would you sell it to? So these people became commuters, and as they became commuters, a boundary established between work and family, the physical environment where they lived, degraded. It's a really important issue. Once this border condition, which they knew in this seemingly awful slum, was converted into a boundary between work and home, the physical environment is, people aren't paying attention to it in the same way, and it's degraded very, very fast. And I hope we're actually going to pull it down, but I don't know. And I'll give you an example about boundaries, how boundaries become borders. This is, sorry London, I think you must have seen, you can see this project in your sleep. This is taken, this is a project that all of a night made to deal with Amsterdam after the Second World War. This is a little misleading as a photograph, because this is actually in fact a very fast moving street on both sides. It must have been taken early in the morning. But what he did was reconfigure it by adding this little bit, which slowed down the traffic, which put a use in, these are kids, who like those kids in Derabi have to learn, you know, this is a fast moving traffic. They never get health and safety permission in the UK, because they could fall into the street. And his notion was, if you want to live in a city, you should learn how to use it. So learn how to play away from the edge. And they're watched over, these are groups of elderly people. This is a famous gin shop in Amsterdam, and I'm told by my mother-in-law in the Dutch that it was a famous place for old people to go and drink gin. So these are slightly tipsy grandpas and grandpas who are looking at these kids who are in danger of being hit by fast moving traffic. That's a border condition. I'll just show you another one. They're so bloody. This is a border boundary, in which that condition of low intensity is absolute. Nothing happened here. These streets, I know well, and these streets are now, at that time, it's a low density depopulated area. And he did this, which is again to create something, which creates activity of a very amorphous source here. Now, I want to say something to you about luminality. The edge condition, just at the edge, is often in planning work talked about as a luminal space. This focuses particularly on porosity. That is, it's a zone of transition. You're leaving one thing, you're going to another. It's a very fancy idea. I want to talk to you about how you actually create that liminal sense of zoning. One way of movement is to substitute fixed ball arts by flexible ball arts. You know that in Cambridge. Every time you take one of those taxes, if you can afford it, that takes you through the centre of town and those flexible ball arts go up and down, that creates a liminal space. Something that before was a restraint, which if you're privileged, a taxi driver, you can pass through. And in a lot of planning work now, it's not that we want to put flexible ball arts everywhere. They're very expensive. But the idea that we would take a fixed form and replace it by a form that can be altered or changed is a way of trying to... This is a terrible... So I don't like pedestrianized zones. They're fixed form, they're low-level life, whereas with something like this in principle, the principle of this, is that you can change the form of use by the time of day and so on. The same issue... All of urbanism is about details. The same issue about... This is a liminal fence. Why? Because it's low and you can see through it. If you're in the green space there near a parent, you can see where your kid is being murdered in some, right? The space is porous, although it is a restraint. This is a non-liminal fence. Why? What's the element of non-liminality in it? This. That's what makes it non-liminal. You can't see through it. This is a project of my huge failure. This is a Potsdamer plot, and I designed this playground. As you can see, it's very heavily used. The reason it's a non-liminal space is that I thought to give these kids as much open territory as possible. The only thing I did... These are sea salts. As Germans think of sea salts, that is their high-tech to perfectly balance. Nobody wants to play them, because they're too simple. There's not enough texture in the environment. It was meant to be liminal by eliminating, right next to it, all sorts of non-child activities, by giving children a way to enter into that space, which was not originally designed for them. But the actual design has made them non-liminal. They are, to me, very beautiful objects. I own one. But they're absolutely... The object does not create the youth. I'll make those again. The last thing I want to say to you about this is to understand this whole subject in the city of differences of people and differences of function getting close to each other to denaturalize the notion of segregation. Has an implication for how we think about the relation between centers and edges. The important space in the city is the center, is the edge, not the center. That means that places that have a strong ethnic identity we should try and blur at the edges. This is very politically incorrect. We're supposed to be reinforcing identity in our multicultural society, right? That's what... Be proud of who you are. But the logic of all that I've told you is that the space which is strongly identified as belonging to one group is less important for the urbanist than the edge condition, which is ill-defined, which is both porous and resistant, which is ambiguous and so on. I'll just show in my own practice another mistake I've made. This is something called la Marqueta in New York. It is a market for Spanish Harlem. The mistake we made was putting La Marqueta in the middle of Spanish Harlem. We should, you can see where it is, where it says I, we should have put it down here at 96th Street, which is the zone of transition between one of the richest places in the world, that is the Upper East Side and one of the poorest places, which is Spanish Harlem. In other words, we should have taken the border condition seriously. It's not that the lady in Furs and her maid are going to chat there, but we should have put public resources there so that they were at least physically together. This market is the kind of resource we should have put there to make a border condition. That is to put the public realm at the edge rather than the center. I understand what I'm saying. We always think about the public realm as the center of a community. In my view, to create this border condition, it has to be at the edge. People learn, I made this when I was in the Planning Commission. I did this. Who knew that? I just thought, you know, Spanish market is Spanish market is Spanish Harlem. The truth is, it isn't in Spanish Harlem. If you want Hispanics in New York, particularly given the horrible history of segregation in American cities, if you want people to be comfortable with Hispanics, you have to get them. You have to put public functions, which they both share at the edge. I'm going to skip this. I'm going to leave this. This is where I'm going tomorrow. It's currently. This is a condition, which is edgeless. That's what we're seeing more and more in urban development. Which is a lack, this is not a adopted photograph. This is, mile after mile, of a condition, which has neither border nor boundary. Mae'r ddafodd hwn yn ddynion i'r sphysgol. Mae'r cwestiynau i gyd yn ymdweithio y maen nhw ei wneud yn ddweud rwy'n oed yn y sgolol cyfwyr yma. I should say that in the framework of open systems theory, of open systems of the city, the idea of porosity and resistance and of ambiguity, this membrane condition are urban values which we have to learn how to design. They don't just happen when you fall from the sky that people live this way. They tend to live more in the kind of conditions of naturalizing separation. So it's something that is an action, it needs an agent. It's a space in which people are making a discovery in which they're finding problems in which those discoveries in this border condition feedback to grow a place. That's what we saw in the natural environment and the natural environment conceived as an open system, that it's a system in which the boundary condition feeds growth, the growth of species, the relations between species with a feed and so on. And we need to think about that property of natural systems as urban systems as well. So I hope this is not too far afield from law, but I hope it's a kind of provocation of thinking about something I don't understand, which is should we be thinking about national borders, where we think about borders and borders with the city. Thank you very much.