 Okay, thanks everybody for being here on a rainy Monday morning. I think the fact that we have a full house, I think speaks to the fact that this is a very important and compelling topic. I wanna thank my friends at PricewaterhouseCoopers for helping us pull this off and bringing such an interesting group together. So thank you, John Glover and company from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The topic is the challenges and opportunities of urbanization. I think many of you know that we've hit a landmark in the last year or so that more than 50% of the world live in cities. That's the first time in humankind that that's happened. It has all sorts of implications for the future of development. It has all sorts of implications for the future of growth as implications of infrastructure, energy, technology. I think we're gonna be able to touch all of these topics today. We really have an excellent keynote speaker to kick this off, Dr. Joan Klos, who is the Under Secretary General and Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, better known as UN Habitat, is gonna present a keynote presentation. I wanna apologize to everybody in advance this is the first time this has ever happened. We're having problems with our PowerPoint today. So we will be sending folks the two PowerPoint presentations afterwards via email. So it's my first time in my four years this has happened. So I wanna apologize to you and to our speakers. We just had this happen in the last 30 minutes. And we can't blame cyber attacks on this that we have had some cyber attacks, but this isn't a cyber attack related issue. But Dr. Joan Klos is Executive Director of UN Habitat, I think is really qualified to help us frame this conversation. He's a former mayor of Barcelona, one of the most beautiful cities in Spain and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. And obviously is also was an ambassador, I think it ended up as well. And so I think we're very, very fortunate to have such a distinguished person. He's in from Nairobi, Kenya because UN Habitat is based in Nairobi, Kenya. He didn't fly in all the way to be with us solely, but it's really a distinct honor to have Dr. Joan Klos with us. So Dr. Klos, why don't you come up and please make some remarks. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you then for giving me the opportunity to address this audience here in the CSIS and talk about a very important topic that now is happening around the world, which is this process of accelerated urbanization. As you know, UN Habitat is the UN agency which is specialized in urbanization. We are supposed to be the planetary observatory of what is happening in urbanization around the world. And we try to study urbanization in its strategic evolution and see a little bit how are the keys and what are the most interesting things that are happening in urbanization. As Dan has said, in really three or four years ago, already the whole urban population reached 50%. By now, we are already convinced that the figure is 55% because the process of urbanization, it's really not just very big in terms of absolute numbers. It's also important for its acceleration. Urbanization is accelerating. We have studied, as I said, urbanization and it's very interesting. For example, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, the process of urbanization used to took place in societies around when societies reached something like between $2,000 and $3,000 per capita. When that happened, it was the moment that the societies used to be in the process of urbanization. But now at the beginning of the 21th century, something very new is happening and is that urbanization is taking place between $500 and $1,000 per capita. And that means that we are seeing urbanization where before it was not expected yet. And this is the case now, perhaps the most interesting case is sub-Saharan Africa where there's a real boom of urbanization. Well, the figures are astonishing in absolute numbers. If we are now 3.7 billion of people urbanized in the coming 20, 30, 50 years, it doesn't really matter, we are going to double this figure. And this is a huge planetary change. The question of the equilibrium of the planet is going to change in a very important manner because when people urbanizes, a lot of things happen. It's not just that people go to the cities. When people live in cities, they change their mind, they change their attitudes, they do different things. And that affects the equilibrium and the status quo of the society. There are many changes which are economic. For example, one of the things that when a rural person moves to an urban setting, usually tends to multiply the consumption of energy by 10. This is the average increase of energy consumption. But, and there are other questions also. When people moves to the cities and they are less under the, let's say, the psychological influence of the family and of the tribe or whatever, or local, local culture, and they move to a big city, they change their social habits and their political habits also. And this is very important because people in cities tend to be more demanding in rural areas, and they tend to make more noise. And this is something that the Arab Spring has shown in a very clear manner. Then I just want to explain this energetic or political and economic changes because urbanization, although it's very important because with the reports of the World Bank and the specialized companies, they always tend to say, okay, there's going to be a need of three billion dollars in basic services, drainage, transportation, yeah, all that is true. But taking account that urbanization, apart from the economic side, about from the financial side, has much other important implications. Some of them, they are not economic and they can be very, very important. And they can introduce a lot of changes in many parts of the world. We, as experts of urbanization, we are used to the classic process of urbanization. For us, the classic process of urbanization is the one which follows the line, which are in that sense normal in a kind of statistical manner. And that means that, for example, we usually have poor societies which are mainly based on agriculture and the rest of the primary sector, let's say mining or fishering and all these things, the primary sector of the economy. The economies which are based on the primary sector of the economy, they tend to have rates of urbanization between 20%, 25%. And then it reaches a point where these societies, if they improve their economy, usually because of improved agrarian productivity, they begin to change and the rate of urbanization begins to increase. And then is the moment when from 20, they move to 30, 35. This is the case, for example, of India in this moment. And many other, perhaps a little bit more advanced, Malaysia, Indonesia and very big countries in the rest of the world which are organizing very fast. In this phase of, second phase of urbanization, we see the beginning of the construction sector buildings and then the beginning of the most basic industrialization. Construction and industrialization change the labor market and the city provides the good scenario for the generation of new wealth related to these new economical sectors, mainly the construction business and then the industrialization and the first phases of industrialization, usually they are the textile industry. Garments and all that. And this is what we are seeing now in India. We are seeing that in Bangladesh, in Pakistan and in many parts of the world where they are already in beginning of the process of industrialization and that it's accelerating the first phase of acceleration of the economy. But this classic process of industrialization, we have seen it in the most important organizations in human history and I am not referring to the old times or the Neolithic or these kind of things or the Romans or the Greeks and et cetera. I am referring to just after the Second World War, for example, the first huge process of urbanization was, what, Japan. Japan was the real agrarian society, nearly feudal society that after the political change introduced by losing the Second World War and under the west influence in its economy, they become a huge process of urbanization which went together with industrialization. Apart from Japan, the second biggest process of urbanization in Asia was, Korea, perfect. And well, then et cetera and now we have seen the biggest one which has been China. China has urbanized for 100 million people in 20 years and it's a kind of massive never seen in human history. The interesting thing though of all these processes in Asia is that they have been driven by industrialization. Industrialization and urbanization has gone in parallel. I am placing some attention here because now we are facing a new revolution that is the first time that we see in a massive scale in human history and is that we are seeing a huge process of urbanization without industrialization. And this is South Africa, sorry, Sub-Saharan Africa. We are seeing a huge process of urbanization without industrialization. And in a way, there's a typical kind of urbanization and we are wondering what is moving people from the rural areas to the urban areas in Africa because it's not jobs. At least it's not formal jobs because in Africa city there's no formal jobs. There's a lot of informal jobs, including mafias, slums, whatever, but not formal jobs. And we are coming to the conclusion that what is driving the organization of Africa is the improved productivity of the agrarian economy. It's not a pull factor, it's a push factor. People is moved out of the rural areas because the agrarian production is increasing very fast and they are not needed there anymore. And that is pushing. This is not the first time that that happened because that happened also in the 17th century in the UK before the Industrial Revolution when it was some reforms in the agrarian law, the enclosures legislation, which opened up the productivity of the agrarian areas of England mainly and that produced huge migration towards London. And in fact, the Dickinsonian London, it's an expression which was full of slums, by the way. It's an expression of this urbanization driven not by industrialization, but by improved productivity in the agrarian regions. This is very important because that presents a political dilemma because in Africa there's a people who tends to say, okay, okay, we cannot manage urbanization, then we should retain the people in the agrarian areas, in the rural areas. But the question is that they cannot be retained there because as the agrarian productivity is increased, they need to, they are pushed out. And then the problem is that, for example, for the first time in history, the African nations, they are confronted with harsh reality that they need to do something with urbanization. They cannot just say, oh, let's see how it solves itself. It's not going to solve itself. Then, just to finish my presentation, I will say, as in this capacity of World Observatory, that we are extremely worried about the model of urbanization that we are seeing around the world. And this is the second part of my presentation. It's not related with the first, just a little bit connected, but not too much. We are seeing what is the kind of urbanization that we are building. Even we study that by satellites and all that. And the kind of urbanization that is being built, by the way, all the urbanization that is being built is in the developing world. 98.9% of the urbanization is taking place in the developing world. And all of the doubling of the urban population that is going to take place in the next 40, 50 years is going to happen in the developing world. Then don't worry in the developed world. We are not going to be part of this huge revolution that is going to happen in the human species. This is going to happen in the developed world. Here in the developed world, we only will see small changes, but not really very important. Now the things are happening in the developing world because there is where the urbanization is very low and there is where the urbanization will reach as everywhere else in the world, about 80% in this period of time. Then the problem is that the developing world is urbanizing under a model which is a copy of our typical model of urbanization of the 70s. It's not even the current day urbanization that is becoming more and more prevalent in the West. They are still imitating the urbanization of the 70s and this is especially worrisome because the urbanization of the 70s in the developed world has been checked and studied in many manners and it presents quite a number of problems, at least two of them, very important. One, it's economic problem. The urbanization of the 70s is an organization which is based on the master planning methodology which tends to make use in an excessive manner of the catalogation of the uses of land. One of the defining principles of the modern master planning is the catalogation of land. This land is industrial, this land is residential, this land is commercial, this land is recreational, this land is for a mall, this land is for that and that and that. This catalogation of land which was invented in the first third of the 20th century now could have been of use in the industrial society but is not of use in the post-industrial society because this methodology of planning generates a huge demand of mobility. A normal person needs to go during the day to tour three different parts of the city in a kind of endless mobility demand. And this is one of the problems which then as we use mainly fossil fuels and we generate a lot of energy consumption and the energy that we use, it's still fossil fuels. If we can find the clean energy, all that will be solved but while we don't find an alternative energy, this is a real problem for ecological issues. But this is not the worst aspect of the zone master planning. The worst aspect is the weakening of the economies of agglomeration. Economists of agglomeration were very well described by geographic economy and relates to the fact that the urban setting increases the productivity of the economy. Due to the proximity of the factors of production and to the diminished cost of transaction, you have in the urban environment a higher productivity rate. That means that you can get more outputs with less inputs and this is one of the miracles of urbanization. It's a wealth engine. It's a wealth generating machine. But in order to be a wealth generating machine, the good productive city needs to allow for the economies of agglomeration. And if the city is not designed for the economies of agglomeration, we lose one of the most important factors and one of the most positive factors of urbanization. And the problem is that the zoning has been very good for the real estate business but it has been very bad and very unproductive for the economies of agglomeration of the city, which is a kind of macroeconomic effect. You have real land values protected by zoning which is a kind of microeconomic effect but you lose the macroeconomic effect of the productivity of the city. And the second is much more important than the first but like multiple of 10 times. And this is something that it's a kind of competition between two goods. The pretension of zoning and keeping the value of the land because zoning, what's due for a real estate business is that it protects very well. It gives you a very good direction of what is going to be the price of the land. And this is very good for the real estate business but it goes against the economies of agglomeration. And as nobody defends the economies of agglomeration what happens is that zoning tends to be extremely successful. And this is a problem that we are seeing in this developing world urbanization that they are resorting to this kind of master planning as the typical form of organizing and they are losing or they are not losing, weakening their possibilities of economies of agglomeration. The cities that they are built, they are not especially productive. And we have seen that in a very big manner in China. In China which has organized so many people if you look at the principles of organization of China, they are principles that although they are very effective for industrial economy, they will be not so effective, you will see that very soon in post industrial societies. The other question and with that I will finish is that a city, you can get a city which produces the good outputs that we are talking here if you design it. The organization either takes place spontaneously without plan and then everybody occupies the land which is the normal way where there's no institutional capacity to put a direction to the process of organization or you can plan. Then then planet urbanization that we have studied it's very inefficient because there's not enough public space, there's no connectivity and then they lose most of the economies of organization. But this is the most prevalent manner of organization in the developing world than planet urbanization. For example, a planet urbanization requires at least 30% of the land allocated to the street pattern and at least the street pattern needs to have 80 street junctions per square kilometer. When we go on a planet city instead of 30% we used to have 8, 9, 10% of space allocated to the street and the number of crossings per square kilometer go down to 20. And then without crossings or junctions and without the street you will not be surprised that mega capitals in the south even with no much cards per inhabitants they became collapse and you need 3 hours to go everywhere. And this is because there's no the most basic principles of planning. Then if we move to the planet world I always say that well the fact that your plan is not enough in order to get the results expected good results of the good city you need to plan well because you can plan badly and if you plan badly you lose also everything. Then this is a problem because in general the plans that are in place usually tend to be bad urban planning. They tend to be not very well oriented to the objective of generating wealth. With that I will finish and I think that we will have the opportunity to have a dialogue and a conversation and perhaps we can introduce further insight to this interesting process of world urbanization which is taking place now in the world. Thank you Dr. Klose. Thank you very much. I think that was a very nice way to kick start this conversation. We really appreciate Dr. Klose being here. I'm going to ask the panelists to come up and as part of my urban planning when the panelists come up I'll ask some of the folks who are standing they can come sit up front here. So please panelists take a seat up here on the dyes and that way we can relieve some of the urban pressure some of the population pressure back there at the back of the room. Feel free to sit next to folks and get to know each other. Shake hands and say hi it's okay. There's also a seat up over here as well. Good. There's still a couple more seats here and here if people want to take them. Don't be shy. Good. We've really got a great panel to cover this to take the conversation further. We have our first speaker is going to be Mr. Haasam Gulal who's a partner for the state and local government sector. He's a state and local government sector global leader. He's also been the lead on the cities of opportunity work that Price Waterhouse Coopers does as well as a major report they recently did called investor ready cities. So we really appreciate you being here. Haasam I'll just go through just through the panels and then I'll turn it over to you. And then we also have Rick Abelson who's based in LA and he's the global director of master planning facilities in urban environments at CH2M Hill and he's a recognized leader in creating culturally significant land planning developments worldwide. We then have Robin King who is with us from WRI and she runs something called Embark but is also part of a larger new initiative at WRI on urban development that I think you'll hear a little bit about later. Thank you for being with us Robin. Then we also have Abbas Jah who's a practice manager in urban and disaster risk management for East Asia and Pacific with the World Bank and then we have my very good friend Charles North who's a senior deputy assistant administrator at USAID and a foreign service officer. So I think we've got the right mix of folks for this discussion. So without further ado I'm going to turn the florals over to Haasam Gulal. Thank you for being with us Haasam. Thank you Dan. I'd like to kick off basically where Dr. Kloss left off in terms of when we think about where really urbanization is accelerating the most it is in developing countries and some places like Latin America it's been at 80 or 90% for many years now. So this is not really new and a lot of the issues that come with that because it has happened without the economic activities and the generation of jobs and the proper planning have resulted I was surprised actually called them slums informal settlements aka known as slums have been not only a phenomenon in Latin America but are starting even to find their way into different parts of the world. So it is in this context that we've been looking at really how can we reverse the tide and if urbanization is a fact or a mega trend what is it that cities and regions can do around the world to deal with some of these issues to become more competitive and to be able to think about things in a different way that would allow them to face the challenges. So we've done several pieces of research one of them actually we called it urban competitiveness with Eureka from the University of Eurasmus in Rotterdam and it was primarily around looking at what we called transformational projects these are projects that had allowed regions or cities to really change their developmental course and from the observations and what we've seen there is what we call the five C's basically. We start with the first one which is the context often times you see a lot of cities or regions thinking about becoming knowledge based economies but what they fail to do sometimes is really understand what are the comparative and competitive advantages in terms of the type of skills they have in terms of the resources they have so many times around the world I would see cities that all of them want to become biotechnology hubs all of them want to be sort of like education clusters and not everybody is going to succeed so the ability to understand your context becomes very important when you're trying to become more competitive the second C would be about the capabilities what is it that you need actually to build in terms of the city management the capabilities that you need to have in place so that you're able to execute on those ambitious visions I mean again mayor class I'll call you this time Barcelona has been touted as an example of a great transformational project that changed how we thought about mega events, mega sporting events and it continues to evolve because you know the first transformation happened and the city kept reinventing itself so how do you take this ability to build capabilities and leadership within the city itself the city management that would drive that kind of transformation and here I would like to link it to the whole requirement of being able to fund some of these projects we did a survey about 3 or 4 years ago and there were about 120 cities and 2 thirds 67% mentioned access to finance and the ability of financial capabilities as the main challenge that would allow them to implement on their visions and is at the same time when you ask the same cities and we're not talking about cities in least developed countries or emerging economies we're talking about also developed cities only 25% of them said that they feel they have internally the capabilities that would allow them to form public-private partnerships to think about creative ways to fund their infrastructure and projects and of course when you think about least developed countries in that case access to multilateral and donor money and the third C I'd like to talk about it's about choices in terms of how do you actually approach your development and the trade-offs you have to make between radical versus paradigm change or incremental transition and many times we're challenged here with the election cycles I mean many cities have mayors that are there for 3 to 5 years and a lot of really the transformational ways that you need to implement wouldn't pay off in terms of votes and all of that within that time horizon so how can you start really addressing this inherent change between the incentives of some of the city managers and politicians that make those allocations and the real needs of the society and the economy becomes very interesting also when you think about it in some of the new type of projects that we're thinking about in terms of smart cities capital intensive investments that their benefits and business cases are not always very evident the fourth one is about the competencies you know in terms of the ability also to bring in the right competencies from your own region and from the surrounding region and to work together on taking these competencies and challenging them in terms of a talent pool one of the things that were very interesting we worked with Singapore on was to answer the question if you're not going to be able to continue to grow economically with your organic population growth rate how do you actually fill in that gap so that you continue to grow in a sustainable way but using important talent if you will and in many situations when you think about what's going to happen in the developed world with the demographic changes there and an aging society if some of these cities and countries were to continue to become sustainably economically that talent gap has to bridge somehow it's either going to be through technology but also by attracting talent and the US has been very good actually in attracting the best students in the world and keeping them here other countries are looking at how to replicate that the final C is about and the most important one I would say is about collaboration it is how you get all the different stakeholders academia the private sector the NGOs the different levels of government I mean Rio de Janeiro where I've lived for many years had a terrible security problem that was unsolvable there were no go parts that the drug dealers controlled completely and it only took three things to happen to start getting this problem under control the alignment between the federal and the state and the city government in terms of political parties that happened for the first time a stimulus event the World Cup if you look at Maracana the famous stadium it was actually surrounded by no go zones that were all taken by the drug dealers so it was not going to be the country was not going to able to host such a mega event under these circumstances and the third one was the leadership you know they had a person who thought in a unique way and what used to happen they would go in into these mostly slums fight the traffic dealers and then pull out and what they started doing is to have more permanent police presence security followed by services because it's all about jobs it's all about access to services that would help either transform the young youth into become more of productive citizens or as compared to being parts of that economy so these are some of the components if you will that we would like to think about as we're thinking about urbanization and how we can not only think about it in different ways but think about it as you know a way of creating more density of creating more economic activities and sometimes thinking even about the unit of planning you mentioned land use being and unit of planning I would argue also for the longest time we've been basing our planning around the cars as the unit rather than the human being and their activities and how they actually move around the city and cars are like cigarettes I would say you know we know they're bad for us but we're addicted to them or at least some people are at least not myself so we need to think about a new paradigm of planning these new cities or actually regenerating and working on some of the retrofit of the existing cities which is always a much more difficult task I'll pause here in the interest of time and then we can continue afterwards the comments thank you husband thank you very much Rick Abelson please the floor is yours speaking about so we're talking about the challenges and opportunities of urbanization thank you so having started early in my career I'm actually working with Victor Gruen who invented the regional shopping center and developing three ways in cities I have an appreciation for that and my role actually in evolving cities is to get in and get my hands dirty I'm trying to figure out day to day how do you get this stuff done I'm the guys that shows up with the markers and the pens and tries to build the vision and sell it through and continue that whole grand theory across and we can get it done and you know right now I think ultimately what we're seeing in both developing and cities as well as emerging cities is that we're all trying to do one of the commonalities we're all trying to kind of redefine the urban areas by reducing their inefficiencies and lowering their costs that's really one of the goals that everybody's trying to do but as I've been thinking as a result of all that what happens if we could get rid of all the inefficiencies and lower all the costs and everybody got to what they wanted in the city what would happen and I think that the benefit out of that would be that everyone would get more time and that's the critical word that you would have more time and what it means is that then you can start to live the life that you want that you can start to play with your children more that you could take art classes that you don't have to drive the car as much and if that's the goal that's the goal that I want to work towards that also I think becomes even the definition for sustainability so this notion of creating or manufacturing time is I think what the ultimate great city would look like that people could actually live the life that they want so how do you get there there's really three components that I've been seeing about how we're developing these cities we have the city itself the entity the government on one hand that really is asking the question how do you do this we see all these papers we've traveled all these places these government officials we want to do it ourselves we just don't know how and you as say in our case CH2M Hill or others you are integrators that's the second piece you're an integrator that can help us bridge to these products and services that are available today to help the city become what it needs to become so tell us we know what we're trying to get to as a vision and all these great things that people come to us from Cisco and IBM and Apple and Microsoft how do we get all that together and there's a piece in the middle which is the integrator and that's the role we're planning will come in that's where all the PWCs come in all my collaborators here where we have to work together to do that and if we talk about opportunities and challenges there is a there's a fatal flaw right there that we're continuing to work on not just the way capitalism works today we see all these great products and services but they don't all work together so all these products and services to change the world give us all this time manufacture everything that we want and live the life we want are available today the key is how do you put them together and how do you get them to work together in a meaningful way that goes into realms with technology and open source we have lots of products that are where companies that don't actually want to work together but say that they do so this is a challenge and it comes up fundamentally when we start to create some of those basic foundations and principles that we want to do to create the brand or the brand image for a city which is the third thing I want to just quickly talk about that when we create these authentic brands for cities the way that I try to solve these is I'll go to a city around the world and I'll try to take the two most compelling problems in the city I don't try to solve the whole thing if we go to countries like Rio like you were mentioning what are the two hot buttons that really need to be solved there that strike the mayor's cord that really are the ones that really would change society so in Rio's case the notion of security personal security and transportation those are two in another city it might be completely different it might be about water and public health so we can't just go around and say all these cities are the same but by taking these two fundamental issues I try to apply what we call complexity theory on that I try to find the inefficiency in one and squeeze out the revenue sources however we can and that's a lot of painful work and then use the money to help fund the other so if I could get inefficiency out of energy costs for a homeowner city buildings or blocks I could take that savings and apply it to a community based health care program and that's how I bring the products and services together to make change we can talk later about examples of how that's done so fundamentally that's how those little wins are going to be able to create the change and then they expand and they multiply so by creating that brand energy and then attracting the right investment partners and development strategies you've got the basics in place then we're able to apply the creative funding I'm sorry the creative planning and design that you were talking about we're able to integrate the right products and services we're able to put the flexible kind of technologies and implementation plans together we need operations and management which is critical to help these cities run these projects once that they're up and we need public awareness campaigns to continue on to keep educating the public this is well done in Singapore on water about the benefits of what they're getting from this so the last quick thing are just kind of the opportunistic trends that I see right now happening in the world related to urbanization one is sustainability is still a key word but we're starting to apply the word self-sufficiency the notion that people want to be able to survive on their own that goes to the resiliency issue but not only sustainability but we want to be self-sufficient we want to be able to hold ourselves up against our own we don't want to have people having to leave our city because of a result and have to go to another city as New Orleans Houston happened the notion of diaspora as a funding source is a really really interesting idea we've seen this in two cases one on a road project in Costa Rica where money wants to flow back to the country and fund an important project there and also in Algeria on an energy project in which the results of the diaspora money would create something very very new which is about the youth and the notion that these countries need to be planned by younger people younger than anybody here that you know I resemble that remark we need to facilitate this but we don't direct this anymore and the notion is if we can get those some of the upfront stuff that we're talking about really come true and the money's sitting right there in the pocket that we need to have the young people and a lot of it there's been some fantastic ideas things that are so out of the box and they start a lot with education funding how to reduce debt through education and apply it to some of the ways that people want to live and I'd be happy to talk to you about that another time finally an aging population that's still kind of under the radar there but every country's dealing with this right now really in any city and my final comment is just even though we're talking about emerging countries I mean if I look around the United States even from 20 years ago I still am in shock about how in our own country I see the homelessness you know cheap and prolific drug use right now going on that's addicting kids homelessness as I mentioned childcare these same principles don't think that we're done here I mean we're sometimes more comfortable walking around Shanghai than I am even in many of our cities in Los Angeles places like that so this is an ongoing problem we're going to have to deal with this and it's very challenging but it's extremely extremely satisfying too when we get results thank you rick thank you very much Robin you're with Embark tell us what is Embark and tell us how it's related to WRI and also tell us a little bit about this new initiative at WRI sure Embark which is the Sustainable Transportation Program within the World Resources Institute WRI recently we just established a new center it's called the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and it builds on the work that we started in transport it really realizes that even if we want to talk about sustainable transportation we need to think about cities in urban form and how cities are organized and work together to achieve them we work Embark has been around for 12 years we started in Mexico and then Brazil expanded to India, China and Turkey so we work in developing countries and while we started with transport we have worked within an approach called avoid, shift and improve so we talk about avoiding the need to move and motorized transport to more sustainable modes of transport and then improving the existing technologies that exist I work on urban development and very much the world of avoid which sometimes makes some of the transportation planners a little bit mad because they're worried and Embark has traditionally really focused on especially focused on bus rapid transit and as a cost efficient and relatively quick way to solve problems in cities and help structure cities when we think about transportation sort of going in specifically we see some of the challenges of fitting transport or any of the sectors that we work on into the broader city and how the city works and the kinds of services that people have in those cities and we've seen a lot of failures maybe not failures but sort of a lack of success we've seen cities that really have developed in a very non-sustainable way in ways that are very distant, that are very dispersed that are very disconnected and so we try to emphasize some of the things that have been talked about here earlier today mixed use and how important it is not to have sort of everybody living over here and everybody working over here and then this need to move them at the same time from one place to the other place all the time we try to move cities towards something that the new climate economy study referred to as connected compact and coordinated so that we talk about an urban form that is more compact that people and services and opportunities are connected to each other and that we really have coordination across governments within a city government but also between different levels of government and we see this actually is probably one of the big challenges and again this is nothing new, it picks up on what everyone has said but this lack of integration even within the same level of government is a huge challenge as we try to make things happen we work with cities to implement and design integrated transport systems some of the biggest challenges are on the governance side we can't get and part of our role is to make sure that different agencies within the same level of government come together for a meeting but also that there's consistency between the different levels of government so the folks from the policies that are being developed at the city level aren't contradictory with the state or provincial level and the federal level or central government and that is extremely hard so governance matters is a big point we have found that we've needed to talk about public-private partnerships and getting the private sector in but we've also had to talk about department-to-department partnerships and thinking about the public-private partnerships that really revolve around people instead of having the financial aspects driving everything we're thinking about how you can get what people need and how to structure these services and institutions so that they work for people one of the great things what we see all these huge challenges around is to see the way that we can help bring lessons from some emerging markets to other emerging markets and really promote a lot of south-south learning as well as try to update some of the north-south learning that was there before when people think about sort of planning many of them are stuck in the 50s, 60s and 70s without capturing some of the newer thinking of what's happening in sort of planning schools and in the work that's been done around the world but there's also a lot of things that have happened in southern cities themselves that then can be shared so we've seen things that can be shared we also realize that there's a lot more work that needs to be done as we've got 80% of the cities that are yet to be built most of those are going to be outside Latin America but we found a lot of things in Latin America to share one of those would be bus rapid transit and so you can go we now have bus rapid transit that started depending on which sort of creation story you want to believe either in Curitiba or Lima I tend to think Curitiba was the complete package is now in 186 cities in the world and that's something that's not just south-south north in terms of work that's out there there are more than 31 million passengers a day that travel on bus rapid transit and mass transit has to be a part of working cities and sustainable cities a second is thinking about some of the things that came from Boata in terms of ciclovias and car free days and now we've helped sort of with embark export that to India in something called Ruggery Day and Car Free Days that started a year ago in Gurgaon outside of Delhi and now is in over 12 cities in India in the course of a year and another 12 are in the planning and so we see that there's a hunger for some of these kinds of things that have worked and one of the things that we do is try to work with other partners many of whom are sitting here to make those things happen and to find folks in cities in government as well as in the private sector and civil society to make those things work together another great idea that came from Brazil is participatory budgeting you think about something that started in Porto Alegre in 1989 that's now in over 1500 cities of getting people involved in a participatory way not necessarily in the whole budget but in one part of it so that they feel that the city is theirs and this comes back to something that Dr. Kloss mentioned cities change and there's stuff that needs to be built and there are new ways of living but a lot of the approach and the way that people feel that they're a part of a city is really key and participatory budgeting, participatory planning can be part of that and if people views are not taken into account they're opposed there's often a disincentive to work towards work sort of implementing those kinds of projects I'd say we also have seen things from Latin America that didn't always go as planned and so we can think about in the integrated transport area the Big Bang approach that Santiago took when it moved when it was trying to bring all of its transport systems together and it really was a disaster it led to the fall of government it was a huge problem but they show that you can't just discard things you've got to continue to improve and work on things so that now the integrated transport system in Santiago is viewed as one of the best in Latin America and a model for the rest of the world and I think that that does and I'll end on this that while we think that we've got something that works we constantly need to improve it and we've got to incorporate people's ideas into that so that they're part of the answer and we have cities that really do work for people thank you very much Robin thank you Abbas so I wanted to hear from two different donor perspectives on this so what are we going to do about all this there's a lot of challenges, there's a lot of opportunities I'm sure that you think about this at the World Bank how's the World Bank thinking about this thanks Dan and thanks to CSIS for this kind of integration and thanks to Dr. Klos for his excellent keynote I wanted to begin by sort of outlining four big issues and one big gap in our understanding of our organization so the first big issue is sort of the big trend on GDP so in living memory we're sort of used to living in an 80-20 world where 20% of countries, the developed countries generate 80% of the world that's going to change very fast if you look out to 2050 about 65% of the world's GDP is going to be generated in Asia and primarily China and India so that's a big shift related to that is that if you again project out to 2050 don't hold me accountable for these numbers it's roughly long run will all be dead, right? but if you look out to 2050 in terms of per capita income the developed world, today's developed world will be around about $90,000 to $100,000 per capita China and India will be about $30,000 to $40,000 and Africa will be about $2,000 to $3,000 that these numbers have potential for great conflict if we don't handle this properly so that's trend number one trend number two big picture is that manufacturing I think Dr. Klose talked about this in his remarks is that manufacturing seems to be losing steam as a generator of growth people like Danny Rodrick and Irvin Subramaniam have pointed this out that countries are moving away from manufacturing at a much earlier stage of development for example, Philippines is another so then what happens what is going to be the driver of growth in the future we don't know the answer to that the third big trend is scale I think we're tremendously privileged to live in this the biggest wave of urbanization in human history just to give you some numbers in the region I work in in East Asia 2 million people move from rural to urban areas every month the expression that Rome wasn't built in a day, well China does it in 2 weeks so just to give you some scale but I think in the past we've been guilty, all of us have been guilty of overselling urbanization as a driver of growth urbanization doesn't create growth it creates the room for growth if managed well it can be a wondrous thing no country in the world has gotten to beyond $10,000 without being more than 65% urbanized if you compare countries that are more than 50% urbanized and less than 50% the infant mortality is a third less so urbanization is a wondrous thing if managed well and then the fourth is demographics and Rick talked about aging populations that's going to be a big driver of growth China is perhaps the China is the big the first country in the world which will grow old before it grows rich and that's going to happen more and more in Central Asia and Europe we're seeing and in Japan soon in China we're going to see this issue of shrinking cities and this is going to be a big policy challenge for city administrators and national level authorities and in the states yes so those were my four big trends now in terms of the gaps and again Dr. Klose talked about this briefly in his keynote one is the big gap is data we don't even know how to define us what a city is we don't have a universal definition what is a slum so that's going to be a big challenge and I'm it looks like in the post MDG the sustainable development goals we're going to have one on cities and that might be sort of a good platform to define and get around some common definitions and a systematic, consistent collection of data that's going to be really important the other big gap is urban poverty we don't know what drives urban poverty we don't even know how to define it properly so if a mayor comes to us and asks I have a dollar at the margin or a million dollars where should I spend it we need to have good answers to that in terms of urban poverty now you can ask me about the donor perspective and one test that I give to my teams and to myself in anything we do is what I call the mayor of Jakarta test which is that you should be able to explain to the mayor of Jakarta what you're doing and have not him throw you out of the room in five minutes so that's kind of a litmus test for what we do, the practicality and sort of the explainability of things and I want to talk about three things in no particular order one is housing many of you may be familiar with the work of Henry Overman who's a professor at London School of Economics he runs a wonderful blog called What Works and I'd advise anyone to have a look at that blog and I was talking to him last week and he said that perhaps affordable housing is at the top of the list of things that cities should do to make them work the thing is that we know broadly the things that we need to do so I would say reform your subsidies most countries have lousy housing subsidy programs so we know that demand-side subsidies are better than supply-side subsidies so that's one second is fix your urban land markets increase the supply of service land for affordable housing the third is cautiously expand your housing finance markets and then the fourth is expand your rental markets and rental markets like a big black hole which we don't know much about so those are the four things that we should do the problem is we don't know how to do it each country, each context is so local that perhaps each country has to find its own solutions whenever I go into a country to talk about affordable housing the one thing I say is forget about Singapore and Hong Kong that's not an example it's generous that you can't really adapt that to any other context so that's housing the other thing is on resilience Hazem talked about political cycles the one thing that the obstacle we face in terms of building resilient cities is what we call NIMTOF not in my term of office is that why should I invest in building say resilient schools when I don't know whether it's going to happen in my term of office or not so that's really a big challenge now in terms of that our job as the World Bank and other donors is to give good empirical evidence in terms of prevention pays so for example on hydromet services and early warning systems we've done studies in Russia for example in many other countries which shows that a dollar invested in early warning systems can save up to eight dollars later on so that's one of the things that we need to do is we need to do a rapid analysis which appeals to ministries of finance we need more of that kind of work so that's one, prevention pays the second is can anyone tell me what's going to be the biggest driver of disaster losses in the next 50 years anyone it's not going to be climate change it's going to be the growth of people the US obviously is the most studied country in the world on this so if you normalize disaster losses by growth of asset and people there's no trend despite all the talk about Katrina if you once you do this exercise it's probably at nine or ten in terms of impact so if there's one message I want to leave with you today it is that cities need to fix this in terms of better risk based land use planning guiding the growth of cities away from hazardous areas because that's really going to be the driver of disaster losses third point is on prepare for the unexpected in terms of the disaster community Sendai and March 11, 2010 was a wake up call for all of us Japan is the best prepared country in the world bar none in terms of investing in disaster risk management 20,000 people die in that so you need to prepare systems for graceful failure when you're designing infrastructure systems you need to ask what happens if this fails and prepare for graceful failure and the last is residual risk recognize that you're not going to build your way to safety there will always be some residual risk left and prepare accordingly in terms of investing in early warning systems and the last point I want to make is what we've been talking about in the governance which is something we struggle with on a daily basis because of this rapid urbanization we're seeing this huge urban agglomerations at the metropolitan level the problem is that very few countries have set up systems to deal with this huge metropolitan level governance and this is going to be a challenge going forward we have some examples the problem is if you look at it 20 years ago the same examples we're citing today so Vancouver and Madrid and Barcelona perhaps but there aren't too many of those and often transport is the entry point for good metropolitan level systems so I'll leave it there and look forward to your questions Charles how is AID looking at this challenge you guys have been working on this issue for a long time I know you came out with a recent report so what's AID's perspective on this Dan thank you very much for having me and it's great to be on this distinguished panel and be able to talk about the very important topic for all of us so AID's mission is to partner with others to eliminate extreme poverty and to build resilient democratic societies so you can imagine if you're looking at that as a mission that we have to address the urban issues the challenges we face have been well discussed by the panelists but there's also opportunities for us and when you look at a city you have the opportunity to focus your efforts to bring together multiple sectors, multiple approaches to address these issues in a concentrated geographic location we've had experience with this with urban development issues frankly going back over 50 years and from that experience we've been able to draw significant lessons and experience not just that we've learned but also in collaboration with others such as the World Bank and NGO groups and so forth to figure out what works and how we should focus our efforts we know for example that committed reforms, community participation and wise infrastructure investments can make a significant impact on urban poverty so we drew on all these lessons and experience and frankly put out a draft policy to many people probably many of you here in this room gave us comments on and we issued this new policy a year ago and the policy focuses on sustainable country-led urban services the main focus for us is talking to our missions around the world and saying as you're doing your strategic planning your project designs take into account the urban lens and how you design your programs going forward we have some missions that are way out in front our mission in the Philippines their entire program, their entire strategy is focused on urban centers Mozambique, they have a significant component of their program is focused on coastal urban centers and what do you do with climate change and disaster preparedness how should they be changing to adapt we also just launched end of September a new mechanism that will support this policy this is a $650 million ceiling for this contracts for 11 companies they're providing services to all of our missions around the world in supporting improved urban services through this mechanism we facilitate the process in country we provide expertise of course but we've heard the importance of facilitation of collaboration among the local experts and the local stakeholders and this is a key component of what this new contract set of contracts will do it also focuses on governance everything from accountability transparency to ensure that this is a participatory process as you go forward and then finally we also working through this mechanism on climate change adaptation and disaster preparedness so this is just one of the tools we have we have a range of tools working from whether it's climate change programs water and sanitation programs governance programs these all we're trying to bring together to bring to bear on this set of issues so the let me give you a couple examples of things that we're currently working on in India our administrator Raj Shah was just out there and he signed an agreement with the government of India that we would work together to address urban water and sanitation issues that we would work together to identify best practices to figure out what works and to share those practices with others around the world and to look for innovative approaches to how to address these serious issues in a country with very large cities that are growing very rapidly in Dakar on a path to major violation of the downtown of the city the first component of that overall plan is the creation of a new marketplace so the city worked with the Gates Foundation to do all the planning involved a lot of participation with the stakeholders including the 3,500 state vendors that they're hoping will be brought into this new marketplace they also had to get their own internal financial house in order to get a credit rating to go forward with a municipal bond and this is where we came in we use our credit guarantee capability to guarantee 50% of that bond this is a new thing for us we've done some of this in the past this is a new mechanism for us to support cities getting access to financing the mayor of Dakar is also the president I guess of the association of municipalities of the all of southern I guess all of Africa and so we're looking to him to help us engage with other cities around the continent that we can help them with this type of approach we can bring these other tools such as the contracts I mentioned to help facilitate some of the work that the Gates Foundation worked with them on so there are opportunities there for us to work together with these municipalities with other donors and bringing to bear multiple mechanisms from our side I'll just end kind of a challenge for all of us is to look at how we can be more innovative what are new technologies that we can introduce to help with this process we know finally after many years GIS technology seems to be finally taking hold I've been a great proponent of use of GIS and I've seen it kind of languish for a long time more recently now we see people really looking to GIS as a way to help with planning to understand issues, to do analysis but there are also mobile technologies that we also should be looking at we've been in when I served in Russia one of the things we were doing was supporting civil society to engage with citizens and with local government to identify problems in the city so finding that pothole taking that picture, sending it in getting responsive government to have citizens more connected directly with their government to respond to their needs there's another another project that we work together complimented the work of the Gates Foundation in Secondary Takaradi in Ghana the Ghanaian government have mandated that all streets need in the country in the cities of the country need to be named now many of you been to other many countries in developing world and you asked where is CSIS well it's in the CSIS building in CSIS house whatever it might be having a street name and a number by that old church around by the old oak tree and then you turn left by the rock and there it is and there it is so in Secondary Takaradi they took approach of using GIS to map the city and then give these names and make this data available on the internet well now the city has more capability to know who is where where people live where the businesses are in terms of planning but also in terms of revenue generation taxation and so forth it also by putting it on the web it gives opportunity for citizens to also apply new innovative technologies approaches to documenting issues as well as for businesses to call attention to where they are and to plan where they should locate their businesses so there is an example of kind of work that we've been doing and that we'd like to do more going forward so I'll stop there thank you Charles okay you all have been very very patient I know we've got some microphones here Jeremiah okay we're going to do this I'm going to capture four or five questions and then we'll do it that way I want to hear from my friend who's the dean over at the Tubman School in Liberia so I want to hear from her first my friend Ms. Simmons thank you this was excellent I'll just and I've been in the United States since June so my 21 days have passed first Dr. Kloss from what you were saying it sounds as if there actually does not exist a model currently that countries could use for today because everything seems to be related to the past so how should the developing societies go about finding out the proper way to approach that was one I want to say to Mr. Jha and to Mr. North I would like to see your agencies require before you give funding that the governance persons have to take your risk management course I took it online it's excellent so I would commend that and then thirdly in terms of Mr. Abelson what is authentic brand thank you all right we're going to capture we'll capture all these first and we'll get folks that this woman in the back with the dark hair and the black sweater thank you reporter from the Voice of America Ms. Dr. Kloss just mentioned that China is having the biggest process of urbanization in the human history and also several panelists mentioned that China's problems so I'm just wondering whether panelists can address China's opportunity and problems here thank you good and this gentleman back here who's been standing so Jeremiah he's back there anybody who's been standing gets extra credit so I'm John Rothamurg I'm an Afghanistan specialist and one of the things that interests me a lot is the urbanization and radicalization I've seen some places where where urbanization causes radicalization and other places where it mitigates it and my question is what's the difference good morning thank you for being here I don't really have a question but I will invite all of you I come from the Philippines I'm going back home and Dan Randy and the Southeast Asian chair have been they don't know that I have been learning from them and I have been a beneficiary of USAID education I was sent here both of the government of the Philippines and the government of the United States the term then was poorest of the poor and my mayor didn't believe in development planning the money that you would spend on master plans I can build a lot of homes I saw but he was a very young mayor 34 years old I was very fortunate that he taught me how to maneuver politics development and you talk about five C's I now have eight I have learned the graceful way to fail I'm going back to the country so you're all welcome because I'm going there on implementing I'm creating a think that will work with the CSIS because they thought me well great I love Manila it's a great city there's this woman back here hi I'm Lucy Maiz USAID Asia Bureau and my question is except for Dr. Ja there wasn't a lot of discussion about economic inequities he said we need definitions of urban poverty and if you look at cities they are not all things to all people some of the people who move in are far worse off than counterparts left behind in the rural sector particularly if you look at health which is my area of expertise and so some of you mentioned governance which is essential if you're going to address some of those inequities I spent the last 18 years in Jakarta and many of the poor don't have access and yet there are world-class hospitals there so I liked the one mention of urban poverty it's very important I'm certainly that the issue of Ebola because of urbanization has taken on a different kind of a footprint because of the phenomenon of urbanization so very interesting so we've got a whole series of interesting questions and so Haasim I'm going to ask you I'm just going to go down the panel then I'll end with Dr. Klose and I'll give you a chance to respond Haasim go ahead any and all sure one point specifically about the question about urbanization and radicalization and I'll share with you two examples there's a national project that's being designed in Egypt right now to develop the region around the Suez Canal corridor it's one of the most important national projects and one important fact in the past basically the philosophy of development for the Sinai Peninsula for different reasons has been to keep the population rather sparse in Sinai and that has created all sort of security issues that we we've been watching over TV with the Islamic groups there taking stronghold and attacking even the army a key driver in the new design of this project is how to create population density in the Sinai because that becomes automatically a security buffer against radicalization and kind of like help you improve security so that's one example the extreme side of this very dense, overly populated and crowded cities that create inequality informal settlements slums that also creates on the other extreme the conditions where because of poverty lack of access to jobs and care it is very easy also to radicalize the youth and you think about what's happening in Europe in some of the poorer cities and their export basically to ISIL and the like for me that's a direct result of some of these inequities in cities Hasim I've got you I want you to take on this issue of China and I want you to take on this so what's the right model for cities those are my two biases I like everybody's question but those are my two favorites so go ahead China is the rate of population and urbanization that is happening there is mind-boggling and I truly believe that if we were to develop the new Chinese cities using the old models basically that have been used in the West we are definitely setting ourselves for a lot of problems because you take that coupled with the aging problem which is a ticking time bomb in China and without really thinking about how to do things in a more integrated more sort of like holistic way I mean pollution is an issue in a lot of the existing cities so if we're developing new green field cities or expanding existing ones in China we really need to think about it in a radical way and as I said before a lot of our urban forms are not designed around human beings a lot of cities people converge to the center then you have the CBD which is unused for the central business district the downtown area unused the buildings and the office places unused for two thirds of the day that is not going to work in China for sure. Okay how about just I think where my friend is going is in the case of Africa what's the what talk about right models for African cities given some of the comments that were made here as well as some of Dr. Klose's comment that South Africa is developing urbanizing without having manufacturing just a little bit of on that reflect on that the main issue there is basically how do you create economic growth and jobs and skill the population that is migrating from the ruler areas to the urban areas and try to if you're unable to reverse that migration by creating sustainable economic activities in ruler areas then how you up skill that population as they are you know migrating to the cities and a lot of it's what I call the Maslow hierarchy for cities right you know I mean it's and I think in the donor world you know which I have been part of with UNDP for some point of time sometimes we forget about that that you know that the needs really vary if you're looking at the bottom of the pyramid it's more about sanitation it's more about basic infrastructure but we really need to think about it so that we're also incorporating the other needs and not losing those. Rick. Microphone. We don't use these in California. Right. You know overall I think that one of the differentiators about the company I work with CH2M Hills that we run cities I mean that's pretty unusual that not only can you plan it but we actually put people on the ground and we do everything for a city we do it for actually emergency services but we're the planning department we're the transportation department we pick up the garbage so when you can get from you know the A all the way down to the Z on that it really makes it a lot more realistic about some of the things that you can do now that model we're starting to take globally and particularly in India where the DMIC corridor is between Delhi and Mumbai where they're developing a series of these the bids packages that are going out are about much more than just planning and land use they're much more about governance and creation of the governments governance and then staying in there and figuring out how to keep these cities vibrant and what the brand image should be on those and how can they be different from each other and you asked about what's an authentic brand I mean there are I've worked quite a bit actually creating some of the brand identity for Auckland and New Zealand in the early 2000s and there are intrinsic qualities that you can pull out of a very warring society that's isolated on an island and you really can there are those intrinsic pieces but then there a lot of the aspirational pieces and then there's just the day-to-day life pieces and so cracking what I'll call the DNA of the city to get to what are the most important ones ones of what are the ones that are going to affect daily life and are going to be able to make change create and maintain the pride that people have and foster growth are really how do you create the authentic brand it takes some time you got to get the right people in the room it takes lots of perspective and it's always being challenged and has to remain flexible in a way could you just talk just I want to push you on this issue of China could you just reflect on China I've worked quite a bit in China I was mostly a started in about 1994 but quite a bit in China beginning in 2000 particularly Shanghai, Beijing some of the second tier cities so I've watched quite a bit of China grow I have many many friends there I understand how the society works there I was fascinated to watch how everything happened I agree that there's a big change in China now trying to figure out what to do next I mean Olympics went by World's Fair went by I've been to Dongtang Island I see all the great things that they've done and I really do believe that China's you know the next big move but right now there seems to be quite a bit of prosperity in the big cities there's a calmness that I feel there in the second cities there's been quite a bit of development on building up the airports getting some of the key infrastructure done while the elected officials are in office I forget the term you asked but there's been a big drive on sustainability not in my term of office I'm going to take that NIMTA NIMTO The key question I get by Chinese government officials particularly is we like that idea we understand that idea show us how to do it we're here to listen, show us it and so this notion that I mentioned at the beginning where we go in and actually stay involved all the way to implementation is really what's needed and I think the funds that are available help support that and the governments will help support that and so that's got to stick with it and go I'll talk a little bit about the issue on equity because I do think that it's very important and I would say a huge gap that we have is even in places where we've got models that seem to work sort of at a small scale if you think about transitory development areas that are mixed use that are walkable that are around transit that can be participatory that oftentimes that success because of the way that land markets work lead to the poor being pushed out of the areas of success which leads to some of that alienation and radicalization in different ways and so that to me is probably the biggest gap that we need to figure out and I think that we can come up with interesting financing ways if you think about land value capture and things like that to fund some of those things but to make it affordable so that the poor can benefit from that really is one of the great unsolved mysteries in this space that I think we all need to work together I think rental housing markets or rental housing is part of that but we've got to think about it for all different aspects that the poor do have access to all of those cities or all of those services because if they don't cities will be time bombs just by concentrating folks together and not providing opportunities for all kinds of economic opportunity as well as access to those services Okay Abbas and Charles if you guys keep it short and then we give the last word to Dr. Close Okay very quickly so urban China I think there is no more important question in the development world than how is China going to deal with urbanization because if they don't get it right I mean we're doomed as a planet it's no exaggeration but that said I must say that China is doing a lot of things right so if you talk about say public transport China has more metro lines than the rest of the world put together if you took the top five BRTs the bus rapid transit, three of them I think are in China including the biggest if you look at fuel efficiency of cars they are above the European standards they are doing a lot of things right but that said there is room for improvement so I would pick two things I would say the urban land markets so more dense, more mixed use walkable form of urban planning I think is really important and fixing the municipal finance systems so that they are less reliant on land sales and land leases and the World Bank just brought out a report called Urban China if you google it you'll find it easily it's a very good report I'm not pitching our own work but it is a very good report and I advise everyone to have a look at it in terms of urban poverty and inequity I think Robin's points are well taken the other thing I would emphasize is social safety nets for urban areas you know conditional cash transfers have got a lot of play we know how to do it in rural areas in urban areas not so well so I think that would be the next big thing your question about risk based planning was in a meeting with the Mayor of Ulaanbaatar about a month ago and I think he put it beautifully and I'll just repeat what he said to us he said I need to make my urban planners and architects think like economists and I need to make my economists think like urban planners and that's really the challenge Charles so a few quick things one great to see a participant of our training programs here and wish you the best of luck going back to the Philippines leading development there so good luck to you the on Afghanistan the I think we have a lot to learn from our experience in Afghanistan I remember when we the issue of stabilization in Kandahar and the first the effort was okay well clearly everybody needs access to a well I'm making this up but if you know so we around and put a lot of wells in it didn't seem to do much good with we got a bit more sophisticated and we started saying well if you actually look at the city you start dividing it by neighborhood you start looking at and actually going out and talking to the people and ask them what they really need and what is their priority list of requirements and you start to address those needs one part of the city it may be another part maybe somebody to pick up the trash and you know this seems very simple but it is something that we ought to be taking back to everywhere we work how do you engage citizens across the city to understand what their real needs are and whether their needs are being met and that will get at a lot of those kinds of issues and finally just just want to say in the spirit of partnership and learning from each other I'm looking forward to seeing this course and make sure our staff are aware of it and taking a full advantage of the World Bank is already done so with that thank you. Dr. Close you get the last word. Thank you very much I would like first to refer to the question about the future because it seems that I have been blamed because I talked too much about the past but I want to talk also about the future in this part of the developing world where most of the things are happening in terms of urbanization we are advising for two strategies one at central level and another at local level at central level we are proposing for a national urban policy funny enough many countries they have a lot of national policies they have environmental policy, housing policy defense policy I don't know name it but there are only 20 countries in the world that they have urban policy and we have studied the 20 that have urban policy and most of them they are not really urban policies what urban policy is is just to answer one question where is your population today where do you think that your population is going to be in 20 years and what is the government going to do about it this is the only question that the national urban policy needs to answer then the second question that we advocate is to do at local level urban design planet urban design well structure planet urban design in order to plan for two things planet city's tensions and in fields then when we think about planet urban design we are not thinking on master planning which has been the traditional western approach we advocate for what we call the three-legged approach and the three-legged approach is not just the architect and the economist no we put a team which is with three legs and one is the lawyer the other is the architect and the other is the economist because in urbanization rules and regulations is something that usually is forgotten and is the most important and the founding principles of urbanization then there's not enough with of course the physical design of the space you need a financial design because without a financial design you cannot finance anything but that there is enough if you don't have a good normative approach to urbanization the problem is that nobody follows the rule usually the first who doesn't follow the rules is the ruler and then what becomes is a kind of ungoverning reality urbanization is about the rule of law we cannot perform we cannot reach good urbanization without the rule of law and that should be understood very well because otherwise where most of the things fails this is the strategy for the future that we are advocating and we are practicing with many countries in small experiments because there's a paradigm shift as you see we don't trust on reports and advisory we put our teams in situ and usually for two years because building a proper city is more a political issue than a technical issue let's go to China China is a very interesting case because China then chose urbanization as his strategy when 30 years ago he began the opening of the economy the first thing that he did was to create the five special zones they were called five special zones but in fact they were five cities being the first nearby Hong Kong the Shenzhen city then the champion was a very clever chap because he decided that the way to take out of China out of poverty was through urbanization and now if you see urbanization of China is the huge success of manufacturing in China the transformation of China has been an urbanization led transformation the problem of China urbanization is not its productivity which is huge the problem of Chinese urbanization as somebody has said here in the table is that the design that they have chosen is not the best and it can be easily improved it serves very well the purpose of development it doesn't serve well other purposes of urbanization because urbanization is not only development urbanization is about generating a new culture urbanization is about happiness you can name it then the very interesting Chinese experiment that a good doctoral thesis should compare the Japanese urbanization the Korean urbanization and the Chinese urbanization in order to see in this very short period of time very in a way different and similar models of urbanization with their outcomes on relation to last one those urbanization generates crisis or it helps to diminish the conflict urbanization is in that sense neutral is not urbanization who is going to solve the conflict or is going to create the conflict is the political model under which the urbanization is taking place don't blame the layout of the streets and the layout of the buildable plots I say I'm saying that because Afghanistan is our biggest program we are in 63 countries in the world and we have more than 500 people in Afghanistan you know urban planners they are not gods they cannot solve all the problems of society if you have a corrupt society don't pretend that through urban planning you will solve the problems of corruption or if you have tribal society don't think that through urbanization and this refers also to the other question of inequality inequality excuse me in the united states but in the rest of the world inequality is not something that is supposed to be solved by cities inequality is supposed to be addressed by redistribution policies and mainly in everywhere the redistribution policies in a society they are not governed by local governments in very few countries the redistribution policies are governed by local policies then you can have for example Rio de Janeiro it's a very good example what improves the situation of Rio de Janeiro it has been not his urbanization because the streets and buildings have not changed what has changed has been the redistribution policy the Miabida Miacasa more money to certain strata of the population etc. and that has appeased some of the conflicts in the favelas and this is not because the favelas has improved in its urbanization in favelas they are as awful as always then don't pretend to solve the problems of inequality through urbanization urbanization serve for certain purposes which is generate economies of agglomeration if it's well done facilitate the good transit of the city the good conviviality of the people etc. but even the best urban planning in an injust society is not going to produce the just ivory tower isolated of the rest of the country then there's an intimate linkages between the effects of central government policies in the urban outcomes you cannot have a group of you know unwise people in the central government and a wise mayor and think that because there's a wise mayor he will address all the problems of the government no for example the security policy, safety this is in most of the cases in most of the countries of the world it's a central policy it's not a local policy in its sense the mayor can do a little bit more or less but you know you know if you have a national security system which is in failure don't hope that even if you have a well if you have a good planned city you will have there a perfect security we're going to have to leave it there thank you very much dr. glos