 You have to forgive me. I know I can get through this talk, but you just have to be You have to be patient with me I'm going to talk about an idea that I've been thinking about for a long time called the poorest city and Maybe I can explain it concretely in the following way Recently I tried to buy an iPhone in their new place and open their electronics market in Delhi where goods that happen to have fallen off a truck Are sold for thirty percent forty percent or seventy percent discounts, whatever cash you have handy My iPhone turned out to be a damaged dud, but it didn't really care the Experience of going to Nehru place was eye-opening another picture of it It's completely poorest spot in the city People of all castes Classes races and religions coming and going Doing deals and phones or gossiping about the small tech startups in the low offices around the square That's above you can see on the second floor is an above You can also worship at a small shrine if you're so minded or find a sorry or just lounge about drinking tea Nehru place is every urbanist dream intense mixed complex If It's the sort of place we want to make It's not however the sort of space most silky cities are building Instead the dominant forms of urban growth are Monofunctional like shopping centers where you are welcome to shop, but there's no place to pray these sorts of places tend to be Isolated in space is in the office campuses built on the edge of cities Or towers in the city center which as in London's current crop of architectural monsters I say no more Are sealed off the base from their surroundings Can I remark it's amazing to walk? Among these spaces you can't get into any of them They're all sealed They're bought their glass boxes look inside, but it's not for you It's not just evil developers however who want things this way The most popular form of residential housing Worldwide is the gated community Is it worth trying to term the dream of the poorest city? Into a pervasive reality I Wondered a narrow place about the social side of this question Since Indian cities have been swept from time to time by waves of ethnic and religious violence Could porous places tamp down that threat? By mixing people together in everyday activities Evidence from Western cities answers both yes and no Andres didn't last year Pegida Demonstrations against the Muslim presence in Germany for instance In that Pegida argued that Muslim culture is alien to Western values This argument was turned out to be made by people in Pegida who don't live anywhere near Muslims in the city Indeed who know no Muslims? So they're completely separated The American social scientist Robert Putnam adds a seemingly contradictory ironic twist to the separation in space of different social groups In a study of several cities His researchers found that the further away white Americans live from African Americans the more tolerant the whites are That is the closer you are the more intolerant So these are two contrary facts They don't fit together. It's yes or no Against this logic of separation stands Paris the Islamist Islamic Banyu of Paris are separated from the center by the Santu the ever-clogged ring road around the inner city and So to in Brussels Molenbeck district from which many of the terrorists come It's a disconnected island in the city As the sociologist William Julius Wilson has shown Such physical islands breed inward-looking men an inward-looking mentality In which fantasy about others takes the place of fact bread of actual contact As true Wilson argues of the black ghetto as it is of Christian the Gita Now I have to say about this that I'm deeply Uncomfortable about Deprobates over separation and inclusion Which move almost seamlessly to citing violent extreme behavior as Evidence for or against This is just wrong socially Which is why Nehru place? Is a better place to think about inclusion than Molenbeck Every day people are going about their business with others unlike themselves People they don't know Perhaps people they don't like There is what might be called the democracy of crime here As Hindus and Muslims both sell illegal like electronics a Wave of violence would clear off customers for both Getting along in this this kind of environment isn't particular to India or to open-air markets numerous studies Show that in offices or factories that adults of different religions and races Work perfectly well together and the reason is not far to see Work is not about affirming your identity It's about getting things done The complexity of city life Tends in fact to bring many identities for its citizens As workers, but also as spectators at sports events as parents concerned about schooling or patients Suffering from NHS cuts Urban identities are porous in the sense that we are always going in and out of lots of different Experiences in different places with people. We don't know In the course of a single day When pundits a pine on the difficulty of difference, they flatten identity into a single image Just one experience Modern economy can then flatten identity when it sells people on the idea of the gated homogeneous community is safe, which is not true in fact Or build shopping centers only for shopping or Constructs office campuses and towers whose workers are sealed off from the city So this is a problem for this this is a debate about purified identity It's not a debate which makes any sense about work Nor about forms of leisure Where the problem of difference in integration just doesn't arrive It's as a kid who says it's a question about the meaning of home and the meaning of home is synonymous with a kind of homogenizing of Identity you can see where I'm going in Order to make the city more tolerant We should have a less strong Identification with home We should learn how to use the city and live in the city in a more impersonal way It's why I've argued against the many many Projects that seek to strengthen Community that's a way of strengthening and flattening Home we belong here even if the we is very many different people It's still saying this is a particular place and this is with the place with which I identify Now I want to just say for a bit. I hope I haven't talked along That if fine, okay, if the public comes to demand it Urbanists can easily design a porous city the model of Nehru place and Indeed many of the architects and planners at the urban age events now unfolding in London have made Proposals to porosify the city. I'm just going to show you very briefly what that means Porosity It is I'm over 60. I mean, you know, you have to be under 15 really The first aspect about porosity is that it deals with edges and edges come in two forms borders and boundaries That's happens in nature I did with some my students at MIT. The cell membrane is a border. It's porous But it has whereas a cell wall Is Not so porous the thing about this is is that porosity is just not free-flowing The cell membrane is both porous and resistant. It tries to keep in the valuable ingredients in the cell and to exchange Ingredients it doesn't need The problem with the cell wall is in this cellulose fibers that we looked at is that no exchange is possible So when we talk about porosity, we're not talking about openness in the sense that anything flows everywhere We're talking about a very complex condition in nature The same thing is true about ecological borders. This is another study. We did you know in Provincetown, which is Stoff Boston the places of greatest activity here both biological and equal and evolutionary or where the water meets the land Same thing about the layers of water in in the ocean itself It's at the edge Where the most activity? goes on in in a natural And a hedgerow you'll all know this as a familiar example of Something which is mixed in that way and so is very And so is very alive much more alive than the moan spaces around it By contrast, this is my favorite slide of everything. I showed these are tiger dropping Border boundaries, and you know how they do it. They shit a Warning set of warning signals here that this is for my group No other tigers are enough are allowed indeed. No other animals Who know how to read these singles are allowed anyhow So this distinction between borders and boundaries fundamental in the natural world It's also something that we can build This is a photo I took of the Israeli security wall, which is the ultimate built boundary on one side that's on the Israeli side I Couldn't get across the other side the Israelis wouldn't let me go but on the other side of this is a market made by Palestinians Where they sell all sorts of things, you know the? The the wall in the morning offers them shade And they have just this one little way to get through but on the Israeli side This is what I mean. This is a low intensity edge. It's a wall Walls themselves Can be Ken function as borders. This is one in Avignon. This is where Jews prostitutes Germans All clustered they weren't allowed in the city center I mean further common and as you've seen in in the Ricky Burnett's original presentation to you this is Traffic is creating a border Whereas this In Sao Paulo remember this town this is we took from Dizzying height is a boundary people can walk across this traffic. It's slow Whereas this is fast and the edges are highly porous. You have to watch out Because You're in Brazil Which means that your life is taken in your hands every time you got in a way of a bus, but it works as a border This is to me the most Profound kind of distinction between borders and boundaries, we know that is between the vertical and the horizontal horizontal Everything above the ground plane here is isolated from it Everything and this is a huge problem in the making of almost all tall buildings How do you make them pour us up? We have some ideas about how to make them pour us at the ground plane by putting in lots of doors By getting rid of security codes Take it into an elevator and so it's so there are lots of ways to do it but porosity is Inachievable for us in almost all vertical dimensions Now well, I don't know but this is a project. I did in East London another way making something porous Is by changing its function and there's a parking lot project Where it's a parking lot, but we pour tons of sand on it. So little kids are at the beach And to come back to this this is a border in Mumbai That is the lots of things happening both vertically and horizontally there people are eating their kids are upstairs whining or crying for mommy who can go from The ground floor up. It's also a space of production and that's why I want to show you this This is another kind of border in Mumbai This is quite a frightening Work of yeah The school for the this is a block away from what I just showed you the school For these kids crosses these train tracks. I don't know what your experience of Indian Train schedules is mine your sounds like it's very regular mine was that these are quite Irregular and these kids have to treat this as a dangerous porous Border to get to and from school which they go back into Day after day hour after hour during the day So it develops kind of street smarts environmentally And finally I just show you this the opposition between a border and a boundary Spatially is something that is a continuity This is Bogota's version of the new place People here they have a lot of things that have fallen off the back of the truck For sale and they're selling them on overturned Cardboard boxes If they prosper they move up a floor and They're still dealing in semi-legal goods, but the floors are now organized like streets And they have customers who come to where they're shopping. I suppose My sale the salesman of my iPhone has a regulars to whom iPhone wouldn't be sold anyhow. They'd say it's a cluster here If you get up to the top The top floor they've actually built They've taken four by eight sheets of cardboard and created miniature stores up there What you're looking here is vertically rising From the poorest the non-porous from the informal to the formal This is what physically social mobility looks like Understand what I'm saying Social mobility is not just a statistical fact It's a physical experience Now I I've mostly showed you things from Non-western countries. I'll just show you very quickly how One of my masters Aldo van Eyck dealt with a problem of porosity This is a this is a space in that Amsterdam with this Huge all this huge opened So what he did is he filled it in and what's porous about this is That people barrel down this street and these little kids are playing at the edge Like the kids in Mumbai. They have to learn the street smarts about where you go and where you don't go That is they have to become visually Safe health and safety Would have never allowed this in Britain to be built. You have to segregate those kids away You have to do the equivalent of shut them up in a boundary Whereas the van Eyck notion is they're learning the city by being at a border edge. Here's another one of this This is a beautiful one and they're everywhere and Yeah, and there are seven hundred Made in Amsterdam. There are all places of porosity And the notion is that a poor city is a way that you learn your city So What I like to say about this in some is That if the public comes to demand it we urbanists can design a porous city like they replace these these other Visions until opening up and blurring the edges of spaces so that people are drawn in rather than repulsed They're dangerous. They're ambiguous. They emphasize true mixed use of public and private functions In British terms schools or clinics Amidst Tesco or Pratt They explore the making of loose fitting spaces which can shift in shape as people's lives change. I Don't believe that in design determinism But I do believe that the physical environment should nurture the complexity of identity That's an abstract way of saying that we know how to make a porous city The time has come to make it. Thank you very much