 We're now going to enter into a bit of conversation and hopefully some disagreement from the other people I have around this table. And then from all of you. Maybe I can start with you, Judy. Judy Weisman from LSE. A lot of what we've been hearing about is how a city becomes self-aware, reflective of its own physical movements and emotions and all sorts of other things a oedd y cyfnodd y byddwyr yn ddweudio'r cyfnodd ond y cyfnodd gysylltio. Yn yw'n gwybod yw'r cyflwyno? Yn y cwnodd yw'r gweithio? Mae'n cael ei wneud. Mae'n rhiwf yn gweld y gallwch yn drwsio'r cyllidau, felly fyddwch chi'n gweithio'r cyfrifio. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrifio a'r cyfrifio boileddau yw'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio. There are interesting issues about big data but I must say that I couldn't help thinking as he was speaking about the very same logarithms being causally implicated in the financial crisis, and a lot of the big data sets that we've been hearing about as being efficient. Actually haven't been efficient in terms of their... in terms of the financial sector and the economic sector. And I must say as I hang out with sociologists of technology when I get paranoid about surveillance they're always the first to tell me this stuff doesn't work too, don't worry about it, they're completely exaggerated claims that are being made. So I think yes, in some ways the big data can do things, but I think it's incredibly limited as well. But can I just take a minute to say one other thing I'd sort of like to throw into the conversation. I'm sort of very struck by how we've been talking about the Electric City, but we really haven't said very much about the Electric home a gweithio y gweithio mewn cyfanc yn y maen nhw'n gweithio i'r ddweud. Felly, dwi'n gweithio'r ffordd o'r hâlyiau arall, dwi'n gweithio'r ffordd ymlaen i'r ddysgu'n ddysgu'n ddefnyddio'n ddysgu'n ddau'r nghymniadau o'r gyfnodau seithio'r ddau. y dyn ni'n gweld cy learnsio a bwrdd cynno cyllidellwyd yn gyfansio'n gybringsio cychwyn ar gyfer cyfansio cyllidellwyr. Felly yn gallu i ddim yn ein bod yna'n ddif wedi'u cyfolio felly wedi'u bwrth iddo i'r wneud iddyn nhw i'r wneud hynny o'r cyflwyng i ddim ychydig iddyn nhw'n ôl yn gyfrifio cyfansio. Roedd yna bod ni'n haf nodi'r cyfeirio am luaeni am yr ysgriff a'r ffordd arno'n cael mynd efallニ, yn y wneud fel hynny, pedw i chi ffordd i chi yn rhan, ond eich Mych, ond nid yw dweud sut mae'n gweld ymweld at mwyaf email hyd yn ymddangos am ddechrau. Mae i wedi bod dweud o'r menu os am fynd i ymddangos ymdaint yw gwell o wneud thru ei wneud ymddangos. I achos ydych chi'n gynllunio a'i bobl o'r hyffredig o'r ddatblygu a chanol yn hynny i mwyawn ychydig chi'n gweld a gweithio i chi yn oed yn ymddangos a'i gweithio ymddangos and there must be some interesting lessons and why did that not happen Aisha? I think that before I answer that I think what was really missing and partly what you're talking about goes to that. We've been taking citizens of cities to be these passive individuals to which technology happens. I think that we should remember that we're living in the information age and a number of us have already been giving away a lot of information and participating in information bydd i'r adweydd ymddangos cyfnod a gweithio siaradol arall ac mae'n gweithio ymddangos a'r adroddiad. Roeddion gŵr hynny maid arall a'r adroddiad i'n ffigurio'n adroddiadau arbellnol sydd adroddiadau a'n deithas bydd yw'r adroddiadau arbennig iawn i gmwyll yn ei gennych cyd, oherwydd hefyd ar meters, oherwydd i'r rhan yn gyfarwydd a'r adroddiadau yn ei gael i'r adroddiad ac eich cymdeilio'n adroddiadau. It's beautiful and dangerous at the same time because once it becomes invisible, when somebody puts up a bridge I know what's happening. But when somebody changes the software and it now has facial recognition in it, I don't know that. So coming back to Facebook, Facebook acquired Face.com, which is an Israeli company last year, nobody really talks about it. What has Facebook been doing for one year with this company? yn gwneud o gweithio'r algwrethau sy'n dweud. Felly, rydyn ni'n gwybod yw'r cyfnod, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r cyfnod, dweud o'r cyfnod sy'n dweud, a'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod, a'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod fyddai'r cyfnod, y gallai ei wneud o'r reisio'r cyfnod oherwydd mae hynny ymdwys i'w rai'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod i'w cyfnod. A gyd, o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod, I think that the smart home has been another one of these things that, like Mastar, like Songdo, like Living Planet, are things that are still not realistic. If you go to Living Planet and I've been there, it's a greenfield city, it's literally greenfield, they're just greenfields there. It's not going to be a reality. I've been to Songdo, the simulations don't really depend on them, we're really not there yet. But they are possible with cheap sensors to outfit homes where it is possible to take care of our elderly. And I think those are the kinds of things that we begin to think about or we can get some inspiration from frugal innovation in the developing world, like even in China where they have been able to make cheap adjustments to homes. It's still not this futuristic home where we have a robotic nanny who comes and cleans up the home, but we can improve the quality of life through cheaper technologies and mesh networks. Very important point there about presentations, perhaps we could have a rule in the future, you can only show photographs of real places, not the simulations, there's been a whole series of future cities presented entirely through the plans and I would say when I first went to New Songdo and found it was just mud, I was a bit disappointed. And all of you actually presented simulation photographs, not real ones, which does slightly confuse this debate. Mark. Yes, I was interested that I come from the world of lighting, which curiously throughout all of the conversations about smart city yesterday didn't really get a mention, which is and it's one of those perhaps it's sort of considered to be a dumb technology, but it's in a way there's actually a very smart technology that we've adapted and used over many centuries in different ways, started as an autonomous technology is now something that's delivered to us through the electric city, which has an enormous power starting in our home and working out into the city to sort of bring us together both socially and also inform our economic lives. So one of the things I've been interested in listening to and in a way we sort of started with Jason Hawks' lovely film where actually what I like about that sort of image of the city of night is the fact that people are working in their buildings, you can see that people are working in the buildings, you see whether somebody's home or not, you see the transactions taking place in the streets revealed through lights. What I really wanted to sort of pick up on was this idea that Richard introduced and Adam was talking so well about sort of using new tools well and how you can actually use technologies to bring people together because I think light actually or lighting does that in the city. I mean on a social level, I mean Don Slater at the LSE has just started a project looking at how sort of the social impacts of light, if you see what I mean, I think it's a sort of fascinating project to begin with and I think that's going to be a major, there's very little research into this and I think it's going to be a major area to promote. But also what I'm, we're particularly interested in is also the sort of economic power of this technological layer of lighting which informs other smart layers and what it actually does for our cities. I mean I was reading a report that said that the UK economy, the night time economy is actually worth 66 billion to the UK of which actually Westminster itself has a 2 billion pound night time economy. So what we begin to understand is that if light is a sort of social thing or is a sort of tool for social cohesion, we've told stories around a campfire, we now do a sort of larger version of that. In fact buildings now tell our stories through light, media screens, et cetera. But if we look at that aspect and then we look at how actually powerful that seemingly done but I think actually quite smart layer lighting in our cities can be to actually help us economically. What we see is that the tools that we certainly work with as lighting designers are perhaps one of those tools can be used, sort of you said using new tools Richard, I think it's like using an old tool lighting to sort of bring us together. Which then feeds into the home and I think the home, you know, we haven't addressed the smart home because I think actually people are quite used to working with technologies like lighting, switching a light on, switching it off, dimming it down and dimming it up and actually they are using technologies in a smart way if you give them to them in a way that they can understand. Just one little question, what's the role of darkness in the future, smart city and smart home? Well, we're very interested as lighting designers in darkness. I came back from a very interesting conference, a very small conference in Chile a few weeks ago which was the first international conference on darkness. It was the first. It's a hot topic darkness. You might think a lighting design was very unwelcome at this conference but not at all. I mean, you know, many of us are doing a lot of work in addressing issues such as light pollution, the adverse impacts that the fact that cities never sleep then stops us sleeping. That darkness I think in the future city needs to play a role. I mean, just like landscape played a role in the 18th and 19th century developments of cities was quiet and contemplative spaces, you know, I think dark areas of cities will be necessary to preserve to help us all live well. Michael Kimmerman, can you tell us what of what you've heard in the last hour or so do you think would actually enhance the creative capacity of a city, the ability of people to make something creative in their lives or work? Yeah, I've been struck by a bunch of things that people have said including I like the story of the breakdown of your project in Saragosa because of course it is precisely when the technology... You speak slightly closer to that. Yeah, sorry, sorry. I thought it was interesting that when the technology of your project broke down, you found people making an interesting use of this space and yeah, I've been very... Naturally, I inclined to agree with much of what Adam and Richard are saying which is to say that cities cannot be just technologically designed from above and that they... But I have a certain faith in the resilience of this, you know, Oscar Niemeyer died yesterday and Brazilia is a very interesting case, I mean he didn't design it but it struck me that he once said you know that you might not want to live in Brazil but it's a real city. And I think it's a good example of the adaptability of humans that we have to what are often top down things. So I think technology is a good case of this that we make use of technology to a large extent in ways that cannot be anticipated. And then the question really becomes as Adam raised I think quite properly access to this information. What does it really mean to have open data? How is this really going to happen in such a way? I take your, for instance, your patio of the restaurant in front of Scala but I was noting as I saw that you probably have to buy a coffee to sit there. So this question of the relation of commerce and access to information I think is important but here's what I was going to say that I think the resilience is the creative answer to your question. That is to say Adam mentioned occupy sandy. So to me this remains a very interesting paradigmatic example. You have an argument often made about Taurier and many other places that it is propelled by a shared technology, Facebook, Twitter. This is not really so much true. It's certainly propelled by mobile phones and SMSing. But to a large extent it's propelled by people coming together in an actual real space, the kind of spaces Richard's talking about. That the need for these spaces and the power of actual space and for the kind of interactions that can only happen face to face cannot be simulated. That this has been trumping all of the predictions in a way about the uses of technology, about the ways in which people network that I think in very profound ways we are constantly overestimating the power of technology to shape our actions in our cities. I believe that there are genuine threats to security and great potential in the shared information we're all talking about. But I also believe that as this evolves we will find ways to access this information and make use of it. The one last thing along these lines, I'll shut up about it, but I was struck after the hurricane Sandy by the issues of how we need to think about redesigning in New York and what this means both technologically and physically in terms of moving neighbourhoods and so forth. I was reminded of the case of Lockwila. I was struck in the case of Lockwila where many of you may recall there was a big earthquake in 2009 and since which the centre of the city, the historic core urban centre, the identity of this great regional city has not been repaired. I was struck that the Italian prosecutors have convicted the meteorologists for failing to predict essentially for a technological failure but have not yet prosecuted all of the government officials and others who I'm not suggesting they need to be prosecuted but let's keep our eye on the ball, those people who really are killing the city, who really killed the city which is to say they have failed to recognise that the city is a network of streets and spaces and the absence of the rejuvenation of that historical centre that Lockwila is essentially a dead city. Again it's the overestimation in a certain sense of the technological aspect and of the importance of actual real spaces that I think is something we're not focused on. Can I take us back to where Richard really began this morning which is the question of what kind of city is cognitively enhancing or a mind enhancing environment. We have many smart technologies which are about essentially material flows of energy or transport and so on which probably aren't inherently that mind enhancing but you're I think asking a question of what kind of city actually smartens people up rather than dums and down. Now this relates to the question of the programmability of the city, all the technologies we've talked about are very good at reducing disruption to use Adam's point. There's a very interesting finding in educational technology that for children to learn well is actually quite important. Their rewards are slightly unpredictable and slightly random. They learn much better with random rewards than very predictable ones and it may be the same as true of a city as a whole. Who around this table wants to offer an insight into and ideally an evidenced insight into what kind of urban environments actually do smarten up rather than stupefine? I've got an example of that and again it goes back to Occupy Sandy where this is the arm if you will of Occupy Wall Street that has turned itself to hurricane relief assistance in New York City, very consciously predicated on values of mutual aid and solidarity, a horizontal leaderless structure. What we find is that the spontaneous or near spontaneous self-organization of people into an extraordinarily not efficient but effective relief operation brings out resources that people I believe didn't know that they had and as a matter of fact people that in other contexts would be considered marginal in contemporary culture, discovering capacities in themselves, capabilities in themselves, predilections in themselves that they had been taught by society, by acculturation were not wanted, were not valued. What I've seen in the past several weeks is that through the process of forming this extended articulated network of mutual aid, people are discovering these amazing capacities in themselves and reconceptualizing the way in which they confront the world, reconceiving of themselves as actors. I have to say it's the most inspiring thing I've been involved in the last two decades. It's incredible to watch. I'd respond to your question if we all think back yesterday to the sudden star turn of the mayor and the prime minister announcing 50 million pounds to build a center for innovation. The reason that the area that we're in is a center for innovation already is that most of the firms that are here were not meant to be here. They had a very adverse relationship to their locality. They dealt with it. The agglomeration effects that they experienced were of people not exactly working together or competing against each other but in some very amorphous zone of exchange. Probably the most important institution around here for creative types is a pret-à-manger, which is around the corner, which is huge and which has evidently very good Wi-Fi reception. We've spent a lot of time there. The point I'm making is that when the prime minister and the mayor announced that now, there'll be a dedicated space to creativity. My thought was this area is now over. Over. So imagine if they were listening and they said, you're obviously right Richard, how should we spend that 50 million pounds? Pret-à-manger. By pret-à-manger. Well actually yesterday one of the speakers was very much talking about the importance of skills. What I wanted to say to Willards is don't build a building. Don't wreck higher education. That was a big theme yesterday in some of the speeches, actually that the higher the skill level in the population, the more innovative companies that you have. Michael, one sentence on how you would smarten up a city as it were. How I would smarten up a city. I think I would try to do it simply by democratising resources. I think that's really what it comes down to. That can be information and technology. And I like the idea of giving towards education rather than towards the centre. I mean Richard raised an interesting point in the paper, which was about the changing role of certain kinds of institutions. And here I think again this adaptability is interesting libraries I was thinking of. So libraries used to be of course a place where people needed to go for information. And now the line that most people have is books, well everything will be online, people don't need libraries. Actually libraries have become incredibly critical elements, especially in working class and poorer communities, I speak from New York as a good example, as community centres places for the elderly, cultural centres places for teens to go after school. The physical space is very important. And the people who design libraries now and think about this need to think of a new function for this. It's no longer the Carnegie Library, now it's the kind of community centre. So it's not quite an answer to your question, but what has happened? You have a technology that has changed the nature of the physical space and people have adapted to it in such a way that the institutions themselves change. I'd like to open up for comment, violent disagreement from the audience. Just on the library point, we actually worked with a library in south London which has got the public to put their own book collections on the library database. One of lots and lots of collaborative consumption tools which do give you the intelligence not only of the books, but also of getting to know people in your street, and so on. So we've got someone over here, and here, if you would stand up, introduce yourself and be as pithy as possible. That would be great. Hello, I'm Hillel Shokken. I think you asked what should be done to make a city more... I think the best thing to do is to take care that there will be people in the street and that you will know nothing about them. So there will be a possibility to make contact with somebody you don't know. As far as I'm concerned, cities are made for that. Cities are the predecessors of Facebook, and the success of cities only predicts the success of Facebook because Facebook follows the city. So that's one thing. The other thing about the 50 million, why not invest in free Wi-Fi in the street for people rather than making the temple, a patisserie station that was built as a temple for electricity? And now we are seeing a temple for IT technology. So I think we have to learn from the past and not build temples for technology. But temples for people. OK, I'd like some comment also on the face recognition, facial recognition technology, and is that the vision of heaven or hell? Over here, please. And do we want to sonar our vision of the future of the city or not? Blain duty from Arup. I enjoyed your critiques of the smart city, in particular the points around the stupefying effect of technology. But I think you also showed in your examples that urban design can equally be a stupefying factor in the examples that you showed. And I think that brings me to the larger point, which I think the critiques that Adam and Richard are part of, which is about how we make cities and how we, the role of leadership and the role of informed leadership and citizens in actually making cities. And I think this conference is a fantastic step forward in bringing urbanists into the debate. But we also need our urban designers and our leaders to be more informed about the potential of technology. Perhaps you could comment on that. Can I just ask you, cities are places of argument. What did you most disagree with that you heard? The examples of Mazdar and Songdo are potentially, perhaps not really where the debate is now. I think the debate now has moved on a lot in the last couple of years in terms of cities actually being a lot more informed. And I went to a recent conference in Barcelona around smart cities. And the talk there was all about citizen participation. So last year was a lot about the industry vision and Adam gave a very good talk last year about critiquing the role of industry. But I think now cities are being a lot more proactive and a lot more talking about citizen participation and the role of technology in enforcing economic development. Which by definition means not the greenfield sites where there aren't any citizens to participate. I would say that unfortunately the biggest problem in the world cities is not that they are too planned, but that they are too unplanned. Maybe Mazdar is too planned, but in the developing world we just have chaos and too much spontaneity in the slums, in the places that are growing in the wrong places where there is huge consumption of energy because they go. So of course I agree fully that some cities maybe is totally fine, but on the other hand you really need some interventions from some experts at some point that the city should grow in the right places, some planning. The question is how much planning? What should the planners do and what should be left for spontaneity? I'm going to ask all of our speakers about two sentences each to sum up, but let's try to get a couple more comments in. I'm going to make this a quick one. I'm Matias, I'm from Hamburg, I'm a transformation designer and I understand the electric city is also a very vulnerable one. Just you name Sandy, Electricity, the power loss. Now that I've seen these examples from Rio de Janeiro where you have this huge control room which I generally find a good idea towards more of a liquid city planning, for example power loss can also mean something very different in the future. If you imagine they have no power anymore in this control room, what will happen? Anarchy or mayhem, chaos, I don't know. So my question would be where are the firewalls for these kind of future sensible smart cities that should also be part of the system. Thank you. And how do you get resilience from buffers, whether it's your finance system or your power? Saskia. Saskia Sassan. I want to come back to the question of making the city or making city-ness. So it is especially Adam and Richard. And Adam, I want to just use your what you ended with which was that the smartness should be in the people making the city or making the neighbourhood making, etc. And that we should not think of the technology as containing the smartness. Now occupy movement you emphasize and you used a particular phrase because this was part of your final illustration and you said they discovered in themselves things they didn't know they had. No, I disagree. And they developed social capabilities. Now then I want to take it, what does that mean? Very, very briefly. Vis-à-vis the technology, making cities but we also need to develop capabilities in a way technical capabilities in the citizens. So I just wanted the two of you to address that briefly. Okay. I'm going to ask each of our panellists to say literally a couple of sentences. We have to respect coffee because Richard has reminded us it's all important to city life and coffee awaits us in about three minutes time. So Carlo, can we start with you? Sure. But instead of it's impossible to answer there's different points but I think there's one thing we all agree about and that's all of this is not about technology. All of this is about people but the potential for this and what we see in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy New York and what we see in the Arab Spring it's incredible. So something I would call like an urban spring. The fact that all of this allows really to change many dynamics of the city or participation what goes back to Jane Jacobs is the same thing but we can do it in a different way today and I think if we look at that then we can forget I think something yes I agree with one of the last comments a comment by Elaine I believe that some of the discussion was looking at things that were about smart cities a couple of years ago the smart city debate a couple of years ago song domas there and so on because really all of this is if you look at the other perspective about how this can allow people to in the bottom up to respond to these technologies then there's an exciting space of new possibilities there. Yes I mean I think it's following on from what Carlos saying about it in a way focusing on people I think you know what I was trying to say earlier was understand that there are technologies that have been around for a long time if you see what I mean that are getting smarter to not forget those that it's not just about new technologies but it's also about technologies that we've used for many centuries that are gradually getting smarter that people are familiar with that started perhaps autonomously and are now sort of organised systems and perhaps looking to some of those systems in order to sort of inform the debate further and not just focusing on perhaps some of the sort of the super smart technologies that have been talked about in the last 24 hours I'd like just to agree with the gentleman from Bogota and say that the debate between bottom up and top down I think is a false debate while it's necessary to empower people let's not forget that some planning is necessary in Asia and Latin America I always find it interesting when people talk about a smartphone application in New York that's crowdsourced and tells you when the trains are not running on time that's great but it'll tell me the same thing every day because the trains are never fixed in New York so you definitely need the physical and the soft infrastructure together and that requires large investments and governance and policy planning I have to echo exactly what Aisha was saying because apropo of Hurricane Sandy it's a very good example I think of and also what Enrique was trying to emphasise that this is not a binary thing in which it's bottom up top down you need to have large organisational top down planning things from technology and infrastructure and everything else and sometimes that involves political decisions which are not entirely democratic that's to say everyone cannot participate but the part of this I've just been struck by here and trying to emphasise is that I think there is this way in which people adapt technologies to adapt urban situations adapt Brazilia adapt whatever technological things they have in other words for all of our top down planning there is an inevitable kind of and healthy I don't mean to sound pie in the sky but I think a healthy way in which we tend to claim and reuse and remake what we're given from the top I think that's right in my presentations and writing I obviously give a very hard time to the command and control institutions but I think there is a role a very clear role and I echo I think it occurs to me that in a very neat way for me personally designed for network cities almost joins Saskia's life work and Richard's life work I think that it's the goal of these technologies and networks is the production of a metropolitan self and I that's what I see myself as working towards and I'm very delighted to hear that these are the themes that are emerging from this work I just wanted to kind of add a cautionary note because I'm very attracted by the notion of kind of the meeting strangers but I think people have this sense that particularly looking to young people everyone says let's look at how young people are using social media this is the future let's look at it well I have recently looked at all the data on how young Americans are using the social media and basically they are interacting very intensely with a group of friends they already know that actually it isn't this great extending of networks this great meeting of strangers and they're doing a lot in places like libraries so you know the world isn't virtual they're not living a lot of their worlds really virtually they're living it via the media with their mates and they need spaces in cities where they can relax and be with their mates and what one sees now very much in pubs in London and everywhere is that young people are kind of with each other and there's lots of other people there as well via the sort of technologies and they need a physical space in which to do that I wanted to take the opportunity to respond to your criticism which I couldn't so far so I guess the economic crisis or the algorithms that were relevant for the economic crisis were in part different because it was not so much about correlated data sets it was not so much about correlating these parameters of human life as more about like earning money or trying to organize economics in a way that you're able to gain things so I guess we have to be so my final statement I guess would be that we just have to be worried of these kinds of controls that are developing or that might be and might be made possible by these data sets and we it's more a contextual question it's not so much a yes or no question it's a contextual question in which situations is this possible and then we just have to I mean that's a theme that's repeatedly come up that we have to provide for freedom, the freedom to act to choose and kind of see the city maybe as a puzzle piece and allow us to keep the opportunity to piece it together in different ways well I'd like to make two final comments one is that oddly enough I think the issue of technology has made a different kind of configuration for interdisciplinary study of the city we need to know about things like how people experience complexity or simplicity and so on which are developmental and psychological questions and I think one of the things that will happen to urban studies at least in universities is the more technologically we get focused the more we have to really think about psychological issues as a domain for evaluating what happens the other thing that I'd like to say is I'd like to put in a plug for the research work that I and a group of colleagues are doing in the economics called Theatrum Mundi Michael is in the fault there are some people scattered around the room which is an attempt to look at what are the conditions social conditions of complexity in modern cities and how do they relate to urban culture and you can go on to our website here's my plug it's called Theatrum H-E-A-T-R-U-M dot that's right dash Mundi M-U-N-D-I dot org have I got it right? it doesn't matter anyhow this is a field of research for us about how complexity and culture combine together in cities and I'm sure Michael or somebody else can tell you the right way to get access to this wonderful website thanks Richard just two final comments from me before coffee one is perhaps an optimistic note which comes from the research of James Flynn some of you will be aware of his work on intelligence globally which shows that overall IQ goes out up about on average 0.4 a year and seems to correlate with urbanization and it's particularly the elements of intelligence which are about abstract conceptual reasoning and coping with ambiguity which seem to rise fastest and it opens up a great research program of what are the most intelligence enhancing environments and which ones don't as Judy said all the technologies we have don't automatically though encourage mixing of strangers and that may need a little bit of social engineering and design even in the modern city so in the spirit of that I would urge you over coffee to speak to at least one stranger about ambiguity and see what happens thank you all very much