 Now the second paper will be presented by Sukehtu Mahda. He's an author in Maximum City and he teaches at School of Journalism in New York University. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm going to talk about storytelling in cities. What is the story of a city? What is the story of Mumbai, of New York? It depends on who's telling it and who's listening. Every city has two types of narratives, the official story and the unofficial story. The official story has buzz and flash about it. The unofficial story is quieter but it is the one that is more likely to endure. The unofficial story is largely orally transmitted. You can listen to it in phone centers in the immigrant cartiers of our cities, in the CDs and videos that are made by individuals and sent back to their families, in the popular ballads and folk songs of Bollywood films and telenovelas. It is the news of the city that migrants carry back to the village. Most of the time these stories are inaccessible to outsiders, partly for reasons of language and partly because the technology is so primitive. In Mumbai, for example, there's a community of letter writers who sit opposite the general post office and help illiterate migrants craft letters back to the relatives in the village. These letters are nowhere recorded in historians' archives. But unofficial migrant stories are essential to maintain a kind of continuity for people on the move. For most of our history as a species, we have not been attuned to radical, continuous movement. We have stayed in one place in our villages. But in the past quarter of a century, the world's migrant population has doubled. Today, there are 175 million people who are living in a country different from the one they were born in. My own family has moved all over the world from India to Kenya to England to the USA and back again. And it is still moving. Like all migrants, our consolation through this relentless movement consists in storytelling, recollection, recollection as an antidote to dislocation. In New York, my American-born children sit with my mother. As she tells them stories, her father told her about Nairobi. And with my father, as he tells them about his grandfather in rural Gujarat. With these story fibers, we darn patches over the holes of the quilt of time. The differences between the unofficial and the official stories are enormous. If the story of Mumbai is that it is the financial capital of Asia, you can demolish hundreds of acres of light industry, textile mills, without much scruple because we need office space. If the story of Mumbai is that it is a collection of villages, then we will keep the male areas low-lying, preserve the old towns in the city. The problem is that the media, print, and especially electronic, favor one kind of storytelling over the other. They are partial to stories that require big expense budgets, snazzy technology, flashy images. Some of the most elaborate fictions about the city are not found in the work of novelists, but in real estate brochures and city plans. They're a kind of science fiction, an idea of the future. Mumbai's city politicians and businessmen have their eyes set firmly on Shanghai as a model for Mumbai. In 2003, the Maharashtra State Government asked a group of professional storytellers, the management consulting firm McKinsey, to construct a narrative about the future of Mumbai. McKinsey came up with a document whose recommendations the government officially adopted titled Vision Mumbai, which aimed to turn Mumbai into, quote, a world-class city by 2013. The architect Charles Corrier said about the plan, that's not a vision, that's a hallucination. In New York, I've been studying the plans for the redevelopment of the amusement district of Coney Island. Coney Island exists in the fond nostalgic reveries of older New Yorkers and in the fevered dreams of planners, developers, and civic activists. In other words, Coney Island exists mostly in the past and the future. Soil present is too depressing to contemplate. So the stories of the people who actually live and work in the district, in the unimaginable present, are ignored or overlooked. One of the most potent forms of storytelling, the one which perhaps the greatest narrative drive, is the history of crime. People living in big cities are fascinated by crime. They read about it in the tabloids, avidly follow sensational trials on television, and vote for politicians who promise to fight crime by any means necessary. In the roaring 1990s, Mumbai thought of itself as a violent gang ridden city. Hundreds of people were dying every year in wars between rival gangs and extra-judicial killings by the police. The city was convinced of its own menace. The newspaper headlines, the movies, suited the gangsters and the cops both. The gangsters, because it increased their stature in society. After all, the live on fear is the sugar solution. And the cops, because the public afraid of crime, granted them the highest power, the power to take a life without a trial. I got the sense of a city straining to imagine itself more violent than it actually was. It's the same story here in Istanbul. This is one of the safest cities in Europe, but the fastest growing segment of housing here are the gated communities, both in the center city and the suburbs. These communities are a reaction to crime or the perception of crime. As a result, people pay enormous sums to hire private security guards. If you look at what people in these gated communities actually pay every month in maintenance fees, it would be cheaper to get mugged every month. But they don't mind paying because the story they are fascinated by is the myth of the monster coming out of the slums. As in all storytelling, the choice of the words used in the story is crucial. And in the most freighted of all these words in the story of the city is the word slum. What is a slum? You and me don't like it, so we call it a slum. The word is loaded, overloaded, toppling. The people in the Mumbai slums have another word for it, busty, community. A busty abounds in community spaces, in the line to the toilet, the line at the water tap, in the patches of empty ground where children play cricket, in front of the hundreds of little shops servicing every human need. The construction of the busty is crucial to the spirit of Mumbai that saves the city time and again through floods, riots and terror attacks. Each room in the busty is exquisitely custom built, every detail of it, including the walls and the ceilings. Each room is different and over the decades suited to its owners' needs. These rooms are endlessly flexible with partitions and extra stories according to the number of family members that live there. They are brightly coloured outside and in to their owners' taste. Look at a slum colony anywhere in the world. It is multicoloured. Then look at the public housing that replaces it when it is demolished. It is monochromatic. We marvel at Lisbon's old city. We pay a premium to live in Trastevere or the Marais or the East Village. All slums a century ago. Our young people now want to live where the other half once lived. A young Jewish friend of mine in New York was looking for an apartment in New York's Lower East Side. When her grandmother heard about it, she reminded her, I spent my life trying to get out of that place. The moral of the story is don't demolish slums but improve them. Give them private toilets or make the communal ones nicer. Show up the roofs, give them clean water and reliable electricity. Most of all, give them tenure, 99-year leases on the land underneath their shacks. The poor already live exactly where they want to live and have made an architecture and an urban plan that they can live with. They don't need planners. And when they are presented with the plans that the city has for them, they don't understand them. That is because much of the conversation around planning is deliberately arcane like the Latin mass. It serves the function of setting up an exclusive class of individuals who are the intermediaries between God and man, between the politicians and the developers who have their visions of the city and the ordinary people who have to inhabit them. The antidote to all of this is another class of storytellers, journalists. The news must return to being a story. Delivery of the news has been bifurcated. One track is the banalities of television news for the masses. And the other consists of the arcane hyper-specialized and often nonsensical professional journals that cater to a diminishing elect who have real power. Language is power. We are victims of jargon in the academic journals, in the law courts, in the medical offices. Part of the reason the world was so easily defrauded recently by the bankers with the talk of derivatives was that very few people understood what a credit default swap really is. Even the government officials who are supposed to keep a watch don't really understand it. And it is here that journalism has a central role. We are the intermediaries, the interlocutors, and nobody else can perform this task. It is the responsibility of journalists to penetrate that wall of jargon, to listen to the experts, and then to translate it into English or Turkish and to communicate to a general audience the deliberations of the powerful and the wealthy so that the rest of the populace can make an informed judgment about whether they're getting screwed. In cities, journalists need to pay much more attention to all the millions of unofficial stories out there and then to retell them compellingly. Nothing less than our collective democratic project depends on this. Thank you.