 This is micro phone working. Yeah, it seems great. Well, wonderful to be here. Thanks for being on someone to invite me. I'm an architect. I make a slightly unusual presentation. I will give a lot of hints, a lot of ideas, and later on we have a discussion about those, I hope. Just to deduce myself, I'm an architect, I'm a kick-ass entrepreneur. I'll show you that. We've been growing rapidly for 10 years from the mid 90s to the 2000s, late 2000s before the crash from 10 to 450. The crash turned me into a libertarian because that's for the compelling explanations from the Austrian school. And in the last 10 years, I've been ever more becoming impatient with what's going on. I've been radicalized because I want to continue to develop a flourishing business. It's very, very hard if you have 10 years of stagnation all over Europe. So just go through some of the images. You don't explain too much the kind of work we're doing, very innovative around the world. And I make that super fast. It's just a little introduction who we are. Our buildings appear on the map of various places, mass media attention, top Google referencing, et cetera. But we're doing lots of big things on urban scale. You can see here. We're doing cultural buildings, commercial buildings, anything. This is my urbanism. Very large-scale ventures around the world. Transport. Sorry about this. I'm just giving you a few glimpses to gain credibility. We're doing Beijing airport at the moment. Most of our work in Asia and Middle East, by the way, nothing in Europe. They were in every single city of Spain, Italy and France with our works. And major operations before the crash in various European countries. Opera houses, Asia, Middle East. This is our project in Azerbaijan, which is very famous. So I'm just going quickly through this extraordinary unusual buildings and just give it to you like this. Starting on the cultural domain, but also branching out into commercial, mixed use, residential, anything you like. Including government, I have to admit that. Research, education, commercial. Just give you a glimpse of what I'm up to. Major large towers all over Asia. Unusual sophisticated geometry feats in large and larger buildings as we continue. But again, I say, oh, what a company we've been stagnating in terms of size. And so this is residential. But also we're brand gold interiors, furniture, products, fashion. So universal design, global design brand. So that's my kind of day job. But in terms of my intellectual work, as I said, I became kind of libertarian, also economics. Political economy interests me, but I was always interested in how society operates politics, economics, and also how this ties back to architecture. So I want to start with a kind of deep anthropological thesis about what the built environment does. For me, it's an engine of societal evolution. I've written about this. So the built environment is for me a kind of ordering of social processes. Instrument for structuring human activity under the headline, of course, of cooperation and the vision of labor and that needs to be structured. Societal buildup, the cumulative buildup of societal complexity needs some kind of substrate. Trust generation with stable physical material substrate. And that's the built environment, which can accrue cross generations and build up societal complexity. But also there's an element of communication to this, not only physical sorting us, but also we need as sentient beings to be recognized and conspicuously find each other in various situations. So social order requires spatial order. And it is a kind of substrate of societal evolution beyond biological evolution. And so these are very, very critical instruments, which accrue, which distribute activities, which distribute status groups and allow society gain complexity and build up gradually without design, bottom up, evolve societal complexity for cooperation. And I don't emphasize this relative to Hans Hermann's work. The emphasis here is on demarcation and dedication, designation of territory, not so much on appropriation of property, although of course it's also important. So my emphasis is not on scarcity and conflict resolution, but on social cooperation, organization, and the stabilization of social relationships. Of course conflict resolution then comes as a second order important phenomenon. But the built environment is doing this, and it is doing this by creating these recognizable divisions, separations, distributions, and can routinize social interactions. And then it has a kind of graphic overlay to these games, a kind of semi-logical code, some of the text, a language, which we're navigating the social world to. And this also includes the way we manipulate ourselves into various status groups, we can recognize what kind of uniforms or social roles demarcation. So all of this is design, built environment design, product design, self-design. And that differentiates, this is kind of becoming human precisely through these means. And this is not a waste of energy, this is an absolute necessity, otherwise we wouldn't expend scarce resources on these kind of systems, they become human becoming necessary subsystems, as it were, and there's no human society without this. And this continues, so it's about framing and differentiating human actors through spatial differentiation, recognizable, and through the marking also of the various personas, everybody in his or her place, and that's kind of order and the place for everything. And this kind of can grow through concentric material into ever larger systems, typical EU city, which then spreads thousandfold across the European landscape, with various social organs, but also accrual ability. And then at a certain point there's a kind of shock of conscious taking the over and participating, when you draw up as an ideal city what has evolved, and now you are in a simulated world of graphics, representation, critique, theory, and discourse at a time when there are also political discourse emerges, literatures emerge, and architecture is part of this. So you very, very quickly can reproduce this according to plan, and I'm talking about spatial order and social order, but there's also, interestingly, these become key models of conceptual orders. So renaissance all these kind of tableaus and kind of sorting diagrams, classification is basically the physical sorting, then abstracted into, and language evolves together with the physical sorting. So it's kind of deep anthropological potency of the built environment of architecture, and the way it evolves through various stages of socioeconomic evolution. So you can see in the sense the registration of society moving on an organizing itself on an ever larger scale, and shaping the built environment of an ever larger scale. So this is the kind of absolute test state, mercantilism stage beyond what was originally the renaissance kind of early capitalist individual city-states into larger territories, and the Baroque comes onto this. And we have, I'm jumping ahead, the mechanical system of mechanical mass reproduction, modernism, industrial revolution has its look and shape and architecture and discourse attached to this, which is kind of modernism, the Baroque that we discussed earlier. And there's a certain set of principles at place here, which is, again, a strong division, separation, specialization, repetition as the principles of that, both on the cityscape and on the architectural scape, this is the Baroque itself. And the way this ties in with a certain type of corporate organization, kind of departmentalization, separation, specialization, repetition, and this you can read off the social organization into the spatial organization as its apparatus. And this is also the era, of course, of, I mean, we discussed this, of mass mechanic reproduction, electrification, a very simple form of industrial society, which becomes compatible with a certain degree with planning, although I'm very anti-planning now, historically I have to recognize that in the certain part of the mid-20th century, forms of planning were at least viable to some extent. And Brazil is an outcome of that. And again, this is mechanical mass reproduction. It exists under capitalism, it exists under socialism, but both these systems go more and more into planning conditions. But that collapses. And that is collapsed by, I think, the underlying technologies and potentials which have built up in terms of the micro-economic revolution, this whole idea of post-fault, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with this discourse, flexible specialization, much more innovation, research development, marketing, financing projects by projects instead of 10 years of universal consumption standard with everybody in the same conflict, the same house, the same washing machine, this one TV channel. And that was very, very stable. You could separate out, sub-urbanize and put everybody in their place. And now we're talking about much faster cycles. We have to communicate, interact, research, develop, market, finance, et cetera. So I think that this kind of new era breaks through. That's why the neoliberal revolution and the Soviet Union finally collapses, can no longer compete. And we have a new epoch, which I think the surge of free market ideas come to bear. And the Hayek, as we just covered, becomes a great icon for Thetscher, Reagan, et cetera. And this, moving from this kind of system to this kind of agglomeration on dynamism of bottom-up, post-modernism, it gives kind of a face to this, an expression, diversity, collage, complexity built up. And I want to just throw in in between, because we're talking about planning and order, simple order, that to some extent this could also be, I'm talking anti-planning, but I'm talking a lot for private planning. If we look at the great estates in London, the way London was developed in the 17th, sorry 18th and 19th century, it was actually private planning, series of district, just as an intercepting. That's the way I'm thinking. I'm thinking of trying to align the great styles of architecture with a kind of series of transformations of socioeconomic orders. And the line here, the Renaissance with early capitalism in city-states, the Baroque with mercantilism, absolutism. The bourgeois capitalism has kind of this neoclassical historicist revolution in the 19th century. Modernism is fortism, international socialism, or kind of corporatism of sorts. And parametism is now, I think, that new style I'm talking about, or not too much about it, that new level of dynamism complexity, a new way of working, a new way of conceiving the city under what I call global post-forrest network society. I still believe that capitalism was incredibly important, that it is the kind of engine of prosperity engine of modernity engine. And now we're having this kind of condition, a kind of agglomerative, unplanned dynamism city of London, a very, very different picture from these kind of new towns, well-ordered, well-planned. There's a kind of, of course, planners try to hang on, they just interfere and interrupt, they don't plan anymore, they just kind of constrain this. But there's no way anybody would recognize this as being kind of planned rationally. It's just, and this contemporary urban concentration is basically that we had 50 years of distributing out on the suburbs, green fields separate, nine to five routines, everybody, and now we kind of have this kind of re-concentration into mega cities. And that's the challenge. And that new dynamism, I think, aligns with nihilism, and ideally calls, I think, much more than ever before for anarcho-capitalism, or totally freed up interaction processes. And I'm just showing how this new world and dynamic with these fast cycles of innovation and global integration, there's no way that bureaucrats of any shape or form have any role in this, except that we become huge breaks on these next productivity potentials. And I think the whole thing for me is when now you need entrepreneurs to, for every site, is a new condition, novelty, new project, new clients, new connections, new demands, and you pick up a site and you tease out the synergy potentials, which you fight into it and test profit and loss as a feedback, you try something, somebody else comes up for them better, you need that totally letting loose. You can't plan this anymore. It's a kind of bottom-up evolving, very, very complex machine, because not all longer kind of making the conflicts cheaper and having electrifications three miles further out, very, very different things happening. But I'm looking at these kind of city agglomerations. And what is happening here is, of course, that they become menacing and chaotic. I'm talking about garbage spill urbanization. So there's a sense of lack of order and chaos, but it's much better than this kind of neat and sterile order. But there's also something problematic, because I said we need the built environment as an ordering and structuring and text and communicating, telling everybody where is what and how together and what kind of conditions. So there's a kind of problem with this, which is a kind of lack of articulated order. And that's what is one of my conditions where I'm working on. If you look at these cities that just endless spills are more for spills. The only thing with shape and order is the river, if you like. And that's why I'm looking at natural systems where you can have complex, intricate, variegated order, which, where you can have variety, adaptivity, and yet you have navigability and order rather than disorder and chaos and random distribution. So we do making city scapes like that. So inherently flexible and open, but always identity giving and structured and not random. And it's a kind of multi-species ecology metaphor. They grow a city with all these interventions coming in in a rule-based way, integrating, weaving in, making connections and making legibles. So these are our kind of model of what I call a parametric urbanism. It's driven by algorithms. So the new level of intricate interconnectedness and teasing out and making resonances is all kind of algorithmic driven design variation complexities that parametric models, they can shift and adapt. The order is not a complete and symmetrical and easily corruptible. It's a very robust, flexible, like organic creatures, like swarm formations of creatures. And so I'm looking at these kind of projects as being adapting into conditions, multiple levels, and being ever incomplete, but always recognizable and shape giving and identity giving. So this is my, and we do these kind of projects. Multiple authors can come together under paradigm and integrate with each other. You don't need a master hand. You don't need an overall hand. It could be a total bottom up process because these natural systems, which are intricate and ordered and navigable for much dumber creatures as us, they can find each other because everything links to everything else. The topography, the river, the water flows, relative to the topography, the various vegetations pick up on these differentiations, sunlight and shade. The fauna comes in. So everything links up in a system of networks and retrievable. And that's, I think, one can have a built environment like this, which we can also later on intuitive navigate. So there's multiple authors integrating and these are scripts feeding various subsystems according to rules, kind of quasi-natural rules. That's the kind of vision of an architecture. And this idea of simultaneously that we want to network, have hundreds of opportunities or offerings in our face to pick and quickly move from one meeting to another, never missing out, you come into a building and you're not kind of hidden in a corridor or elevator or cell. Thousands of people all in each other's face, interactive, quick, quick, quick, very productive, multi-communication interaction environment. And I think that can only be delivered by private ventures. The bureaucrats don't have the knowledge, they don't have the incentive. They're far too slow. You have to hold hands with a majority to get anything done. It's totally banked up. That you could do when things remain stable for 20 years. When it's just about, in 20 years, we're still doing the conflicts of washing machine, the TV channel. BBC's maybe moved from BBC one to BBC two, but we're not explosion of 100 channels and then a thousand YouTube channels. So that's my argument is that this can be only done by private. And our ideologies are so kind of stifled and backward. I put myself out there and got kind of hammered and defamed for instance saying the privatization of everything, streets, squares, public spaces. And these are still public offerings. There would be huge diversity of open spaces for various niche markets and the multiple audiences that we are not bringing everything to the average, dumb, stupid, median voter and wasting all these resources. So I'm looking at this, but there's of course, if you look at the media, a huge kind of hostility to anything private, particularly when it comes to the urban condition. And I'm recognizing that these things in an urban condition, there's kind of synergies and externalities, but private systems are the rival. So it's a guardian kind of crying out against public space privatization, pseudo public spaces, totally ideological and I'm starting to combat that. And these are examples that we go through as major developments, various parks, public spaces, retail spaces, interior, exterior, everything private, but the guardian thinks, oh, how horrible because we can't demonstrate in these places. The Occupy movement couldn't be in these spaces and that's why it's a kind of breakdown of society. And they're kind of charting these and vilifying all of these kind of public spaces, which I celebrate and we should have much more. Of course, these are also private, but they're over-regulated. They're not really set loose. They're all of the kind of same over-policed condition where some should be much more freer, much more funky and groovy and others maybe more safe than they are now. So this is one of the kind of conversations that I'm looking at is kind of feed the way people kind of upset about because something is kind of privately owned. And yeah, they want to intervene, of course. But these are beautiful, if vibrant spaces, but I think there could be much more vibrant, much more beautiful, much more diversified than they are now. And there is kind of private parks and there's initiatives I find interesting. So I'm interested in all this all breaking open the build environment development for private entrepreneurship. And at the moment it's so stifled and we come to what that means. By the way, I'm just showing you one of our projects where I'm saying this is a kind of startup, how hundreds of companies with lots of food and beverages, social spaces in Beijing and how I'm trying to create this kind of vibrant three dimensional space of spontaneity inside outside connections. We have our own office and Beijing office there as well. So kind of multi level straight up public space with lots of crowds activity events all curated and it's also privately run in the center of Beijing, which is otherwise kind of very stifling. And you know, this windswept empty Tiananmen Square, there's nothing else. So this is what we're delivering in Beijing, for instance, with events and my next vision is kind of towers opening up and creating these kind of interior urbanism, everything, thousands of actions and interact as a conglomerate. We're designing this for a intervisible interacting. And of course there's huge regulatory hurdles for this as well in terms of fire safety and so on. So this is kind of what I'm doing on the architectural front. And the other thing is this whole idea of the housing crisis and these kind of the distortions in the market which are criticized and seem to be drawing in more and more heavy handed the planners and politicians. But I'm arguing they've been creating these. So the kind of ratio of how much per income you have to pay for your place, the value distribution, there's enormous amount of course supply restrictions and nimbism and political interference, which which kind of distorts and makes this market totally dysfunctional. And I've been pointing this out. And then you come in and since it's all overpriced, the state comes in and wants to affordable. Now it starts to subsidize and ration. And more and more and more and more and 50% every new build is rationed supposedly. And the threshold of people who need that is climbing, climbing at the same time. It's a kind of self-fulfilling spiral. It's 90,000 pound per annum. It is eligible for a kind of supported. So they pick winners and losers and arcane systems, a huge waste of time. So from pointing this out and vilified. The other thing is the only thing which allows London to grow as a city, of course, they need savings from somewhere. So the world like thinks there's a good real estate opportunity. It is thriving. Money is pouring in, fueling the potential to deliver these required housing real estate, which are hampered by nimbism, but they're vilified. The foreign investment kind of castigated and kind of slashed and as kind of a negative. So I've been pointing this out. And what we're having looking at, looking at the politicians come in and have these frozen for decades exactly which patch is for residential, for commercial, for office. You can't touch as you can change this down to the building. How much can be built? What can be built? It's crazy. Then once it's residential, they give you the exact unit mix. How many one bedroom, how many two bedroom, how many three bedroom, how many flats per core, how many balconies, each apartment, minimal size of each room, washing machine, every item. There's nothing you can touch. And so everything is preconceived. Entrepreneurs can do absolutely nothing when it comes to the visual communication. It's very important to express into an urban environment who you are, who you attract, to show you what they mean. They proscribe this and say, no, you have to put a brick here. So all what is left for entrepreneurs and developers is to game the system, get exceptions, understand the councilor's predilections, bribery and political rent seeking. That's all there is. And then there's sometimes a loophole. A young entrepreneur in his 27 years old, a guy called Reza, we were in contact, we were designing things. He found a loophole that you can actually do different kind of product. He called it kind of multi-occupancy home. This is a single house with 500 people share a bunch of living rooms which allows you to finally go beyond these horribly far too large rooms and apartments. And he creates a totally new product and it's thriving and running and attracts entrepreneurship. He adds in incubator services and so on. So it's a great entrepreneurial product, but it's only a loophole. And then there's another loophole which was happening. So I came out with this kind of manifesto to address this housing crisis. So I said, regulate the planners. You need to start with property rights and really look at where is there potentially, because there's transaction costs, et cetera, perhaps kind of interim need where they could come in. I said also, yeah, all this kind of land-view zoning has to go. These kind of, all these milieu protections where you can't, there's also to do with land-view zoning protection. All these housing incentives are ludicrous. The housing centers where all the architects are with me because they're, hey, they can't work. And they find it ludicrous and it's absurd, but they're getting worse and worse. But I also think that whole affordability system, actually, if you have 50% of all new built rationed and you burden that on these developments, all new built work is over-expensive because you basically use the leftover, the private apartments are sold. They are subsidizing the giveaways. And there's something between, they're up to kind of 60% giveaway of the value. So that increases the in affordability. It's an in-affordable system. So I've been criticizing this, because of course all this wrong headed way of going into property ownership as a kind of financial asset planning is wrong, it's Hampad's mobility. And then in the end I said, we have to privatize all public spaces and squares, et cetera. So this was what I wanted to present, and I know it was a bit rapid. And just to give you some glimpse of some themes and threats for later discussion, thank you.