 Norman, thank you for that. Now Dan, Sujik, is joining us. What I didn't say in the introduction that Dan, in fact, is what I could say a student of Norman's work, having written a book on him and produced, in fact, authored and narrated a beautiful film on his work. So in many ways this conversation also becomes more intimate. Andrew Adonis, as you know, unfortunately, can't be here, a number of the issues that you raised, Norman, about infrastructure and airports, which I thought would be happily moved on to Andrew. I can't do that, so I feel very nervous and want to put on my crash helmet in case we start talking about the Airports Commission of Decision on Heathrow. Some of you know what I mean by that because I wasn't the Airports Commission, but we're not going to go there directly. But I thought, Dan, we might start just going back a moment. You wrote a few years before we started The Urban Age, a book which for many of us actually is incredibly influential, still is today, called A Hundred Miles City. And there you, in a way, chronicled some of the problems of the cities as you saw. You traveled to different cities with a great photographer. You described the sort of homogeneity that was appearing. And it's going back a number of years, 13, 14 years. I can't help, but after hearing Norman sort of talk, feel actually, even though you bombard us with statistics and you show us things of enormous beauty, by the way, every single beautiful project was by him, just in case you didn't get it, and quite a few of the colleagues in this room, I couldn't but help feel a sense of optimism, actually. You could solve some of the problems. Now, Dan, it might be fair that even The Urban Age, let alone your book, nearly gives a sense of not hopelessness, but here's a problem and is it intractable. And as you sort of think back and, in a way, are informed by the analysis of this work and these ideas, what are your reflections on that? Have things changed? Is there greater potential? There's greater knowledge of the problems. Well, Norman is obviously the consumer optimist. You know, I thought watching that, what Norman was doing was making extremely difficult things seem extremely easy and straightforward. I remember a long time ago thinking about Norman's relationship with Buckminster Fuller, who once proposed the idea of putting a dome over Manhattan, which in his day was a speculation, I think Norman could possibly do it at a pinch. Yes, optimism is what one takes from that. It made, I mean, to me, the optimistic things in particular were that image of smog being dealt with in Britain, the green belt, Britain responding to the big stink, and that sense that you can make things happen. But that was also the period, of course, of Brunel, who was perfectly right about making broad gauge railways. It was a far better way of doing things. However, we have a narrow-er gauge system because by the time Brunel came along, it was too late. We couldn't go back. First, that's some of the arguments that we see about why Heathrow is an investment that will not be walked away from. I saw lots of big ideas, and I think that some of the world has an allergy to big ideas. We saw those great mares, but there's also a tradition of technocrats, I think, about Robert Moses, who made Manhattan, but also provoked Jane Jacobs to see him as Beelzebub destroying what makes a city special. Houseman did much the same for Paris, but perhaps rather more beautifully. We have, I think, this other tendency in the West in particular of activism, that sense that cities are too complicated to leave to big ideas, that maybe there's another approach which is to solve each problem one pothole at a time. I suppose we have that continuing tension. We like to think of ourselves in London as being a fundamentally conservative city in which nothing very much happens. Of course, look out the window, and you see an extraordinary amount has happened in the last 10 or 20 years. I think back to 1984 when the Prince of Wales created a collective nervous breakdown in the architectural profession of this country by objecting to one 18-story high building that was never built by Mies van der Rohe. Look out the window now, and you see a forest of 1,000-foot-high skyscrapers. How has that changed? What's actually allowed what was seen as being insanity building high-rises over London to seem normal? It's not based on the electorate in London voting for it. I mean, in fact, Ken Livingstone did actually have an agenda when he was elected the first mayor to make London a world financial centre, and in his mind, I think that also involved making it look like a world financial centre, which is the high-rises. We do have some of those technocrats. I think that Peter Hendy's contribution to London is extraordinary. I think we now have one of the best mass transits. The head of transport for London for a number of years. We have one of the best mass transits in the world now. It's a fantastic system which has technologically advanced as well. One of the ways that London has changed is City Appa. It was a big idea. It was a very big idea. So I suppose I'm ogging with myself as usual. So I suppose really what lingers in my mind is how is it that one creates a democratic consensus for the big ideas? But just I could pick up. There are good guys with good big ideas and there are bad guys with bad big ideas. New York wouldn't exist without the big idea of a grid. And there was a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that chronicled the history of one block of that grid. When it had no value in the 17th century and was given to slaves and it had gone up and down. And one of its biggest rises was in the 60s when you had the painters who were doing great big paintings and they could suddenly use that stock. So it had gone up and down. So you need the fix, the framework of the big idea. Big idea Central Park. The only three dimensional park in the world. Probably the only park that was created for the social good. All the other parks, Royal Hunting Grounds, which eventually were shared by everybody. Those two big ideas, just pick two, New York wouldn't exist without them. What would London be without Regent Street? Big ideas. And the underground, that's the biggest idea of all. So you either go forward or backwards. And it's the mix of the two, the small initiatives. So it's not just, but it is planning for future generations. It's looking beyond. I think that's very encouraging in terms of some of the things that are happening around us now. What is interesting about the points you're both making is where do these ideas ultimately come from? Some are good, some are bad. And how do you test them? I mean, one of the reflections we've been making recently with Fiddup, my colleague at the urban age, is we've been observing for 10 years this extraordinary pace. You've talked about it. We've all talked about the pace of change. The numbers and the amount of things that happens in the hour that we're speaking here are unheard of. I think it's probably fair to say that most of the things, 95% of what is built out there in India, in Asia, et cetera, is probably spatially fragmented, socially disruptive, and environmentally negative. In other words, most of that which is built out there is problematic. There was an occasion in Shanghai where the city architect looked out of the window with us and said, you know, probably 25% to 50% of everything that we're building now, that I'm commissioning, will have to be torn down because it actually will become socially dysfunctional. So the question for me about the ideas to you, to Norman, to you, Dan, also, is there a problem ultimately, or how do you deal with this problem, of speed? In other words, is there a benefit, maybe, of having a little bit more time, maybe not too much time, you're impatient, I know, in terms of just knowing whether we've got things right. I mean, if Andrew were here, I would say you've set up a National Infrastructure Commission. You're going to commission thankfully things that go beyond political cycles. This is a massive political innovation in this country. All good news. How do you know what you're getting right and how do you, in a way, test that? And I was wondering whether you've reflected on that because, you know, you rightly said you have good and, there are good and bad ideas. How do you deal with that issue of time? I think that if you, if I think of the experience in places like Barcelona or Bilbao, there was a very conscious gathering of talent. In other words, you were not just getting people because they were influential names in the society. You were getting them because of their skills and the fact that they could make a contribution and they could put the collective interest above their individual interest. So, and a tremendous amount came, I think, from the architectural profession where you had individuals, I think you've come across it, who would use their skills not in designing, and of course, this is what your cities program is about right here at LSE. So, I think it's the quality of the team, the collective, and that being chosen for its expertise rather than- My question was, how do you deal with that in a city that's, say, Lagos, Contrasa, Dakar or something, which is moving at a pace where perhaps you wouldn't have that maturity of, I don't know, checking, bringing in the right people. But you know, Ricky, when Engels wrote the condition of the English working class, he was actually in Manchester in a city which he described, which does sound not unlike Contrasa or Lagos now, in which he looked at multiple degradation. He looked at things happening very quickly. He looked at things being destroyed. I don't think it's the first time in the history that things have actually changed remarkably quickly. I suppose there are intellectual and architectural and planning fashions as well. I think if we look at what's happened in the West, we've gone from a period in the 1960s when a technocratic approach allowed us to think that big things could work. Many of those things actually did work. The British New Towns, for example, I think now look like a very solid achievement, the sense that you might actually have technocratic adventures, and there was a loss of nerve. Culture's learned from one another. London built the world's first underground railway. Paris didn't do very much for another 40 years and then built a better one. And finally, Crossrail is better than that. Hausmann and Napoleon III saw what Nash did in London and took that to Paris. Things do go up again. Isn't it the bigger picture? I mean, isn't the transformative effects of a society that is being emancipated on a huge scale where educational standards are going up, access to all the basic necessities, shortcuts will be taken. And it's almost like the opening address right at the beginning. The city in that sense is a little bit like a manuscript that's added to, things will be done in a hurry. They won't be good enough. They'll be knocked down. They'll be replaced. New technologies will come along, improvements. But I think that there is a certain inevitability. Perhaps there are things that you can try and slow down. But if you're exposed to that, it's like a juggernaut. It's got an energy and a dynamic of its own. What is interesting on that note is your last project, the drone project, which in many ways is a piece of infrastructure effectively that you've been thinking about together with Jonathan, which frankly, it's very difficult to see what the downsides are. And in that sense, it could actually leapfrog a whole series of otherwise inevitable transformations, investments from the wrong people, terrible roads which will cut off communities, have negative impacts on. How does one get that story there? Now, a few days ago you were interviewed by Rowan Moore, a journalist, critic, writer in The Guardian and The Observer, and the headline was, I don't know if you ever saw the headline, and coming from Northern, there's a sort of quite amusing, says, I have no power as an architect, no power whatsoever. That was the headline that came out from you. Now, I think there's an interesting connection there, which is there's the leadership issue. You have to have the people who are ready to listen to assemble, as you said, the right team, but you nearly denied the role of the creative mind. And therefore, the ability of people in power, and this is, if Andrew were here, it would have been interesting to ask him that, but we can all reflect on that together. Where does beauty come into this? How do you convince someone that actually spent more money on that beautiful bridge in France is actually worth it? You can't say you don't have power, come on. Well, you didn't finish the quote, you see. So I'll finish the quote for you. Right, okay. I said I have no power as an architect, absolutely no power whatsoever. The only power I have is advocacy, because I can't, if I try to convince somebody that they should do something and they should do it so it's beautiful, and it wouldn't necessarily cost more. But if it does cost more, then it would be justified. I can't go into my back pocket and pay for that. I can't pay for the project, so I'm not commissioning it. I'm not a developer. And maybe that would be a more interesting position to be in. Maybe to be like a Nash in the past who was an architect's stroke developer and could put his money where his whatever was. I mean, I made the point that I can't direct. I can only persuade. So I think that if with my colleagues we have a passion and a belief about what we do and how we do it and why we should be doing it, then sometimes we're more effective than others in terms of persuasion. So it's the power of advocacy to be able to try to demonstrate that you should do it that way rather than that way. That if you spend a little bit more money doing it this way, you will have a better environment or you will save some energy or you will have better internal communications. And that will result in greater productivity. Power is a very slippery thing. A developer is actually usually not an individual. A developer is usually a group of people who manage to assemble a pot of cash in a site and deal with a panning system. My experience of developers, they're led by individuals who are prepared to take massive risks. With other people's money. Yes, well, they always have the power of advocacy. Exactly, exactly. But usually the developer will say, of course there are exceptions. But they're probably putting their own financial lives on the line as well. So they're taking a gamble. There's a downside to it. What only hears about the success stories. And that's true of any walk of life. But the idea of the individual... It's interesting you're both... Wait, finish that because I want to go on. No, I mean, I think you're right. Of course there are. And there is that strength and that leadership. But more often there are multiple levers. And usually the individual will say, well, it wasn't me. It was them. I was told to do that. I couldn't do this. And so the sense, I mean, good things emerge from groups usually. Of course you have a very strong client down the road. Before we begin to open up questions from the floor, I just wanted to take this discussion and connect it to what was talked about last night here. Saskia introduced this extraordinary statistics, which she then referred to as practically chronicling a monstrosity of what was happening in the sheer numbers of square meters, square feet, that are owned by foreign investors in different cities. Not that in and of itself was just the problem, but that was having an impact on the fine grain effectively, on the porosity, on the architecture of the city as we know it. And I think one of the things that we have all been reflecting on since that moment, since there is this extraordinary need in the world. We've all talked about it. You showed it with your sort of statistics of what's happening in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. There could not be a moment in history where we need more valuable fundamental infrastructure, fundamental as in the drone project, fundamental as in the hospitals and health centers. And you've been involved in many of those. You didn't have time to talk about it. Why is it going a bit beyond your developer conversation that money is not being channeled into exactly this meaningful necessary infrastructure? What is happening out there whereby the investment is not happening? Is that a political problem? Is that a risk averse problem? What is that? I never think it's about money. I think it's about attitude of mind. That's as simple as that. And if you take it out of infrastructure and you use the metaphor of making a building, there are some countries where you will pay a price for doing something. They'll do it once, they'll do it well, and that's it. And there are some countries where you'll never get it right and in between there are some countries where you do it two or three times before you get it right. Which is the cheapest, most economical, high-value route? It's doing something, doing it well. That's value for money. It may be a higher or lower first cost. In my experience, it's never about money, it's always about attitude. Some of the best buildings that I know are essentially low-budget buildings. Since Stephen's war broke, Ren was on a shoestring. There were very, very few things he could do. What he did, he did very, very well and just sacrificed himself. The big church in Covent Garden is a great barn of a building, has a super sort of facade. I think it's not only about money, but I think that when investment flows around the world, development becomes a simplified process. It depends on people who are sitting in a bank in Shanghai understanding the proposition of development in London or in Mexico or in Moscow and that tends to default to simple basic solutions. And those things simplify cities. Cities are not simple things, they're complex organisms, but if you start to simplify them too much, then they start to lose that sense of essential urbanity. Right, let's use the last 10 minutes to have some questions. Being the London School of Economics, there's a well-known tradition. We ask you to say who you are, wait for a microphone and don't make a speech. Ask a question and what we will do is take four or five of them and then ask Norman and Dan to, in a way, respond to those that capture you. So lady over there on the right-hand side. My name is Susie Hall and I work at the LSE. I'd like to ask what kind of political courage and optimism is required to take or reimagine social housing in London seriously? So we'll just go through a few. Gentlemen there, third row. So yeah, say who you are please. My name is Merlin Fulcher and I'm with the Architects Journal. I'd like to ask Norm Foster, would you support Jeremy Corbyn's idea of people's quantitative easing if that could be used to direct infrastructure investment towards projects for social good? And also projects like your own Estri Airport, thanks. All right, right in the middle. Gentlemen there, I'll have you take a few more and then... Jason Sayer, Architects Newspaper. Cities such as Oslo have since become car-free, juicy London and other European cities following the same suit. I didn't fully understand that. Could you just repeat it, sorry? Oslo City Centre will be car-free in 2016, according to their current mayor. Juicy London and other European cities following the same path. So in terms of car-free. So way up at the top over there. Philip Abarth. I was interested in this comment about the idea of planning and doing things by improvisation, maybe multiple times or doing them properly once. Can you comment on how the speed of infrastructure development might have to change with situations of crisis or emergency such as, for example, the influx of refugees into Europe at the moment? Dan, you want to touch on a couple of those questions? No, I'll leave it to Norman. I'll leave it to you. No, it's okay. Andrew. Well, taking the question that was specifically directed at me on quantitative easing, I'm not the person to ask about that. I'm not an economist. So I guess it's intuition, and I'm not a historian, but I think there's a link between inflation printing money and living outside your means, whether that's a nation, a household, or an individual. I just intuitively, and I don't think there's a connection between the need for affordable housing and quantitative easing, which is a euphemism for printing money. I would have thought that with such a land stock within the ownership of local authorities, that there could be a mechanism whereby a certain proportion of that would be sold at a rate which had conditions attached to it in terms of the way it would be priced on the market and another proportion that would be made available under a different system so that you could use the regulatory powers of those who sell the land to sell them with strings attached so you could address the issue at every level in society. I mean certainly we do have a housing emergency. It's a similar problem in other majorly successful cities. If you talk to people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, they have some of the same issues that we have in London, which is unaffordability, people buying housing as asset classes, and that might have something to do with quantitative easing as well when you have zero interest rates, then of course housing as an asset starts to bubble. But there is something really disheartening about London and the UK in general, which in the 1960s could build 400,000 houses a year for a smaller population, about 50 million then. We now have 10 million more people and we simply can't manage that. It's partly about the market. Market housing does not really prosper on building large numbers of housing units quickly. It depresses prices until now governments have actually also discouraged the local authorities to build more and I would certainly think that that needs to be altered. I think there is a, if we can manage transport for London to do one of the best mass transit systems in the world, there's no reason why Britain can't use some of those techniques and skills to address its housing crisis. Just on note, do you see London becoming more car free over the next generation years? Absolutely. I mean, you see a generation for whom car ownership has not become a necessary thing in a big city. And we're now at that tipping point where, I mean, the conflict between cycling and motoring is now at a critical point. But I think that as cycling becomes safer, it starts to take more cars off the road and I think we're at a tipping point there as well in the way that London functions that way. Maybe also the car may morph into something else. It may change its nature. The ability to perhaps with robotic potential for cars to be nose to tail like a convoy to reduce accidents. The drive becomes leisure time. The car is on autopilot. It's following the same pattern which has evolved in the airways, in the aerial highways. And that could give greater saturation of a road system. It could change the perception of suburbia. It could avoid more road building programs. And the aircraft themselves could also change. The largest regional carrier in America, which is Cape Air, in terms of its orders for new aircraft has gone totally electric. I'd like to try and capture and maybe conclude with some thoughts on the tool. Let's call it social questions that were framed a moment ago. When Norman, you and I talked about inviting you to speak at the celebration of the event, said, well, what might we talk about? And said, you know, design infrastructure. And I think you became very interested in the notion of social meaning of infrastructure. And, you know, you talked about that. And in hearing what you said and also what Dan was talking about in terms of the reactions to some major events in the 19th century, in the mid 20th century, or as has been referred to now, you know, a very real problem. Do some ideas actually come out of these shocks? Do you need something to completely throw things around, to change the paradigm, to question what you're doing also to consider what the value of architectural infrastructure is? And I think it would be interesting to just reflect on that, Dan. Sometimes you do think that there are very few basic ideas about the city. It's high density or low density. It's, let's say, fair or it's control. There's always this duality between the two. There are, I think, speed has impacted. I also keep going back to one of the ideas that Saskia Sassen had in one of the earlier sessions of the urban age, where she came up with this idea of sittiness. And maybe these urban agglomerations that we see everywhere have greater or lesser degrees of this sittiness quality. So the edge of Brazzaville is a place in which rural Africans have migrated and live on market gardening. So it's urbanism that's actually bypassed industrialization. Does that have a quality of sittiness or not? I'm not sure, whereas in the Western world, perhaps we start to leech out this quality of sittiness as cities become oversimplified or the grain loses. Maybe we lose that and maybe the most essential quality that we need to really nourish and nurture is sittiness, whatever that means. So what is the infrastructure of sittiness, Norman? I think it's all the, in a way, I suspect, if you wind back decade by decade and you had a gathering like this, there will be a certain rhythm to it. You would hear the same elements being protested and the city would be responding by changing, by morphing. Some areas would be going up, some would be going down. I remember with Elena, we traveled to China to meet with artists who, some of whom are household names, Ai Weiwei in the Royal Academy, totally unknown, then saw the areas that they had led and transformed, rather like Soho, and then saw that those areas became popular, gentrified, 9-11 in Beijing, and they move on, colonize, it's not affordable, everybody's protesting. They move on, they find another place, and it's that kind of those waves, the chance things. I mean, the ideal city, I mean, in London, I don't think it's ever been better than it is at the moment, all the problems not withstanding. It has an extraordinary vibrancy. For different reasons, other cities, Madrid is an extraordinary city, Berlin is an extraordinary city. They all have their own qualities and identities, and thank God for that, there is a there there, there are differences. Well, it's clear, just by referring to these cities and their different characteristics, there's much more for all of us to do, just in response to the question about the refugees issue, we've spent the last five hours with many of the colleagues sitting here in the front rows of the urban age, really saying we don't have an answer to that question. What are cities in Europe and elsewhere doing, even though, as the mayor of Washington City reminded us, it's the city that's the front line. It's national policies can fail, international policies can fail, but it's the city that has to take it all in a way. So I think that is an issue that generations of urban age and the students who are here and fellow city makers will need to take into account. But in the end, it's the environmental and the social meaning of infrastructure that needs to be understood. And I think tonight, Norman, you've given us great insights on that. Diane, Norman, thank you very much.