 Thank you, real heroes. You stayed all the way to the end. There was this one line from President Lyndon Johnson. They asked the guy and they said, you know, you went through the civil strife, then Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King, you went through all these protests. How did you survive? So he says, you know, every time I was in the midst of drama and trauma, I would look at myself in the mirror and I could say, Lyndon, things could be worse. You could have been a mayor. So on that note, I am actually really excited to be here, not because it's the right thing to say. I come from Albania. I don't know how many of you know where Albania is or have been? A few. What is the connection between Albania and Ethiopia? We were once fellow citizens. We were all part of the Italian crown from the mid-30s until the early 40s. So, you know, coming to the rest of my country was quite a surprise. So I am very happy to be here and thanks for the invitation. Now, you know, small countries, I was looking at my friend and I know we'll get from before we did pension reform when I was doing minister of labor and social affairs. But I looked at his budget of 3.8 billion euros. I was like, oh my God, if he is poor, what are the rest of us? But I wanted this topic to be about three things. First, the most expensive and the most difficult infrastructure project is only 10 centimeters. Second, that there are some unusual aspects that we haven't even touched. Maybe someone touched yesterday I heard, but pretty much we've ignored a part of the population. And third, we need to do more tristorming than we do brainstorming. We sort of brainstorm ourselves to death and sometimes we need to try things in practice. Let me illustrate. Coming from Albania, being a very, very small country, we always try to make our name in the world. You probably do know Mother Teresa is Albanian. So there's a saint. You probably didn't know that the Blues Brothers, John and James Belushi from the Chicago House of Blues, are also Albanian. And what you definitely didn't know is that the guy who invented Viagra is also Albanian. So never underestimate small countries because you never know what the type of creativity that can come out of there. But I needed to put the jokes because everybody was falling asleep. All right, but I wanted to share a story about maybe what small countries can do. And sometimes being in between, we're Eastern Europe. We share a lot in common with many African countries, particularly with Ethiopia. During the Cold War, there was a fraction here during the communism days that belonged to or adhered to the ideology of Enver Hoja, which was our psychopathic dictator. So sort of our influence in the world in terms of exporting furious political thoughts was very well known in this country. But I think there's a few sharing lessons that we can all learn. This is what, when I was 10, this is what the country looked like. This is what downtown of the city looked like. You can see the city limits. You can see all the fascist buildings. There's a few fascist buildings I've seen here. And you can see the Chinese-inspired historical museum. And so all these famous architects, right, like Mussolini, Nikita Hrushev, Mao, they all leave a mark in the city because most politicians always envy doing some other job. So they all want to be architects and leave a mark rather than deliver speeches. So I grew up in this city and it looks great because it has no cars. And not because we were environmentally friendly. It's because during communism, public private property was forbidden. So no one had a car. So we were car-free by default, not by choice. And then what happened is this. I became mayor. I look at the roof and I say, I look at my job description. The city quintupled in less than 25 years. So it started as a city of 200,000 people. Now it's a city of about a million people. So it doesn't only happen in big countries, it also happens in small countries. So one city alone has one-third of the population and 50% of the GDP. And you can imagine this is what an afternoon looked like during communism, where everybody just walked out and about and tried to have a sense of intimacy and meet friends and family in the city. And this is what the epicenter of the city looked like. So you put the dictator there and in a lot of authoritarian regimes, you know, the epicenter of public life in the capital is the guy in charge. And if he's dead, it's his monument, right? Question is, some called it inpatient capitalism, we call it casino capitalism, what happens then? Then the epicenter of the city, where we feel, can we please go back one more, right above it? So this was my first day in the office when we took this picture. And this was basically us replacing the monument of the dictator with a new trophy symbol, with a new status symbol, which was the car, the automobile. Why do I call it a status symbol? Data. We measured that people did 800,000 trips a day with 200,000 cars, out of which 400,000 were less than one kilometer. People were basically going from one coffee house to a coffee house with a car. People were going from to the barber shop with a car. People were going to get their nails done with a car. And we sort of said, why? Why is it a status symbol? Well, one, because of poverty. You came out of communism, you went to Germany, to Leipzig or some other country, and you brought a Mercedes, mostly to show your neighbor that you made it, not necessarily to go places. So all of a sudden we started becoming, it's true. We started becoming junkyards, mostly of cars coming from other countries. So then this becomes a value system, as a mayor, as an urban planner, as an architect, as a designer. Do you aspire a city where every poor person eventually gets a car? Or do you aspire a city where even rich people eventually get on a really nice bus? So if you answer that question, then you start designing with that value in mind. So then we said, we asked the focus group, we said, what is the most important thing in your life? 10 out of 10. The most important thing in my life is my child, my children, my family. I bet you can do this focus group in any country. The answer will be the same. So we said, would you put your money where your mouth is? And then the group said, please explain, Mr. Mayor. Would you put your money for your children more than anything else in your family budget? Oh, please don't offend me. Of course, this is no brainer. Of course, I spared nothing for my children. And we said, well, let's make a little calculation. And we calculated that on average, all the people in the focus group were spending on average 30% of their income on the car and only 20% on one of their children. Now, wait a minute. They were shocked because they said, someone changed our values without asking our permission. Between the purchase of the car, the parking of the car, the fueling of the car, the mechanic and the insurance, they were spending more than they were feeding, clothing and getting books and sending a kid to school. Something abnormal. And the reason why I said that some of the most difficult infrastructure projects in a city are 10 centimeters long is because that's the space from here to here. This is where our dogma, this is where our stereotypes, this is where our stigma, this is where our values. So we can change that. And then we ask people, so look, why don't we do an experiment? Instead of this, in the same downtown area, we will do this just for one day. People were furious. He said, he's a communist. He's trying to take cars away. He wants to bring communism back. So we lost the PR war during the morning. But in the afternoon, the kids went back and the kids started saying we had so much fun with the bikes and the roller blades and the roller skates. Can we do it every month? So these nagging parents were saying, okay, fine, once a month we can tolerate it. And then we started doing almost every week until we ended up doing the largest pedestrian space in Eastern Europe, in a country or in a capital that has a budget less than 100 million euros. So for many who think this is an infrastructure project, this is mostly a mentality change project. Then we started thinking, look, we have this great designer, Stefano Boeri. He came and became our chief architect, wanted to do something out of the ordinary. How great to plant 2 million trees by 2030, but we couldn't afford it. And then we started getting creative and trying to think, are there others in a society that we are not using? In the previous bet, we won the bet because of the kids. We thought, wait a minute. As the politicians, we're constantly advised, worry about your taxpayers, worry about your voters. Because if you can keep both happy, and 50% of them, you get reelected. But wait a minute, is it only about the next election? Or is it also about the next generation? And if we won battles that most mayors could not have won, with the help of kids, kids do more. So then we said, look, we can't afford 2 million trees because we're a poor country. But what if every kid planted a tree for their birthday? And what if this became the biggest game in town? It didn't only become the biggest game, it became a game changer. Because once you have 100,000 kids and everybody's planting a tree and you're completely uncool if you didn't plant a tree, then it really starts a frenzy where people can get their GPS location and start planting a tree. And all of a sudden, a very poor country can afford to plant over 100,000 trees by individuals alone and not the banks or not the funders or not the philanthropists. So we started this craze and we try to do it every year and it's been a lot of fun. We're in the middle of the craze now and it's working incredibly well. Now, why do people throw trash on the street? Why do people urinate on the street? Why do people spit on the street? You know why? They do it because they feel they don't belong. In a place where you don't belong, you do this. You don't do this at home because you belong at home. But once people put roots, not only metaphorically, but physically, then the city becomes theirs as well. And I think once every family has joined together to plant a tree. And then people say, no one is going to bike. We're Albanians, we're from Eastern Europe. We're not Dutch. Well, the Dutch weren't big bikers before the 70s. The mayor of Groningen received death threats. So it has to start somewhere. And this whole alibi that, oh, we're not Dutch. Of course, we're not anything until we become something. And again, kids become a huge powerful force for change and it also helps us design. But kids are great about marking territory. And once kids mark the territory, no parent on SUV will violate it. I can speak about schools, but I don't know my time is running up. I wanted to share one final little story why building schools like cathedrals, a bit like Medellin is important. And having schools not as places where you park kids for six hours a day, but as community centers that you can use around the clock, particularly in countries where public space has been deserved and you can only rely on the public space that has been spared, which is most of the schools. Now, this is a story when we try to build a park, a playground. I landed here this morning and I asked my taxi driver to take me around the city just to look. And I said, where are all the kids? And he said, oh, we don't have kids. I said, well, you grew by 13 million in the last five years and they're all 30 now. There must be at least five if they were all born five years ago. Oh, he said, no, no, no. I didn't mean we don't have kids. We just don't have them around. So the kids are there somewhere. We just don't have them around because they're not the epicenter of public space. So on year one, we said, look, this is a young city, the youngest city in Europe, age 27, median age. What are a third of the population being children do? They're nowhere. So we said, why don't we build the largest playground in the Balkans? Once we went to setup shop and start, then we had a huge uproar, huge violent protest. This is not a serious mayor. We need streets here. He wants to build playgrounds for children. And I said, look, I promise this when I got elected, you know, get over it. If you don't like this, then vote someone else. But they took it very seriously. So in 100 days of building this playground, and this became an iconic case study, we had 78 protests. And we were adamant. They said, look, for the first time, we're not going to do things because of elections or because of voters or taxpayers. We're going to do it for a constituency that never gets a seat on the table. So they destroy, we rebuild, they destroy, we rebuild. And then in the end, we will have a referendum. So we had a lot of fights, and this was the referendum. And it goes like this every day. And then the elderly come in because they also want to be as grandparents looking after the kids. You know, the grannies are needing, and the grandfathers are getting some sketching up on gossip and getting some exercise. And then people are doing yoga. And when I said in the very beginning, we should open this space and say, we don't do yoga. We're Albanians. We're not gay. What is this? What type of mentality is this? And all of a sudden, yeah, it does happen. Even in the most conservative, backwards, former Eastern European communist mentality, then people do yoga. No one has a problem with it. And then people do sports and so on and so forth. But then we figured out, what if we do this acupuncture? Well, we put these playgrounds in every, just like in Egypt, in every free space that we found that hasn't been occupied, or that we can kick Mercedes's out that before occupied the spaces. What if we did this acupuncture? Why do we call it acupuncture? I don't have the money to do the whole city. I don't have the money to, I'm done. I don't have the money to put stuff everywhere. But what we can do is like this needle of acupuncture. You can touch your nerve. You don't get a full body massage. But if you touch enough nerves in a body, you can get the whole body to tweak and the whole city to tweak. Thank you very much. And I look forward to catching up later.