 The former Mayor of Washington, DC, Anthony Williams, who presided over a great renaissance of our capital city in the United States. Please welcome Mayor Anthony Williams. Thank you, Darren. Thank you, Niels. And thank all of you for having me to all the excellencies who are here, the dignitaries and all of us who are not dignitaries. I want to share with you my experiences in Washington, DC. Personally, as Mayor of the City of Washington, DC, share of you my experiences as an individual and my experiences as a Mayor. As a Mayor, you're not an expert. You're not an official prognosticator of any of the fields that we're talking about. Your job as a Mayor to take a vision and transform a vision into reality. You know, there's the old Japanese proverb that a vision without implementation is a daydream and a lot of implementation without a vision is a nightmare. So your job as a Mayor is to try to link those two together. And I came to my job as a Mayor as a bureaucrat. People affectionately say I served in a number of different governments around the United States in economic development and in finance and the federal government, the state government, the local government, then became Mayor. And it gave me that variety of experiences, I think, a unique perspective on our nation's capital at a very, very difficult period in our nation's capital's history. When I say our nation, I'm speaking of the United States obviously. Now you might ask, how can a Mayor of Washington, D.C. presume to say anything about a huge, glorious mess? And I say that as a compliment, that's the city of San Paolo that sprawls on and on forever. That's defied all attempts at planning. Here I am standing as a former Mayor of Washington, D.C., which is one of the best or worst examples, however you look at it, of planning in the world today is a specifically planned city. It didn't really exist before the year 1800. How can I come and presume to say anything about the city of San Paolo? How can I, as a former Mayor of a city of 68 square miles and around 600,000 people, and that's being generous, presume to say anything about a city approaching 20 million? A city in metropolitan region approaching 20 million people. Well, there are some perspectives, I think, that are relevant here, and I'd like to share them with you. One, I would direct your attention to our friend and colleague in the urban age, Diaspora Bruce Katz, who is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of the colleagues here at the urban age, who has done a masterful work called Region Divided. And he expanded on that to really talk about divided cities and regions in the United States. And he talked about regions and cities in the United States divided by income, by class, and by race. Now, you know one of the most divided regions and cities in the United States? Washington, D.C. So as Mayor of Washington, D.C., I presided at the center of a region struggling to make its way in these global circuits that Saskia talks about, right? But that was a region that had the most knowledgeable set of workers and elites in the United States and a city struggling with one of the highest rates of illiteracy in the United States, one of the richest populations in the United States, and the highest concentration of poverty in the United States. So that's number one. And number two, a city that, as I translated out of my role as finance director CFO, we call it Chief Financial Officer for the city, to Mayor of the city, and this is apropos for the occasion, as we've heard with the previous speakers, was struggling with insolvency and bankruptcy, a debt of around $600 to $700 million that we've managed to now turn into a cumulative surplus. And I think that there is a relevance there. I think a lot of us, when we hear the previous discussion, I think all of us feel like the old saying, in my country in Seattle, right after the Vietnam War, there was a huge contraction in aerospace and defense, and the Boeing company, which is a big manufacturing firm in the aerospace line, went into a severe contraction. And so the city of Seattle and the region heavily dependent on manufacturing suffered a similar fate. And at the depths of this recession, there was a sign on I-5 outside of Seattle saying, well, the last person leaving Seattle, please turn off the lights. So I think after listening to that discussion, I think a lot of us are prepared to say, well, the last person leaving our cities, please turn off the lights. I would like to tell you as a mayor of a city, you know, you have a lot of different jobs. A lot of us are tempted as mayors of a city to build a beautiful city. This is an elusive dream. I don't think there's any such thing as a beautiful city. I don't think there's any such thing as reaching an ideal, but I do think, very emphatically, there's something such as a resilient city. And just in my time with the urban Asian and, you know, my own personal reading and experience, we've seen cities that have been devastated by terrorism, by bombing, by hurricanes, and by floods, and these cities have survived. So yes, as Betty Davis would say in the movie All About Eve, buckle your seatbelts or in for a bumpy ride, this economy is going to be bumpy, and I think we're only at the beginning of the beginning, and we don't know the effect it will have on our cities. I can't emphasize that more, but I would also emphasize that our cities are resilient and it's our job as mayors to use our explicit as well as our apparent authority to rally our city and to make sure that our cities and our people prevail in these very, very difficult times, which brings me to my first point, and that is when we talk about our cities and the impact that our cities play, mayors have very, very different roles, a number of different roles. They are chief custodian of the city, they're the chief engineer of the city, they have all these different roles, but the most important role that a mayor has is as the, I would describe it as the defender of the public realm. The public realm is making sure that wealth passes from one generation from another. The public realm is obviously and conspicuously our public spaces. The public realm, as Enrique Pino Losa would describe it, is making sure that the public interest is not subjected by the private interest. That's what the public realm is, and defending the public realm means very importantly and urgently balancing the inclusiveness that must be our cities and the order and the settled expectations that allow that freedom and that mobility. It's a very, very tricky subject.