 So, glad to be here, I arrived yesterday in Heathrow and the immigration officer asked me, why are you here? What are you coming for? And I said, well, I'm coming to the London School of Economics for a lecture. And you are an architect. Yes. What does economy have to do with architecture? I wish he was here tonight because if I'm able to show, if there's any relationship, I might be able to explain if architecture and planning will be able to manage to steer urban growth. And I'm going to use the next 15 minutes to show that eventually the clues and keys for planning an architecture to do so is in the voids, in the bones, and in the lots of cities. So let me start with a short story that might explain this, not just an anecdote. I started studying architecture in the mid-80s in Chile, the last five years of Pinochet era. And despite individually, you had to take a position against or in favour, the majority of course against. The school I started in introduced me in the kind of sacred laws and the artistic integrity of modern architecture. Simultaneously, we were trained for how to translate those sacred laws into reality. So it was a mixture between fundamentalism and pragmatism, what I got as an education, as an architect. That education allowed me to do buildings, mainly institutional buildings, actually just one, which is my first building, the mathematics faculty in 1998, which allowed me to be invited to Harvard to teach. So when I arrived at Harvard, I found a complete different universe of policymakers, lawyers, economists, engineers, and I didn't know a word of the language they were talking about. And more worrying is that when I tried to talk about what I was being trained in, this laws of form, they didn't got what I was talking either. I was lucky enough to find the translator, actually two translators. One, I'm a transport engineer that was studying his masters at the Kennedy School of Government in public policy, Andres Yagobeli, who said, well, why don't we do something with social housing? In his engineer mind, do something meant a company and build according to the market laws. In my architect's mind, do something meant a book, a seminar, an exhibition. So we went because of him to the company. So I found myself in these meetings, and the second translator I mentioned that even though I was not able to speak the language, over time I was able to understand the language, the second translator was form-making, design. If anything, if there's any power in design, is the power of synthesis. So all these discourses that were linear through architecture allowed to be synthesized in a simultaneous proposal on paper at the time. Well, I still do paper, not many computers, but anyhow. So because of that capacity of design to translate forces that are outside architecture into form, we were able to move forward and do social housing. And actually this is the first project we did back in 2003. The point, we had actually just two points while doing social housing. The first one is that when there's no money, and evidence showed that the middle-class family could live reasonably well in around 80 square meters, when because there's no money, and this is the case for the majority of the world, what the market does is two things, displace and reduce. So what can be built, in average, in the world is around 40 square meters, and the market interprets that as a small house. So the only thing that we did was, okay, if 80 square meters is the target, but we can only build 40, what if instead of doing small houses, we do half of a good house? This in other words is incremental housing. So when you don't have enough money, focus on what's more difficult first and allow over time people to take over, in this case, channel their capacity to build. This is not new, it exists since the 70s, but maybe the only new thing was not even half of a house. Many times when I'm interviewed, the journalists say, well, the guys are doing half of a house, no, we're doing half of a good house. So the question is, what does it mean good? And eventually we have to redefine what is good or quality design. When you frame the problem as half of a good house, instead of the small one, the key question is, which half do we do? And the definition of a public policy, that's what I got from my former partner, is that let's do the half that a family won't be able to do individually. And we identified five design conditions that belong to that difficult half. That was one point. The second point, which is connected to what I just said, redefine what is good. Is that, in average, what we understand by good design or a decent housing project was, well, let's make them as big as possible, try them to build as good as possible, and let's try to make them beautiful. And we replace these three Bs by just one V. A good design is the one in which a housing unit gains value over time. So it should be the opposite of a car, that every day goes down in value, and by definition, a house should grow its value over time, which what we understood is that it's an investment. We identified five design conditions that, interestingly enough, the same five design conditions that a family cannot modify or do on their own. If we did so, then housing, which is a huge amount of money being transferred from the public, good, from the public money into a family asset, at least in properly oriented policies, which is the case for the developing world, then housing may be an investment and not just a social expense. And in that case, a tool against poverty and not just a shelter against the environment. So with these two points, we went to build our first project, and because the economy proved to be right, families were kept where they had their jobs and their networks, they began the process of completing the second half and tip to achieve a middle class standard on their own right away. Encouraged by the fact that we were able to show photographs and not renderings. If it's not built, it doesn't count. And that's why the picture of something that was built according to the rules of the market, no exceptions. Then we tried to do many other projects, and given Chile goes, the equivalent from Moscow to Mumbai, we were able to test very different geographic conditions, and eventually this has the potential to be a case study for many places in the world, which allowed them to build in Mexico, for example, or the last project we did after the earthquake on Tsunami in Chile in 2010, where the scheme of half of a good house is actually very literal. But we found out that, okay, if the houses were not good, the city around was not in much better shape. So let's try to move beyond to tackle public space, infrastructure, transportation. The problem that we encountered is that even though we had access to people in the position of power, even to the president or ministers or mayors, or people with money, whenever you wanted to explain that this is exactly connected to what Joan Kloss was saying, why should I care about the city? I mean, I'm worried about difficult issues, important issues. The city was not the case. So in 2006, I happened to go to the Venice Biennales very last day, and somebody said, look, go because there's an interesting show. Had no idea what they were talking about. It was Brudez Biennale, and actually the numbers that were there, I took out my sketchbook and began to write, not to draw, to write, which gave me a different language, the capacity to establish a dialogue with decisions makers. A year after, it was this kind of thing. As soon as something is in the economies, then the decision makers and these in places like Chile, well, maybe this thing matters. So we were able to enter in meetings, at least with an agreement that it was important to deal with this kind of issues. The importance that we were trying to communicate is that the cities and these exhibitions or these articles and all the research that began to appear in the world, it allowed us to communicate this double condition of cities, of being magnets. So good news, the more people in cities, the better, but simultaneously being a threat if we don't do them well. Well, we actually framed it as the three S-menors. The process of urbanization is going to happen at the speed, at the scale, and with a scarcity of means that it may become the sticking time bomb if we don't do it properly. And information like this came so that at least we could explain the relevance of the issue to the decision makers. Like, we will need to build a one million people city per week with ten thousand dollars per family. So then the challenge for decision makers began to at least make sense. If we don't solve this kind of equation, it's not that people will stop coming to cities. They will come anyhow, but they will live in very bad conditions in informal settlements in favelas and slums. So how to, what may be some clues to solve that equation of the one million people city per week with ten thousand dollars per family. And here comes another very interesting moment. Six weeks ago, I happened to be in Chile on a Skype call on the other side of the screen. Joan Klos, Paolo Baratta from the president of the Venice Biennale and the Burdette. I was very amazed that there will be a kind of agreement so that whatever is discussed in the Abidat 3 can arrive to architects. Otherwise we architects just care about things that nobody else but architects care so that the agenda is marked with relevant issues. And eventually we may offer some examples for how to tackle the issues that were just presented in Joan Klos presentation. But what remained in my mind, and I guess it came in his presentation, but I actually wanted to include it not just to tell to you, actually to tell to myself and to us in the office that not to forget about the big picture, but if you put a gun, let's say, in my head and say, okay, about this issue that is very complex. What do we do? We have to choose things. I would choose these three. The first one, as he just mentioned, that take care of the voids in the city, the space in between the buildings. Make it at least 50 percent. Design it in such a way that the black parts here gain value. Fine, but anyhow, the black thing that grows in value. In other words, I mean is the majority, he asked, who's economist? Who's an architect here? So for architects, get the nollie right. So this is in the end what needs to be very upfront and very direct. Because if it is not, of course you can guess, this is Manhattan. This could be in Islam. So get the voids right, because the voids, the public space are the kind of things that individual action cannot guarantee. And it's not just the quality of life, because the cities are measured for what you can do in them for free. Public space then, by definition, is redistributive. I mean, you can improve quality of life if your public space is right. But in addition, depending on the form and the proportion, then the value of the black goes up or goes down. So get the nollie right. Actually, in between the black and the white and the nollie, we found something that was also very important, particularly in the housing projects, that intermediate collective space in between the public and the private, a level of association where social agreements can be maintained. This is not beyond 20, 24 families, 150 people, more or less. And this is important when the governance in the cities is not good. Going back to the issues that Klaus was saying, public, well, he mentioned in the three leg thing, extremely important, get the rules right, get the finance right, and get good design. What I'm talking is just three clues, I think, maybe a clue regarding design. So the voids, the plots. Well, since there are not many economists, for us, reading the book of Anando Lesotto, The Mystery of Capital, the clarity and the definition of the private law, which is the biggest difference between the formal and informal city, and why then value may grow or not. I don't know if mentioning the Sotto here, it's a disaster for us. It was a huge discovery, might be that for economists naming Calatrava or Pelli or Vignoli, it's a good thing. I think they suck in any house. So I don't know if the Sotto for economists is equivalent for Calatrava in architecture. I hope not, but for us, it was very important to discover that the clarity of the private law was crucial in the channeling, I'm talking about steering, individual capacity. And finally, the bones. By the bones, we need the infrastructure, the physical frame to channel individual performances. So that's why many years ago, and for many years, we thought it made and didn't make any sense. But thinking backwards, now we discovered again these drawings of an aqueduct house, where the infrastructure and superstructure is defining the law, is also helping the structural growth of families. Some of the things that cannot be done individually are structural for finance scenarios. So eventually that frame may be helpful for channeling individual actions. In any case, the point was this, slums and favelas, we believe are part of the solution and are not part of the problem. Instead of being an incapacity to provide decent shelter, it's just the contrary. Despite not having any formal aid, people are able to provide themselves with shelter. Discussive resource there is coordination, not money. So instead of resisting that informality, if we are able to channel that enormous capacity in the right direction, then we may succeed. I don't think we are going to ever solve the one million people city per week with $10,000 per family, unless we channel people's own capacity as part of the solution. So I guess that individual performances like this, if coordinated properly by structure, by design, actually if this is the way to define the voids and protect them from future invasions, then eventually we may get something like this. And somehow this is the way or the clues for which I may answer the question of the immigration officer about how planning and design may steer urban growth. Thank you.