 Everything about who I am, I think, has been formed by my love of cities. What I really am concerned with is the vitality of cities. And I'm concerned with artist's place in keeping cities vital. How do we keep cities exciting and vital? And how do we fight against gentrification of cities and homogenization or what I call the suburbanization of the urban environment? Every generation starting from ancient Greece, you know, all the way through to the surrealists, you know, to the impressionists, you know, have come to cities to be with each other, to cluster, and they love the anonymity of cities. Every year, for example, 12,000 young people graduate from art schools, all of the United States, and they move either to New York or they move to California and L.A. or San Francisco. And the good news of that is that artists are helping to revitalize so many neighborhoods. So what is it that artists really do? They go into deindustrialized neighborhoods. They do all kinds of exciting community initiatives in terms of housing, in terms of children. They make it safe again. They bring in small cottage industries. The neighborhood becomes trendy, fun. Everybody wants to be who artists are. They think that's cool in him. So artists are working not just for themselves but for the society. At this moment I'm thinking about this issue because I'm watching the deterioration of cities in my estimation. The problem is that artists are increasingly being pushed out of inner cities. And the problem is that it's very difficult for them to compete in the free market economy as they help to make neighborhoods more fabulous and everybody wants to live in them. They're priced out of those neighborhoods. When artists begin to be pushed out of neighborhoods, they're actually the indicators of all these other groups being pushed out. So if artists are being pushed out, elderly people are being pushed out, small businesses are being pushed out, people of diverse backgrounds are being pushed out. I'm looking for models. What are models that could be created to create the city of the future and keep it vital? We have to agree about what we would like future cities to look like as a species, you know? And in my estimation what we want cities to be, we want them to be the best of humanity.