 Picking up on collision, but also picking up on some of the questions that were discussed in the previous panel I'm going to make a kind of pitch for design because I think design is a very important part of resolving these collisions and You know, they say in today's world if you're confused It just means you're thinking clearly and so I'm going to try to contribute to your thinking more clearly So urban design and planning or architecture are clearly practices and disciplines I believe that I engage to the public planning, especially you can't talk about planning without the state I believe So what does this shift in the present culture of city development mean for these disciplines when acute? privatization in and off the city development that is becoming frighteningly evident and you know This was I think the topic of the last panel and in an interesting way I think because in fact privatization of city has always existed historically But the scale has increased dramatically from the single family building to now entire chunks of the city and Sometimes entire cities or more accurately what become gated communities And so I think I think privatization private capital all of that is not a bad thing Of course, we need that but its implication on form I think is increasingly becoming Disturbing because I think that's really the heart of the problem because today the obsession across the world of And especially in sort of the developing economies of building a global city and pandering to global capital Which is beginning to bully our cities by making its arrival on any terrain frictionless is the problem This is rather different from developing a city that is premised as many people here have sort of surfaced on nurturing civil society creating equity in terms of access to homes amenities and all of those good things Clearly the former or the global city Imaginary is propelled by what called impatience of capital and is articulated as the aspiration by private interests such as multinational corporations developers and Increasingly the state itself the latter which is about civil society is a voice that emanates from the academy the non-government sector foundations institutions labor unions and all other formations where Capital acquires patience to reside and grow in more inclusive ways this model and this image you see here is Amravati Which is a new city? Designed by Jurong, which is a consulting firm from Singapore and you can see the reference to Singapore Which is you know beginning to appear on our terrain So this model which I believe has been exported from the North American landscape of deep democracy to landscapes Now of severe tocracy finding themselves finding its way back to deep democracy So from China Singapore coming back to South Africa South Asia and Africa through large multinational urban design and planning corporations so What is interesting and this map which shows you two worlds? It shows you a world where the walls are being created where 73 percent of the economy resides with only what seven percent or 13 percent of the population and The other world which is where we are part of which is 86 percent of the population So the majority world with 27 percent of the economy now What's ironic is we are taking the paradigms from that world and trying to implant them in this world of the majority world Where the population is incredible and our economies are well take on a different form Let's say we've already discussed how the informal economy doesn't get mapped and can contribute I don't know what even registers on that official sort of Statistic so this approach and practice is pandering to capital in unprecedented ways again What I call the architecture and urban form of inpatient capital highly brittle naturally It has this operating logic as does capital which is intrinsically Impatient and assume some form of patience as I said when it resides in other forms Universities or enlightened governments. Thus they create the best forms of architecture in that situation. So even you know yesterday there was a reference to Unfilled or unused homes, etc on the outskirts of cities So if you look at Hudson Yards or even the center of London The problem is that the damage is done It was impatient capital that built a city form the fact that it's not being occupied. It doesn't even matter any longer That's not patient capital is just the impatience of capital has damaged the form of that city or that terrain now in this whole Argument, I think there's a great chism between planning and architecture and urban design and I think your urban design Or some formation of practice which bridges So what we need to resolve these collisions to create an inclusive city is a bridge practice Which I think we are all on the edge of but sort of teetering at the edge only because we have more than one foot in our Own disciplines and so this diagram shows you city as big architecture, which is how Modernism sort of defined it and then the city as socio-economic landscapes And how do you kind of resolve this and I think bridging the site specificity of architecture and the abstraction of planning? I think becomes a real challenge So urban design or some formation of practice that is a bridge practice one that's implies flows and is open It's an open practice that is plastic reconfigures itself depending on the problem the agents the actors the Constituencies it has to influence is the call of the moment plastic enough to even configure and reconfigure itself between Build form and the broader ecologies of the natural landscapes in which it is situated. So I think for me Inclusivity is like sustainability. It's a big basket. You can put everything into but so what I'm going to do really is Not use that rubric as much But share with you three thoughts that I think we should be cautious about as we sort of move on The word transition has been used a lot in the conversations And so I think what I want to point to is what is the design of transitions because even though we talk about transitions? Finally what we are coming up with is absolute solutions and these absolute solutions make compelling images But that's not the answer. So I think we have to decouple the phenomena of transition from absolute solutions and begin to think about how you design transitions and the design of Transitions can be clumsy It doesn't have the cohesion which compelling absolute sort of solutions have and I think that becomes an interesting Question and so for example our Prime Minister in India proposed gift city I mean every big we talk about made in India But every building there is photoshopped out of some other terrain But this is the kind of absolute image and we saw absolute images of housing projects Which Gautam Ban others showed those are complete pieces of city and the incomplete city I think resonates very deeply when you kind of see this So also I think when we talk about And we can have a discussion about this is you know letting slums just become part of the formal city overnight That also is an absolute solution however compelling it might be and I think we've got to manage this balance and I think we need other forms of discipline Inter-disciplines that can actually do that But in fact it is in this contradiction to the robustness of the appropriate and good practices of urban design where I think Without being an absolute it can have sufficient Specificity to operate on the ground in that sense this sort of urban practice Operates across scales from a piece of street furniture to large-scale Territorial operations, but with a humble approach to ground realities and I go back to Medin my friend Alejandro was Petrified what am I going to say about Medin again because he said it's can't be the only solution But I want to see something different here, which is the idea of the design of transition So I think this is a wonderful case not only of the alignment of the cultures of professional practice and patronage but the emphasis of drawing another part of the city into what we call the formal city through the Imagination of transportation of infrastructure to create the ground for the informal Let me just use that broadly to get into created into the city. So it's a kit of parts This is urban design. This is a bridge which makes a connection sets up new networks architecture comes last architecture is not the instrument by which Medin was sort of organized or reorganized it came last it was the end of The process which is I think very important and for me This is the emblematic image for the design of transitions where there's a coexistent There's a pluralism of some things that have morphed some have evolved But these adjacencies is what design has to evolve has to address and we can't accept this because this aesthetic question is a Problem and I think in an earlier discussion. I think what this was raised about the informal Transportation, it's actually formal. It just looks informal my friend mark Anjali who's not here I remember him telling me about how he came to others and with the ETH studio and they found a settlement because they wanted to They wanted to map informal cities and they found a settlement and they mapped it But like social sciences, they asked the questions last they first mapped it beautifully Drawings images and in the last day when they actually had the questionnaire They discovered in the first question that it was not an informal city It was a formal city. It was a government project It just looked like an informal city and so this question of aesthetic I think between the transition and how we designed for it And what is the aesthetic of transition and the absolute Absolute solution which has a completeness is I think a huge problem that we have to Address so in all this discussion, I think the one thing that seems to characterize The practice of urban design or any of this sort of formulation of new practices Is clearly the coupling of design and contestation conflict Contestation where designers have to interrogate and clarify the context in which they operate and to imagine a precise range of Potential interventions for urban design and planning for it is the space in which design Intersects with its broader social political and economic implications and the humanities more broadly is where I believe we will move closer to solutions So I think you know again, this was raised yesterday in the in the housing Panel, you know, what is a planning regime that might even accept this? that's a really interesting question because autocracies often are fixed on on Absolute solutions and democracies don't have the patience for Transitionary solutions because the time of an election cycle and so I think we have to be strategic How we we bring these ideas to bear into the political sphere, and I don't know what the answer is I just want to put that on the on the table The second question that I want to sort of bring up is flux of course representing flux is a massive challenge and How do we sort of do that? You know my current research in India? I think we are building a thesis that India is 40 percent urban for six months of the year and 60% urban for the remaining six months Which means it's 300 million people who are moving back and forth and the the connection with the hinterland and the internal Territories that sort of feed these cities is mind-blowing and so flux is something we have to grapple with We have to find ways of representing and discussing and I think flux occurs at many levels It's this flux of people moving its flux in the way the profession thinks and this is a diagram that shows you You know that the oscillations we as professionals have between outcome oriented and process oriented kind of impulses And I believe I'm optimistic that we are settling on a flatter kind of curve there because now the intersection of design of ecological thinking because of climate change which has become imminent but also the kind of nuanced readings and understandings of participation of Governance I mean Edgar articulated this very beautifully in his sort of Presentation is all coalescing and we have to seize this opportunity if we want to collapse between Outcome and planning and process oriented and I think that's where we have to head as a profession as a as a sets of professionals who can work together and I think this thinking about flux is Naturally propelled by two critical phenomena the first the massive scale of the informalization of our cities and in that urban space That is constructed outside the formal preview of the state and it I think here the temporal landscape can play a critical transitionary role in the process of Dealing with this flux that this planet is going to experience in more frequent occurrences because I think it implies the transitory rather than the transformative or absolute and I think given this overwhelming Evidence that cities are a complex overlay of buildings and activities in one way or the other In And temporary why have urbanists so been focused on permanence and I think we have taken permanence as a default condition in our Imagination which takes up to these absolute solutions and the last sort of issue. I want to talk about is the temporal This is a diagram which shows you how today There's a reversal between building and the urbanization process rather than what we had traditionally which is a whole totally different sort of paradigm And so I just sort of want to Just say in closing That I think urban design is about these spatial possible how these spatial possibilities play out and I think what I want to sort of You know talk about just you know, I'll take five seconds Is that it's about how these spatial possibilities play out to influence the quality of our lives Economy society evolving culture and the broader well-being of the planet I think the choice is between us collectively being thermometers which measure Temperature or being thermostats that can also alter this condition And I think finally we need both these and for design to be instrumental It has to be socially engaged elastic in its intellectual configuration, and I think that's what will make it relevant for the future Thank you very much