 Welcome to GSAP and welcome to Avery to the Dean's lecture series. I'm Weiping Wu, the director of the urban planning program here at GSAP, and wanted to introduce our speaker. And with us today is Professor Richard Senet, who is really one of the world's leading thinkers about the urban environment. And through his talk, you will get to know a little bit of his work. He just told me that he has unretired and now working for the United Nations Secretary General's office. He'll speak about some of his personal thoughts and ideas about ethics and about climate change. And Professor Senet has had a rich career. I read that he was a music genius, but that had to give up that career and has really written about social life in cities, changes in labor, and social theory in 20 and plus books. He actually had time to also compose three novels. So you can see, I hope you'll see a little of that in his talk, his multi-talented career. He founded with Susan Sontag and Joseph Broski the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s, he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work. He has taught occasionally at Harvard, of course a long time at NYU. He began to divide his time between New York, especially in New York University and London School of Economics since the 1990s. Many of you also know his significant other, Professor Saskia Sassen, and many of you are saying this is really an intellectual power couple. Saskia will join us a little later tonight. So in addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT, to Trinity College, and Cambridge University. And among many awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University. So let's welcome Professor Richard Sennett. Well I'm going to talk to you about what I'm doing in my unretirement, which is to work with the UN on a project on cities and climate change. I've worked with the UN as a consultant most of my life, but this is a new challenge for me. I know about cities, but I'm doing a quick study about their relation to climate change. And what I thought would be useful in the next 45 minutes or so is to talk to you about some of the issues that we're grappling with. This isn't going to be a talk in which I tell you how to solve problems of climate change because that's not a realistic way to deal with this overwhelmingly complex subject. But I thought it might be illuminating to you to know what are the kinds of problematics that we're trying to puzzle through. And I've listed six of them here, and I should say I'm speaking individually. I'm not speaking to you on behalf of the UN. If I were speaking to you officially on behalf of the UN you could sleep. So, well let's not go there. So the six issues I really want to deal with, run through with you, are the first of which is why, since we know this is happening, people are in denial. I want to show you some of the research that my team has been doing about what the present condition is of the impact of climate change in cities. I then want to just look at an issue which is explained to you, an issue which is bedeviling us, which is what does it mean to talk about a climate refugee? And that's both a legal and an urban issue about migration. Fourth, I want to just sketch very briefly the problems in thinking about how to deal with climate change democratically, whether that can be done. And the fifth, which I think for you as architects might be the most close to home, is about the building strategies that veer between adaptation and mitigation and how to get those strategies right. And the last thing I'd like to talk to you about is the kind of cultural changes that I think have to occur in the way people use cities in order for us to address this problem. So these are huge subjects, and I just want to give you a kind of map of the territory in which we are addressing them. I'd love to get your responses to this very depressing subject, but it's one that we all have to deal with. So let me start with the issue of the states of denial. One way to look at this is that there's this kind of simple-minded way of thinking about climate change, which is if we got the facts out to people, if they knew how bad it was, people would be mobilized to act. And that is unfortunately very unrealistic. That denial is a much more complex phenomenon than simply a lack of knowledge. And I thought I'd just say briefly about two ways of looking at states of denial, which is something, as I say, more complex than simply not knowing. One is something called the Arendt-Cohen thesis, which is that there is an intimate connection between knowing and not knowing about a threatening situation. This is something Arendt developed in a very malign book called Eichmann and Jerusalem, and the notion that Germans really knew that if six million people suddenly disappear from a set of three contiguous countries, it's not that you say, oh, where have they gone? You know that something horrible has happened, but simply because you know that it's horrible, you begin to deny it. And it's a paradox that the more you know that something is life-threatening, the more you're in denial about it. And that paradox is elucidated by my former colleague Stanley Cohen at the London School of Economics in a book called States of Denial, which it's out of print, but if you can get a hold of it, it's really worth reading. And it's about the way in which important knowledge produces its own other, its own negative. So that is one way of thinking about this. It's that knowing and not knowing are inseparable from each other. For Arendt, of course, this was why she, one of the reasons she was not an Enlightenment thinker, because that's a very un-, it's much more like the position of someone like Heimann or of Isaiah Berlin, that enlightenment produces always its counter-enlightenment. So that's one way of looking at States of Denial. The other comes from Pavlov, who was a 19th-century psychologist, Pavlov's dogs, you know about that. And as a sidelight of what he thought of about conditioning was what he called a rabbit-wolf problem, that whenever a rabbit sees a wolf, it plays dead. And Pavlov explored this, why it is that when an animal is confronted with mortal danger, it behaves as though it's dead, it's totally passive. It's, in modern terms, you know, any deer that's paralyzed in the headlights will stand absolutely still waiting to be hit, as though somehow it's not going to happen. And that's an alternative and much more Freudian way of looking at why a state of denial comes about. The result of either way of this is that there is, for me, and I think for many of my colleagues, we worry about the dysfunctionality of crisis language. There are some conditions in which when a city or a country declares a climate emergency, that that can be a way of paralyzing people, thinking like, it's so overwhelming, there's nothing you can do. And so in terms of the rhetoric of dealing with climate change, we are having to think about how to deal with this problem in a way that doesn't arouse either the Orentian or the Pavlovian paradox that the graver it is, the more pacified people become. So that's one thing. You're asking me for an answer to this. If I live long enough, ask me in 10 years. I want to go through briefly with you the present condition of the relation between cities and climate change. And the first thing is, as they say in academia, a very robust and I would say cast iron prediction that my team has done of what in 16 years the energy mix in the world is going to look like. Oh, so clear. Renewables, right? The future? By our projections, the most energy sources that will come from renewals are 14%. Nuclear, which is a very, very ambivalent although non-polluting in one measure form of energy, comes, there's a bit of it, but it's this figure versus this and this and this that we should take into being. These are, as I say, these are projections that in our view, this is the reality if we continue in present trends. And that translates into over 2.6 degrees of global warming. So that's the challenge of this. Here is, I don't know how, I've given these slides to your programs. If you can put them on a website, there's nothing proprietary about them. These are the, another way of looking at the same sort of problem. And what you'll see here is that these are very fundamental contributors to emissions. You can see that these are sort of basic activities which are going to be very difficult to alter. Now, getting closer to cities, since the issue of fresh water is so urgent to us, these are 30 hotspots that we've located near cities where fresh water is in danger. In the U.S., I'm so bad with this stuff, this is Phoenix and this is all of California. But you can see that there are fresh water issues in Alaska and Patagonia. In other words, these impact on cities, but the loss of fresh water is not simply located in them. And that's an important point to understand about why cities are going to face a water crisis. Because this non-urban sources of water for the water tables are far away, are drying up. I want to say just a word about deforestation, which is, this is a map that we've made. What's important about this here is that deforestation in the Tundra regions, in Russia, is going to release a lot of methane, which is a gas that is much more potent than CO2. And one of the reasons we're worried, this is not as horrible as here, but one of the reasons we're so worried about this part of the world is that there's an enormous amount of methane that's trapped under the Tundra and that's going to be a contributor to warming. This is also, the brown is in between the green and the red. This is a horror I'm not going to talk to you about. But you can see that Canada also has a very serious problem of deforestation. And that is because as climate warms, the patterns of plant activity can be radically transformed. These are plants that were adapted to Arctic conditions. They're not going to be adapted to conditions under a different regime. Just to give you an idea of what this is going to feel like in your country, in our country I should say. This is, you can see here for instance, that the, just to give you an idea of New York City for instance, is going to feel like Jonesboro, Alabama. I chose it because it's virtually uninhabitable for five months a year. I could have done this another place. But you can see that what we're talking about is something in which there is a vast shift in the amount of habitability of these cities. And it's why we're worried, for instance, that Miami could become a kind of near-tropical city, and its infrastructure is not built to deal with those kinds of needs. One thing, as in a technical way that I want to explain to you, and this is another way of looking at that, this is what summer temperatures will look like in the world in about 25 years if we continue on the present path. And that is that much of the so-called temperate world is going to be extremely hot, and the belt around the equator is going to be virtually impossible for people to inhabit. And that gets me to, oh, I want to say one thing about this. It's important with this, there is a kind of geographic common sense which is wrong about this, which is that the farther north you get, the less there is a problem in the development of hot spots. And the problem with that is that's a very kind of linear thinking. Because of past dependent irregularities, many places which are cold will in fact heat up. This is, again, I took for the U.S. a map of how that's going to be. It should be, for instance, that this should be a real hot spot. This should be a very hot spot, but that's a bit of a solo. And there will be more of a hot spot than parts of Texas, relatively to its past. And that is because you have all of these past dependencies of things like water, changes in the Gulf Stream, very important, and so on. I'll show you just another one of these. This is what it looks like in the northeast. It's no news to you that New York City is going to get pretty hot. But look here in Maine, or up here in an upper New York state. So the notion that sort of populations will simply gravitate to more temperate zones is something that is not really supported by the science we have. Now I want to talk to you about flooding, because that's what everybody always focuses on when they think about the effect of rising sea levels on cities. Here's a map as a prelude to that about the growth of coastal cities. All those little blue dots are places which are in particular in particular danger of flooding. And that's in our country, that's New York and Los Angeles in particular. I'll show what it looks like in England. This is what we project based on current rates, that is with no more of these past dependencies of current rates of flooding. The blue is areas of Britain which are likely to be flooded and to become less or totally uninhabitable. That's quite a shrinkage. The only bright spot in this picture is that this after four degrees of warming, I'm a dual citizen so I say this too about Britain, this chart makes me enormously happy this picture because it means that all the politicians in my other country will have taken say to canoes and that many of them will drown in trying to conduct the business of our nation. But that's, this is a pretty accurate map of what four degrees of warming would look like in Britain. So that's the happiest image I show you tonight. Let's see. So that is the kind of summary of where we're at. Here's a big issue that we're dealing with and that is the status and reception of climate refugees. And what's a particular concern to us is desertification and refugees coming to cities. I'll show you first what the desertification means. We're focused on Africa in this. This is a general map of how we get displacement in Africa due to natural hazards. And just to drill in a little more, I hate that phrase. Let's look at the case of Somalia. Already, already now you can see that drought is driving more people to displacement than conflict in security. Somalia is a very violent country. And already drought is a basic cause of displacement and most of that displacement is from rural to areas to cities. This I don't know is so interesting to you. This is what we're having to deal with, which is when somebody moves to a city, this is what we need, the distribution of priorities for us. And that's mostly food and things like sanitary napkins, toilet paper, just the basics of life, but this is not probably interesting to you. I wanted to show you what desertification looks like. And here's a dry well in Somalia. A well that's dried up. Here is what that well looks like. The well used to be up nearly to ground level. They told me it's just about here. And that's producing a situation that's desertification. That's what it looks like. And this has happened in the last five to seven, eight years. Here's a problem for us. This is a ring of desertification within which we expect this to drive people to cities. Now the problem is that the cities that are contiguous to them, as in Bamako and Mali and so on, are also suffering from desertification. Remember when I showed you that slide about freshwater spots in the U.S.? So that means these cities, even some of them that are temperate, have lots of trees and so on, are losing their water tables because of this far away desertification. The issue for us is where people are going to go. And our best estimate on this, on this ring of desertification in Africa, is that by 2050 we will have between 65 million and 75 million climate refugees that have to get out totally. And most of them will head north to Europe. If you think about the upset, the drive to the far right, that a million and a half Syrian refugees caused in Europe in 2015. Imagine what, let's say be conservative, say only 40 million actually try to get into Europe. What kind of political upheaval that would be? You could do the same thing in North America. Much, I'm not working there, but much of Mexico is going to become uninhabitably dry. And those people have one place to go, which is somehow to come here. So to me, this is given the way people deal with refugees. As we've seen, I don't want to say anything about the U.S. because it's too depressing. But in Europe, the trauma that a million and a half caused to move people to the far right, this is an almost unimaginable catastrophe. What we have, I should say one other thing about this, that this is something I owe to my friend Naomi Klein, who has written a great deal about climate change and power. This is an example of what she's talking about. This is a settlement cut in two by the Israeli security fence. These are Berber tribes down here. They have no resources to deal with desertification. Whereas on the Israeli side of this, they're gradually doing just what you should do. They're planting trees and so on. So the fact of desertification is, as Naomi points out, is a political fact of inequality as well. And that's what it looks like. That's what it looks like. The other thing I should tell you about this, this is a map one of my kids did a couple of weeks ago. When people are displaced, it's very rare for them to simply go back home. This is what happened to Katrina. You can see it had a big splatter effect and people don't tend to return, even in the case of Katrina when the city is so-called fixed. And that's even more the case in desertification because it's impossible to return. So the issue for us, let me just go back here, is this. The law of displacement, the international law of displacement is that you are a refugee if you have a well-founded belief in persecution if you return to the country. If you have that under international law, we have very pitiful resources, but we do have some to aid people who are classed as refugees. But desertification doesn't fall under that legal rubric. They're treated as migrants, and migrants in international law is a question of choice. Put in terms of climate change is you could dive thirst. You could choose to do that because there's no political regime threatening you if you went back. So one of the issues we're working about is to revise at least in the treaties that we have some control over to change the distinction between migrant and refugee. And that's climate change obliges us to do that. It's not persecution. It's a well-founded belief that you'll die if you were to return to the place where you are. So that's an issue that throughout the UN we're trying to see how we can at least... Our resources are pitiful about this, but at least there's something we could do if we make that change. Now, I'm very long-winded about this. I hope you just stay with me. The next thing I want to talk to you about is the question of whether climate change in cities can be addressed democratically. It's a huge issue. And what I mean by democratically is the kind of practice that I've done in the past, which is community-based bottom-up activity. And the question of time which arises in that is the following. That most community organizing, I don't know how many of you have done that, is slow. It takes two, three years to get people to really talk to each other in a way that's productive. You have to be very patient as a community organizer to listen to a lot of junk, you know, because people vent. Not in Yorkers, but you know, other people have a tendency to vent, which makes meetings very long. But it takes time. And the problem from what I've shown you in the second part of this talk is that we don't have much time. We have between 12 and 14 years before things really go out of control. And so there is the problem about democratic bottom-up community-based approaches to climate changes, partially that you're caught in that framework of time. And then there is a question of scale. Again, if you've done any community organizing, you know that a solution for one community is not necessarily the one where its next door neighbor would follow. And in, you know, that bottom-up democracy produces a kind of irregularity, not irregularity, but it produces a variety of results in dealing with the same problem. Now with climate change, in dealing with something like lack of water, varying approaches to the rationing of water, when it's rationed, or with gasoline, who has to observe which days of not driving and so on, cannot be locally based. You need a comprehensive strategy in order to make any effective moves in climate change. So that both for issues of time and issues of scale, there is a problem about whether we can deal with climate change democratically. I only know this in Africa, in first-hand experience, to get people, for instance, to deal with brown water issues in Egypt, where you would think that wouldn't be an issue, takes a lot of, it just takes a lot of work and it's very inefficient. Am I not doing this right? Is that better? Okay. Okay. Sorry. I don't speak very loudly. So this is a problem we're grappling with. It's a universal problem, but it is particularly a problem in places which are not used to bottom-up democratic dealings. And that leads me to you, which is the relationship between mitigation and adaptation as building strategies in dealing with climate change. And I'll explain to you the democratic to-built link as follows. Let me start this. In principle, mitigation is sort of making things less dire, and adaptation is dealing with realities that you can't control. Let me show you two extremes of this. Hello. I'm going to show you two berms that were proposed for Hurricane Sandy in a way to deal with storm surge. One of them is Bjarke Engel's necklace proposal, which is to create this berm in Lower Manhattan, which is, you know what a berm is, just a pile up of rubble. You can even use landfill for some of it, although I don't like that, but he does. But it's basically that you build the berm as high as possible in order to deal with storm surge and the sucking wash that is as dangerous as it proved in Hurricane Sandy as the initial impact. The sucking wash has, in a way, it's really quite interesting, it has more dynamic power than the impact wash for reasons that I'm not going to go into. Here's a contrast to it done by colleagues of mine at MIT, which is to let the surge hit Manhattan, but to break the sides of it by dealing with the areas in the Jersey Flatlands and up the Hudson and East River. So that after the storm, it's basically berms, underwater berms that are then planted with reeds and other aquatic plants. So that the land can renew itself after the surge, but you don't try and break the surge. And this is a more adaptive strategy, whereas Bjarke is one of, if I can put it unkindly, of building your way out of climate change. I'm putting that too crudely, I mean he's thought it out pretty well, but that's the impulse behind it, that you can build your way out of climate change. And this, I think, is a very dangerous way of thinking about mitigation. What we're interested in, and I'll tell you why, here is probably the best storm surge barrier in the world. It was built in Rotterdam, I'll show you how it works, quite beautiful. It was built in Rotterdam, it took 45 years to build, it's an amazing piece of construction, but 45 years is not the time that we have to deal with this. And more, like Bjarke's proposal, it requires a level of engineering which is incredibly expensive. So that is one of the problems about building your way out of climate change. You can do it, I mean, in a way, but not in the time that we have available. Here's another problem about mitigation and time. This is a proposal to green up Phoenix, Arizona, to cool the surfaces which are now heat absorbing tarmac. And this proposal, if we started today, would be finished and would work in 30 years. And again, we simply don't have the time. So there's a lot of thinking about adaptation, about building in a way which is more adaptive and quicker. Here's in Amsterdam, for instance, an alternative way of dealing with storm surges. This is a house that is literally a floating house, it's on pontoons, rather nice. You don't try and break the surge, you try and deal with it in a more modest way by this kind of building. It's the same spirit as the MIT berm, which is that you're working with climate rather than trying to combat it. Now, in my shop, what we're doing, I'm going to tell you about goo. This is something called cool seal. And what it is, is it's a way of coating streets with a water-based titanium-infused material so that the streets turn white. Why do we do this? One of the great sources of heat increase in cities is the tarmac. It's dark and it absorbs heat and it holds it all night. So what we're experimenting with with the cool seal people is how to literally to finally realize Corbusier's aim of these white cities. And coat all the surfaces with this reflective water-based goo. The water-based is important in this because it means we don't use more oil and it's cheap. And the thing about this kind of mitigation is that it's quick, it's simple, and I'll show you this LA they're dealing with this. In New York, here's another version of a Bronx rooftop, which is applied, cool seal goo applied to it. In a way the idea of this, if you've ever seen all those white Greek cities painted white, that's the same principle. But here the idea of heat repelling that's applied to the building is applied to the urban fabric. So this is a kind of mitigation work unlike what Bjarke wants to do, which is long, expensive and for which we have no time. This is something that can be done shortly. Here's another version of, I'm very happy about this because the cool seal goo is applied with a, do you know what a bioswale is? It's a plant retaining, it's like a cistern with plants floating on top. And such water as there is is contained in the bioswale so that you're both dealing with heat and you're dealing with water shortage at the same time. And these plants, which are sabbaticus, anyhow these plants tend to be cleaning of water, sabbaticus, it'll come to that probably. I'll give you another example which is probably more familiar to you of the same kind of repellent. And that is by making green terraces. This is Singapore. This to me is the most dramatic in, you know this with, what's the name of the architect in Milan who does this? Do you remember who, what's this? Boerri does this. This is a kind of massive Boerri. This is the Oasis Hotel. It's 18 stories high and it's planted with a kind of ivy that keeps it very, very cool. So what I'm saying to you about this, just to go back here, is that what we need are more solutions in mitigation that are of this sort. My own belief in this is that this kind of mitigation can be practiced democratically. And indeed lots of the adaptive strategies I'll show you when we deal with culture can be practiced democratically. There are other kinds of addresses to climate which have to be autocratic rather than democratic. Water use for instance, or limiting the amount of time as the people in Delhi are doing now that people can be in cars, you know, where if you have a different license plate out or even, you can drive an out or even date. That's autocratic. Nobody has to vote for that. That has to be imposed. So this is, it's a very complicated issue. We're all for democracy. But the democratic practice has to be one which is scaled down and it can't be sufficient. I want to talk lastly, and then I'll shut up, about cultural changes. And first I want to say something about behavioral change. I'm sorry about, this is not the greatest graph. These are various things you can do from changing light bulbs to anything that has to do with population control is verboten by the US and also by the Catholic Church for the UN. It's just an issue we can't touch anymore. The other thing about this which is off the scale is to use non that would really help is to go car free. I want to say something about that since pedestrian equals virtue for many people. If you're in a city like Mexico City and you live in a barrio and you're employed as an industrial worker, the factories where you're employed are typically an hour and a half to two hours away from you. If you say to people, you should go car free, give it up, that means you should do without work. By driving, I'm talking about an hour and a half to two hours. The problem with this comes back again to an issue that Naomi Klein has touched on, which is to deal with the problem of transport, we have to deal with the problem of breaking down capitalist industrial concentration. Small factories, which means a different kind of capital financing and so on. The maquiladora, you know the kind of huge assembly plant is one which is climate super unfriendly, but to make it friendly you would have to deal with, you'd have to rethink the industrial process. What I want to say to you about this is that the whole push for pedestrianization is something that only makes sense in privileged places. That is, this is what you really say should walk or bicycle to somebody who might spend four hours a day walking or bicycling to work is blindness. And that is a problem that we're facing in the planning that we're doing about this. There are no, there are public buses, even in a place like Bogota, which has a very good public transport system. Most people still have to get into cars. So the issue of pedestrianization is an issue for privileged places. And that's why we have to look at other forms of behavior change for those places. One thing that I have been very interested about is a whole question of diet. And I got into this because one of the things that we're going to have to do to deal with methane is have fewer diet which doesn't use cows. Cows fart and shit waste products that are full of methane. So, and as I told you before, methane is an extremely polluting source. So we're trying to think about what ways people, in terms of individual behavior, they might have, they might reform. I wouldn't say that everybody has to become a vegan, but close to it. And we're actually doing, we've done this forum for the UK, what these changes would, I'll show you another one here. This is a contrast between when the UK was on the verge of rationing in World War II what that diet looks like and, sorry, and what I should have reversed these slides and what a sustainable diet looks like now. So this is something that would make a difference, but it would mean that we'd have to transform farming and it would mean that a lot of the things that we like eating, we would no longer eat, less milk, cheese, so on. The ham sandwich disappears, so on. So that's the seriousness of this. But that is something that actually in, it's something we talked about with people in Delhi and in Mumbai that somehow they, since a lot of the patterns of consumption they have are near vegetarian, how the habits of cooking might be ones that could be more universalized. So that's that. The last thing I wanted to talk to you about and the most overarching part of cultural change doesn't have to do with individual behavior. It has to do with dealing a basic trope that enabled both capitalist development and imperialism for the last 250 years. And that is the idea of the cornucopia. That is that mankind is capable of an endless amount of productivity given control over nature. There's a book by William Lease called The Domination of Nature written in 1982, which was the first signal about, to me at least, about the notion that the idea of endless, that nature is an endless source of material abundance, was something that was linked very much to the problem of capturing the peoples who had that nature, that is the imperial part of it, and of industrial manufacture, which transformed things that seemed of no value into things that seemed like value. As a cultural problem that we face now is a problem of reversing that notion of the cornucopia and living with less. I think for Americans this is the notion that say you could only visit Amazon once a week is not one that immediately springs to mind as something that's culturally possible. But it has to be. And it is part of a whole different way of thinking about how to live a life in which you have less and less rather than more and more material goods. Some of that can be done through socialist means. You can share things like a car, for instance, if you need to try it. But it's even more than that. It's a kind of mindset about the notion that nature is not a source of fecundity. That's a basic change to the way in which development has occurred. Some of my colleagues think that it's actually a kind of recipe for de-development. I don't believe that. I think it's rather a notion that's built into the culture about a kind of puritan minimum that people would begin to accept as normal. That the addition of something is abnormal. And that's the problem of less in cultural terms. And I think climate change is going to force us to deal at this deep level with how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves. That nature is not fecund anymore. It's become something else. I can't give you any policy that we could write that we could get member states, the UN, to agree on that. But I think ultimately that we're never going to be able to deal with the issue of climate until we undo the notion of the cornucopia. So I'm sorry to have talked so long. Do we have some time to chat? So we're going to chat for a bit and then ask me questions. I probably won't be able to answer them, but you'll answer them. Thank you for a very sombering, but also encouraging conversation with us. If I may take this opportunity to ask you a couple of questions first. So, Professor Senet, when you were talking about these bottom-up democratic solutions, for instance, as the Kusil Ghul, it really makes me think about when you first talk about the paralyzing effects of really dooming the predictions. And it speaks to the possibility of small changes and adding up to large and perhaps dramatic effects. And so that is one way. So how do you see that being scaling up? And particularly as you talk about using the current democratic system, which makes me think about the autocratic alternatives that you also mentioned. So it's a very wicked problem in a way that we want to keep everything, or all the good things of certain systems, and not to deal with the innate inability of institutional structure to deal with problems at this magnitude. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on how perhaps some more autocratic actions and how they can be taken in a fundamentally democratic system. Well, I don't think you can scale up infinitely. It makes a difference. I mean, the goo, for instance, makes a real difference. Communities can do it. In poor places, they need, oftentimes we or a foundation needs to buy them the material, but it makes a difference. But my point about this is that the fantasy that we can keep scaling up and scaling up and scaling up and deal with this problem is wrong. That, for instance, what the authorities in Delhi have done is an imposition. People are hurting because the days they can't drive, many poor people can't get to their work. It's something that nobody would choose. And there are many aspects of climate change that if people were given their druthers, they wouldn't choose to deal with. So it's a tension, and it's a question I think, and this is a policy question. What are the areas in which people have choice and what are the areas in which they don't? And we need to work that out. And we have this natural experiment now in the degree, you know, it goes the other way too, that with what's happening in Delhi, which is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. And by the way, you know why it's so bad in Delhi because they burn the stubble from farms and the city is kind of bowl-like. And that stubble creates, burning stubble creates this horrible situation in the city. Some authority will have to tell farmers you're not allowed to do that anymore. If you ask a farmer, would you like not to burn the stubble? No, no, I know how to. So I'm just saying it's got to be worked out. And the fantasy that, the notion that we can do this democratic, everything democratically, is again a very privileged idea. And I think it's the same thing as you were talking about pedestrianization and others. A couple weeks ago, we had a sidewalk lab here, sort of talking about their work in terms of using technology to achieve many climate change goals. And if we look at many cities around the world, it's simply unaffordable for them. So I wanted to also ask you perhaps point us to, the direction that we can think about is, much of the world that will shoulder the burden of the effects of climate change are going to get wetter before they get rich, right? And these are countries that are no longer going to be grown economically in the same way that the western countries have done. So in terms of industrialization, in terms of economic growth, they will also probably, in terms of the progress they made economically, much of it will be wiped out by effects of climate change. So what we are looking at is a world system in which perhaps the poor will get poor because of the particular African subcontinent, sub-Saharan African subcontinent. So in what ways, you know, when the Kyoto Agreement and subsequently all of that, we're talking about how we need to get, or western countries need to get developing countries on board. But really, if we're looking at it, the burdens of climate change will be proportionally shouldered by the less developed countries. That is true. And so in what ways do you see the governance structure, the supernational government, the governance structure has to, you know, work in that direction of allowing these countries continue to improve quality of life but in a way that is more equitable in ways that could... Well, you raised an incredibly important issue in two parts, which is that the, as you can see from almost all of the material that I presented to you, that the brunt of climate change is going to fall on poor countries more than wealthy ones. And in countries like our own, it will fall on poor people more than it will fall on middle class or wealthy people. How to get... See, I don't like the term growth. So the issue is how do you get something that is and proves people's living standards without getting into the whole cycle of what we understand by growth? And I'm trying to think about that, so are many, many other people. But, I mean, there are ways to think this through. The Chinese did an amazing job of raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty at the cost of a quite polluting economy. We need to find an alternative to do that, but we need to get out of... That's what I meant at the end of this, out of thinking that countries who are suffering from inequality need to follow a Western model of development in order to do that. I'm waffling on this because you're asking me a very deep problem for which I, at the moment, don't have any inkling of an answer. So I'm waffling. Great talk. I just wanted to go back to your first slide about denialism. You didn't mention the constructed political denialism. I think you mentioned Naomi Klein and Nathaniel Rich's recent book. Documents that denialism as a political idea has been... It's a new thing. It's the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation trying to give political cover to fossil fuel interests so that they can promote their... The adorable Koch brothers. Right. But that also goes into this concept of the growth paradigm. It's a constructed idea that there is endless growth in this country and that should continue. In fact, we didn't ask for that as an American citizen. We're being fed this idea that that's our choice. And now this denialism has changed from this doesn't exist to you can't do anything about it because doing something about it would lead to world government or communism or something else. But in fact, we're being denied our ability to have a choice. We're being fed this idea that we still want single-family homes and we still want Amazon Prime and we still want all these things, but perhaps we don't. I actually just have a question about if you're familiar with the work of ecological economics, for example, or the studies of the economy, those ideas have been around for about 30 or 40 years now, I think. And I think they've been largely ignored in the mainstream rhetoric. Are you saying that you buy into some of that now? I can't quite hear you. Are you saying that you buy into some of those ideas now with a no-growth kind of economy, right? And it being almost like if you believe in the ideas of equity, for example, you have to redistribute, for example. So are you saying that you buy into that? I am. So I spent a lot of time researching the ice in Greenland and Antarctica and Greenland is a place that's going to change potentially for the quote-unquote better in terms of development. So I was wondering, I know you were talking about the equator and the mid-latitudes, but could you speculate on whether you think there's going to be new cities popping up in the Arctic and what you might want a sort of city to start from scratch to look like? Well, I think the first two are linked. What the gentleman here is asking me about is about 30 years ago there was an economic heresy that rather than growth, redistribution was the name of the game. And what I'm saying to you about, I don't know, I believe that. Personally I believe that. To me the word sustainability means redistribution. It's not very popular with my colleagues, but anyhow. But what I'm saying to you is that now that's no longer kind of left-wing pie in the sky. We're going to have to take that on board because we can't have growth anymore on these terms. We can't milk the earth to have growth. And it's also a problem in Rawlsian philosophy as well, which is how to redistribute to the people who have leased the goods that people have on the top. So one of the things that interests me about that is in terms of resources like gasoline. I believe in rationing totally. I'm kind of an autocrat that way. But I believe that scarce resource like that should be rationed. And it should go first of all to people who need to drive to go to work, for instance. And that you shouldn't be allowed to take a car to go to the local sacks. But that's a trivial example of this. I just think what it's doing is changing entirely of necessity, things that once looked like kind of pie in the sky works. And that goes for what you're talking about as well. Because the notion that you have to grow, the flip side of that is there's nothing you can do about it faced with something that impedes growth like this. So you get this. Pessimism was very useful to the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers are basically their wealth is founded on oil. And they poured billions of dollars into climate science denial. And that was one of the rhetorical tools they used that you can't do anything about it. So what the hell? Just go on as you are. And that's also part of it. I want to come to your question because it's a really interesting one. And the question about this and this is something at MIT we're really trying to look at, which is people have a belief that high tech might provide a solution to dealing with problems of climate change. And they point to a place like Songdu in South Korea, which is a totally metered city. Everything is climate. It's carbon neutral and so on. And it's kind of Orwellian control to make sure that nothing happens with the climate. It is a place of such expense that it's simply the South Koreans can afford it as an experiment. Another one is outside of Abu Dhabi. What is it called? Mazdar, right? These are not solutions for us. So they're too expensive. They don't really work. Mazdar is a kind of failure. People don't want to live there. So what we've been looking at is very low, the equivalent of goo, of cool seal, different kinds of technologies which are cheap and which are usable by people themselves in simple monitoring devices so you know how much energy you're using every day with food, the same sort of thing. But very, very low cost, low tech solutions rather than looking for a kind of high tech fix on the model of current smart city thinking. Of course that high tech is because it's expensive. It feeds into a whole network of capitalist technology stuff. Cisco Systems is now advertising itself as climate friendly but it's friendly at quite a cost. So when I think about this, if I were to try a new city I would look at what's the simplest technology I could use to put together a new kind of settlement so that people could communicate with each other and so on and monitor their resource uses and so on. And that technology is not, it doesn't make anybody any money. So that's what we're trying to do at MIT is look at that kind of, I don't know where it will go, but at that kind of way of building different kinds of urban forms. One of the other things about this which is very striking to me, as you know from my work I really like experiment, architectural experiment. But I've just been, any of you know a book by Bernard Rudofsky called Architecture Without Architects? Does that open book people read anymore? It's about simple urban forms that people built without anybody telling them about stress vectors and so on. Those are very ecological. Greek villages are very, I think they're pretty, but ecologically they're very sensible. And I think there's a lot of, as I said, I don't like saying this because I like architectural experiments. But a lot of them are simply useless in dealing with climate change. There's a lot to learn from so-called primitive ways of building in order to deal with it. This is a cool seal is a good example of that. That's basically the Greek house, as I was saying, taken from a house and put into the fabric of streets. There's a lot of things we can do like that. The swale is again something that comes out of the Chinese invented swales 2600 years ago. So it's just, it's a different kind of world, you know, than the one we know in architecture schools. Though I kept wondering throughout your talk about values and ethics, given the title, and that generally isn't it a question slash provocation that the way to change collective discourse is to make one's values explicit. And so I'd ask what are the values that you are promoting that we are implicitly assuming here, right? I think we all as planners or architects or interventionists in some sort assume a desire to do better by the climate. But what exactly do we mean by that? Can we make those more explicit? And then secondly, in a profession, and Wei Ping is our president of the profession, for the last year he's put this in our planning statement and in GSEP statement, the notion of values as something that we can bring to the forefront. It's a big discussion in planning too. So what's the relationship between values as a profession and ethics, which is the perception of individual morality? What a good question. And how can we use that for action? I disagree with you fundamentally. And I'll tell you why. I don't think that making ethics explicit is or defining a value is a way to behave ethically. I think the issue here is that we are... No, I'm trying to answer your question seriously rather than make a debating point. I think the issue about this is that if you start with the notion of, say, for instance, we have to reverse the notion of the cornucopia as a value. What follows from that may be very obscure and there may be very many different practices that come out of it. It's an old point that Hegel made, which is that a negative value is almost much more clearer than an affirmative value. And I think with climate change where we're at is that we have a set of very clearly defined values, like growth is good, you know, or at a less abstract level. That should get... People should... I don't know that... Well, let's take that. That's a negative value. And what I want to see... This translates for me... I don't believe in the idea of best practice. I think we get a lot of practices on the ground, some work in some places, some work in others. And a lot of the kind of consultant hood, there's a huge consultant hood around climate change issues. It's an industry for consultants that is replacing earlier problems like inequality, you know. And they're all oriented to this notion of best practices, that there is a best practice, for instance, for mitigation. It can't be. So I just think we need to have a much more experimental attitude about this in which obscure or implicit things... We're doing things we don't really understand, but you know, we're following a hunch. All of that is good. I also feel that's the case in any kind of artistic production, to take another kind of example. If you know exactly what you're doing, what you're going to do is mediocre, you know. So I just... We need a different kind of mindset than making our values explicit, in my view. In terms of transportation, New York City has been in the forefront of the country by introducing congestion pricing and trying to mitigate some of the effect of pollution and congestion. But that also doesn't address what you discussed, the transit deserts where people have long distances. But the talk is of light rail and express buses. And that would also be more adaptable to third world countries because subways are extraordinarily prohibitive and not realistic. But light rail and Europe, I see a lot of that and express buses. You know, I had a rather searing experience of that in Johannesburg in the 90s, which is that they came to the World Bank after apartheid fell. And if Sasuke is here, she can probably tell you more about it. They wanted money to put in a subway system. And we argued with them over in Oregon, why don't you have a tramway? Cheap, you know. They're easy to stabilize in the ground and so on. But it was that notion that, well, New York City and London have subways. So we have to have one too. And it always struck me about this. It again goes back to what I was saying to this person back there. We have to look for the lowest technical denomination of what we can do. I'm a big fan of tramways, you know. But I'm also very cognizant because they're so cheap to make. And actually tram cars, there are some manufacturers that make them more cheaply than the equivalent of buses, which is good. That's the kind of thinking I think we need to explore more in dealing with transport issues. As London was preparing for the Olympics, they expanded their light rail to some of the areas and express buses are cheaper. Let's take one more question and then I'm ready for a drink. I was just wondering and taking up what the lady just said. There was the highway Eisenhower system that was built of course after war. And then there was some talk over the years and faded away of a train system. You know, taking over from the highway system and making it fast transportation system with trains, bring it back to train. And also, right now, there's buildings being built without any... All the energy is produced within the building. Sun, wind, rain, so forth. And it's all done, has been done that way. So the technology, together with the architecture, which is in the planning, has been going on in different stages and different ways and faded out. There was failures and successes. There was the satellite cities that were started being built after the war. What question do you want to ask me? Do you have a question? All of that is something that could be touched more on. Well, I tell you, one thing that I'm really interested in is architecturally about this. This is a big, great project for you to do here is how do we get out of the sealed glass box in dealing with verticality? I mean, from an ecological point of view, the sealed glass box which is ubiquitous, which the windows can't be open, which needs to be air conditioned and so on, is a nightmare. It's an ecological nightmare. On the other hand, we need verticality in cities. We need it in order to, for issues of density. And I think as an issue for research, how to break open the sealed glass box in tall buildings would be a fantastic project. And it's not simple. I mean, opening a window at the above a 12 or 15th story, as you know, is very dangerous. A lot of problems with it. But it is, and I think it's a contribution that architectural thinking can make to the problems we're dealing with. Super tall buildings are unbelievably destructive, the climate point of view. And yet, you've got them all, it looks as though New York City is going to be populated with them. So there has to be some other way of dealing with a vertical dimension. It's also very, one of the things we found with plants in Singapore is that this works up until about 15 stories and then it's too difficult to do. So anyhow, I'd like to end this evening by just saying that what I haven't given you is a blueprint of what to do. And I wish I had one, but I don't think there is one. I know some things that we shouldn't be doing. And I think there are lessons to be learned from existing experience with dealing with climate. But I think this is, it's a realm of experiment rather than of following a rule. And the problem is we haven't got much time to do it. So that's the message I'd like to leave with you. Thank you very much.