 My name is Ricky Burdett, I'm a professor of urban studies at London School of Economics and together with Phillip Roller and many other colleagues are involved and run LSE cities and the Urban Age Project which is an interdisciplinary program based at the LSE. For years we've been trying to understand what the issues are around urban expansion, urban entertainment and very recently we've been working on publications, a research and also an exhibition which has brought many of us in fact who are here together. Now in order to discuss the multidimensional aspects of urban expansion versus redevelopment or containment perhaps sometimes we can use that word. We've assembled a group of people who I think have an enormous amount to add and you'll see immediately from, you wouldn't be in this room if you weren't as excited as I am but we'll see who we have here of enormous significance but the most important thing they all can't add it from different fields. We're convinced as a group at the LSE that you can't talk about issues of physical form or urban planning without thinking about the environmental consequences and scouting of the work which we'll talk about without some important planning aspects in terms of where cities are going and how they're going to be shaped in the future. So Lee and his group at New York University have been focusing on that for a number of years. In fact he'll mention in a moment that they're about to launch at midday just down the corridor of World Atlas which looks at much of this work. So we're looking at it from the point of view of course on the economics and so make from the broadband that's been focusing on aspects of Africa and also from the aspects of governance. You can't really talk about any of these issues without knowing who's going to be in charge and decide whether a city can expand or should be redeveloped and completed and Edgar Petersen from the African Centre for Cities is contributing to that. The way we want to play this session, we only have an hour as you will know is to have a number of set pieces and presentations, Karen will start in a moment to have a dialogue here at the table, not just at the end but also in between. A word of apologies in advance from Soli who will have to leave about five, six minutes before midday because he's got to get to the next meeting which is his show. Just one thing perhaps to frame it from our point of view of the London School of Economics. We as I say have been looking at this aspect of urban growth or containment for a number of years and we remind ourselves being in London that it was effectively the first mega city. It was the first city that was around a million in the 19th century that expanded to around whatever it is, 8, 9, 10 million if you take the largest sort of area and it's never had a plan. No, never really had a plan except for one which is what the great planner Patrick Tapercombie did in 1943 which is to put a big belt around it, the green belt and I have to say whatever strengths and weaknesses are, it's not only served the city rather well, it's now, it dropped the population and it's increased again but it's a piece of planning legislation which is still talked about as a great moment. I think a lot of us when we talk and we say there is this thing called an urban growth boundary as a green belt still in this industry across all the people represented as growth it's not really understood what that means and I think the issues of urban growth, the issue of planned expansion relate to political decisions and decisions of what sort of city model is. So we have the four speakers to talk about different aspects. I will try and connect the different aspects as we will talk and take from there. We probably won't have time to question from the floor but let's see how it actually goes because as you know we've got to get out of here and allow the next group to come in. So without further ado I want you to please welcome Karen Siegel who as you know from a lot of the geographer or urban scientists as we just said but no one knows what that actually means in American politics but I don't want to go there based on Yale who has been doing several work with IPCC and many other important organizations. Karen has come especially just for this event more or less just arrived and leaves just out to build back the sixes. Fantastic you're here and please welcome Karen Siegel thank you very much. Well thank you Ricky for inviting me into this. It's always a pleasure to be part of the LSE group and age event. I have one main message and 12 slides for one main message and it's a pretty clear message but it is that from a scientific perspective using state of the art satellite data historical maps it's very clear that worldwide the urban footprint is growing at faster rates than urban population. So that is the main message from my presentation. Urban land is growing at rates that are faster than the rate of population growth. I'm going to start off with a video that was put together by my team that you can download from the CNN website and it puts together 6,000 years of urban history and it's almost over. What you can see is this remarkable acceleration in the number and the size of cities over a 6,000 year period. All of these data are downloadable from our website at Yale. They didn't play with it and take a look at it. But the point from this analysis that took about 2 years to combine archaeological data historical data is that we are now at this unprecedented era phase where urban expansion, the physical growth of cities continues to grow at these really unprecedented rates and we've never seen this before. So what have we seen around the world? What is actually happening and what's the evidence? Some years ago we looked at the pure reviewed literature. We looked at studies that looked at 335 different studies that were published around the world that looked at 291 cities and so these are satellite studies that looked at these cities and looked to see how they grew over about a 3 year period and across all of these different regions you can see along the exercises on the top along all of these different regions the urban land is actually growing at faster rates than populations. So the very top is urban population growth and blue represents the 1970s, red is the 1980s and then the green on the right is the 1990s and what you see is there's variation in the rates of growth by different regions and by different decades but if you look at the graph right underneath the V graph that shows the percent growth in urban land so in the top one you can see most of those numbers are at like 2 to 3 percent, some of them are at 4 percent. If you look at Asia during the 70s there's some higher numbers around 1.5 percent but if you look at the land numbers below in graph B you see that these numbers are a totally different scale on the y-axis so we see rates of growth that are closer to maybe 4 percent on average but a large range of up to 16 percent up to 20 percent so the rate at which the land is expanding is pretty significant. What we have seen using satellite data that most cities around the world are growing up or growing out rather than we just repeat that, most cities around the world are growing out they're not growing up. So this is a crash course at ALI I teach an advanced course in satellite remote sensing, I'm getting all of you a crash course in satellite remote sensing right now and basically what we're seeing on the x-axis is growth in the horizontal dimension as monitored by the night lights, most of you have probably seen the night light data on the y-axis is a different satellite, it's called the scene wind scatterometer, you don't even know the name but basically it's a radar sensor and what that is measuring on the y-axis is height, the height, average height of these cities. So here we have African cities that are growing primarily out, we see cartoon grows a little bit up but it's primarily out Indian cities are pretty much the same with a little exception in Delhi and that's primarily the only major city in India where we're seeing a little bit more going out. The only exception that we're seeing is with Chinese cities, so Chinese cities here you can see are clearly growing up more than they're growing out but that's because this data set monitors the 1997 through 1999 to 2009 and so the period during which Chinese cities primarily grew out was during the 80s. So this is really capturing a more advanced stage of urban development. So again the take home point here is that we have a lot of evidence from satellite imagery that cities are growing out and they're growing faster than the rates of population growth with a few exceptions in Chinese cities that are increasing in density, most of these are actually growing out. So we've been developing various global models of how cities might expand going into the future, this is just one of the projections that we have published a few years ago where these are probabilities that a particular area might become urban by 2030. So these are probability maps so in yellow, any place that's yellow is less likely to become urban but still positive. So another way to think about it is if you're going to get on a plane and I said this plane has a positive probability that it's going to crash but it's not zero, are you going to get on a plane? So yellow is it's a positive probability greater, oftentimes greater than 25% but it's less than 75%. In the darker colors, the darker red, those are areas that have a greater than 75% chance of becoming urban. So what we're seeing is that there are lots of places where we're going to see significant urban expansion. Globally, in terms of the actual footprint, what we're going to see the most amount of urban expansion is going to be in China and India and then parts of Africa, which is not surprising because that's where most of your population growth is. I want to just highlight that in the case of India, our projections only go to 2030 but if you look at the demographic projections for population growth in India, most of the urban population growth in India will happen around 2040, 2050, 2060. So by the time China's done building, we're actually going to see India coming up to the global stage and really developing its infrastructure in cities. And this begs the question of what drives these patterns of urban development? What's happening? Why do we see these patterns of urban growth? And I want to just underscore that this is a global study and I think Sally's going to talk greater detail about what's happening at the local scale. But the take home point from this slide is that for different regions of the world there are very different drivers. So if you look at Europe, if you look at Europe, we see that population growth only contributes to about 4% of urban land. In contrast, it's 86%. If you look at the next column over there, GDP per capita growth rate. So about 86% of the urban land growth can be attributed to economic growth. So this is the question of whether urban development is happening because people are migrating to cities or whether urban development is happening because of economic growth. So in the Europe case, we see that cities expand primarily because of economic growth. But if you look at India, we see that more of the land is being driven by population growth and not economic development. So I want to just point to two main environmental implications and I think the panelists will talk about other types of social governance implications of urban expansion. But I want to highlight two implications of urban expansion and the standard urban expansion. This is a graphic from the most recent IBCC report on the chapter on how cities can be acclaimed and changed. And one of the things we found in that report is that there's a lot of variation in how cities affect emissions. So there's an adage out there that says, well, cities are very efficient. And so if you have people living in cities, it actually reduces energy use. What this graph shows is in yellow are cities where the average energy use is above national averages. And in blue are cities where energy use is lower than national averages. And we divided it between annex one that are primarily developed OECD countries and non-anx one countries. So you can see very quickly a very big difference between non-anx one and annex one countries. So non-anx one countries cities have on average a higher energy use than national average. This is not surprising if you consider that on average if you go to Malawi or Nigeria or China that energy use is very low on average. So it's not surprising that Lagos and Beige will have much higher energy use. But the other thing is if you look on the annex one, why is there so much variation in these industrialized cities energy use? A lot of that depends on the economy. So if you're a place like New Haven that no longer really produces anything other than degrees you're going to have a relatively low environmental footprint other than why I come here for this. But one of the big factors that determines the variation in the energy use in cities is the layout for cities. And very specifically it's one thing, its accessibility. It's not density, it's not density alone. It's how accessible are people to the services that they want. Service could be either work, it could be school, it could be commerce, but how accessible are these cities and that really gets to the issue of planning. My last point that I want to make is huge implications around agricultural land loss. Now I want to make this case that and make it clear that at the global scale urban development is not a threat to food security. So let me just repeat that. At the global scale urban development is not a threat to food security because urban areas are a small footprint compared to the global land area. But if you look at these individual countries and you look at the very last column, the percent of the cultivated area that's going to be lost due to an expansion, you see that places like Egypt and Vietnam and Pakistan and China are going to lose potentially very large portions of their agricultural land. So the issue of unchecked low density urban development is going to be a very big issue for agricultural security for individual countries and for very specific regions. And I'm going to leave you with this image that I think some of the main conflicts that we're going to see are around how we're going to use resources around land, clearly, but then also around water. Thank you. Thank you for that. I know we are going to be talking in a moment about issues of governments, issues of the impacts on global issues and more. But you've given us here a very, very clear plan around what's going on and how different things are in different parts of the world. And you've made very very clearly the implications of this form of development which goes out as being problematic in terms of environmental issues. You've made that break. If anything, having heard Karen speak before, you haven't made it as a big problem because of time. I'd like to ask you, nearly jumping a little bit, that's where we are now. What are we going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? You talk to American politicians. But also very closely involved, the international organizations. Because we're going to come back to this in a minute. What can be done? How much of this is inevitable? The end is because I know Toronto has strong views on this. But Karen, what do we do? You've given us a picture. Do we just stand back and say nothing to do with it? So I think a lot of this has to do with market failures. Actually, and I had talked about this in my talk, but I had to do with market failures around land and about resources, about infrastructure. This is a much longer conversation around how do we price things like access around land and access to things like energy, electricity, water, sewer. And in places where we see much more higher accessibility and more compact development, we actually see much more rational land markets. It's in places where there's a lot more informality, where the land market is not as clear and maybe property rights are not as clear and the local governance is not as clear that actually the development is much more free-form. So I think one issue is around failure of markets. The other Well, I'm going to toss that to an economist here since I'm the scientist. So I'm not really sure exactly what we would do, but I can tell you that that's one of the gaps. I think the other really big gap is when we think about planning cities, we often think about only the local municipality. And it's very clear from the IPCC report that cities have clearly jurisdiction over the local municipality, but it's very clear that it's national governments that set economic priorities. It's national governments that set priorities around whether it's development or about where to educate certain types of industries. Why is Detroit in Detroit than not in Silicon Valley? A lot of that has to do with national policies around federal funding around highways, around infrastructure, but also investments R&D. So I think the second main point around what we can do is really thinking about multi-level governments and not thinking about only the local municipality or regional municipality controlling urban world that has to link with national government. Let's take these two points, the market phase and the government's issue. Perhaps Shlomo or someone who wants to just comment on these aspects. Perhaps Chandler? I think this is absolutely fundamental. If you think about the markets that make cities work in the markets for land, and those are the markets that fail all the time. So if you think about the American model for urban development you have the city, or a big developer putting a lot of land together putting the basic core infrastructure and then kind of subdividing it. You think about Africa, you think about South Asia, you don't have such capabilities. So African and Asian urban development is just a bunch of small scale urban development put together. And we really need to think about zoning, land use planning, but more importantly property rights. Who is we? We as US academics, as of the World Bank, the counterparts we work at are not within the national government. But Edgar will come up and say that in many of the countries you're talking about there isn't a political system that actually can make the sorts of decisions. That's what you were referring to. Well that's true, but I mean just what I'll talk about later and I'll explore it in more detail, because there's a number of those things that the problems don't go away. So I think that the question of the way in which we're talking about land markets at the moment is suppose aggressionality. You've got to connect that with the cumulative effects of how cities have been built over time. And inequality and injustice is both into the DNA of these cities. And you impose these supposedly rational markets on top of that. What those rational markets do is that they rationally reproduce inequality. So I think that it's a much more profound question about understanding what are the risk-a-cheater components to facilitate an appropriate degree of access and equity within the city. And then we can try and understand what are the role of markets to mediate competing interests. Just one point. Karen I think made the million dollar point that it's not about density, it's not expansion. And if we can reframe the debate to being one about accessibility you can get efficiency but also equity. Maybe press the button. I think it's good to make a comment. I just want to agree with what something was saying and continue when I start my presentation. Okay. Karen just concluding folks and what you're hearing in terms of I mean you talk about market figures if it's a neutral thing but there is a degree of sort of intervention which is necessary. I'm interested in your role as an academic who just in the end work with agencies that take political positions. Just a final thought from you. What do people actually hear when you present them with this material? I think so too. Am I a capital hero? You know when I'm in the U.S. I spend a lot of time on capital talking about this and talking about urban development as a national security priority. One of the things that comes up when I talk to senators is senators say well urban development that's at the level of like mayors. We're senators we deal with states and we deal with the national government. We deal with national security. So I think that part goes back to this tension between local level and national level priorities. I think the other is certainly in the U.S. case when I present this kind of work there is a very strong reaction against any type of intervention that would change the status quo which is single family low density housing. But many of the people who argue that we don't want to change that don't recognize that it's been 50 years of policies now for this type of landscape to develop. So the idea that these landscapes are neutral is completely absurd. I mean as Edgar said they are built on a history whether it's a colonial history or whether it's history around mortgage and who gets access to mortgages and redlining in the face of the United States. But I think that's one of the things for us to recognize is all of these landscapes, urban landscapes that have already been developed, they have been developed with certain policies and with certain histories in place. So the question is if we like these types of landscapes, okay we can't continue this as usual. But if we think that they're inefficient, they're unacquittable and they have dire impacts for the local and global environment but ultimately for our well-being. So I'm in a forestry and environment school and a lot of my colleagues we think about the environment 24-7. But at the end of the day we think about the environment because it all feeds back to us and our children and our grandchildren because we need to have a safe planet for us not because the safe planet is a pre-poster. We want clean air. Only for now the elements of the world is land ownership and speculation behind all this because in the end of culture and attitude towards what should we do with the city and its development is not just up to the politicians or whatever. Now I can have a comment to make and to Karen specifically. Our role as academics and scientists is to produce the evidence that connects the idea that we're consuming land faster than population growth to desirable outcomes. Our goal is that the evidence is not there that we keep shifting around. Once we say it's energy consumption going back to studies that were done 30 years ago and others says well it's transportation equity, inclusivity and so on. I would like to move on to doing serious research that connects this fact which is yes cities are expanding faster than their population with outcomes and up until now I'm afraid that the evidence is not there. We'll come to that and I think a few people might dispute that in terms of whether the evidence is there but we're all in favor of doing more detailed work but you don't dispute in any way what Karen is saying in terms of what the work that she and others are doing. I'm convinced like Karen is that urban areas are expanding faster than their population. The question is that good or bad is something that requires some science and I'm claiming that the science is not there. I want the science to be there. I'm working on getting the science there but I'm afraid that it's not there. I must respond to this. I don't think the question is whether it's good or bad though. I think the question is whether it's multi-dimensional. It's good if you want a long space. It's not good if you want to be able to walk everywhere. It's not good if you value your time. Before I went to Yale I was a professor at Stanford in San Francisco and I drove an hour every day to get to campus. Two hours a day, ten hours a week very quickly I could see my life just melting away on the highway. I now live literally one mile from my office. I walk most days, I walk 15 minutes to work. It's a complete change in my lifestyle and well-being. You could make that choice. Part of our role as scientists is to demonstrate to the decision makers. Here are all the different multi-dimensions in which these are costs and benefits and trade-offs. You are unambiguously clear that there is the evidence that scroll has a very negative impact on the environment. Yes. So are you or not? Looking for the evidence. Seriously. In American cities I've written and I've demonstrated that cities with higher densities have shorter commutes in American cities as evidence, but I couldn't get any data beyond the United States. There's lots of data, so I'll just show you three different examples. One is embodied energy. So the thing of embodied energy is all the energy that takes to mine the material to make this light bulbs, mine the material to pay the land. So the embodied energy to build low density cities is much higher than compact, accessible cities. So that's very clear. The energy use both in transportation and in buildings is also much lower. So the evidence is very clear there. The thing that's not clear is why is there variation between different types of cities? That's not true. I measure particulate matter pollution in all the city, in the 200 cities in the global sample of cities. And it's very high in China even though the cities in China are quite high density. That's because the cities in China are producing most of the materials. So it depends on what metric they're using. So I wouldn't use particulate matter as a measure of the environmental outcome because we're also to differentiate between producer and consumption, production and consumption within cities. And so in some cities in the China's case they're producing a lot of stuff which is why they have high in particulates. But in terms of consumption it's actually relatively low. Okay. We are going to change scale but not necessarily the tone of the conversation. We're going to change scale on the tone of the conversation. But the more interjections there are, the better. Sorry, since you've already started on this issue of measuring and we invite you to talk about your work on the expansion program at New York University. We have a lot of slides up. Just press the button. Thank you. We can... I'm very happy to be here. I'm very happy to be here. I'm very happy to be here. I'm going to actually address the topic of the workshop which is expansion or redevelopment. The idea is should we favor expansion or should we favor redevelopment. The picture that you see here is of Panama City. We have both expansion and redevelopment and this is what usually happens. We have redevelopment usually from the center upwards and we have expansion at relatively low densities on outwards and everybody that's seen a density curve knows the densities go out as we expand. My first problem with redevelopment is that I think it's anti-poor. Redevelopment, except for in-situ is generally anti-poor. Tone buildings do not address affordable housing. Much of affordable housing is in poorer countries. It's progressive housing on the urban periphery. What you see here is Sydney and Basel. You see the bells in front. This is what the poor know how to build. Then you see the buildings in the background. This is what the formal market can build and for that you need finance. So you need to go to the bank. So in poor countries where you cannot go to the bank, you cannot expect tall buildings. The second is what Karen was talking about. I know for densification, but after 30 years of the compact city agenda pursuing increased densities, we have very little to show for it. Built up area densities are still in decline and have been in decline for a long time. This is the situation in the global sample of 200 cities which is represented with the University of cities. 1973 persons per hectare, 2,129, 2014 ADA. So densities are still in decline. Now, the problem is this. I'm afraid that the compact city agenda is essentially a non-planning agenda as well. Clearly, if you don't want cities to expand, you don't plan for their expansion. That would be a contradiction. As a result, the share of the area that is not laid out is increasing. And here is the results from a sample of 200 cities. In the areas built before 1990, 22% were not laid out. In the areas built after 1990, almost a third of the expansion area in the world is not laid out. Now, cities are expanding rapidly. Despite the fact that more than half of them have now adopted containment strategies of one form or the other, whether it's the green belt that Richard was talking about, or an urban growth boundary of a sort. So what we see in the last 25 years, almost two thirds of the cities have at least doubled their area, some 20% of areas that are more than quite horrible. So we're seeing a lot of urban expansion. What we want to do with this is the issue. I think Karen explained very well that the extent of cities is largely a function of their population and their income. And basically, when we look at the urban extent as a function of population and income, those two variables explain 85% of the variation in urban extent in the world, leaving very little for policy to make any difference. Here are two cities with roughly the same population, Lagos and Paris. 11 million people in 2015. Paris has 10 times the income. It's three and a half times larger than Lagos. Clearly, cities densify and expand at the same time and we must allow both. The key is to plan for orderly expansion by organizing the territory that the city is going to expand into instead of saying we don't want it to expand. And the way to organize this territory, the key to organizing this territory, that's what I meant by anti-planning, is to do it in advance of development because once development gets there, it's too late. So what we see here is the plan for the city of Monterey and we're working with 30 year expansion plan where all we're trying to do is create an arterial grid on the expansion area, one kilometer apart, roads that are 30 meter wide, and then basically organize the territory. How that territory then develops in terms of land use, in terms of density is another matter. What you see on the right are people kids planting trees along the edges of the expansion of these arterial roads because the idea is to get the arterial roads now before development gets there and what they are doing in Colombia is kind of both preparing acquiring the land for these roads and planting trees on both sides so that this will be known as the arterial road. If you don't do that you get what you have in Bangkok and here's an area developed in the 60s, 8 kilometers between each arterial roads and it's one of the most congested cities in the world you can get to work and you have to stay in the bus and compare on the right to Toronto. What you're seeing here is not a street network, it's the public transit network of Toronto and it's very efficient, it's the third largest public transit system in the US. It has an arterial grid to support it and that's why it's so efficient and effective. So what we need to do is instead of resisting expansion we should remove the regulatory barriers to densification. So we want densification, don't get me wrong I know for densification but the planning rules prevent densification. So in China they're building 22-storey buildings but the floor area ratio is 2.2 I know but it's because of the plot coverage regulations. They want Corbusier tower in the park and then minimum plot sizes I'm showing here is always too large, too big so when Karen is complaining about this the whole family is dwelling on the periphery. If you have 200-meter plots on the periphery you get a lot higher density but we don't allow that we want to exclude the poor by saying that you have one eight per lots or two eight per lots. So that's what is preventing densification and not anything else. Thank you. We know that we could spend the next five hours having a little chat about whether poorer buildings allow for poorer. Most of the building, quite a lot of London in the 19th century was housed for very well in 8-10 storey buildings. But I think the biggest issue we're going to come back to that is your point about planning and expansion versus compact but maybe somebody will vote first. Thank you very much. I think we and others and Paul Romer made the broader point that we need to set aside rights of way, protect rights of way and that's what we need to do. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about research we've been doing in Africa and we looked very carefully at the morphology of 64 cities across the continent. When you have development at scale you can get amazing efficiency gains and that happens because you can concentrate more economic activity per square mile of land area. But here's the point. The economic opportunity that you get through density is absolutely an externality. But the cost of putting in the infrastructure the added cost of construction is born directly by households, directly by firms. And that's where the point that I disagree with Solly that if you just set aside the rights of way and don't correct bigger market failures you're not likely to get densities right because building a city takes long lived and lumpy capital investment. You can't build incrementally. You put a lot of investment with expectations of how the future looks like and markets are just absolutely myopic when they do this. So it's not enough just to put the density just to put the rights of way and protect the rights of way. We need to correct market failures in the land market to get urban development at scale much earlier on in the process. So we've been doing research across Africa and this is Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and what you see is the morphology of the city has a few of these blue peaks. But across the city when you look at this metropolitan area it looks like a real pancake. And what this means you have these few blue kind of peaks because of some people concentrated together like in Kibara. But the majority of when you look at the morphology of Nairobi the peaks, the troughs the peaks, the troughs. It's not really a city. It's actually a bunch of disconnected villages connected together. And when we look across African cities and we looked at all these 64 cities across Africa we compared African city morphology to other parts of the world. And compared to Latin America if you are a resident of an African city you have about 40% fewer neighbors to interact with. So your potential to benefit from these externalities of the operation are suddenly muted. Then if you're living in the core of the city you're much more fragmented in the patterns of building. And that does not get solved by just putting the land rights aside. It gets solved by actually putting land consolidation and development in an orderly manner. So you kind of have this fragmented development. But since World Bank, our main objective of thinking of cities is miracles of productivity, what it is, can this urban form really connect people to jobs? That's the fundamental question. And in Nairobi 70% people they walk to work and they walk about an hour and they can only access about 11% of the city's opportunities. On the other hand if they take the bus the colorful buses called the Matatus about 28% do they can only access 20% of the opportunity. Because of this urban form that's disconnected the city is not behaving like an amazing matchmaker. It's just a bunch of villages connected together. So the question I want you to think about is can we do any better? Can we think about different models of land assembly that have better capacity to be conducive for matchmaking between people and jobs? So I sat around last weekend and asked my kids what it would mean. So here's a picture of what an American metropolitan area looks like. There are clusters of industry, commerce, and kind of residential areas, multiple nodes. This is an American metropolitan area. Then we took the same capital stock and we reached and we made this into a pancake city. Everything was randomly allocated. And we wanted to see if this had a different welfare consequence. And then we built something like a Latin American city. Everything was concentrated on the downtown, on the job, the commerce, the industry. The homes kind of put around in the peripheral neighborhoods. And then being economists I thought let's take this experiment to scale. And we ran 100,000 counterfactual ideas of how land could be put together. And what we found and then we applied this to the Nairobi model there were huge gains to be had from simply changing land around. And in fact there was doubling of accessibility for people who would walk. Doubling of accessibility for people who would take the bus. Simply by consolidating land into multiple nodes. So the idea is if we just left it to the market we would have pancakes. Or we would have like a Latin American city with excessive concentration in the CBD. To get cities that work we really need to address the fundamental land market issues. But that's not enough. Getting a city to work and getting the land is okay. The returns to land only get amplified when you invest in public goods at the same time. You have to put the water networks, the sewer networks. And it's not enough just to let the land and be allocated for a hundred years. Because what happens for this is that all these networks that are provided can't be provided by individual communities. They're network goods, they're huge diminishing but they have no marginal cost and high average cost. So getting cities to work really requires us to deal with land market issues. And to deal with complementary services to them. Thank you very much. First of all, Soli said Toronto is the third largest biggest transport in the US but I think you didn't need one. I think you've been to America. But the other thing is you said that Greenbelt and the comeback city of Canada hasn't worked. And I agree with you, it hasn't worked. But I think part of it, a large reason why it hasn't worked is we no longer live our lives only in one city. We live in this city and we work in this city. And so we need to have, and I think this is part of Soli's cases, we need to have coordinated strategies where not just at a local approach, one city at a time it's much more important to have a regional approach to think about Greenbelt's at a regional approach. And I think Soli's point about accessibility, we need to co-locate housing and jobs at a regional scale. I don't think it makes any sense to think about this at one city at a time. Because ultimately most people now are living in one city and then working in another. I think Soli, the one point I'd like you to clarify. It's quite a negative point to make that the comeback city of Canada has failed. This is what's been happening. Therefore that's what we should make. I want you to be clear about that because you've just opposed that against planning for expansion. I think there's an absolutely middle ground. Which is what we've seen your family songs, your family kids doing at home. In other words, that's integrated planning. It sounds as if you completely agree with everybody here. I want to make a few clarifications. First of all, when I say that in answer to Shomik first, when I say let's get the arterial road system in place I don't mean and then retire. I mean that this is my critique of master planning. You know we go out and create a master plan it takes forever to collect the data and to write out the master plan. It's irrelevant. Then it's put on a shelf. And what I'm saying is if you want to do one thing to organize this territory get the land for the arterial roads now. Protect some environmental, the sensitive area of that. And then you have to do the infrastructure system you have to invest, you have to organize the public transportation system. You have to organize the land. Again, none of us disagree on that. And we have 10 minutes left. And Shomik you want to get to your next slot. So unfortunately I need to end this part and ask for Edgar to make his presentation so we can talk about Shomik's issue. Let me just say thank you to everybody here and I really have to leave. There's another 5 hour discussion here which is kind of in space. Think about it yourself. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Thank you. Thanks Shomik. Good luck. Can we turn over to you? Do you have a slide? The next one. Thank you. What a fun panel, especially when it's something like this you go to one session up to the other where there's a litany of platitudes in that discussion. So thanks LSE City and Ricky for the great moderation. So Johannesburg is in a way I've been asked to talk about Johannesburg and give a very practical example of how some of these debates is landing in a specific context and the political economy of making this stuff happen. So Johannesburg is the largest economic hub in South Africa and it's at the core of the city region of about 14 million people but the population of the metropolitan area is about 4 million people. It's of course the embodiment of the racist apartheid imaginary that you can structure space that combines modernist functionalism, in other words you segregate functions with a racial imaginary that you can reproduce plus privilege in terms of a racial hierarchy and contrary to what Sonya said it's a classic example of master planning achieving its objectives in almost perfectly up until the 1990s. So what you have is a city that is about 140 years old and you've got the consolidation of investment stock of that period in this both environment that is home to these numbers of people and it is a highly advanced modern financial services driven economic region. So of course what that means in class terms is that you've got fantastically high quality middle class suburban areas that is driven by the private real estate market. You've got a massive underclass in the city of people who have been in formal settlements about 22 to 23% of the housing stock is in formal in Johannesburg and then you've got social housing programs in the apartheid era and in the post-apartheid era that accommodates the working class populations of the area. These are physically segregated and of course the poorer you are the further you are from economic opportunities and the more excluded you are. So the basic proposition has been that the TOD model of NODES similar to what SUMEC has been referencing is the way to go that the way you catalyze that is to adopt the Latin American innovation of BRT systems into the South African fabric and to build a new set of cores and a new set of centralities where you can build this consolidated compacted fabric of the city where you can also have more mixed income mixed use settlements. We've been fortunate to have a mayor with a lot of determination and vision in Pubstown who took this agenda on board and has been driving it incredibly hard. He's been hitting up against multiple vested interests. On the one hand the private real estate industry is not interested in this model because they make perfectly good money from this urban growth model that we have. On the other hand the poor people in the city also don't want this because they're saying it means you're not putting investment in the townships where we live you're putting it in these connective corridors so why are you doing this your electoral base as the working class in the poor residents of Johannesburg and so a lot of opposition from within the party as well. And then there's of course this interesting category of consumers which is the emerging black middle class which has seemed to be the primary initial occupiers of these new spaces. But of course as the first generation of middle class people their desire is the picket fence and the suburban lot and the double garage and the two four by fours. And so in a way what you have in South Africa is the expression of a mayor that has brought into all the arguments we've heard about how we deal with this. But a set of vested interests across the political and class spectrum that can't see the benefit of this within the next ten years. And how do you marshal then the resources and the focus on the energy to have enough capital investment to do this kind of repurposing of the urban fabric. But at the same time provide enough in terms of some kind of transaction with these different interest groups to give sufficient political and market buy into the situation. The only way he's pulled it off to date is by doing the tactics budget. And I don't have time to explain why but what he could then do is give a little bit to the middle class, a little bit to the poor and then use the risk to in a way prove a demonstrate proof of concept by investing radically into a new kind of urban fabric which is what that map reflects there. Which is the one corridor, the three TOD corridors in the city. I've run out of time but the last kind of point I just want to make is that the Achilles heel of this project is in fact affordable. So even if because he's incredibly said he was being asked it because a different coalition is coming. So we don't know what the future is of the corridors of freedom to your project in Johannesburg. But always the Achilles heel of this gamble has been how do you make this affordable for a wide enough spectrum of income groups in the city. And so all of this returns us to these fundamental questions about market payers and how do you invest simultaneously in a public realm that gives you a broader set of incentives for people to buy into this agenda. I'll leave it there. Is the discussion or has the discussion Johannesburg actually ever been couched in the terms of expansion versus redevelopment? Well, well, inevitably it has been because our public housing program they impact many pieces of expansion agenda because the subsidies are just like the trillion model that's 100% includes the cost of land. So because of the subsidy model it's completely skewed for debate. The big issue to mention is that in these social housing areas you've got an informal rental economy. So every single new social housing that has been built of that was built before their particular as 2-3 informal dwellings on the site. So in fact we've had densification and if you look at the numbers that apply to global data sets because of the densification of both middle-class suburbs and the poor areas in the sub-applicancy. But we don't have the instruments to recognize that and to optimize its potential. I had two broad reflections for you to think about. One I've been to Johannesburg often and you stand outside the city mayor's office and you see the BRT lines going completely empty. And on the other hand you go to communities like Soweto and you're shocked to see there aren't very many informal activities of business enterprises. Is it time to rethink the economic job recovery of cities in South Africa? Rather than thinking about linking them to one economic center should we seriously think about moving jobs to where a lot of people live? And is that something in the political economy that's peaceful? That is certainly very much part of the discourse at the moment and the mayor of Johannesburg is a self-made businessman from Soweto and he's called the first shopping war in Soweto and so his vision is very much there. But I think it is a very narrow understanding of what they could mean and part of the problem is because of the amount of bulk infrastructure investments we've already made on the big corridors. The transaction cost for the private sector to relocate to the township is just too high. And so that's a real issue. But the second point I just want to leave you with is that one of the ironies of the TOD gospel is that we've got, we've solved public transport from the minibus taxi system. So every single resident in the whole city regions have been put into 20 minute walk of the minibus taxi opportunity. They serve 80% of public transport trips but we see them as a problem. And in fact the future lies not in very expensive BRT corridors that is empty but in understanding that through smart technology we can make them cashless, we can make them safer and we can have of course fleet of electric vehicles that system. So there you have we need to fundamentally rethink the model for the spoiled urban form. For our time I'm going to leave you all with one final statistic I hope you take home with you. Every day between now and 2030, every day about 34,000 American football fields become urban. I'm sorry I don't have a court international football, but American football fields, 34,000. And I think one of the big questions for us moving forward, and here I have to turn to planners and people who know how to do this, is if we have 34,000 football fields, American football fields being converted every day, what are the different strategies that need to take place at different places, in different places? I think there's a real danger in thinking that there's a one size fits all and that it's the American model or it's the South active model or the Lima model and that we actually have to be to recognize that there's really different histories of these different places. But I think the other thing is that different people want really different things. Different communities, even within the US so anyhow, I'll just leave it at that. I'm not going to try and sum up, we need to end that code often when we're there, but I'd like you to join me in thanking three planners at the moment, but something really important that really does come to my mind is that the language we use sometimes actually excludes the subtleties of the range of scale that we're doing, but the compact languages expansion is just insufficient in dealing with the issues that we've talked about. I think there's another aspect which is popular about printing out, there's an ethical dimension to it. You know how you build these 34,000 at the end, and I'm just reminded of smoking. 50 years ago everyone smoked, everyone wanted to smoke and there was an industry that had a better interest and I think there are similar ethical issues here which cut across everything we're talking about. Happy note, I want you to thank these wonderful speakers on this debate.