 maybe we should pick up. So to go to more kind of specific questions, I think on Paris we already at least talked about a few issues. Alejandro, you know, one of the things I wanted to, I mean, the elephant in the room in a sense, you know, when we use governance, we kind of flatten it. For me, I think in Medellin, if any case, the question of patronage, which is maybe an old model kind of surfaces, because I think you, I think the case of Medellin was a fantastic alignment between professional capacity, that is, people like Alejandro and many others, but also political patronage, and patronage almost in the classical sense. And that partnership is what sort of created an amazing chemistry. So, you know, I'll go around, but I'd like you to comment a little bit on that and share with us the kind of importance of that aspect. And what was very particular about Medellin? Thank you, Rahul. So, like any other city, the history of a Medellin is complex. I was telling you a beautiful history. And there are different layers of that. But it's true that you need to understand the process. And I completely agree with you about the artifact. So it's not possible to understand, to use the, I don't like the word model. Because behind all those processes and projects, there are a lot of partnerships, a lot of histories, and that bring them different sustainability, could look the same, but happens differently if you test after 15 years. So the robust agenda and the number of institutions local leaders, organizations, that found the process is very important of that. And I agree with you that the politics change the perception and the confidence in some way of the environment and the moment of the city. But to understand that, you must understand the level of the crisis that we had. Because always the people ask, so how to start the process? How to move politics? How to change politicians? How to develop a different sensibility? And it's not good to say, but the crisis helped us a lot. And to turn it around. So there are many things to talk about it. And of course, it's a fragile process. It's not ideal and we still have huge challenges. But persons are important as well. So some leaders are very important. Yeah. And that sort of also results in a particular set of protocols that you kind of develop. And I think just to pick up on that, in the case of Kigali, I was struck that in your presentation, you move between master plan and strategic plan kind of sort of interchangeably. To me, that could be mean completely different things. And so I was sort of curious to ask you when you were describing that master plan, what is the form that takes in terms of a format? Is it a static plan? Because that's what you need to do politically or is the strategic plan much more a kind of listing and inventory of values that you somehow built consensus on? I wasn't clear from the presentation. So I just thought if you could elaborate on that. Yes. And that was by design, by the way. I did not want to talk about the master plan again. Like I can reiterate it. So the, I think the master plan was not the right tool to do what the governance of the country was trying to do. But there was no available, close available tool to help do what the country is trying to do. That's why I'm saying I have my own criticism of what that master plan looks like now and how it presented, what it's talked about. But I think it has some components of it that answers some of the strategic planning that we were talking about that was intentionally put there because that's how the country decided or wanted it to be. On a resident level, I strongly believe that the physical spaces that occupy kind of the physical manifestations of systems that run of our societies. And I think trying to understand our cities in that sense, you can understand that Kigali, the way it is at the moment, is reflecting all the efforts. At least that's what we are trying to do to reflect all the efforts that the country has been trying to instill when they talk about the new wonder, the new political values. They're trying to understand how we change our justice system, for instance, to deal with the problems we've had in the past or trying to recreate this sense of, in Rwanda we call it agachiro, is dignity of the person. What does that mean in Rwandan terms? And therefore, trying to get those back into the fabric of the city is very challenging at the moment because the city physically as it's built is, again, come from the colonial time where all the cities people have described here come from that area. The same problems the cities have, we have those problems. There's a mentality also of the model that we're talking about, where there's an aspiration. Kigali should be like Singapore. Kigali should be like, I don't know, Guangzhou or Beijing or Shanghai. Again, that is a thing that we cannot ignore. Then there is also the economics and finances where, like we say, developers are there to make money and therefore they're pushing the doors of the decision makers and try to do these things. So I think that search for the right answer or the right solution is something that is started now in the city of Kigali but I only see it succeed if we keep consistent at iterating at it and when this new generation kind of takes over and understand it well and implement it in the right way. Yes, no, and I think that became clear because you were talking about constructing a new identity but not using architecture as the central instrument to organize it which is what often happens. From principles we jump to architecture as the instrument to organize cities and I think in the case of Seoul, I think you described the protocols historically and till the colonization that created a culture of planning but then I was struck by the jump to the architectural project as you kind of rightly pointed out and then furthermore you said now the shift is to these multifarious smaller projects polycentric disaggregated. My question would be, is there much discussion about the tissue or let's say urban design in a very broad way that connects it all because I find there's a massive jump between the bureaucracy, its protocols, those planning instruments you described and then the artifact in Seoul. So that's the constant tension between the bureaucratic system that is primary therefore maintenance and regulation. So the bureaucratic system doesn't really effect change. It sort of regulates capital and I think that's a good thing. I mean you do need from my ideological perspective you do need to be able to control capital to a certain degree. So how do you respond to global changes to changes within the society? And that is one way is through these projects and the nature of the project of course change. And so there are discussions at multilevel scales and so the largest scale right now is this global possibility of a connected Korean peninsula which will change the economy of the whole region. And so there's that level and how architectural urban design responds to that. And it's a very difficult discussion because we don't know what North Korea is. It's one of a unique kind of situation. And then of course within Seoul, within the more micro scale levels, it's a kind of debate within architecture and urban planning communities of how to deal with micro scale. And one of the great discoveries is that we really don't know at the micro scale level of the economic mechanisms. And so that's something that I think every city really has to work with. There are global forces, but at the same time there's a lot of work to do on the ground because we really don't know how the global economy actually works within micro scales. And I think that's from my perspective is the crux of architectural intervention. And in your case the tension is greater just because it is a centralized bureaucracy. It is still centralized though we say we've been horizontal but compared to other societies we're still very centralized. It's still a very bureaucratic system. First I don't know your city well but there are three things that came to mind which I would be curious to know how you're trying to reconcile. One was I think these are the three forces that you seem to be dealing with. One is I would call it the tyranny of images because you're beginning to morphize into something else and there's a clear pressure to do that. And this tyranny of images is, I mean I think you alluded to that too, be like Singapore and then some small town wants to be like another small town that has copied Singapore, et cetera. The other was that I think the interventions that you're facing with the fabric being ripped with what I would call monofunctional infrastructure and I would think clover leaves and flyovers. This has been a disaster in cities as part of the development paradigm which is monofunctional infrastructure that actually completely destroys any sense of the city and it connects a few people but not really. And the third question was that you yourself bought conservation. And you know I mean we deal with this in India in many parts of the world where when the custodians of that artifact are a different culture from the creators because in a post-colonial situation that's exactly what happens. You've got to completely construct new narratives in a way to engage people in terms of what even that means because otherwise it's a colonial stigma in a sense. And so I thought these were three challenges that clearly you're dealing with and I'd just be curious to know on what kinds of questions come up. Yeah, yeah, yes. Well the tyranny of images I think we all live in Africa. We are all experiencing in Africa. It's also this urge to do away with what is, to get away from what is traditional, what is considered as slam. Because all this is just brought in as something which is backward, full of poverty, informality and so on. But within this as I was trying to illustrate there is a lot of activity, a lot of public life, there is a lot of ingenuity. And the biggest thing is of course the multi-layered life, the production, the social life, the cultural social life and so on. Which cannot be easily duplicated or replicated but there is a lot of lessons to be learned from there. And we are still not able to generate an urban design which actually accommodates this. Because as you mentioned everything that we do when we do housing it ends up being a monofunctional thing. It's just residences and so on. And all the other things even though we try it's the very messy but multi-layered wells of human life that you find in these areas cannot be easily replicated. So is the solution reading this, completely erasing with Tabula Raza these areas and creating new housing? Or would it not be better to work with this and develop it into something which is more sustainable? Which brings me to the question of conservation. We actually came to this through our study of urban conservation. Usually when we talk about conservation in the first world, in the developed world it might be also looking at very good historic buildings and so on. But not, we lose what is intangible, what is a social cohesion and so on. And I think there is a big potential in the public, in the lower strata of the society to empower it and bring something out of that instead of just putting the top-down approach. I think it has to go both ways. Top-down, bottom-up. Great. I think we'd like to open this up a little more now, if we can. And in opening it up, can I be very blunt and say it would be really nice to have some people speaking who self-defined as women? Perhaps. So please volunteer yourselves. But in making your comments and reflections and questions please would you introduce yourselves, tell us where you're from and bear in mind that what we welcome now and Raul will look up and make sure we do get representations from around the room. What we're looking for are summative comments, critical comments, disruptive comments. We won't take individual questions, we will try and leave some time to wrap up at the end but we will, and you may want to bounce off each other. In other words, everything doesn't have to come back to the so-called high table. So if you could indicate, preference will be given to people who haven't spoken before, people of a kind. My name is Devon Brookins and I'm working on a transforming urban government, transformative urban transport project that focuses on the governance aspect and we're doing a new pilot in sub-Saharan African cities. My question for you for the table and this is particularly for the speaker from Seoul, you mentioned that bureaucratic systems are for maintenance and regulation and they play a role in controlling capital. I guess this is a bit of a comment actually. It seems like basically governing forces are actually meant to enable capital in the current paradigm rather than control capital and some of the conversations here about the images that we see are really sort of a race to the bottom competition of African capital and primate cities to try to enter into the global economy. So I was wondering if you could comment about this sort of distinction between this controlling force versus enabling force when it comes to the role that capital plays. Thank you. I think this will be also part of my closing comment and I think that there really needs to be a kind of long-term vision about how we create new forms of economies, I think. And I think the central issue here is a sustainable economy that just, it's not just follows the old modernist forms of job creation of employment and so you have a manufacturing sector and then you have a service sector. We know that the global economy and there is a serious crisis of capitalism despite of the dominant force of global capitalism. So I think that the answer would not just be between enabling and regulating that there needs to be a kind of practical vision not only at the national level but at the municipal level of seeing a new form of economy that will eventually come. I think the climate change and the crisis of capitalism at the global level will require us for new forms of the relation between what we think was capitalism and what we thought was sort of governance at the public sector. And so new forms of economy, basic income systems, economic mechanisms that fit the specific culture of the community of each different African city, of Asian cities, that seems to be the kind of imagination that we are all trying to pursue. So I wouldn't sort of divide that. I think in reality each society with their own mechanisms have different ways to control it at this moment. And so enabling and controlling is I think two sides of the same sort but when you wield that sword you have to have that kind of practical vision of a new form of society because unless we have that I think we're sort of like as the term goes, we're doomed. So we do need a new kind of vision. I'm Helma von Lujewski from the German Association of Cities. I'm the alderman looking after urban development. I think we all know that the planning fundamentals are determined by the land market fundamentals and at least in the seven German metropolitan areas we try to either suspend or dim these mechanisms. And I'd like to know from the panelists what your experience is with the land market mechanisms and what your answers are. The second is informal informality in urban development is something that appears also in Germany. And we have a lot of lessons to learn from all of you. Don't we need formal planning for more informality is a question which puzzles us in Germany. What do you think? I'm Patrick Lampson Hall from New York University. I have a question that has to do with the power and omnipotence of planners. I think plans are often not implemented even in the event that we're able to create a plan that actually seems reasonable. Oftentimes it stays on paper and there's a disconnect between the planning process and the implementation process. How do we address that? What are the causes of it? And how seriously should we take that as an issue? My name is Marco DiNunzio. I'm an anthropologist at the University of Birmingham. Sorry, I'm breathing from my laptop because I'm quite... I'm not used to talk to a big audience. So we are hearing now about public spaces, art installations, pedestrian areas, zebra crossings, green areas, heritage sites and so on and how planning promotes spatial proximity. But my question is, are we actually pursuing a certain aesthetics of inclusion, imagining how inclusion might look like spatially against corporate geographies and aesthetics of capital? By the same time, are we actually giving up on thinking how architectural interventions can deliver on a social and economic level entirely? Or we are simply assuming that architectural interventions and aesthetics will trickle down in terms of social and economic opportunities. So if you have experience of that, can you please share with the audience how aesthetics of inclusion trickle down social and economic forms of inclusion and empowerment? Head of From Berlin and I conduct research on local democracy and participation. And we have heard a lot of comments about the future development of a lot of different cities with a very different set of characteristics, I would say. And it was mentioned that the identity of the people living in that city is very important. But something that I have been missing, that is very... Yeah, it's a very big topic in Germany at the moment. It's the topic of participation of the people that will actually live in the changes. And I think that Eugene has had a lot of interactions with people that live in the changes that actually affect. But I have a friend from many of the other cities probably who actually tried to engage with the local population and encourage city participation in the process. Anyone want to? Well, there's one about, well, implementation. One on land markets and what we can learn from informality, the aesthetics of inclusion and what that might mean. And the last question, which is fresh in everyone's mind, participation. May I? Yeah. Talking about informality and the necessity for formal process and planning. I was remembering yesterday when we were crossing the Mercato and my mind was doing a lot of numbers in relation with the economy and the processes that happens there. So the challenge is that I think we must understand the processes not to kill them. How to develop plans that permit those ecosystem to improve, maybe with new, new conceptions. More thinking in transitions, in hybrid conditions, not in a frozen images. So we need, I think, a different paradigm and more modesty as well. Because at the same time is my point of view. It's completely impossible to anticipate some situation that is happening in Latin America and in Africa. So to be strategic and where to act is important. So this, from my point of view, this is the problem of the traditional planning approach. And I strongly believe that in our context, that because the fragility, the lack of continuity, the corruption. And you will be more effective thinking in mid-scale and a small-scale actions that belongs to a bigger ideas, a systemic principles, more like a viral actions. I'm not saying that it's going to be the solution, but it will be more effective of that. It's difficult to answer all this question. I will begin with one idea I think is important. It's about the relationship between public space and private space. I think that in all cities, public space must govern the private space. In a city, the emptiness must drive fullness. I mean that we must have the planifications, the planning in mind by designing first the public space, the parks, the streets, the squares and so on, because it's the place where people are connecting together. And this is why it's so important to involve the private sector and mainly the developers and of course the financial sector in global projects, what I've called private project of general interest. They have to produce public space. They have to produce amenities. Producing cities amenities, it's not the monopoly of the local government. It has to be a shared goal between all the stakeholders in order to work together in the same direction. For example, and maybe it's a recommendation I can make to my friends from cities of developing countries. You have to put the pedestrian and the biker at the center of the mobility planning system. And it means that, for example, building urban highways is a big mistake in every city in the world. And we have made this mistake in Paris. It's a lot of work to go and undo it. So don't do this mistake because you can learn of our mistakes. And this is maybe the biggest mistakes. I've begun my presentation with a picture of the Ring Road. And maybe the Ring Road is the biggest mistakes that have been done in the middle of the 20th century. And it's a challenge for us and it will take maybe 30 years to get rid of this highway and to transform it into urban boulevard. Another question I think is not to make a confusion between density and high building and skyscrapers. For example, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world. We don't have skyscrapers. So thanks to Mr. Osman and it's possible to have density. Without skyscrapers. And you can have a livable city. Sometimes a livable city is a city without skyscrapers. And the competition between cities on the highness of the buildings is a stupid competition. And you have to forget it. You have to forget it. And another recommendation, and maybe it's related with the question of aesthetics. I was in the north of Ethiopia the last days and it was a heartbreaking to see all these new buildings built with concrete and all these old buildings in wood and in stone. And it's a paradox, it's ironic that in Paris we are going exactly in the other direction. We are abandoning concrete to use biosauce materials like wood, like stone, like terracotta. And in these wonderful cities which have the habit and the knowledge to use these traditional materials, you use concrete, it's terrible. And you should create a training of all this traditional knowledge and make young people knowing how to build these buildings in the traditional way. And this is maybe the DNA of cities like African cities. And maybe this is the new aesthetic of the future African city. I think, Jean-Louis, I can't agree more. Yeah, we as late commerce we have the chance to learn but we seem to be not learning because we associate these things that you said with poverty, back gardeners and so on, which is a pity. But I think practice will show us that we should go elsewhere. But do we have the tools in the question for the planning, implementing the planning? Do we really have the tools to understand this, interpret it and bring it to, because all our education is based on the Western models of how to do planning. So we really have to rethink, relearn and so on. And I would say start from what is there, learn what is there. I think we are almost blind in understanding this and we need to rework backwards and find this license. That's what I want to say, thank you. I'll just make a couple of quick comments and then Susan you would close. You know, I think just the aesthetic question, I think we've addressed the question of implementation in many ways, it's a difficult one. But I think going back again to that idea of the incomplete city, of pluralism, of bizarre adjacencies being able to coexist and then the task of the designer and the planner really becomes how do you facilitate those connections to make them work, difference we must accept because otherwise we are getting very, you know, the absolute solutions in terms of complete images. So I mean, I think that is something worth discussing. I just wanted to put two issues on the table and I hope it'll be picked up tomorrow in the housing session and otherwise. One is, you know, we have to also caution ourselves of not treating cities as closed systems. I think a lot of the discussion has that implication. Cities developed to distribute surplus from the hinterland. They were mechanisms to distribute that surplus. They got wealthy and then they had merchants who lived there and now you have services and it's becoming, but yet the extraction, the resources come often from the hinterland and this connection, I think we've got to bring back on the table to have any relevant discussion about planning and as an extension from that is a question of housing, we have a whole session on that actually in any city 75% of the fabric is housing yet planning tends to focus naturally on the public space because that is the common space. Those are the commons. But I think this juncture is becoming very severe in the culture of planning today and I think we've got to reconnect housing, which means repair, which means upgradation, it means how do you make informal auto-constructed, there are many words being thrown around these days and hopefully we'll pick it up, but how do you make all that happen within the imagination of planning, not outside it? So thank you. Interesting, I think if we reflect that we have, I think not divided planning and design and for me that's a very significant step. The second thing I think which is really marked about our conversation is that we have not contested that there is a role for experts but we have contested what experts do, how they think and how they might be held accountable in the city, whether it's on, whether they should be building at Ringroads or not or any number of those things and I leave you with two I think provocative ideas, the idea of kind of how do we use an urban crisis in productive ways because almost all of the cities that we've talked about have had those where they've provoked us and whether it's a crisis born of growth, a political crisis or some other form of crisis, how do we begin to respond in ways where we are able to trigger large scale institutional changes in what we think and do in our cities and hopefully in ways that get you a little bit more than trickled on by design and with that I leave you with tea. Thank you.