 First of all, I've been very stuck for a long time. Economics isn't working, politics isn't working, our relationship with creation, with the ecosystem isn't working. But I've been very stuck as to how we might progress that. If you like, I've been very intellectually and emotionally constipated. A lot of composting has been going on, so new frontiers certainly loosens up a whole bunch of stuff. So this is going to be kind of free flowing for the next... enough of this. Let me start with a little plug. But actually this is a nano story. I'm not, it just kind of... Anyway, this is a... I told you I wasn't going to get through these 20 minutes. This is an absolute nano story about a whole bunch of things. So these are some New Zealand school kids. Remarkably, very few children in New Zealand cycle to school. It's because their parents drive them in SUVs, streets are considered too dangerous for them to cycle on even pavements. Schools are very risk averse. These are really lucky kids because they've been the benefit of this man who's so humble it's hard to find a photo of him. So this is Paul McArdle in the Hawkes Bay who came home from... he and his wife came home from ten years overseas in Holland, where of course everybody cycles, and wondered why kids weren't cycling. So he developed a programme to build cycle tracks like this inside schools. So to give kids the confidence and the skills to ride. At our Kina Foundation that had been involved in from the start, the organisation back in 2008 until it achieved a complexity that I was incapable of exercising any governance over, which I very gratefully retired and handed over to Anarchy. We helped Paul develop bikes in schools. This coincides my next point with another enterprise, social enterprise we helped get going which was the tour of New Zealand cycle race. Team Arcana has taken part in the three tours so far. The fourth one is coming up first week of April this year. This is the team at Cape Reinga at the start of the race two years ago. I'm organising two teams for the South Island. You don't have to be a fantastic racer. It's not about that. It's about doing things like raising money for bikes in schools. I'm still a few riders short for the two teams. So if anybody feels like cycling on average 100 kilometres a day up the South Island and with a fabulous peloton party every night and then meeting the riders from the North Island for criteria and races in front of parliament, a treacherous little 600 metre course around the steps of parliament and down this exact drive and up Mollsworth Street and back in the top end. Talk to me afterwards. But it's about of course social enterprise. It's about community. It's about active transport. It's about confident healthy kids. It's a micro story about this about how we reimagine cities and therefore try and find a bit of hope in the Anthropocene. This is now officially according to the geologists the human epoch where we on our activity we humans are the greatest driver of planetary change. So of course it's and you saw this chart earlier the Stockholm Resilience Centre's work. It is about crucially the biggest overshoot of planetary boundaries is the biochemical flows and that's how we grow food. And so that's right. To hear what Severin's got to say and all the other things we've been hearing about food and of course related intimately with that is the biosphere integrity there at 11 o'clock and very desperate loss of genetic diversity. And the only answer to this is completely radical. So this is an American writer from two a couple of years ago Roy Scranton's book. Sorry it's really can you all read that from no. Fantastic because I hate it when people read other people's words. I just let them you read them yourself. When I first read that I thought man I'm really scared that the civilization is already dead. But then I originally came round to thinking well how exciting you don't often get to build a new civilization. So let's get on with it. So this is about cities and it's about the rapid rise of cities. So round about 2007 2008 we crossed an important threshold that first time in human history that more than half of people lived in cities. But that's escalating very rapidly and it has enormous economic and technical benefits. So if you just look at the 40 mega regions of the world they are responsible for an amazing amount of economic activity and by far the greatest outgrowth of science and technology as well. And of course problems happen so that's a picture of Shanghai on the left most days and occasionally it looks like that on the right. And that's the measure of what happens just in those 40 mega regions of the world. At that threshold in 2007 2008 the Tate Modern in London held a fabulous exhibition about it and I took these photos which speak for themselves about the sort of impact cities have on the planet. But it also posed these two incredibly important questions about how we organize ourselves. So this is population density. In the left hand picture that flat little pancake on the right hand side is London and then the big ant heap behind is Mumbai. On the right hand side you can see that's grown 1180% in a very short time. So how we imagine and then design and build and run and manage ourselves and our cities is really important. So here are the two big questions. Can cities be improved by design? And in many ways far more importantly can cities promote social justice and greater equality. So do we want to go heading screaming off down to the planet of slums or do we want to be international curators? This is a picture from Sao Paulo and I don't whether Sharon Lucas recognized this how it turns out in many cities. If lucky few have Babylonian hanging gardens and tennis courts and swimming pools and then there's the rest. Cities are also important because of what they do to us positively and negatively. This is a wonderful thought and again I'll leave you to read it from Lewis Mumford, the American sociologist. So we know that our cities are brutalizing us and that's the conditioning of the mind that's going on. Trying to understand this a bit better I went walk about September of 2015. I went only to Beijing, London and Chicago over those that month interviewing people. Not across section of cities in the world but it's places where I could stay for free knowing people. And also I've got long history in the three cities and although I've never lived in Beijing but I first visited in 1979. So it was also a chance to reflect and that's the result of that was a book published little BWB text that Mark mentioned. Three cities seeking hope in the Anthropocene that I BWB Bridget Williams books published last September. When it turned up on Kindle I was so proud and when I met up with my Saturday morning cycling group was kind of standing around ready to cycle. I said oh my book's on Kindle and it says it takes two hours to read. So I said it's kind of a book or a rugby game and they all looked at it and said who's playing. This is an incredibly beautiful cultural centre in Beijing given by the people of Holland. So it's not to say that China isn't incapable of imagining and one of the very strong themes going on in China is this quite extraordinary phrase, eco-civilisation. And it's China trying to imagine how to solve its great ecological and economic and social issues by reaching deeply, deeply back into its culture. And I was bowled over by that phrase. I hadn't seen any reference to it in English. And the back of the book I could offer now some references. And I was hearing about this from really senior people who are trying to make this happen in China. And it's turning up in the current five-year plan, for example, there are projects around eco-civilisation. Massively ways to go because essentially people in Beijing were telling me well we're kind of still building cities the way we were. So it seems to me fundamentally important that we can't get this right in terms about what cities do to us and for us and what we do for the planet. If so many people are going to be living in cities, we're heading to 80% of human population living in cities, 90% in Latin America, that we've got to bring nature back into the city. And I don't mean in a manicured way like parks and back gardens or window boxes, but finding ways to make cities largely self-sufficient for energy, food and other resources. And that of course is in no way to undercut what goes on outside the city but about connecting the two. And the great role of that deeply restorative restoring of the landscape and the ecosystem as we produce food as Severin outlined. So then these also have to be places which are delightful and inspiring because then those 80% of people who live in cities are deeply reconnected with recreation, reconnected for many of them, it'll be for the first time. Now I grew up in a big industrial city in England, Auckland's the smallest city I've ever lived in. And nature was something that was deeply manicured in the city and we would go off to the mountains or the coast for wildness for nature. Well that's completely crazy. I want my wildness in the city. There are some technology pathways. Biomimicry is one, people like Janine Benius in the United States. And this is where we borrow and barely adapt technology from nature, the old joke that nature has been doing R&D for four and a half billion years. It knows some stuff. A couple of examples from the slide at the top, that's an office building in Harare in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is pretty high up so it's hot during the day and it's cold at night. But that's a modern office building with no artificial heating or cooling. So that the ventilation system is based on the ventilation system at Van Anteep. So if you can heat and cool in Harare with extreme temperatures without mechanical, sorry there's a little bit of fans blowing some stuff around but not much, then what else do we do? And then there's wonderful things like self-cleaning surfaces that borrow at nano scale from the surface of a lily pad. Have you ever seen a dirty lily pad? No. Wonderful self-cleaning. It goes on like that. I don't know what to make of cellular agriculture at all or airponics. Part of me says, crikey, 10 billion people need to feed well, eat well even if we stop wasting food. But look at a mess we're making, the ecosystem, the way we make food. Maybe there's something in this because this apparently has zero environmental impact. But deep down I can't believe if you grow some hamburger meat from meat stem cells that all the nutrition that we barely understand is there. Mwfri milk is based on a vague smulchrum of real milk. How can it possibly have all the deep, deep nutrition of real milk? But how do we do milk that's fair to the cows and the land? So I really wrestle with this and I don't know the answer. In terms of looking for people who integrate these things, a person that many of you are familiar with because Kate Scott quite a following these days is Kate Rayworth, a British economist who for many years was the co-editor of the United Nations Human Development Report every year. And when she worked for Oxfam one day five or six years ago, she kind of let up and started drawing circles on a whiteboard and here are the two circles. The outer circle is the most important one, that's the environmental ceiling. Those are the stock home resilient centres, planetary boundaries. We can't breach those because if we do, we have no future. Or the planet will be fine, it will morph into something else as it's done over four and a half billion years. But humans as we are now won't be around. But to get that deeply profound scale of change, speed of change and complexity of change, we've got to have communities where everybody is in on the journey. So we have the courage to move faster but the compassion to bring everybody along with us. We have to have common sense, a common understanding of what needs to happen, common purpose about what we're going to do and real common wealth about how that's shared. That only happens in communities with a social foundation where of course it's food, water, income, education, gender equality, all of that. But between that floor, that wonderfully strong floor and that absolutely unbreakable ceiling is the safe and just place for humanity where inclusive and sustainable economic development can happen. Kate's got a big book about this coming out this year because it's going to completely overturn economics. And so she was one of the people I interviewed and there's a bit of her in the book, so do watch out for Kate's book. Then there's the people. Think about some cities like Marseh which is 30% Muslim and 70% Christian. I put Christian in inverted commas because some people wouldn't call themselves Christian but whatever. But Marseh is a very peaceful city compared for example with Paris or the other end of France which has the same, has a lower percentage of Muslim citizens. Or Kerala, the state in India where pretty much equal mix of Christians, Muslims and Hindus. And yet that state has India's bets, literacy, life expectancy and health care. Or indeed Queens, New York City, a borough that's bigger than Auckland, 2.3 million people, 138 languages spoken, a crucible of creative diversity. So these are the observations of two Americans, Karl Mayer and Shareen Bresak in their books, in their book packs ethnica that came out a few years ago. And they travelled the world to find these sane oasis in a rabid world. So these are oasis of civility where human ingenuity and determined statecraft had diffused potentially explosive civil conflicts. So as we go about this there's an awful lot of fun that could be had. John Berger, who sadly died at a great age just a few weeks ago said this about cities. Every city has a sex and an age which has nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine, so is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin and in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris I believe is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. I put this to people in Auckland and the best answer I ever had was from one of my daughter's great friends, Catherine, who said that Auckland is a middle aged Pachihar semi sober businessman. There's work to do. But how does New Zealand contribute to this? This is what's happening for example in China. Jing Jing Ji brings together Beijing, Tianjin and parts of Hebei province around it. An awful lot of people, very high density of people. That's New Zealand by comparison and Jing Jing Ji would occupy about three quarters of the South Island. It makes no sense that we have anything to contribute but this is in Shenzhen. This is a wonderful marysfrolg, high end ladies fashion, wonderful designer. This extraordinary building has been designed by Van Brandenburg, an architectural firm in Dunedin. And pioneering architectural construction techniques which are right for local people in China. So there's some wonderful concrete stuff going on here. It's like the concrete's a problem but the building's very inspirational. This was Auckland shortly after Hobson planted the flag at Brittenmark Point in September 1840. What a most extraordinary physical place with the two harbors and the bush and volcanoes. This is Tamaki Makoro today. Our ability to make this an extraordinary city as the same sort of opportunity that Wellington or Christchurch has means that I think we do have something to offer. But it's probably more about the way we work and a lot of the cultural things rather than say oh well we've got big cities too, we know what it's like doing big cities. So what we've got to do is to make sure that everything we contribute in this and this is why the global impact visa is so important about bringing people here from places like Sampalo or Beijing or wherever to be able to help support them in a different kind of way than they would in their own countries to tackle some of these issues. And we would benefit hugely from it of course. But we've got to do this in very distinctively New Zealand ways. In a fast homogenising world where one country, one culture looks ever more like another, our identity and what we can contribute to the world is really important. So this building is the first living building in New Zealand, a very demanding standard out of Seattle where buildings are self-sufficient for energy and water. And it is dead right that this is Tuhoi who built this in the Uruguay era. I'm going to let you read this because I don't think I can get the words out but it's better you read them. This is Alan Kerno in 1943 at the depths of the Second World War and when we last saw fascism on the ascendancy, he wrote a poem celebrating the 300th anniversary of Tasman's sail-by of New Zealand. What? I love the Dutch but how stupid not to get off the boat. Anyway, he sailed by. But what was going on there, innovation and this is what Alan Kerno's wonderful poems about is innovation then was, heck, you just had to sail in a different direction for everybody else and you need to bump into some new land. How hard was that? Well actually very hard. But here is just a few lines from that poem which I think is the challenge.