 So Saskia, thank you very much for really stimulating, slightly disturbing, but very stimulating picture of the issue of ownership in the city. We now have time for a discussion with our two really exceptional panelists who have been encouraged to end the LSE tradition, ask hard questions, and then we'll open it up for questions at the floor. So let me go first to Tony Williams, if I can. And I'll ask you to think about this. Saskia has given us a picture of not just the common picture of inequality, but of a real erosion of some of the nature of the city with a transformation of ownership, and potentially of both private and public space. What is your view of what's going on here? The common view in the cities I've seen, both in the urban age and my work in the United States, is that when you visit a city for one of our discussions, or you're an investor coming to invest in the city or live in the city, it's like the people who are in the outer classes, if you will, the kind of denigrated people. The other people are like the crazy uncle that's always kind of kept in the back room. So we're going to show you the city we want you to see, which is what Saskia would call the global city, the formal city. And we don't want you to see the informal city in all these people. We saw this in Sao Paulo. We saw this in Mumbai. We saw this in Istanbul. We saw it overgoer. You see it in my city, Washington, DC. And a lot of managing this as a mayor on the underground here, you say, mind the gap. It's when you're the mayor, you're minding all these kind of breaches and all these gaps. And one, between the quote unquote underclass or the real people of the city and all these new people in the city, I take this bus to work. It's called the X2 bus. And it goes from the poorest part of the city to the most prosperous part of the city. Now, the Washington Post does a story about the X2. And they made this X2 look like a ride to hell. You would not want to be in this bus. It's a horrible bus. There's this crime, plundering and pillaging on the bus, except I take this bus all the time to work. This is not the bus I know. The bus I know would be more like the Canterbury Hills. There's the clown and all the gestures and all the people entertaining. But on this bus, which is what I've seen in all these cities where we've been, people with the most dire circumstances, you go into their home and their home is tidy. People under the most intensive pressure, these mothers on the bus, they've got their two or three kids. They probably got how many jobs, taking their kids to work at 6.37 in the morning. These are the people that really power the city, that as a mayor, it's ultimately your job to represent, to address, to embrace. And we've got to figure out a way to do that because right now, and I'll wrap up with this, right now the common thinking in many countries and certainly in the United States is that, and I've been part of this whole, I won't say much, I have to be careful here because a lot, I work with a lot of these guys. Careful. The idea was that 20 years ago, the city was about pathology and it was about bad circumstances and it was about all these ills. Now to bring in new investment to the city, the city has to be about exporting, it has to be about creating new markets. We're not gonna talk anymore about the pathology of the city and all the dire circumstances of the city, we're gonna talk about the new city. And we're not gonna talk about the need for national policy to address enormous circumstances of inequality, not gonna talk about that, we're gonna work without national governments. We're not gonna talk about the need for the corporate sector to take additional responsibility, even though in a global economy, the big question for a global economy is if you're a global corporation, where is your city home? This is not always clear anymore. We're gonna do this all on our own and it's a big, big problem. Inversion. It's an inversion, it's a big, big problem. So I'm tempted, I'm gonna resist the temptation to follow up with Tony who's been at every single urban age conference and ask whether mayors really have capacity to deal with this, are they put on the spot and how much they have mayor? So how much real capacity they have to deal with this? But first I wanna ask Jose on this, coming from the perspective of an architect and thinking about this same sort of pattern, what does this do to the design issues for urban space? I would say the first thing we have to address is what do we talk about when we talk about design and what do we talk about when we talk about planning? It seemed that even from Monday's presentations by Alejandro Arabena and Joan Klos, the discussion of how we frame our understanding of planning is key to the notion of how we decide to act vis a vis some of these issues. I would think that the first notion of design is to actually give something a name. The sign which comes from Desenio and Latin, the signal to name things, it's actually in a way what Saskia is doing here. She's naming something. I don't know if she knows what to do about that something. Yeah, it's slightly monstrous in my sense. It's maybe on grasp. I find it monstrous and the city that you describe is precisely, the poor have given us cosmopolitanism. We have taken it all from all these different cultures and then it becomes something else, unrecognizable as coming from there, but without all of those diverse. So I think that this what is happening right now is a monstrous development, a monster. I really want to use the term monster. So we could also say it's aggressive, it's bad capitalism, it's whatever. But I want to also say that vis-à-vis the city, this is a kind of monstrous intervention. Let me ask you two things which have to do with the notion of. First, maybe you built some of those buildings. I wish. Do you really wish? Oh no, I mean, there's a kind of powerfulness to the notion of being an architect. It comes with a narcissism is the middle name, so. Right, yes. Now I do think that the question is, Alejandro Avena was talking about this on Monday. So how do we reclaim a notion of power in the question of a kind of reflexive self-criticism of what has become of our cities and what has become of our discipline? I wanted to show or maybe visualize two examples in Mexico City that have to do with these two approaches to design. One of them is the gated community called the Bosque de Santa Fe, which 10 years ago we visited before the waste dump, Ute. And it's probably one of the most dramatic cases of urban exclusion. Geography becomes a way of exclusion. To access this community for 200 families, you cross a tunnel from one ravine to another. And two weeks ago, the hill next to this tunnel, there was a big landslide, so literally the tunnel was blocked, limiting the connection of the community to the outer world of Santa Fe. And suddenly it was a crisis? It became like a huge crisis. Even the mayor is taking this issue into its own hands. So we kind of are tempted to see this as a kind of nature taking vengeance on the extreme forms of capitalism. Yes. And that's an easy task to criticize, those forms of exclusion. I'm more concerned about the ways that the solider forms of exclusion do happen. And the other side of the coin is actually one of the most successful public space reclaiming projects in Mexico City Center, which is a pedestrianization of Madero in the Historic Center. Some of you may know the street. Think of something between exhibition road and I don't know, Covent Garden. But the problem is that what we tend to see as a success story in terms of reclaiming public space, underneath the surface is similar to what you're talking about. Not a land grab, but certainly a huge accumulation of leases by a very limited number of properties. So Inditex holds maybe 45%. Inditex, which is Sara and Massimo Dutti and all those companies, they hold a large percentage of the retail. They're closing basically what used to be the access to the upper floors. And Madero has become a de facto a shopping mall. It is an open shopping mall. But the question of how do we regulate, which is a challenge, but at the same time, how do we learn from the mistakes of designing or maybe not designing well enough how that transformation is gonna happen is really at the key of the problem. I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. And it seems to me that when I take a bit of a more abstract perspective and I use other language to describe these land grabs or whatever, this buying of property and just letting it sit there very often. I think that in my view, a lot of this sort of this second capitalist phase that we have had that really begins after the crisis. I mean, it begins in the 1980s. Generates economies of extraction. When you think about finance, which is radically different from traditional banking, the traditional bank sells something it has, money. At an interest, finance sells something it does not have. And therein lies its danger because it has to invent complex instruments to invade and take. And it invades to extract. So we think of finance as this complex set of transactions. No, it is also, it does that, but it does that often with the logic that is a logic of extraction. These investments that I described, I think they're just, to some extent, holding their money there because there are other issues. But this is a kind of also an economy of extraction. And that, I find that is, when you begin to look at a lot of our dominant sectors as having this logic of extraction inside of them, then you see the radical difference with capitalism one. By the way, I've never really liked capitalism that much, but capitalism one was a bit reason. I mean, the post-war deck, it's not really literally number one, number one started. So if we're gonna have capitalism, we ought to have the post-war boom. Well, we used, I was going to say it a bit differently because that is not like one can choose that as an option. I think the problem is that when you're mayor, though, you have to deal with capitalism, you can't choose your foreign government. So this is why I wanted to. I have to finish the point, though. Rather than extraction, mass consumption, which means that every household's individual consumption actually mattered. Mass consumption had the capacity to make no orderings. Today it still exists, but it doesn't have the capacity to make no orderings. Finance makes no orderings. Other kinds of sectors. It depends on where we're talking about, how they look like 50 years ago. Can I go back to the time, though? You were going to say something. I think that, Barron, this question, mayor's an office, mayor has certain capacities, but neither capitalism nor the corporate power structure are entirely within the mayor's capacity to shape. How does the mayor get leveraged? What can the mayor do? Yeah, because typically when you're mayor, the national government is not to your liking either because of the personalities in the national government, the structural relationship with the national government. So you don't like that. Corporate tastes and investment tastes are not to your liking. You don't like that, so you're in a bad place. Always analogize that you're sitting on a lonely country road and you're waiting for the coach. The coach is not coming. But you're the mayor. You've got to figure out a way to start walking. You can't just sit there and complain. Now therein lies a dilemma. And what typically I see mayors do is you try to bring in investment and then through regulation, through subsidies, and through other means, channel that investment to create what we call multiplier effects, inclusive effects. Way back in the day when I got out of graduate school, I worked in a place that was well-known in the States called the Boston Redevelopment Authority and I was assistant director there and we had this new program called Linkage where if you build one of these monstrous buildings over whatever the number was, I forget now 100,000 square feet, $5 went to housing, $1 went to jobs. So there was a notion of linking this investment to positive social effects. And I think that we've seen a lot of that and that's been good. But I think the real Olympics here to really get an A plus in this, you've got to answer the question, why has the kind of breadth and velocity in terms of recovery from each recession been slower? Why are fewer jobs been created? You've got to figure out a way to actually directly bring your city back. And I haven't done this and I haven't seen a lot of it. Figure out a way to invest in your people, in your neighborhoods, in your city, in ways and economies that create small businesses, that create jobs. One of the greatest things Saskia said over the years I've carried with me to this day is the notion of the informal economy. How do you embrace this informal economy? I've actually gone to mayors around the world and they say, oh, mayor, I got this great city. As soon as I can get rid of this market over here and clear it out, everything will be great. I'm going, oh my God, I want to, you know. Right, right. Yeah. Right? Yes, absolutely. That's the power of your city. So I might take the same question, Jose, you in a way hinted at this, right? You labeled it narcissism, but the architect is to some extent at the mercy of getting commissions. So when it comes along and says, we're going to rebuild Atlantic yards, that's a fantastic opportunity to build a building. You'd build a better building than that. The era when so much of what Saskia talks about has happened has been an era of stark architects and extraordinary buildings which you either don't like or like as individual works of art. How does this, where does the architect come in? Is the architect really the prisoner of this pursuit of commissions or are there a variety of ways, possibly by working with mayors or with others to break out of that? I think we're dammit we do and we're dammit we don't. I was afraid that was the answer. The, but let me take it even to the larger scale which has to do not only with architects or with a practice and discipline of architecture but to the question of cities in general. So somewhere between the dissatisfaction of Detroit and the dissatisfaction of, let's say, Bloomberg's New York, somewhere in between the London of the Tashara era in the 80s and the London of the Qataris, there's no room for actually an understanding of success or we are very hard to find the... I think that's a really good point. What we like about... It's like DC, free Tony Williams, DC after Tony Williams. Everybody talks to me like there was this golden age before I came, the city was a disaster, you know what I mean? But they're always disasters. I mean, in a way they're always disasters. I mean, I was gonna ask Saskia whether the problems of urban capitalism or let's say capitalism in cities is actually fixed with more capitalism or with less capitalism. I have a question, I do think that the answer is not as easy even here at the LSE, it's not as easy as we tend to think. One could argue that it is not the question of the one billion project, how many billion dollar projects we have in the city but whether it is actually better to have 10 projects of 100 million than one of a billion or 100 projects of 10 million rather than a billion. So it's about the fragmentation of finance which could produce a form of porosity, real, let's say physical and financial which goes back to Tony's question of linkage. The other question that I do have is whether we can decouple the discussion of this sort of a mega global trends with a question of equity and if it's necessary to produce this sort of coupled critique of the form of city this is creating with a form of finance that's creating the city. Well, those are two great questions. I would say on the first one, when I think about urbanity as opposed to density because the issue here is that we're producing a lot of density but as I said, de-urbanizing actually so it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't have to be that way but I think at the heart of the city and the city means the neighborhoods but within each neighborhood, there is something that has to do with commerce and the civic and I think of old Baghdad of all not that I was there when I think I don't remember but old Jerusalem. This was amazing so many different religious groups so many but when it was in the bazaar I mean they may have had disagreements but it was about commercial issues. So the city has this capacity to intermediate all kinds of things in a good way. When I see these mega projects that occupy a lot of urban space that eliminate urban tissue, little streets, little, this little government office where that old little lady or this young student goes to get that, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. That to me is deeply problematic. That really deconstructs. Cities have always undergone destructions. So the fact of destroying is not the issue. The issue is destroying a certain kind of tissue you know that is messy and implanting these monsters. If there are beautiful public architecture buildings maybe you need some of that, you need some of that because it's sort of, but do we need what is happening here? I'm not so sure. So when the Chinese buy all these old buildings that are protected, I really don't care who owns them to tell you the truth. The buildings, it's still the build environment but when I see this inserting of these huge mega projects that I find of concern. There was a second question that you asked but I think you wanted to say something. But I wanted to come back. You said it doesn't have to be this way. I don't ask, well, why is it this way then? And to get beyond the, here's a pattern. I don't hear Jose or Tony start saying oh, we like this. You're wrong to think this is terrible and monstrous. But why do we have to have such an extraordinary global transformation? They say, right, well after we've gotten rid of global capitalism this can be different. After we don't have an internationally linked financial system this can be different. When we no longer have nation state structures this can be different. Or is there something a bit more at the scale and the political organization of cities that could make this different? What is it? Where do we see positive examples? The counter argument, the positive to this and the experiences around the world and certainly in my experiences, there are all the downsides to all this investment. On the other side, just at my city all the investment we are able to bring in we are able to generate or create a billion and a half dollars for school construction. That's a good, that's a public good. Yeah, investment is okay. Absolutely. And so I always say, same thing with finance frankly. Hey, they can make capital at a scale that is unbelievable. Well, let's materialize it and use it for something good. You know, social housing, green transport system. So it also depends how capital gets deployed. I find this a deplorable deployment. I'm just playing now with the language here. Of all that capital. And we know that there are piles of including cash as opposed to derivatives based on interest. Sitting there on the top they don't know what to do with, right? So when you make the list of all that needs to be done. Wow. Could we, you know, couple it? Who's the way? Who can do it? Politicians, citizens, activists, you know, I mean, many people don't even know about this stuff which is already disturbing, right? And this is just a part of the city. Mind you, London still has a lot of neighborhoods but we know from the neighborhoods that many people are feeling pressure, displaced, they are, you know, gentrifying, et cetera, the sort that is not so good. So I think it is sort of a problematic time. Now I just am looking at major cities. You know, for all I know most cities are not the cities that I talked about. Most cities are probably far more reasonable. It is amazing when you see how it is penetrating, you know, into more and more places, this type of investment. But the truth of the matter is that this is an extreme condition. The question is, is it also sort of if we, as we might say as academics, heuristic? Does it tell us a story about a larger emergent history? Or is it just the thing in itself? You know, I don't have an answer to that. Well in these cities I think it is a story of, I'll talk about the gaps again, the local hard buy, the global right smack together. Yeah, so these can be one possibility is there's a set of global cities within which there's a massive circulation of foreign investment and capital markets are creating the particular problems we see in London and versions of them in a couple dozen other cities. I wanted to actually to go to Jose and sort of say, well how does this sound, if you think about Mexico City, is this something that is also coming? There's lots of porosity. There's lots of fine grain, small scale development. Mexico City hasn't been transformed completely in this way. It's not all good news. Does it feel like this is coming in as potential or does it feel like there's a different story for Mexico City and a number of other major cities in the world that aren't quite the foreign capital market targets? I would say that contrary to what Sasuke just said, that this is just kind of an extreme situation. There's an irony that toxic ideas actually do have a trickle-down effect. Yeah, I know. I was afraid of that. And they do, I mean, they're doing and replicating these techniques in Latin America, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia as we speak. So it's not only, let's see, we have the Champions League, but even at the lowest level of a local football league, someone's actually biting someone's ears like Luis Juarez is. So the, or trying to emulate Messi or Ronaldo. So I do think that this... I didn't know this part of you. Are you really so much into me too? If you're not into soccer, I think this is the... I grew up in Argentina. I played soccer. I actually played soccer. Netherlands and Argentina. If you don't like soccer, I think this is an absolute... But now let's go back to... No, but this world of emulation, you're talking about sort of... Following the examples of others is big. It goes back to the question that Tony was touching about, which is the trade-offs. We're always, as architects or as urban managers or as politicians, trying to understand where's the trade-off for forms of investments or forms of capital accumulation. So think of, for example, large infrastructure projects in Mexico. So we all need a better... We all agree that we need a better bus transport network. And we need better inter-modality jobs. And the other thing I would mention too, and because I deal with this a lot, is of this class of the global investors, this isn't all just one big villainous class of people. And I'm not their spokesman, but for example, in the United States, we deal a lot on a project with what they call the givers. These are people of enormous wealth. They basically all pledge to give all their money back to society and one means another, which is worthy of praise. And they're all interested in doing projects that are not self-interested, but are about the public good. So I think part of leading a city is leading a community and finding out who these individuals are and trying to galvanize and harness that force for public good and for social responsibility. I want to come back to what you said at some point. And that is that we need capital concentrations to say the United States. We have, what is it, 15,000 bridges or whatever, that we know will fall down. Every month, one falls down, somebody loses a leg, another loses his life, and we go on. But you know, there is no money. This is the obscene part of it. The second side of it. Well, the money's not going there. No, exactly, but that's what I mean. It's an irony, there's a lot of money. Secondly, what I showed you, a lot of the stuff is empty. It's a holding operation. The city is paying, the larger community, if you want, is paying a price for that. But you know, those who are putting, that's just a, when all is said and done, not a particularly huge investment for many of those investors. And a lot of those properties simply are underutilized. So when I put those two things together, you know, this is, you asked something, Craig, before, about a deeper logic, or whatever language you used, you know, something that underlies. It sounds more like you than me, but okay. Yeah, yeah, I know. But you know, there is a profound misalignment, and that is part of the issue. Right, if one would have access, you know, to these people who have all this money, and one would say, this needs to be done, this needs to be done, this needs to be done, this needs... I'm sure that some of them would, actually. But some of them not. One possible solution we can hope is that you get to sit next to a lot more really rich people and give them advice. That's a non-systemic solution, right? I mean, and so we have various kinds of sort of solutions that finance capital can behave differently. And how does that come about? That governments could be less out of balance with finance capital. Another way of looking at your story of 50 years ago and today isn't that there was no finance capital, it was the balance between the capacities of government, the capacities of finance capital wasn't as one-sided. It was less than finance capital. It was less. In fact, I'm just in case I was wondering, finance capital has gone from about 25 to about 75% of total assets. So there's a massive growth. But the same period is also the period of neoliberalism and a shift in government. And then there's a rise of philanthropy, partly as a byproduct of global inequality and the existence of large fortunes. So what are the places of access here? In this world of philanthropy, there are governments, the governments haven't gone away, but they don't seem to be effectively acting to counteract the trends that you're looking at if anything they are facilitating, right? They're on the package. And I think one of the things Tony said was, a mayor can't decide he doesn't want investment. And so the mayor has to be in part a facilitator, can guide it, can try to steer it, can say let's reserve 5% for this. Where's the point of traction on this? I think there has to be more. I was so pleased to see Juan yesterday, month, whatever it was the day before, talking about the importance of national policy and setting a strategy for a city because there's so much conversation today about how the national strategy doesn't matter. Cities can do all this on their own, which I think is preposterous. Obviously cities have to do a lot on their own. That can be necessary, but it's certainly not sufficient. The national policy is so important. The mayors, the public managers, along with a public-spirited people like this have to figure out ways to network, to force those conversations, create those public policies. So much of your job as a leader is as an educator. I read so many books now about the Great Recession and all these guys writing these memoirs and gals were all saying, oh, I wish I'd done a better job educating the people about what needed to be done. It's nice for you to say now. Right, so much of this is education. So I'll give you a great example is we had to rebuild our police department. One of the things we had to do when we, our police department was completely dismantled, not nominally, but certainly practically, we had to rebuild it. The good thing about that is we were able to build into the new department better citizen-police relationships. You see so much of this around the world, certainly now in the States now, most recently in Chicago, right, where race continues to be a big, big part, unfortunately, of this conversation, this cleavage that's used to drive people to act and vote against their own interests, I would argue, in my humble opinion. Well, so if it's race in some places, it's nationality and immigrants in other places, but there are a series of these cleavages that undercut the possibility. There's always somebody to beat up in every country. Well, and there's always a challenge of building the coalition that can actually have powers. Oh, the people could have power, but the people are split and all this is happening, I think this is key. Let me ask a related question. Tony gave us the example on Saskia's, on many occasions, giving the example of the vitality of the informal sector. What about the issues of corruption, tax avoidance, illicit capitalism? The informal sector, not at the small and creative level, the informal sector at the giant massive flows of capital level. But then we give it a different name. Now he goes all the way, he gets charged. It's not completely different because the logic of tax avoidance links them. The money that is not there for city or national governments to spend because it's not being collected in taxes is a significant issue in a lot of places. And I agree that the illicit capitalism on the trillion dollar scale is different from illicit capitalism on the $20 scale. But I don't wanna ask, and I'll start with Jose and this. Where does corruption and where does the capacity to carry out capitalism in illicit, untaxed form come into these stories? I'll start by saying that in Spanish, we have no translation for two words which are accountability and enforcement. So basically the system, and it's not a minor issue when we are not able, it goes back to our notion of naming things. It's not contabilidad, contabilidad is accounting. The notion of being responsible and transparency just because it's an easier word in a way but the moment that we don't have accountability to address the public for how the money is getting spent, who's getting the contracts, it's very difficult to actually follow a smoking gun. So this probably is an inheritance from the Spanish colonial system. But I would say that it still permeates the way that city politics gets managed in our city. A recent study by the Mexican Institute for Competitive Inmits found out that for example, the new airport that Sir Norman Foster is probably going to mention tomorrow. Yeah, the answer. Don't laugh yet or don't go security but 98% of those contracts had been direct commissions to construction companies. This means that the level, first of all, maybe we're not getting the best standards but maybe we're not getting the best ideas. Maybe we're not getting the best of what needs to be the best. And I'm not here to question Sir Norman Foster. I'm saying that maybe the guy who has a billion dollar contract to move land is clearly not accountable to the public in a question like this. And this is a major strategic infrastructure project. When you think of the kind of the multiple scales in which this happens, this becomes a huge obstacle for growth. I would say there are two, a couple things. One is I think we shouldn't, we talk about other countries and corruption. I think the first thing we shouldn't be trying to do is just from the get go trying to change their form of government and their culture and history because things are what they are. That's number one, number two. Just in terms of corruption. I mean, in the history of many countries there's been corruption but at least the old gutting gains, so to speak, were reinvested in the country. So at least take the stolen money and reinvest it in the country. Right, don't use it to buy property in London or Hong Kong. That's right. There were limited options where you were going to put your money. And I just say the final thing in education, so much, you see so many political leaders who've been corrupt who are so powerful in their own communities because so much of corruption is seen as Robin Hood and stealing from the rich and giving to the poor and this is our hero. No, the guy was corrupt. So how do you educate people to understand that and change the culture? I must say for me the main objection I have to the current landscape are corporations who are not criminal, who are not bandit. Last evening I happened to be at DigiCom where we had a plenary debate with Google. And I raised the issue. Now they're going to call security. I raised the issue of taxation. And of course the head of Google is very smooth and he said, well we are waiting for the government to make new law, so otherwise we don't want to do it alone, in other words, pay the taxes, you know, where they earn the money. And so when you look at, I mean I did this for my expulsion's book, I really looked at all kinds of accountants analysis of this kind of corruption, you know, the taxation issue for big corporations. And we all know about inversion, right? The debate right now with Pfizer where an American company stays, you know, headquartered where it is, but it gives itself another nationality, so to say. And they use the language of inversion. I mean you would say inversion, how chic. I want to invert too. But you know, this, or quantitative easing, or you know the kind of, this is a language that obscures a kind of highway robbery that is at the heart of the system. But like the amount of money that, well if you take the United States government, you know where corporate taxes used to be about 45%. I think there were 70 officially under Eisenhower. Yeah, exactly. Well I'm not even going far that back. But you know, and now it's like 25%. That is for me a far deeper kind of corrosion, corruption and criminality than the, you know, than some of the guys that you were alluding to who are of course little criminals and all of that. I mean, I really think we have a serious issue. And I think the political classes are a bit out to lunch. They have decided that telecommunications is too complicated. We delegate to the experts. Who are they? The corporations. Finance far too difficult. Whom do we delegate? To the financial system. No. So we have a serious problem, and I think you alluded to that, that the political system, now as I said about something else before, but now I want to say it further, no formal political system, type of political system, I'm talking about a format, has lasted forever. Why should this one? We might be seeing the decay of what at one point was a working liberal state. Now, that doesn't mean that communism is the option. I'm not saying that at all, because that is not an option either, I think. But I think that the way we're going, we're in trouble. There are very few governments that one can stand back and say, well, they are really accomplishing. But at least in ancient Egypt, there was a mayor. So I can go to bed at night now. Asia. Right. Sasketa, one last question for all three, Bill. So Sasketa. You're also some architect, don't you? Yeah. Hey, Egypt did indeed have, yes, some architect. All right, we're not going to tough your square now. In the end. But in this, I think, it's compelling, I agree with this, but let me put it, so is one of the issues that liberal democracy has gotten stuck? And it turns out that democratic decision-making, which I think we mostly sort of believe in and desire, in the form in which it's been institutionalized, one person, one vote, large-scale separation of economic wealth to be able to influence it, whatever, is it that the liberal democratic systems are stuck? US looks pretty much stuck on some of these issues. And that it's the states that are effective in being able to bring power to bear on some of these questions, if they want to, are not very democratic, that whatever their choice is in urban design, it's Singapore, or it's China, or it's a range of other rather more authoritarian states that are actually able to take hold of some of these problems, what does that say if it's true? Yes, of course, the landscape that you depict and the way you depict it is very difficult to disagree with what you're suggesting. The question for me is democracy. We, the citizens, our capacity to vote, has that really become an absolutely decaying instrumentality? You know, that we vote, but we have few choices. We vote for a government that then does anyhow. So I think that there is a real sort of, I see a decay of liberal democracy. And that doesn't mean that there aren't good alternatives that include democratic elements, but in a way I'm saying, like who owns the state? My state, who owns it? I don't feel that every citizen has, no, the state is some strange, so. Which state were you referring to when you said your state? Well, I'm especially thinking about that one, you know what I mean. Yeah, okay. The one I also have connections to. I mean very, very, and I'm a supporter of our president, but still, and then when you bring in another element that I would like to just put on the table, which is that when this global era begins and deregulation and privatization become key issues, we hollow out the legislatures and the parliaments. Because you dereg, I mean you just shift functions, the functions don't disappear, but they become private specialized services, or they go into the executive branch of government. So we have, and the legislative is where we, the citizens have our strong standing. We really do not have strong standing. My political mentor, professor, guy named Stan Greenberg, who was a lot of Gerhard Schroeder, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, my professor, just wrote a book, and he was my poster too, but you never know it. But anyway, so he wrote a book, just came out a couple weeks ago called, I forget what the Blue America or something, and it's about the march of the demographics. This is just one example in the states where essentially folks on the right side are in a rear guard action, trying to hold back the tide. And so I'm a little more positive of what's gonna happen over the next 15 years than others. Well, since we're talking about citizen power and democracy, I think we'd better go to the audience for questions. It's about time, right? And let me invite maybe five, so I invite questions, I'll call them maybe five people, get questions, and then invite the panel to respond as they choose among these. So there's a woman with her hand up, one seat in from the aisle, about 20 rows up there. Can you get the microphone to her? Hello, thank you for the presentation, Spyleen Sackfold. My question is to Saskia Sassen. I'm interested to know a bit more about what we're likely to find in other cities, so not in the hundred, and whether this kind of property investment is creating or likely to create similar levels of expulsions and spur the de-urbanizing that you spoke of. Okay, great, let's have another question here. And we're sort of in the front on this side. Thanks. I'd like to ask about urban regeneration, which I suppose to highlight, that that's led or facilitated by public authorities and supported by designers. Now for a long time, large-scale clearance and reconstruction was about kind of moral reform. For a while, it was about health. I guess I'm talking about 19th and 20th centuries, talking about the pathology. Could I ask what or whom does the current wave of urban regeneration serve? Okay, urban regeneration. Another question. Okay, I've got one over here in the front. Thank you very much for your talk. I think the solution could be very simple. Oh, a simple solution. Let's hear it. Since it's grand beautiful that the people of the city or country should own their land, and that means any profit that ever happens on that any business or any living or any investment would be owned by the people of that city or country, and this would stop all corruption and remove the royal family from their power base. And the Duke. And the capitalist. I note that he described this as simple. And Oxbridge. The people own the land, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Another question, okay, right here. Yes, hi. To pick up on the end of the discussion, I'm hoping you can discuss how you see participatory mechanisms for policymaking, agenda-setting, decision-making, fitting into this conversation, and if so, what those look like. Okay, and last question. Is the man in the middle on the far right there? Wait for the microphones so everybody can hear you. You talked earlier about the lack of definition of success and sort of taking out areas of cities that are deemed successful to redevelop them into huge tablets or whatever. Is our definition of value too narrow, and if so, how can we motivate the people in those positions to look at value beyond something that just fits in an Excel spreadsheet? Okay, I hope you all took notes and know what you want to answer. Sasuke, do you mind if we go in the same order we started? Okay, so the first question, well, he already mentioned something about that investment is also beginning to happen. It's kind of corporate buying of property or of urban land. It's also beginning to happen in what we might think of as smaller cities. In my list of 100 are quite a few. I don't want to call them smaller cities, but not the kinds of cities that we think of. For instance, Manchester and Birmingham in the UK are really receiving a lot of capital, not Liverpool, you know, which I find interesting also. And when you look at China, there are a lot of cities that we have never heard of. They are not small cities, but they are not particularly on international circuits where you also have capital coming in. Now that might mostly be Chinese. You know, there is a lot of Chinese, what we might call corporate in quotation marks. That supposedly it's different, but it is that too. So I think that probably this is going to spread. In the list of 100 has a lot of smaller cities that would take you by surprise. Now the second question, your question, I would like to leave that to, is that a good idea? Regeneration and, right? But the owning of the land, you know, I think that if cities were corporations, a kind of, the good sense of corporation, like the old fashioned medieval term almost, that that might be very interesting. My concern here is, I alluded to it in passing, is that the law is very ambiguous in many cities. It's really, it's like, if nobody thought about it. And so what's happening with these, this is one of my key concerns actually, what is that I didn't develop here. What is happening with these big acquisitions, the contracts are done by very, very smart people, you can imagine. And I'm afraid that once this question of who owns urban land comes really back into the picture that those contracts are going to provide some, if you want, intercedence, or this is what we have done and will be built into what might be an urban law. There is quite a bit of discussion among legal scholars now in different parts of the world. They're a little, little group, but still they exist about the question of urban law that addresses the question of urban land. This is something that had been totally out of the picture for, I don't know, for a hundred years or something like that, as far as I can tell. But it's now reemerging. Now it's a very specialized little circuit, but they are in many different places of the world. So anyhow, that is an issue. Why don't you start answering the regeneration? Because we have to be really quick. I'll try to connect the question of value regeneration and the question of land. Maybe we need to re-edit Henry George's 19th century books on the discussion of land economics. And our good friend Enrique Peña-Los, a member of the Urban Age and an expert in losing elections until two weeks ago, used to say that- But he won, he won this time. Yes, he's back. Now he's two and seven. Is that really? Yeah. But we're really happy for him. Very happy. He does better when he runs for mayor than president. For nine years, he told us that urban land cannot be managed as a kind of a capitalistic asset. So that states and cities should control that asset and manage it in order to capture value in a different way. Let's see how that plays out in Borota. But I think the question of value is really key and it's actually connected to the notion of urban regeneration. Because value is seen as an excuse to transform cities. Terms that used to be relevant at one point, think of urban renewal in the 50s and 60s became toxic a few years after. Or even nine years ago, Rem Koolhaas talking in the second urban age conference in New York City made a comment that the word gentrification which we used to be critical, maybe in 2007 we were not so critical right through the middle of the Bloomberg year. So I like to expand the question of value beyond a notion of economic wealth. Let me give you an example. In Berlin, 80% of the homes of households are rentals. So how do you accumulate? I mean, everyone would probably agree that Berlin is actually a fairly attractive cosmopolitan and interesting city. Poor but sexy, but we can argue whether that still holds true. But the question of ownership is actually decoupled from the notion of success. In the case of Mexico City and some of the poorest neighborhoods in Mexico City, it's actually the inverse. So ownership is 80% and rentals are 20%. So how do we connect the production of urban transformations to what kind of wealth and accumulation, even if it's micro-entrepreneur, the guy who has a 150 meter plot and produces a house that as Arabena was saying is not a car and decreases in value but actually produces capital. If there was one thing that I actually found fascinating that Alejandro was apologizing for quoting Hernando de Soto. But if there was one thing that the Soto did successfully for Latin American, is to connect the notion of houses and land can become a form of capital. Whether we want to follow that sort of absolute correlation, I'm not sure. So we have to be suspect of urban regeneration. I like to think of a Brian Nino's oblique strategy of making more mistakes faster. If we produce smaller mistakes, we're more able to transform and learn from them rather than if we do the $10 billion mistake which takes a lot of time to retrofit. So again, the same fragmentation, smaller scale experimentation. The way I would relate the questions, one at the end, the question about joint ownership, I think we ought to keep trying because we have tried, I've been involved with projects where we had common ownership, joint ownership of the project, but the question was how do you within joint ownership create incentives for everyone to take, so you don't have the tragedy of the common issue that people are transferring the burden of somebody else. But we ought to keep trying. That's to the value of communities and value of property in an urban area. I think the common way of looking at regeneration has been to, again, look at you guys' subjects. We're gonna do this for you. We're gonna do this despite of you, on behalf of you, but not really with you. So we haven't figured out a way to. We generate an area. You continue to live in the area. We provide you jobs. We give you the education. We do all these things and we bring the area back that way. Most folks in my business say, I'm just being honest. We say, oh, that's just too hard. Let's bring in the investment. We'll leave a few of you here and we'll call that inclusive because that's why I call it the Olympics. It's really hard in a practical world to provide that uplift when the escalator is broken. What do I mean by the escalator? One of the ways that cities have functioned so well over the decades as people moved into the city, they were able to achieve upward mobility through jobs and they moved on. The escalator kind of stuck. What in the 60s? So you no longer have this upward movement, this job creation, this expansion of the economy. The 60s were pretty good compared to the 90s. I think we're 74, 75 for social right now. This is where you get to the whole notion of the occupying police force because the only jobs that are left are with the government and the folks in those jobs don't even live in the city and therefore you get the conflict. Can I ask you a last word for you? Just a final, and I'm going to take it into a totally different direction but the current so-called migration crisis in Europe where we deploy these two categories. Immigrants, migrants, whatever, and refugees. And of course they capture something. My question is, and it's an honest question, it's not a rhetorical question, is what am I seeing when I see these flows? Because there are also strategic flows, new types of flows happening from Central America, not Mexico to the US and then the Rohingya people. So we are very focused on Europe but things are happening, new types of flows are emerging. Now so my sense is that what we are seeing is the beginning of a new history. Now in this moment it's very acute, the war zones. Nothing competes with war in its immediacy of expulsion, et cetera. But when you look at the land grabs in the global south, when you look at the massive expansion of an extremely destructive type of mining, when you see that so many people are simply expelled from the countryside where they have inhabited, where they have knowledges about how to protect the earth, make it have a long life. They all wind up flattened as urban slum dwellers, all that knowledge, all those cultural issues. And so for me, the dominant logic that is happening here where war is indeed one element but just one is sort of this massive loss of habitat. Now, when I then come back to our cities and I see this, how can I not also ask, am I actually seeing the making in cities when you have this kind of appropriating of urban land and basically poorly inhabited, barely used, are we also talking about a loss of habitat in our cities, two very different worlds by the way. But still it seems to me that we need sort of new language to begin to capture some of these extreme conditions, whether it is the migration refugee crisis, whether it is this extreme buying up of ultimately pieces of urban land. This is not a happy note on which. So we don't end on a happy note. We end with a question. We end with reasons for you to come back tomorrow night. Here, Norma Foster talked about infrastructure. Well, you will be very happy. December 3rd to hear Richard's Senate talk about social equity in the city. Right now, please join me for thanking the urban age and our three cats.