 Anyone who has a Samsung 7, please throw it away immediately. Good evening, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It really is a tremendous honour and a privilege to have been invited here tonight to deliver this, the 2016 barb reward lecture, particularly here in London. Amongst so many people I regard as friends and colleagues and fellow urban activists. So a big thanks to Andrew and the full team at IIED who've made tonight possible, who've made my stay in London so pleasurable. Thank you for that much appreciated. I must admit right up front, and I'll be honest with you, I'm far less enthusiastic about this idea of delivering a lecture. A lecture is after all an educational talk to an audience. And given my company here tonight, I think that might be just a little bit pejorative. Alternatively, it's a long and serious talk. And I don't think that the offer of free finger food or drinks after this event is sufficient compensation to you or to me to put ourselves through that kind of experience. So I want to suggest that we move beyond the idea of a lecture and we throw out that notion in its entirety. So apologies to Andrew and the team for promises broken in that regard. The next big question, of course, is what we're going to do with the next 30 minutes. Because I've certainly got to do something up here to warrant having flown across the world to talk to you here tonight. And so I'm going to take a cue from my heritage. I was born, I've lived, I've worked my entire life on the African continent. And the one thing I can tell you without fear of contradiction that every African, regardless of their cultural background, loves telling stories. Now why is that the case? Storytelling is intellectually liberating. There are no rules. There's no anticipation of any level of perfection. If you commit to give a lecture, there's an inherent assumption that you're striving for some level of perfection. And I want to dash that in its entirety tonight. So tonight is really going to be about storytelling. Kiara, I'm really with Ben Oakry because I think that Nigerian also really highlighted for us the importance of striving for a story than perfection. He indicated where there is perfection, there is no story to tell. As we saw, Barbara Ward was herself a consummate storyteller able to capture the imagination of world leaders and local communities alike with her often very provocative and challenging ideas around social and environmental sustainability. And so I think if we were to pursue this notion of moving away from a lecture and rename tonight not the Barbara Ward lecture series but perhaps the Barbara Ward storytelling colloquium, I suspect she might have been at the beginning of the queue supporting us in that endeavour. Now the interesting thing about telling a story is very often the storyteller is as important as the story itself. And I think tonight it's very significant that the storyteller up here for the first time in the history of this event is not an ex-president, is not a national minister, is not a regional commissioner, is not even a United Nations executive secretary or director and is in fact simply a local government official from a very ordinary city in Africa along the east coast of South Africa. And I don't think that that choice of storyteller was at all coincidental by Andrew and the team. In fact I think it was very intentional and a real indication that the story of the 21st century is in fact changing. We're moving away from one large overarching global narrative, one size fits all, to a greater interest if you will in more nuanced local novellas that allow us to connect to real people and real places. I don't think there'll be anyone in this audience tonight who denies that we're at a critical moment in the history of our species economically, environmentally or socially. Despite the fact that we're the newest hominid on the block, the latest branch of the evolutionary tree, we've only been fully human for about 40 to 50,000 years, they're already talking about naming a geological era after us. I'm sure the majority of you have heard of this idea of the Anthropocene, that we're entering a geological age which is going to be defined by the impact of the human species on global earth systems through things such as climate change. We all know that we're living through the worst financial crisis we've ever seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And when we look about the world, we can see that there are a variety of hotspots where global and social cohesion is collapsing at an unprecedented rate around us. We already have about 20 million people living out their lives as refugees. So I think it's not surprising that what we've seen at the international level in terms of policymaking is a real frenzy to try and put in place policies that allow us to get to grips with some of these very profound challenges. And certainly, as Andrew indicated, in the United Nations universe, what this has generated is a real plethora of new agreements and new agendas and new frameworks and new goals. The most significant of which, and how this is so complex, I'm simply going to read them to you, is the Sendai framework for disastrous reduction. We've got the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Development Finance. We've got the Sustainable Development Goals. And, of course, we've got the Paris Agreement dealing with climate change. And then the next couple of days, we're going to add to that list the new 20-year urbanisation strategy for the world, otherwise known as the New Urban Agenda, which we told will be adopted on Day 1 of the Habitat 3 meeting in Keita in Ecuador. And I know that some people in this audience at least will be on a plane quite early tomorrow morning and heading off to be part of that particular meeting. I think it's incredibly significant that the New Urban Agenda forms the full stop at the end of this very long policy-making centres. And it's significant, I think, because what it does is indicate the kind of capstone role that cities are and will continue to play in our striving to achieve a more resilient, sustainable and equitable world. But I caution. And I caution that it's merely a full stop at the end of the sentence. It is not the end of the story of cities in the 21st century. And, in fact, we know that the tale of two cities, and here I'm going to have to update Dickens very substantially, the tale of 10,000 cities, is, in fact, only just beginning. So why do I issue such an advisory at a time when my fellow urbanists, in fact, might be quite bullish about what we've achieved at the international level in terms of raising the profile of urban areas and cities in the international debate? After all, we're anticipating the New Urban Agenda coming into force next week. We've already got in the bag the very hard-fought-for sustainable development goal 11, the City SDG, which urges us to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. And, of course, we've got the Paris Agreement with its much-anticipated acknowledgement of the importance of non-party stakeholders and the action they take, and cities are embraced in that. We've got the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which talks to us about getting more support to the city level. The only floor there never tells us how many years it's going to come from, but it's a nice idea anyway. We've got the Sendai Disasteris Reduction Framework, which talks to us about how important cities are in reducing the overall global risk profile. Now, these are all substantial achievements. They take us well beyond where we were, for example, with the Millennium Development Goals, where the only nod to anything urban appeared in a target hidden away from the city goal. That target urged us to substantially improve the lives of a minimum of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. My real concern, though, is that we become so obsessed with this move to get the word city and urban into agreed United Nations text that we may be losing the plot. We may be forgetting why we started this work in the first place. And that was really about responding to the local challenges and opportunities and local urban communities and in the natural ecosystems that underpin them in a way that ensures that we build cities where no one, no space, or no natural system is left behind. The point I'm trying to make here is that on a planet of cities, borrowing the phrase from Shloma Angel, you simply cannot afford to have only half an urban revolution. Bob Reward herself noted, there is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then to leave it half done. And certainly as we stand here tonight, or in your case as we sit here tonight, the story of the world's cities is only half told. And what we're seeing is that there's a growing disconnect between policy and urban realities. So to my mind, we live in real danger of chapeaus replacing communities, of preambles preceding people and in the drive to achieve agreed text, totally overshadowing the need for extensive but still unfinished activism in order to save the world's cities and indeed the world itself. And unfortunately, the draft text of the new urban agenda seems to suffer most severely from this policy reality disconnect. So if you actually take the time to read that document, you'll see it's become in many places just a long litany of every politically correct statement you could find. The only one I couldn't find there is All Hold Hands and Work Towards World Peace together. Now while all of those high level aspirational statements are indeed incredibly laudable, they by themselves are not going to get the job done. They are very clear implementation pathways that are direct, that are concrete, that are resourced and very often targeted at our small and medium sized cities where the real challenges lie. That's where we're going to get eternal bank for our buck. Sadly though, if we look to the new urban agenda, it's a long list of wills, there are no shells. It's a long list of what's but very few howls. The agenda brings to us is a storyline asking us to believe in a happily ever after urban ending but it's a story that never introduces the enterprising young wizard with a sustainability one capable of overcoming the evil sorcerer of injustice and inequity. So if we're serious then about this happily ever after ending for the world cities, we're really going to have to focus a lot more intently on that issue of implementation and that's going to require us not only to understand the formal aspects of our city. We're really going to have to start looking at those unplanned spaces, the spaces where people are building the city from below. We're going to have to figure out ways of getting resources to those particular communities to increase their level of agency to increase the sustainability of what it is that they're doing. We're going to have to reach out not only to science but to research to help us understand the role of natural ecosystems in improving the adaptive capacity of cities around the world and we're certainly going to have to reimagine forms of governance that allow everyone to come to the table across all scales, local through to international across horizontal barriers in order to talk about the past, the present and indeed the future of our city. I must confess to you that as someone who has worked for alongside local government for three decades now, I can find no personal call to action in the new urban agenda and I find that particularly troubling because if we are to truly set the dial at a new level for the world's cities then every city dweller is going to have to become an activist. Bob Reward again herself noted it is a truism that one person who wants something is a hundred times stronger than the hundred who want to be left alone. And indeed activism is about direct and vigorous action which means we've got to find ways of taking those high level altruistic statements and tying them in some very real way to real people and real places around the world. Unfortunately so many people are disempowered and excluded from the global urban project that's going to take a huge level of mobilisation commitment from others to draw them into that debate. Kia ora Marevi and his team in India in the first edition of their new journal urbanisation say it's a question of how we relate to each other as human beings and as humans to other beings to forge equitable and productive relations. In this regard I want to diverge slaki from the general story of cities around the world and take you somewhere more specific and share with you a little bit of my own personal history and the city in which I live and work Durban in South Africa. And the reason I divert our narrative in that way is that it ties me personally to IIED and by virtue of that link to Barbara Ward who indeed founded the organisation and who we are honouring here tonight. To give you a sense of my background I'm a biologist and a biographer by training and in many ways that could have condemned me to a very narrow world view dominated by taxonomy and species area curves but I was extremely fortunate because my doctoral research was overseen in fact by Professor John Pointon who I'm delighted to say is here in the audience with us tonight and John because of his incredibly broad ranging interests in everything scientific really highlighted for me that there were many different forms of science and that science could play many different roles in the context of the world's cities. He encouraged me during the course of my research into the importance and value of nature and biodiversity in cities to really interrogate the various environmental philosophies that were out there at the time so that I could better understand and deepen my understanding of the relationship between the built and the unbuilt aspects of this thing we call the city and it was during the course of that intellectual exploration that I first bumped into Barbara Ward and her work through her co-authored book that Andrew's already referred to Only One Earth, the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet That book, along with many others authored by people as diversas the deep ecologists all the way through to Lewis Mumford really impressed upon me at that stage of my career the importance of localising agency of taking a personal responsibility for a particular geography and those ideas and ideals have stayed with me throughout my career. At the end of that research I toyed very briefly with this notion of staying in academia but very rapidly became unhappy with the way academia at the time viewed applied science and what I thought to be its necessary corollary that of activism. So in many ways I became aware as the narrator of Robert Impersich's delightful book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance does that in the world other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind I just want to talk about how to fix the motorcycle and so I realised that if my career meant that I was going to play a role in fixing the urban motorcycle then staying in academia probably wasn't the best place to be at the time so as 1994 came along in South Africa and our country began this vast transition into democracy I took the opportunity to initiate a personal transition and moved out of the ivory tower in academia and transition down into city hall joining local government as Durban's first environmental manager and what I can tell you about those early post 1994 days is that they were a heady time we were all busy excited becoming the rainbow nation there was a huge amount to learn firstly about ourselves as South Africans as we began to reconnect but then also about the outside world the problem with that was that it was also a challenging time because in our naivete we assumed because we had been isolated for so long that everyone who came from the outside must certainly know more about everything than we did and that seemed to be confirmed by the flood of people who came into the country after 1994 offering in many cases very well intentioned to help us develop the country to rebuild the nation and manage our very complex cities and I think it's safe to say that at that time South Africans were absolutely the international flavour of the month you simply could not have an international program if you did not have a South African involved or a South African institution involved and that meant that it was a process whereby we became copted willy nilly for the most part voluntarily but sometimes involuntarily into a number of international programs and processes I can recall being at Habitat 2 in Istanbul and there was a break in the negotiations so I took myself out and I went to attend a side event where a representative of an international agency was presenting their program on local sustainability and up came the obligatory distribution map so they could brag about a number of cities on their program and I sat there quite perplexed because they're taking pride of place was, Durban in South Africa and I thought that's really odd I hold the sustainability portfolio in the city and I didn't even know we were participating in that so I did some polite investigation after the particular presentation and what I found was that a very cursory conversation or indeed a conversation about cursory in the United Nations precincts in Nairobi several months earlier had resulted us in being copted into this program without ever being invited to say yes or no to that particular invitation and given the nature of the time though we never contested those sorts of incidences because we were just so excited to be part of the mainstream but as with everything life settles down and deeps in and you begin to realise that at least some of the people who are trying to advise you are very little about South Africa and indeed very little about Africa at all and that created a period that I refer to as the clash of civilisations as these kind of warring ideologies trying to fit into the same country and that in itself generated very many memorable moments top of mind for me was our participation in an international climate change program where we very dutifully prepared our progress report and we sent it off to the international director and he came back to us with a whole slew of comments and really top of that list was his reflection in terms of what he regarded to be an African viewpoint our project and our progress report reflect African feelings or African voices as if there was some kind of standard or caricatured way of being African and if you didn't immediately dispense that particular viewpoint you were un-African I think the only statement perhaps more ignorant than that is the people who refer to Africa as a country and so when that self-same international program director decided wanted to come out to Durban he wanted to visit the project he wanted to meet the local community members involved all of whom live in a very large informal settlement very high risk from a crime and a flooding perspective we went at all surprised when we arrived at the hotel that day to pick him up and he emerged from the hotel in designer trousers and white leather shoes anyone who knows anything about site visits in informal settlements particularly in Africa knows that white leather shoes will simply not do it for you however these white leather shoes have remained with me symbolically as a real reminder that the attempts to re-colonize our continent are ongoing and we have to be vigilant at all levels around it and so it's not surprising that during this time I rather rapidly became very cynical about anyone who wanted to talk to us who wanted to help us or heaven forbid wanted to draw us into an international program and so it was during this very cynical period in 1999 that I first met David Sattletweight from IIED who's sitting right in the back there I can recall sitting in my office and taking a phone call from David who politely introduced himself and introduced IIED he indicated he was in Cape Town at the time and he would like to come up and talk to us about the local sustainability work we were doing under the umbrella of our local Agenda 21 program of course by this stage my eyes are rolling back in my skull and I think he has another international researcher coming to tell us what to do but I'm a very polite city official and I follow our Bata Pele our people first principles and so I said of course you're most welcome to come up and visit us and so several days later David materialized in my office and in retrospect I'm very grateful for the shoes however at that point in time I was much more concerned about the fact that he did not have a guidebook tucked under his arm because generally the people who came to visit me had guidebooks to offer me those guidebooks that have the standard five to ten steps I don't know why it's always five to ten steps that kind of normative recipe and if you follow it in some kind of linear fashion you'll save yourself, you'll save your city and you'll be on the pathway to some kind of sustainability and so on well David didn't have the guidebook and he was true to his word he just wanted to listen to what I had to say about our local sustainability work and so he sat there while I rammed on about that work and at the end of it he was quite thoughtful and responded he said look this work sounds quite interesting have you ever thought about documenting it so that other people can learn from your experiences, your successes and your failures and then he did something that very few people who come to my office doing he says I've actually got some money for you from the European Commission that will help you secure the time and support you need to do this work and joy of all joy is it was funding that had very few of the normal conditionalities associated with it which make the transaction costs of international funding so high for those of us in the global south and so this really was a moment this was an offer that we simply couldn't refuse by that stage we had got so used to the international researcher who arrives in your office and the first thing they do is they come to your table and they put down a diktaphone or a smart phone depending on their generation and they foist a piece of paper at you that you need to sign and then they record you for two hours and then they go away and write a paper that bears absolutely no relation to your reality at all and so this offer of telling our own story of being able to document it in a way that we thought was authentic was really incredibly exciting and empowering and I brought all the way from Durban a copy of the book that flowed two years later from that meeting with David a paper was also written at the time which is still an incredibly important piece of institutional memory for us I myself had to refer to my copy a couple of months ago because I had forgotten some of the early work that we had done I also learned from David that the value of true and equal partnerships is in fact only revealed through time the next time I heard from him was in 2007 when he contacted me and said will you come along to this global urban summit that the Rockefeller Foundation are putting together at Bellagio and will you talk a little bit about the new climate work that you're doing anyone who knows anything about the Rockefeller Centre at Bellagio knows that you only refuse those invitations if you're dead it's such a fabulous location and so I truly accepted and arrived in Bellagio and it was such an exciting week of meeting people that I would never have met in the normal universe of being a local government practitioner I'm delighted that at least two, three of those people in the audience here tonight what flowed from that was ongoing interaction with the Rockefeller Foundation initially through their ASIN project and Welcome Gorakpur the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network project and from that flowed some small seed funding again unconditional which came to Durban which allowed us to start our climate change adaptation planning work and that set a whole series of dominoes falling the first of which was that Durban became one of the very few cities around the world to lead its global climate change response with local adaptation action generally the response of cities comes out of the mitigation field this also meant that our administration in two mayors became very strong champions for the notion of local adaptation action as a critical part of the global climate change response most notably through the Durban adaptation charter that Andrew referred to which came into being at COP17 at the local government summit convened in Durban at that time in 2011 but the links between Durban and IID don't end there because three years after that fabulous Spelogio meeting I was nominated to become a lead author on the Urban Chapter of Working Group 2's contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC's fifth assessment report again very fortunately for me David was the coordinating lead author on that particular chapter and he used this unusual event of having a grassroots local government practitioner as part of his writing team to really ensure that as we waded through this enormous task of assessing the global literature that we were constantly triangulating that with an assessment of the experience of local actors which I think really gives that chapter an added depth of course the payback was that that chapter couldn't escape reviewing the importance of natural ecosystems and their role in proving the adaptive capacity of cities but that was David's particular burden to bear for having a biologist on the team from that particular process and the connections made there flowed my involvement in the global initiative to ensure that we got a city SDG and because of my IPCC experience I was ultimately nominated and elected to become co-chair of Working Group 2 in the sixth assessment cycle the first time a local government person and a non-researcher has been elected to that particular role in the IPCC so as I draw this more personal story to a close what does the particular offer us as a way of filtering out the important messages in the more universal story of the new urban agenda well these lived experiences really left two important messages with me the first of those is that it reminds us that it's only by people working together as equals over time that real change happens at all scales it's not only about joined up governance it's about joined up science joined up funding but ultimately it's about joined up people secondly it demonstrates the value of providing opportunities for different and new voices to be heard and the importance of enabling such contributions and the fact is without organisations like IIED there are in fact many thinkers around the world in cities of the global south many practitioners who would never have a global voice who would be excluded from the global conversation simply because of lack of access and lack of resources so in many ways IIED has become Barbara Ward's most lasting legacy at the global level the message from this too is that we like David have to become social entrepreneurs we have to be active in finding those new voices we have to be active in empowering them so today those little stories will ultimately make big history so using this global platform that I have here tonight by virtue of another woman who as you saw herself was rather prone to activism I want to send out a very clear message to all of those national government representatives who will shortly be getting on a plane to head off to Quito and Habitat 3 and really remind them that global policy makers do not lead revolutions local people do policy is also only the start of the 21st century story of our new cities once that new urban agenda is adopted the real challenge lies in enabling local actors to tell and change the story of their particular city I was recently at a climate change conference in Oxford talking about the challenges associated with improving the global level of ambition from well below 2 degrees celsius degree 2 in Paris to that 1.5 that is potentially in the offing and there one of the contributors observed I think very profoundly that we need to start valuing the cement as much as the bricks and certainly in terms of the 21st century the SDGs the new urban agenda Paris are all really important policy bricks that we're going to build the cities of the 21st century out of but ultimately it's going to be local people local governments and local ecosystems that are the cement that bind them together in a lasting way and without localising the global urban agenda and transforming these ultimately impersonal altruistic global policies into something that's more personal and direct and focused on action and capable of changing local stories Antonio Gramski's caution will ring true in our ears the oldest dying and the new cannot be born so that's my story for this evening and in the words of another famous Nigerian author Chinwa Ochebe if you don't like my story write your own thank you