 Thank you for this invitation and what I'm going to really do is extend some of what Alejandro has presented and use the rubric of urban design because I think it's important that we also frame what might be bridge practices in delivering exactly the challenges that Alejandro has sort of outlined. And I think what is critical is the question of synthesis because these are the multiple forces that we are trying to bring together. Democracy and we've talked about this, advanced capitalism, neoliberal policies is a fatal combination for urban form of cities and more generally for urban design as we imagine it today as a practice, a practice that aspires to create both coherence and efficiencies in the way urban form is imagined in our cities. However, today the reality of operating in an environment where most decisions are made or determined by market forces Alejandro had patient capital but this is really the architecture of impatient capital. It's sort of contradictory to what urban design aspires to do as a bridge practice, one that implies flows and is open, a practice that's plastic and reconfigures itself depending on the problem and the agents, actors, constituencies it has to influence. Plastic enough to even configure and reconfigure itself between bill form and the broader ecologies of the natural systems in which it is situated. So how does one bring that sort of question in? And more critically as the bridge discipline that embraces the autonomy of architecture and the rich terrain of the social sciences that ideally inform the disciplines of urban planning. Now starting in the mid 80s when governments around the world were unleashing privatization of city development, architecture at scale came to be understood as urban design. Battery Park City that you see here and the likes of models of best practices, Canary Wolf in London of course a public sector was involved but these generally landed up being sort of large scale architecture. Now interestingly this model is now exported extremely rapidly from the North American and the metropolitan European landscapes of deep democracy to landscapes of severe autocracy like China, Middle East and many other locations around the world. Naturally this has caused urban design to be understood as a large scale architectural project deployed at the urban scale or architecture as an autonomous object with little relation to the urban in a sense. And the reality is the world of the informal, I mean look at India here in Indian cities 90% of the economy is informal. And of course this sets up a whole different, because it reverses urbanization and this is a diagram by John Buskets who is a colleague of mine where he shows us how from the traditional city where you had urbanization plot division and building in the informal city it's exactly the opposite. You have built form first then plot division and urbanization if you legalize it so to speak or try to integrate it. So there's a complete reversal even in the protocols and processes of the building of cities. Now I think this sense of disengagement with reality has attracted criticism of what urban design has come to mean and its obsession with the built form in a narrow sense without the dimensions of the social. Today there seems to be a growing consensus within the profession of architecture and planning to supplement the rubric of urban design and this is very much out of the American Academy because in Europe it was natural where we are trying to supplement urban design with this broader urbanism. Now the many forms of reading and engaging with urbanism that have emerged in the discourse today really serve as a critique I believe of the unrealized potential of urban design to engage in more substantial ways in place making and how to intersect with the social and the more natural ecologies we operate in. However the use of urbanism implies a passive field of study, observational. The dictionary defines it as a study of cities or city life depending on the context it is used. Urban design with the prefix of design to urban I think makes it much more pointed to design. It makes it more operational versus observational of the urban. Now these critiques of urban design whether it's new urbanism or landscape urbanism are projected or represented as an absolute position often without any specificity or at least the aspirations to become absolute positions. Instead I think urban design as a bridge practice or discipline is intrinsically counter position to the perpetuation of the absolute and I think this is very important for us to imagine the city crisis as we are discussing. In fact this is the robustness of urban design as a category where without being an absolute it has sufficient specificity to operate on the ground through its negotiations with the discipline of architecture and planning. In that sense it's a practice that operates across scales from piece of street furniture to larger scale territorial operations but with a humble approach to grounded realities and we saw Medellin, we saw the examples in Paris. I mean they're just many examples of work Alhandro showed us the work we are going to see. Design advocacy is an integral part of the practice of urban design. In fact urban design is about activism, about drawing the disciplines of architecture, landscape and planning closer together as being a conduit for critical feedback loops on which the survival and improvements of our cities and broader landscapes depend. Today with new technology that can be appropriated for this purpose these processes, these feedback loops can be deployed in far more complex ways and actually give urban design as a practice a much sharper advocacy edge which I think is really lacking. This would really make urban designers a kind of contemporary practicing polymath, one who directs dialogue based processes for imagining spatial possibilities means directing movement, lifestyle, morals and the interaction of individuals. Thus rendering urban design highly influential in the imagination and construction of the built environment. Thus the definition of urban design besides its activism dimension of closing feedback loops between planning and architecture and that is necessarily and that it also is very human centric, a field of constant contestation where social resolution is manifest by the resolution of spatial imaginations coupled with the design process. So I think that sort of is my framing of the crisis within the definition of urban design and I think going into the future one of the issues that will be critical for urban design is to grapple in the coming decades with a question and the role of temporal landscapes in the imagination of our cities. The argument is clearly not to pose this as another form of urbanism but to argue of its inherent values in supplementing the dynamics of the static city but also phenomena that's part of an expanded field of understanding the current state of urbanism globally. Basically to identify it as not to identify it as just one more form of urbanism but a strain of urban readings and practices that could be instrumental for both practitioners as well as for the reflection of urban design on the ground and this argument is really of the temporal is further propelled by two critical phenomena. The first is the massive sort of scale of the informalization of our city where urban spaces configured outside the formal preview of the state and secondly the massive shifts in demography that is occurring and that will be accelerated through climate change, the deletion, the imbalances, the inequities, the rise of natural disasters, etc. But largely this flux is emanating from and will continue to accelerate given the sense of inequity as Alejandro talked about and you know the European crisis is bringing it to the fore but this migration and movement has occurred. I mean look at between Mexico and the United States. Just look at between India and the Middle East and the conditions that people live in. We are recognizing it in the context of Europe because it's becoming a startlingly different condition in terms of the adjacencies it's posing but this is a phenomena that has occurred but design hasn't paid it any attention and this is a diagram that's called the five stages of squatting which is the incrementality with which cities are made in places like India and many parts of South Asia. I want to sort of it also at a larger scale poses much broader questions. If you just look at India and what is urban in India, it's very interesting. In India and the government uses three criterias to define what a town is. One is a population of over 5,000 people. I think Mexico uses 2,000 people, a density of 400 persons per square kilometer and interestingly that 75% of the population should be in non-agricultural employment. So it's interesting if you look at that, you see the map on your left or depending on your left, that's what the map will show us but if you pixelated down to just the criteria of 5,000 people, look at the kind of pattern of urbanization but if you look at density, you begin to get one big city along the northeast from west to east of India. So that becomes a large metropolitan area but if you look at the 75% of people in urban agriculture as a criteria, very little is really urban or you could argue that India is 60% urban for six months of the year and 40% urban for the other six months which is an interesting question because it leads us to the question of what flux means and I think the big challenge for design and for urban design as we go on and I think this resonates even in what Alejandro showed us at the scale of the half house is that we are designing for absolutes. We have to address the question of design for transitions, how do we make these transitions? Environmentalists, energy experts do that. India is making a jump from fossil fuels to alternate energies but it's making the transition through nuclear which is a completely different direction. Now whether we get caught in nuclear is another question but sometimes transitions are not obvious. They're non-linear and how do we design for transitions in making this jump I think is a very critical question and so we've been using this rubric of ephemeral urbanism as a way of embedding a discourse within our normal business as usual discourses on urbanism to see how we could deal with this flux through what is temporary in nature and we're using the rubric of ephemeral urbanism, we've created this taxonomy of transaction, religion, strife, extraction, celebration, refuge and military and the critical thing is how do you begin to embed time into this equation of planning. We don't have a way of articulating the notion of time and planning and that is critical for transition. So of course these are broken down by buildings, by landscapes, by waterways because these rhythms are different. I don't know the answer but these become some of the very important challenges and this project which Alejandro alluded to, the Kumbh Mela which is called Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity because this is a city built every 12 years for seven million people to live there and 100 million people to visit and it's on the banks of the Ganges and the Yamuna, when the river dries up after the monsoon, on the banks this entire city is built. It's on sand, it has no foundation, it's the lightest city that is built ever in the world and it's the largest gathering of human beings on the planet and that's a scale to Manhattan and probably has twice the density even though it's just sort of low rise. That's a before and after image which I took in late October and the first week of January that's what you saw from the same spot. The city emerges on the sand banks. It's a grid which we've been discussing all day yesterday but it takes care of a shifting context which is the riverbed and it's very robust because every road in the grid goes across as a bridge. So it's the most robust grid in the world because the river is negotiated through a bridge for every road and that's what it's sort of how it pans itself out and the interesting thing is the entire city for seven million people is built out of these five materials and that's why it's deployed so quickly. The five materials go up in scale from the smallest hut eight foot bamboo to large temples that are built there as community centers that are then clad in cloth and become incredible spaces all for these 55 days very reversible and at different scales for different functions with great diversity because within the grid itself organized. It's very interesting that here even the governance structure is temporal in nature because we talk about temporality as an aesthetic question something that looks temporary but here you have a governance structure that for the first year works with this kind of hierarchy it shifts to administrators in the next six months and then it shifts on the ground to administrators on the ground. So it's a complete shift in the hierarchy with very little reporting between the two and this group can go outside the circle. So it's a temporal governance structure which shifts with of course linkages in reporting and the guy here then has only two people he reports to so he can be very efficient and so there's a whole flip in the governance structure. So temporality also occurs at that sort of level and after the festival is over the rivers flood again and the city sort of takes over and it's left as a memory. I only put this as an example of extreme urbanism which takes care of this notion of flux and to conclude in a minute one could argue that the future of cities depends less on the rearrangement of buildings and infrastructure and more than the ability for us to openly imagine more malleable technological material social and economic landscapes. From these settlements we can learn how to move towards an urbanism that recognizes and better handles the temporary and elastic nature of contemporary and emergent built environments with more effective strategies for managing change as an essential element for the construction of the urban environment. The challenge is then learning from extreme conditions on how to manage and negotiate different layers of the urban while accommodating emergent needs and often large neglected parts of urban society. Thus the aspiration would be to imagine a more flexible practice of urban design more aligned with the emergent realities enabling us to deal with more complex scenarios than those of static or stable consolidated situations. Then urban design is about how these spatial possibilities play out to influence the quality of lives of our economy, society, evolving culture and the broader well-being of the planet. It is in the broader view of planetary implications and ecological thinking that will prepare us for questions of equity and humanism in the context of our operation. And finally the choice for urban design and for a lot of design and planning is between being the thermometer or the thermostat. One that registers and the other that sets the temperature. While we need both finally, it's the instrumentality of design what Alejandro referred to as a synthetic quality. One that is socially engaged, elastic in its intellectual configuration and practice is what will be relevant for the future. Thank you very much. So, Raul, most of the projects or initiatives or pieces of urbanism that you show with a sort of fondness, with an excitement are probably not designed by urban designers. Or architects. Or architects. So, is there a message there that actually both the way we think about the profession and I think you made that very clearly? And is there something about education in which we may want to take up in a moment where basically urban design and urban designers have failed? Because in a way, if we take your words and we take the images of what most of us in this room think an urban designer does, we think of something fixed with ballards, badly designed, not elegant, but it's got all the infrastructure in place but it has no soul. But that's what we think of urban design. And in a way you're saying that's one of, is that where you're taking us? Well, yeah, I mean, I'm arguing sort of in response to that two questions. One is that, yes, urban design is this bridge practice which creates these feedback loops. Therefore it has the ability to understand protocols and processes and the implications that has on the built environment. And the other is which I think has an implication and education is that I think in our professions for too long we've taken permanence as a default condition. Our solutions are imagined with permanence. I mean, imagine if someone came to you and said design a city for seven million people, a mega city for 55 days, we won't really know how to start. Our education won't prepare us anyway. Yes, would like to ask you as follows. You spoke about this festival, your festival. Yeah, my first. Could you imagine that this festival is also produced in Milano, Berlin, Barcelona? Well, you know, I mean, well, of course, this is... Sorry, the question. No, no, it's a really relevant question. I bought this up yesterday. I think one of the things we have to be careful about which is a trap we easily fall into discourses like this is the idea of universalizing these. So I think you have to abstract it more to see what you might learn from it. So I don't think it's a question of replocability, but for me, I think one of the most exciting things about what we learned was the governance structure flips around like that. That's interesting because we take... Besides our cities, we take governance as a very fixed permanent. We look at continuity in incredibly limited ways in some ways, but the fact that you could have this move around on a temporal scale, I think it challenges us to think about other models. I'm not saying we replicate that, but I mean, I think that suddenly opens up a question. Takes us away from the limitation of aesthetics and temporality that we as designers seem to correlate, you know, and so. Well, I'll give you a simple example. I quote this very often. My friend Mark Anjali from the ETH told me about this wonderful experience he had when he took 10 students or 15 students to Ethiopia to study an informal settlement, and they showed up there and they had a week and they did six days of intense mapping, measure drawing, photography, and they kept a lot of discussions. We have an aesthetic baggage. We connect to it, you know, which is about temporary materials and all of that. So I mean, I think this decoupling of protocols and aesthetics is again a challenge for the profession. And does this issue of, you know, good design doesn't actually embed in it at the moment if you add the value aspect of your triangle, so to speak, doesn't actually accept temporality. You want to invest for the longer term. I mean, is that, I mean, you broke that rule with your half a house, but. Yeah, the problem is that the kind of challenges that we're facing won't be answered if we deal with inpatient capital. And people want, using the built environment for having a profit as much as possible in the shortest possible period of time. We won't get there. The only way to address that is if we can appeal to patient capital that is looking for predictability. But what does the architect, the designer, need to do to appeal to that? Okay, in order to guarantee the long term quality of the built environment so that individual interventions gain value over time, there's a few things you need to guarantee. And in that sense discusses resource, of course it's not money, but coordination. Synthesis on one hand, coordination. The quality, the footprint of the void. And I really think the more. The footprint of the void, what is that? Well, this is a more or less architects environment. I would frame it like get the nolly right. If the nolly of the future city. The space in between buildings. Jump at the nolly, mapping what's built, what's not built for taxes. That's what the main issue. So if you get the nolly right, and particularly the white part, what is not built, then eventually you can allow for that private initiative be it an investment or be the person just providing themselves with the built environment to gain value over time. And that's why there are a few, I don't know if it's rules, but at least some clues in the proportion, in the width, in the quality. That is, it's not rocket science. It's a rather simple thing to achieve, but it's an open system. It's more than synthesis. It's great. I mean, when you're talking about proportion, that's fine. I'm saying it's more than synthesis. Closer to the mic. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also a matter of both because I mean, I think this is, at least my argument is not about the fact we should be making temporary cities, but we should be inspired by maybe just the protocols of these. I think the half house is a good example of exactly this where it's helping making a transition to another economy but keeping it open-ended at least for 50% of the space. So I mean, I think the lessons that one can draw out of this are at many levels and therefore we mustn't be obsessed by the aesthetic implication only.