 quality and housing the poor it becomes quite easy for me to introduce the next Peter which is Senate because I think if there's some one from the last 30 40 years certainly in the English language to start off with because that's the language in which he writes has been a keen observer of the issues of social integration and the relationship between physical form and social integration and therefore equally attentive to the issues of the creation of social exclusion by the structure Richard has and is a professor at the London School of Economics but also teaches at New York University with Professor of Sociology is the chairman of the city's program which is one of the elements obviously which organizes this event together with the Hermarten Society and is also teaching at the IT so it's my pleasure to ask him to reflect on the issues of urban inequality which will then lead on to the next session on housing. Thank you it's a great pleasure to come to Mumbai and turning out to be a very very productive session for your visitors from abroad and hopefully in the informal and informal sessions that we have over remaining to the next day and a half we will be able to articulate a set of common interests and problems that we share. I come to you with one of those problems which was one of the reasons for creating the urban age project itself and that was that problem is that urban design went into a kind of creative decline in the 20th century. The art of making cities became an art that became increasingly crude and unable to respond to the realities of social life in cities as they changed particularly in the 20th century. And part of the point of the urban age is for professionals themselves to recover some of the art of making cities. Something that we have to do by a lot of thought often whereas in the earlier ages this seemed like a kind of almost instinctive practice about making environments. I want to speak to you today about one of the challenges to recovering the art of urban design. And it has to do with dealing with the problem of changes in global capitalism. The kind of visual forms are appropriate to this profound change in the political economy of today's modern world. And in particular what kinds of visual or physical forms are appropriate to dealing with one of probably the greatest of the deficits of this global system which is the increase in inequality that it generates. Excuse me, I haven't spoke about the reformulation of inequality that it's generated in the last two generations. How could a designer go about addressing the phenomenon of inequality? And I just want to share with you in the next 20 minutes some thoughts about this. This is a huge problem and I thought about it in a rather homely way. And it has to do with my thoughts on this recur to the Hippocratic oath that all doctors take. And the Hippocratic oath, as you know, actually not devised by Hippocrates but no matter. But the Hippocratic oath is do no harm. And I think the issue for us has a parallel in the world of urban design. How can we do no harm in design? That is, in this context, how can we not make inequality worse by the things that... The Hippocratic oath is not a negative formulation. Do no harm inspires the doctor to look closely at the conditions of well-being. What Hippocrates did say is that you're likely to treat a patient better if you investigate the fine grain of his condition rather than generalize about his illness. And that, it seems to me, is a wonderful guide for us today in thinking about how we too can take the Hippocratic oath in cities to do no harm and so to make our cities at least more resistant to the pressures of inequality. Let me say, since I have very little time, just to name two features of it that have spread over the blow in the last 30 years, which bear on the problem of urban design. These are features of capitalism which have to do with its time frame as well as its spatiality. The first of them has to do with the phenomenon of what has been called inpatient capital. That is investment in projects, principally in urban projects, in which the investors want a quick return to their investments in which they did not intend to become long-term owners. This behavior in the physical realm is based on a way in which inpatient capital works as stock markets have become globalized. People who invest in stocks and even in bonds are no longer long-term owners who consent to control companies but rather are sitting for short-term gains in the prices of shares. I'm just giving one example of how this works. In the United States, pension funds should be the most conservative of all investors in stocks and bonds. 35 years ago tended to hold stocks for an average of 46 months. As of last year, they tended to hold them for four months. Even the most conservative of investors have become sources of inpatient capital. That has had a profound effect on the way in which these are found. The second issue, a large change in capitalism that bears on our particular problem has to do with the phenomenon of chameleon institutions. So just to say in reacting to these patient capitalists, many managers and many institutions themselves re-engineer themselves over the short term changing their business focuses on how they're organized and where they're organized in order to meet the demands of investors who want short-term returns of investment. That is, the chameleon turns out to be a rather more attractive investment proposition than a change of any sort that affirms that at a fixed purpose, long-term goals meet another steady development. These are unsexy and tend to suffer. Now, both of these aspects, inpatient capital and chameleon institutions, have had an effect on modern cities. For one thing, they both push towards increasing the scale of cities. That is because investors prefer much more to invest in very large cities than they do in medium-sized cities or in small towns. The notion is that the federal character of very large cities is going to produce businesses which are likely to change, take on a chameleon quality and so be investable in.