 Right, thank you Tony for that fatalistic examination of our future, not fatalistic though, it's not fatalistic, I didn't say near fatalistic, realistic. Further challenge to energy supply and the consistency thereof, radical innovations in production leading to changes, balance of power between different countries and indeed between different groups within societies, a dystopia, the need to respond to climate change rather than realistically being able to stop it. And at the very end there Tony makes the point about how the difficulty of getting citizens, I think this is the challenge for governments, getting citizens to understand what's happening in order that those who govern have a chance of moulding and allowing them citizens to deal with or perhaps to react appropriately to these kind of changes. I see I could have given a talk in 30 seconds because Tony just did. Good, right, excellent, it's easier for me, I was just following you. Now if I can move on to our discussions and give them sort of two or three minutes each just to open out from what they've heard and with the view then to having a bit of a discussion around the table and then I'll open it up to the audience a little bit later on. Tessa, are you optimistic, pessimistic or fatalistic? Oh, I'm always optimistic. It's very important if you are a politician and I've been a Member of Parliament as you know for 20 years and I've been a Minister in the UK government for 13 years of which more than eight were in the Cabinet. So all that makes me very optimistic and I've also been one of the sort of five or six people most centrally involved in conceiving and delivering the Olympic Games. That makes me feel even more optimistic given the conditions in which huge challenges become possible. But my experience of facing these huge challenges and in a way we all come to this I think by analogy and my first job in government was as public health minister. And then the other and within that one of the major objectives to reduce health inequality to reduce the levels of inherited deprivation through the construction of programs for early intervention in childhood and then the Olympics. Now what's the common theme through all these disparate public policy challenges including that which is ostensibly the focus of our discussion today. It is the need for pluralism and the frustration about inactivity on climate change and some of the very difficult questions that Tony outlined, energy security. The ideological nature of much of energy policy is what stands in the way. And I think that there are long term challenges. Known as Nigel Lawson. What? Known as Nigel Lawson. That's a political remark. OK right. Well I'm just. No I think that's a heckle so I'm just going to carry on. Lot of you there. So I think that the only prospect for getting a rational long term set of policies to address the acute challenges of climate change is to build the basis of cross party agreement. I'm talking here from a UK perspective but climate change as many of these challenges is heavily tiered the impact of action to give effect to climate change starts with behaviour change. How we all act in the privacy of our own homes. Did we how many of us turned the plugs off that we charged our phones with overnight last night you know and and so forth. How many of us are scrupulous in meeting the recycling requirements of our local council rather than just putting everything that we can get away with into a big black bag. And then there is the scope for remedial action which can be taken by local authorities by regional authorities by national governments national governments working with the relevant industries. And then of course the interact ability of reaching global agreements but what underpins this is a pretty brutal recognition that if you allow these policies to rest purely within the electoral cycle nothing will happen. And that's why if I were in government now I would be identifying three or four major areas for long term change which are absolutely fundamental to the resilience of our society and I would be putting an awful lot of effort into those. And to move from the heavily strategic to the small and local to here the reason that the delivery of the Olympic Games on sustainability grounds on cultural grounds sporting grounds regeneration grounds confounded all expectations was the stability that came with the agreed terms for consensus. And you mentioned the Olympics and in the UK there's no doubt there was an all party consensus that drove that and you were an element in that but. I was the instigator. You were the instigator. I'm sorry. Not that we want to over clean. The battle I had in cabinet means that I shall always be quite proud of being the instigator of that. But it still begs the question of more generally with the fall in trust in politicians and not only in Britain not unique to bring by any means. That makes it difficult and I like to come on back on to this when he speaks. I mean the question of how if trust in politicians is falling away does it make it more difficult for them to lead the kind of changes and to make the kind of policy that are needed to react to the changes that Tony was talking. No I think it actually makes it easier and much easier because I think that anyway let's set aside the question of trust in politicians. I think that politicians who think that they're ever going to be trusted are unrealistic and trust is too high a bar for politicians to aspire to. However. Still more or less trust. More or less trust. But if you set politics aside we are as anora O'Neill set out so clearly in the reath lectures we are a society that runs on trust. We are a trusting society and I'm being very UK centric here but I mean I can talk about India by comparison where I was last week for 10 days if you like. But I think that where the public see politicians putting aside the hard edge of ideological difference in pursuit of the public interest that increases their confidence. The word I prefer to trust that increases their confidence in politics and politicians because they feel it's about them rather than about the politicians. OK. Well thanks for that. I'm sorry to interrupt there. I'll turn to our second respondent Craig Calhoun. Thanks Tony. Well thanks both Tony's for the good talk and the passing of the floor. Just some quick remarks first regarding what Tessa just said and cited anora O'Neill for I have a partial pessimism on that if we're a society that runs on trust I think we're in trouble. And indeed we are a society that runs on trust and we have really a series of major problems about that first off at various sorts of scales. What is the structure of trust and solidarity that works at a European scale to global scale. But indeed in Britain or in any other national society there are lots of indicators of serious problems on this front and difficulties with sort of public trust. Which means which creates problems for any potential responses to an issue like climate change. And we have the sort of declining trust in political parties or the other sorts of indicators of difficulties in potential collective action. If government is to play a central role I think it must in these sorts of responses then we have a real question about the political bases for being able to generate the effect of responses. I think the most important thing to say about urban responses to climate change is that they're mostly hypothetical. We had some yesterday some wonderful prospective visions that the possibilities are enormous the technologies are interesting and the realities so far are pretty small in a relationship to the issue. Massive risks are real but massive risks unsettle us more than they in themselves guide change. I think that they don't produce in and of themselves responses that go in particular directions. And so knowing that there's a risk explains more that people get nervous than it does what they do to actually confront this. And a lot of what does shape responses existing social organization. So I worry that we get for example proposals that reflect more about the existing political economy than they do the kind of response needed. A simple example is something like cap and trade as a proposal to try to deal with carbon. Not entirely implausible but a lot more about creating securitized financial instruments that can be traded in markets and be advantageous to Goldman Sachs than about actually confronting the best possible way some of the climate change issues. I think there are all sorts of obstacles I'm going to try to detail them but there is possibility here I'm not unambiguously pessimistic and this is very much a matter of cities. So one of the features of cities that's important is that cities are sites of a fair amount of social self organization. A fair amount of cooperation but also tacit of creating of ways of working together and alongside each other by a variety of different people in different organizations. And so they are indicative of the extent to which it's possible to create very complex structures and systems not in centrally planned ways. And the difficulties of centrally planned response therefore are only part of the story. But cities are also here structures of inequality in a way that needs to be recognized as our common theme of the urban age conferences and of LSE cities. But the extent to which it's not just that there are the wealthy and the poor but that cities are structures shaped by the activities of production and consumption and the byproducts of them. So that cities do a lot of creating externalities externalizing the impacts of production into some parts of the cities. Whether through pollution or through poverty or through extreme over concentration and so forth. So that we need to look at the extent to which these dynamics are constantly reproducing in new form these extreme inequalities and externalizing the negative byproducts of what we do. And I think that goes on into the climate change issues and who lives in low line areas as the sea level rises and a whole series of other sorts of things. And we won't have the solidarity. We won't have the trust to confront this so long as we continue to reproduce these vast inequalities and structure them into cities in crucial ways. We are very likely to face increasing disasters we already do so I actually accept Tony Giddens' suggestion that we see the kind of hurricane Sandy Superstorm discussions as portents whether there's an exact individual relationship to a trend is not. But then we recognize that disaster is often itself urbanizing that massive disasters that climate change disasters don't come just in the form of walls of water hitting cities in Japan or the United States. They come in the form of ecological change in Africa that things like the situation in Darfur are intensified by water shortages and other shifts that are climatically induced shifts. And they have the impact of driving urbanization in significant parts so that we're actually getting more urbanization in part by responses because people displaced from other forms of life end up largely becoming urban populations. And a lot of urban growth is driven by difficulties elsewhere in the larger ecology and that and it creates an issue for resilience not just of the cities we live in of the big high tech cities but of resilience for low and middle tech cities in other parts of the world. And a lot of the question of lives lost and the resilience questions need to be asked there not in the places or not only in the places where we imagine the new utopian technologies to come. Urbanization has long made and remade nature of this and this is going on today and there are various bits of this we could go on and talk about. I would in line with my remarks yesterday note the importance of repurposing infrastructure, the extent to which cities are rebuilding and repurposing projects not unlike the space in which we sit and that in our imaginings of ways to deal with this, imagining repurposing is often as important as imagining completely new things we would build into cities yet our imaginations are heavily structured towards the completely new as in the smart cities fantasies and so forth. And a last thing I would put on the table is the we come at whatever our new era is and however we're going to describe it we come at it at the end of an era of de institutionalization unlike the post war boom that built a variety of social institutions for dealing with problems. We come at our current situation after 30 or 40 years of undoing many of the social institutions of weakening many of the social institutions that in fact create resilience that help people cope with problems that deal with social inequality and this undermines our ability to respond effectively. And this is reinforced by much of the way in which we think about the electric city that is our techno fantasies are often highly individualistic techno fantasies and on the one hand and yet every possible solution that's proposed is a system level solution. So we have a sort of a political individual utopian fantasy of the technical cities. We have a dystopian fantasy of which is I think quite realistic of systems in which people don't matter the matrix or however you want to think about it. And we have a very hard time connecting these into an imagining of a future which is actually amenable to various sorts of socially organized action for which we would need institutions organizations something between the libertarian individual and the massively planned system. And this place is a premium on politics mechanisms for participation kinds of social protection that would enable people to cope. And so I think the biggest issue of responding to climate change isn't per se the technologies of response. It's the capacity to create a politics that would get us to utilize the potentials that are being offered by the technologies and other changes. Great. Thank you very much. I mean if I can play back to your question a bit like the one I asked Tessa but about academics, intellectuals. I mean what's their role? I mean if I have trashed the reputation of politicians or say that somehow politicians have had their reputation or trust in them has fallen. Actually academics reasonably high levels of trust. I mean what's their role in the world you've just described? High levels of trust although a certain expectation that they'll do their own thing and just not cause much trouble. So that's not an expectation that we will deliver as much that's socially useful that contributes to this as we might. I think academics have a hard time shifting their research agendas. So it's unusual. Here we look at Tony Goodens who's written on 30 for years and says climate change is bloody important. I'm going to stop what I'm doing. I'm going to work on the climate change issue. This is very hard for academics in midstream of careers and we need more of it but not just on climate change on a variety of issues. It's also the case that we have a variety of disciplinary structures that are often antithetical to looking at major issues. Urbanisation itself cuts across ten different disciplines the extent to which we can repurpose ourselves to look in intellectually serious ways at the practical issues that cut across disciplines is crucial. And finally I'd say things like this conference are good and what I said yesterday in opening that it's a social collaborative production of knowledge that's crucial that also shares it. There's no future for imagining that academics are going to think up solutions inside their universities and somehow by some transmission belt they get on these are going to reach the larger public. It's going to be a collaborative process if it happens at all in which there are relationships with people in other settings besides pure research settings shaping the questions that are being asked shaping the research that's being done creating an appetite to use the results of research whether they're political actors or corporate actors or other kinds of actors and so we'd better be building these alliances now not just doing research waiting for some chance to disseminate it later. I'm sure lots of people in the room will have heard that. Excellent. Enrique Penalosa. Here we have been we have clarity that the cities are going to grow hugely especially in the developing world. That means in the next 40 or 50 years practically all cities in the developing world will grow between three fold and 12 or more fold. But not only the developing world for example the United States over the next 50 years will be necessary to build the homes equivalent to all of those existing in Britain and Canada together. So the way these cities are built can have a great impact in sustainability and what I will try to say is that sustainability or how to avoid climate change is extremely closely linked to equity. We have problems with sustainability in the developing world mainly because of inequality. For example we are building for example slums. We have slums all over the developing world the poor are forced to go to the wrong places very high up in the hills around cities for example. So this creates a huge amount of energy expenditure for the next 500 years because they are not being located in the right places and it's very difficult to use bicycles to reach those places too for example. Or else also private property of land around growing cities is forcing the development to go very far away. This is a fantastic study in Mexico recently in which they showed that between 1980 and 2010 approximately Mexican cities grew two fold in population and about seven fold in area because seeking cheap land so this inequality. The inequality is making people go very far to totally car dependent environments which again will consume a lot of energy. Inequality is also that which keeps upper income people from riding bicycles but they feel they are too important to go in a bicycle or to use public transport. I mean the upper income people in the developing world feel very fancy using the subway in London or Paris but they would never be caught riding public transport next to the low income citizens. So I would say that inequality creates bad cities and also bad cities create inequality but on the other hand happily also equality creates good cities and good cities create equality and many things can be done if we realize. I think we have sometimes inequality before our noses and we do not recognize it as we had for example slavery or when we think about the French Revolution we think so obvious what changed them but it was not so obvious because a thousand years had gone by and everybody thought those things were normal. Or only maybe six or seventy years ago there was no vote for women in our society and people thought this was totally normal. Now today it seems to me that for example to have a road with traffic jams without exclusive lanes for buses is a symbol of inequality almost lack of democracy and technically rationality because it doesn't take from the technical point of view doesn't take a PhD from MEPs. I might hear from LSE to realize that the most obvious way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses and from the equality perspective if it's true as all constitutions say that all citizens are equal before the law then of course a bus with 80 people has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one. So this are very simple technologies which could solve mobility I mean mobility is a political issue and an equity is not a technical issue and of course this could have a week you could almost solve mobility in a developing country city in a matter of months if you took the right political decisions to use road space in a democratic rationally rational way. I would also say that so that even basic infrastructure such as sidewalks will get people to walk more but in developing world there is no sidewalks protected bicycle way a protected bicycle way again is a symbol that shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one on a $30,000 car. So it's equally important because it protects the citizen as it is because it increases the social status of the cyclist a bus in an exclusive bus lane. Summing by as expensive cars are in a jam is a very beautiful symbol of democracy as well. So I would say that I mean sewage can be fine if they are done for the right reasons but they are simply too expensive but often in the developing world they are done because the upper income people want them not because they have this lightest intention of ever getting into one but because they want other people to go underground so they have more space in the streets so and with sewage is wonderful and it's beautiful but it's impossible to solve this equity. Now since we are doing totally new cities, totally new cities, I would just propose that we can design totally different cities which with ingredients which do not exist in London or New York which would completely and radically change the way cities are lived and used and it would be very cheap. For example we could have hundreds in Bogotawe did for example about 70 kilometres of pedestrian and bicycle road such as bicycle highways going through a very dense city. Cawdwch lle o bai chi ddweud cyddiad hynny. Yn y bwgottag, byddwn yn 70 km o bedestru, a achos mewn arrhyentlyn lle o rwyng byddwn yn cyfriddol petrolau'r cyfriddol. Yn y pryd y cîn, yn credu byddwn yn cyfriddoll y cîn, a'i fyddechrau bod eu cyfriddol número of hynny'n cyfriddol bai cyfriddol, felly mae'r cyfriddl ni fydd ynnghwyl i fynd i gyd yno. Yn y cîn, ymddol yr cyfriddol e'n cyfriddol yno, of hundreds of kilometers, thousands of kilometers of bus-only roads which would work like fantastic mass transit systems and would be very easy and very cheaply done. And I would say that technology in many ways of course I am optimist that is making improvement but for example just to end with one last comment about this, beyond all the wonderful things that cell phones are doing for developing country people it's amazing how it improves their productivity. I would mention two things. One is electric bicycles to which was a reference yesterday. Electric bicycles can be a revolution but you have to have the infrastructure for this because you can use them even in hilly cities or where people maybe are not in good shape or whatever. And finally the iPods. I think iPods have made bicycle riding a totally new experience. It's almost like flying low through a city so I think but all of this has to do if we make the decision to make a more democratic city, a little bit more for people and a little bit less for cars. Okay, thanks. I can put a similar question to you to the one to Tessa which is I think described as a way of, if it's not a new city you're going to have to change a city. So in a sense it requires the politician to take interests on in a pretty aggressive way. Now from your own experience you've done that but other politicians don't find it or don't find it nearly as easy to do or you've said as in a sense the applause suggested people want because people in the room want. Why don't they see the obviousness of your case and then just make people change? It's really as I mentioned some things are so obvious but we are so used to the other thing. If I had said 90 years ago that women should vote people would have laughed as a little funny thing. Like today if I say that any road with traffic jams should have exclusive lanes for buses people smile a little mockingly that this is something a little funny or almost ridiculous or when I say for example that clearly the private property of I believe in the markets and private property and of course I mean this is but sometimes it doesn't work. In the case of land around growing cities it doesn't work. The beauty of the market and private property is that when prices go up such as in the case of tomatoes or computers then supply increases and then prices go down and prices tend to approach costs. That's the beauty but in the case of land around growing cities so you can increase prices all you want and the supply of land that is accessible to transport to education to jobs to water. So I think if this was more clear maybe there would be a battle to give but unfortunately the poor people in developing country cities are too worried about surviving to be able to fight and even the upper income people are so powerful. I was almost impeached when I was a mayor because I just took the cars off the sidewalks and I put ballards you know and then this was I was public enemy number one. At some point I had 15% of positive image. I even had to send my daughter to live in Canada with a brother because he was my 12 year old daughter because it was almost like being a criminal because I was so. I hope that this process which was top down led from the top down is not the right way to do it. I think with these new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook and Internet and all of these things is more possible that this change process will be more supported and even more led from the interested people. OK, right, thank you. And again last but not least, Martin Haier, your contribution, your response. Yeah, well I think actually it was a great keynote that Tony just gave us there because I mean it's nice that we have all new sort of gadgets but we want to put them to a certain use and you gave it a certain urgency and orientation that I think is important. As we know at the moment we can still actually reach that two degree target but that's technically it's possible. Whether it's socially possible that's the issue I suppose here. It's not about technology, it's about how to make that society transform itself to use that technology as was just said. And then you realize that often when we talk solutions we talk really nice little solutions but not the ones that will make the change. So give you a sense of the degree to which the order of magnitude issue is not in the room a lot of the time. I mean if you save yourself a return trip to New York you can drive your car for 35 km every day. But this society is one in which we localize compromise, become more compact in the cities but we combine it with a global life. So that is precisely the sort of non-solution that's not going to help us out of this issue. There is not enough bio-fuel to run these aeroplanes in a sustainable way. So there is a real politics of energy and I think that was well put. And you can also actually see in a conference like this sort of the outskirts of what that politics is about and it is as of yet uncertain. What we know is that we have to think very broadly and think perhaps about 20th century, 21st century. Because the 20th century, say take the post war period was all based on fossils. It was based on global integrated organizations like the United Nations. It was based on the idea that hierarchy would solve the major public issues and it was based on a central rule approach. Once the elite agreed we would just devolve and the solutions would be implemented. But now we can no longer use fossil fuels and it is in the mix that we now have. We have five, sometimes ten percent renewables. The rest is fossils. That implies that you have to work on a sort of a war based system to get into that two degree world. We cannot rely on the UN. These sort of global institutes are not going to deliver. There is not going to be a consensus based 193 country wide coalition for this. So it are going to be coalitions of the willing. That's the new 21st century term. And these coalitions of the willing might be big corporations NGOs and some cities and perhaps a few universities. But these were all sort of actors, the new actors of change that know how to fight each other not how to find each other. We know very well how to put sort of multinational capital in the dock from a critical science perspective. But we know that we need to have new sort of coalitions of the willing to make this move. Now then the third was hierarchy of the 20th century is cooperation probably of the 21st century. That is I think very much in the room here. The spirit of cooperation using these gadgets to share because one of the reasons why we needed hierarchical organization was that we needed some unit that had all the information. Now the information is spread out. And central rule won't work. We need sort of incentive based rules. And I suppose that's one of the things that I think that the state can make a difference. To really say we have that vision, we can still manage to keep this a pleasant place. And this is the incentive structure. We're not going to tell you what to do, but we're going to tax carbon. For instance a very logical approach. If you have a problem in a society of taxation in the 21st century, well connect it to the one big problem that you have. If you have another big problem which is labour, then reduce the amount of tax on labour. I mean you don't have to reinvent a sort of employment strategy. You have to put the incentive rights. And there again I thought that what Bruce Ked said is important, but also shows you the problem of getting this play on the stage so to say. Because we must also allow ourselves to talk about it in a political way. Where there's space for real disagreements. Because let's not forget that one solution for the climate crisis is not immediately supporting your sort of equality project. There are many solutions to the climate problem that say well we have to take that away from you. We are going to sort of control and make sure that the world is going to be a safer place. So that mix of different things we want to get right is what we need. And then I suppose the urban being the site where this all happens is precisely because this is the space where we create new norms. I think that value change is going to be the driver of it all. And cities are renowned for being places where you are seen, want to be seen and where people are seeing each other. And what you now see and that is I suppose a really significant change is that it becomes hip to be sustainable. A house in California that is visibly sustainable, that means it has PV on the roof, is worth more than the value of the house and the PV together. Because we like to be seen to be doing good. And that is I suppose what also is coming through from this conference is that there is indeed sort of a value change. And now the problem is, and it's not Enrique's problem because he's sort of an odd case out, you are sort of a courageous politician. But most politicians only dare to follow when they're certain that it is a majority issue. So the issue really for us now is how to construct the sort of a coalition that says we want this. We think this is a good strategy. And I think that will come from very different political issues. And when Tony said the new politics of energy, I think there is no one single solution to that energy issue. And it might actually be one where you have to choose very directly whether you prioritize the central electricity generation or central electricity generation. And a smart grid which helps people that are prosumers might be one that you want to put forward. You want to prioritize that investment to the detriment of the super grid because there's also a solution suggesting that we are going to get all our energy and electricity from desert tech in Africa. And that would be a central organizational principle. So good old Charles Perrow did an investigation of the Harrisburg disaster in Three My Island. And what he came up with was a disaster for the fact that these systems were tightly coupled. They were not loosely coupled. And I suppose one of the interesting things that we can now decide is to have very decentral energy systems that allow society to be much more democratic, much more able to innovate to readjust by changing out a module and putting in a new one and avoid that we need a song state which we don't have and that we need to have central technological solutions that we probably don't want. Again, the question to you. I mean, how far do you think politicians can be or the leadership that you're describing, either from politicians or from social and more popular movements? How fast they can move in relation to Tony Giddins' is we may be too late for you? Well, I think that if you look at it historically that politicians often do not really lead but follow. So they codify something that's already happening. So if you look at the major innovations in building insulation, it wasn't that politicians said that needed to be installed. It was that the industry said they could do it. And then the rules followed. So what you can now do best is to make it an interesting trajectory. And look at the Danish example. They had a sort of societal agreement that that renewable revolution was what they wanted and that was what made it robust against coalitions that changed. The German example, again I suppose, is now, well, it's getting controversial but the reason why it's relatively robust is that a new interest emerged of people that now are seeing themselves as energy producers, renewable energy producers. And they constantly monitor these acceptance rate of that energy vendor. So it is, politicians do not walk up front but what we could do, critical social scientists, people working in industry is show that this is actually viable proposition. Many politicians are, I think it's fair to say, willing to be a bit more proactive than that in many cases, aren't they? But the question is, how far can they go beyond their own image? Some do it for image purposes, some do it because they believe in it. But I think you're saying it doesn't really matter providing they do it. That's what you're saying, isn't it? I mean everybody, you would like to give the politician the glory of being the one that changed the world. But I think the big issue underneath will be the value issue. And often that goes unintentionally. So I suppose that one of the positive effects of the austerity of this day and age is that people look for radically different solutions. So what I find striking for instance in our discussion here is that the incompleteless is now idealized. So we say that's good that something is incomplete. I don't know why. I mean I like a beautiful finished building. But the reason why many buildings are incomplete and why we start to like it I think is because we have to anticipate that we no longer can afford to build these expensive buildings. So values have a funny way of adjusting to new systemic challenges. Okay, Tessa's caught my eye. I'm going to ask Tony Giddins to respond to the responses in a moment. But Tessa, you've caught my eye. I just wanted to pick up what I think has become a theme. And please challenge me if I'm wrong. Which is for these big challenges, whether it's shaping new cities or climate change to be met requires a different kind of politics and in some senses different kinds of politicians. The difference between those of us who are politicians is that we're on a kind of five-year contract and at the end of that time the people can vote us out. A lot of you may have a bit more security of tenure than that. But that is an asset. It's not a liability. But I think the other thing is that I would invite on behalf of politics and politicians, I would invite you to be more open-minded in creating coalitions for progress with politicians whether they be city level or local level or national politicians. Because that's the way in which good policy is achieved. And I think that somehow creating the stocks for politics as an activity as a vocation is entirely counterproductive in this. The best cities are cities that are led by vibrant and engaged politicians who would always put it kind of grit under their fingernails, to connect with what's actually happening in people's lives. Experience the rush hour on the underground in the morning or waiting for the bus or the fury at the cars who drive up the bus lane when you're actually sitting on the bus and so forth, this sense of solidarity. And I therefore go back to what I said at the beginning. I think there's enormous possibility of building these kinds of alliances for long-term change and turning the product of that alliance into a kind of contract with the public more widely. But I think that this is a big moment for politics and for politicians and those who will emerge as the leaders of the next 10 or 15 years are those who understand that and are prepared to act in a different way not always necessarily being the politicians who are out in front mopping up the glory, which is the result of other people's efforts. Okay, in defence of politics and rightly so, in my fault, probably just starting that one. Right, Tony, would you like to respond to the responses? Well, I'll just respond to one of two things. Thanks very much for all those observations. First of all, I'm not interested where the only one is an optimist on. I think the important thing is we recognise the reality of risk. And when you say you're an optimist, it should not involve the denial of risk. So, for example, you could have cancer and you could say I'm an optimist because I believe in lifestyle change as the way of treating cancer. Well, that would be, in my opinion, a fairly foolish position to take. I think the difficult thing for people, politicians and others is to think the reality of the risks we face. We are a civilisation like no other civilisation, no other civilisation confronted an issue like climate change. No other civilisation has been global as our civilisation is. Very hard to think the reality of risk and to take it seriously. So, to me, I'm not interested in division, between optimism and pessimism. I'm interested in recognising that these risks are huge, that the scientific basis for them is extremely solid, that whatever degree we end up with, these are massive problems, existential problems at the outer range of risk for our civilisation. On the other hand, as I said, this is a high risk society in two senses because all risks breed responses and it's our obligation as global citizens to try and create responses which are equivalent to the scale of risk. What we mustn't do is just live in denial and I fear at the moment that's what too many people are doing. They're like a smoker who says, oh, I got plenty of time to give up. Look, my granddad smoked 90 cigarettes a day and it had to be 100 or someone will invent a cure for cancer before I get it. That is not a way to look at and respond to realistically a high risk, high opportunity society. We've got at least two sets of risks, climate change and nuclear weapons which could essentially destroy large chunks of our civilisation, no point pretending otherwise. Of course you can because it makes for an easy life, but as thinkers and as politicians, that is not the way to do things. It's so easy to say, oh, the risk doesn't really exist. What can I do about it? Surely it's exaggerated. The climate has always changed. All this rubbishy stuff, there's no credence if you actually look at the literature. So we must recognise the reality of risk, but recognise that all risks, even the most serious, create opportunities. For us they could create quite radical opportunities, I think. Second on the issue of trust, I'm interested in trust in politicians and social science has been studying trust for 100 years really. The big issue that arises in climate change in some extent in our society more generally is trust in science, actually. What people who deny the reality of climate change is doing are denying the validity of the scientific enterprise and quite often do that openly. Scientists who work not only on climate change but other issues like animal issues, for example animal experimentation on a front line in a way which was never true before the advent of the internet. Without the internet, we would never have had the case that you might know about East Anglia where the climate scientists' emails were hacked and then became a source of massive controversy. Science is in a new position in a dialogic internet-based civilisation where everyone thinks they can be an expert. And really scientists have got to rethink their own position because they can no longer, I think, take an ivory tower view, actually. So data must be published far more extensively than before. But there's a real issue because you can't really publish your data before you've worked on it. And see, real difficulty is surrounding the role of scientific authority in an internet world, I think, which we should be looking at and be interested in because it's not just in climate change. It's in things like cancer. You may read the case in the papers yesterday where Amala took her child away and ran away because she didn't want him to have medical treatment. Is that a freedom of the individual or not? Anyway, the police went and got the child and now the child is to have that medical treatment. I think there's a new front line here, though, in the era of the internet between science and the lay person might be quite difficult to tread. Third, as I go in my book, I'm in favour of what I call the politics of utopian realism in relation to climate change in other areas, too. By which I mean, we have to think beyond the existing world if we're going to cope with the risks which we face. I find more and more acceptance of this in the so-called emerging economies. It's not possible for China or India simply to tread the path which the West followed. It's not possible. Talking of traffic jams, the biggest jam in human history was from Beijing to Tibet, I think, where it went on for about four days and people were camped by the side of their road with stoves and so on because they couldn't bear to abandon their cars. This is a country which, when I first went there, and many other people, everyone rode a bike. I think we need a utopian element. We've got to revive that in politics. We've got to think beyond the world we know. I think in the realm of cities, this is very important. However, it's no good just being a utopian. Climate change is very, very real, all too real, I'm afraid, and so are other risks that we face of catastrophes. Therefore, it must be bracketed to realism. There must be some way of getting there. I'm all in favour of, for example, like the MIT study called Beyond the Automobile, which I think I would thoroughly recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it, which envisages a kind of mobility internet with a completely different make-up between private and public transport that we have now, and argues that the technology is already here for this. To recognise the motor car is a lethal instrument, not just an instrument of privilege. More people have died in vehicle accidents in the 20th century than died in two world wars. The motor car is absolutely brutal. Well, we already have the technology in place, it's avant-garde technology, to avoid traffic accidents almost altogether. Volvo is currently devising a car which they say should never be an accident, and we know that driverless cars are more effective than ones with drivers. I think utopian realism is where we are politically, and how to get a utopian element into everyday politics is a really, really difficult issue. But I think we start from the developing world. I mean, I'm not at all of the view that the poorer parts of the world have to depend on the richer for innovation. I think many innovations will come from the poorest parts of the world, and I think of what Bangladesh has done in already trying to produce resilience by, for example, creating floating gardens, by integrating a very high technology tracking of weather systems with localised kinship groups to try and provide protection for poor farmers. So, sorry. I therefore finished. Sorry to do that. I want to take three questions quickly. I've got two hands, three hands. So, one, two, three. They were the first I saw, sorry. Yep, then gentlemen behind you, I'm sorry. And then that gentleman there, right? One. This is Vasily Kimalakasi from Arp Lighting. Following a little bit what Mr Kall said before about the developing cities and developed cities, we come across to the reality that the developing cities suffer the consequences of the environmental changes and the side effects of the developed cities, or other words, the smart cities, you may say. In other words, effectively, the least energy offensive cities suffer the most with very little representation in what happens today. How do you suggest we address this issue? Thank you. OK. Breaking news. Yes, I think it's interesting. Leppler from Hamburg. It's very interesting to discuss important, to discuss the climate change, but Tony has made a comment, which I think I'm very grateful to regard the city as a center of production. City, for the last decades, all had an post industrial nexus. That's real and important point. And to see the possibility of a smart city, that's not just to get a smarter consumer, to get more entertainment, to get other forms of elections, but really to enable the people to become makers and to create a makers movement and to transform our neighborhoods in factories where we can integrate those who are excluded by all these new technologies which are offered as solutions by Siemens and Cisco and so on. So I think it's a real radical position we had to follow and to think about and we can talk about sustainability without talking about equity. And the equity is depending from the re-inclusion of the people and this is already possible by this mention of production. Thank you. No, no, very good. Gentlemen, a pink tie, gentlemen with a pink tie there. Your last, I'm afraid, fourth and last. You stand up. Sorry, Savas from the LAC. I was just wondering if the panel could address the issue of why the markets are shying away from some of the opportunities that Tony is addressing. Usually when you get a technological revolution you get a very exciting short period of financialization where barons or the railway barons, car buyers, barons just put the risk and invest in these new opportunities. So why is keeping these markets away from exploring green tech and we're still kind of giving too much value on ICT technology for example? All right, good, good. And then gentlemen in the front. Nick Rosen from Off Bread. I see the big battle of the next 30 years is off-grid versus smart grid. America is going off-grid crazy at the moment. There are TV series all over the place and preppers coming out of your ears. And the reason that they're going off-grid crazy is because of the decline in trust. It's not just trust in science and politics. It's trust in all social institutions and even society itself as a means that's going to sustain us. So people are realizing they're going to have to do it for themselves. And the smart grid seems to be a way of cementing all the mistakes of the electrical grid into place for another 50 or 100 years. Whereas what I see is, just to give you a very short big picture vision, is information is going to replace electricity. And information, Tony, is not going to need the grid. I love my smartphone. People say, well then you're not off-grid. I say, well I'm off the grid and I'm on the cloud. And the grid of computers, or that may have the same name, is not the same as the grid of electricity. You're going to have huge server farms next to nuclear power stations sending information wirelessly to people who are running their screens and their hard drives from energy they've generated locally. And the big debate now is whether that smart grid should be scrapped. Right. That's a very large question. Thank you for that to end with. Break expanded my mind if nobody else is. Right. I'm going to, I've now got, I'm told I've got four minutes left. We've got four minutes left. So what I'm going to do, I'm afraid, is to ask each of our respondents to respond in slightly less than a minute and then turn back to Tony Giddins for even less than that. Tessa, would you like to pick up some of the points in the questions or from Ogeron? Yes, if I can just, the point about why the markets are shying away. Microphone. Sorry. The question about why the markets are shying away from a number of the challenges that Tony articulated. I think it's lack of consistency and certainty. Markets will invest where there is the likelihood of stability in the certainly in the medium term. And I think that there is a lack of confidence in that, which is why I think that this this challenge of building a platform of stability through the contract, which is based on a consensus, is so important. I think that the, but also very much like your point, I think what we haven't talked about enough is human capital as the great resource here and the untapped ingenuity and inventiveness and ambition in communities. It's abundant in East London, which was one of the most deprived communities in our country. I've just come back from working in the slum in Mumbai, in India, in Delhi, and in Jharkhand. And I am in awe of the ingenuity of people living in physical conditions that are unimaginable, maintaining a subsistence income on the basis of their optimism and ingenuity. Thanks, Tessa. Craig. I think that in addressing these issues, whether we're talking about the grid itself or we're talking about the politics of all this, we need solutions that link but don't depend on master plans. And so the design solutions that we're talking about are the design of ideal comprehensive systems. They are ones that design systems, that link that are open, that have that potential to connect but don't depend on all master plans. We need urban design that invites flexible repurposing, urban design, that is not like urban design now, massively tilted in favour of the wealthy of enormous buildings for corporate headquarters of office centers and districts, but that serves the poor. The cruise has been campaigning for and alternative design structures and Mexicans on the California. We need to talk about all this in a way that scales up and what worries me about a lot of our discourse is that it just doesn't take seriously. Antonio began to say some of this but it's not just a question of urgency. It's a question of how to imagine the scaling up which is quite dramatically different to challenge. So I very much agree with the call for people to be seen as makers of this but what we're making, the poetic challenge here is to be remaking a very large scale collective undertaking or else it doesn't really have the capacity and we need to deal with the fact that we may well see a partial disaggregation of some of the larger structures in which we work today so that the solutions of this future are sort of hinted at already in the off-grid comment, maybe one not necessarily the radical disaggregation of preppers for a post-Holocaust future but of reversing a long-term trend to ever larger aggregates dominating and we just need to look for ways to do that. Thank you, Enrique. Well, given that this is a conference on urban issues, cities what I find fascinating is that much of what the experts in cities so like here Richard Rogers when he made his book about this report on the new British urban environment most of the things that urban experts propose to make a city better to have more quality of life and I refer to what Dieter said about equity is the same policies that you will have to make a city more sustainable so I think it's fascinating and it's happy, it's a happy or unhappy I mean you can say because sometimes it's easier to fight for equality than to fight for something more ethereal to some people such as global warming so but what is happy is that all of these policies which will be very good such as using public transport, walking, bicycles will make a city more equitable and also more sustainable so this is I think a good thing we also have to be able to see how do we find this do we solve this challenge post by Martin about the flying around that people will hopefully will but in your senses I think it's a positive thing that we coincide in the objectives OK thank you, Martin I think the questions suggest again that there are different shades of green that need to be investigated and look at the spaces of a city if you walk into any airport these days the green advertisements all over the place so there is a big market proposition there is lots of money waiting to be invested in clean tech but whether that is the same as the off-grid solution it's also green but it's very different and as Dieter said about the city being a site of production I mean these are very different green paradigms they are not the same and I suppose what I think is a real risk is that politics get caught up in this in a nasty sort of way that they side with what they can understand which is big actors that walk into their offices where you can make a deal and that they fall into the trap that the legitimacy of that green intervention is not carried by the whole population so my single biggest thing would be to make sure that whatever you do in this green revolution make it work for people make it something that is about quality of life something that is visible that makes the quality of life of ordinary people better otherwise this might actually be a very nasty sort of transformation Thank you and the last word as the first goes to Anthony Giddins I'd like to thank everyone for their comments including those from the audience I'd just respond to the last one briefly what was said about the cloud and the smart grid I thought was what I was saying actually because you know there's a collision here sort of interchange between new communications technologies and the demands of environmentally dangerous world and that's where most of the future will be located not in electricity as such but you know if you're on the cloud you need electricity, you need power because you've got to plug your bloody phone in somewhere so you're still going to need power moreover there will always be what sociologists call the compulsion of co-presence because it doesn't matter how many times you'll use your mobile phone you want to be with people otherwise no one will be at this converse at all if we didn't need to bring people to it and be together so the cloud is never going to replace the actual physical meeting of people in specific places in cities all of this has to be powered Okay, right Thank you, Tony and thank you Tessa, Craig, Enrique, Martin thank you for your questions all I'd say by way of summarising is I think we've identified risk is the issue and the way politicians explain and deal risk and opportunity, sorry, risk and opportunity and how politicians explain and challenge people with ideas particularly I think when politicians often find it easier to sell good ideas than difficult ideas my own personal thought at the end there right the next session will start at 3.45 and is on governing urban transformation so drink your tea slightly faster than otherwise thank you very much