 Right, ladies and gentlemen, can I welcome you now to the final session of the Urban Age Conference in Istanbul, which will deal with I think a critical theme which has been running through, if not lurking behind, some of the other sessions over the last day and a half, which is that if cities are growing and if cities are changing, how do you actually manage that growth and how do you establish a guideline for that growth? And there's an awareness, of course, in the discussions that we've had that this can be done and has to be done to a degree from top down, but also an awareness in the recent discussion we had and part of yesterday that it also has to be, it must also involve the bottom up. And one of the key aspects that the Urban Age has certainly identified in the cities that we've studied over the years is that some of the cities that we think work better than others, I know that's an enormous generalization, but are able to create a political consensus around their program and the implementation of their master plans. We've certainly identified that these cities have a very clear sense of leadership, we'll come to that, but more importantly in terms of this debate, a clear vision, a clear sort of set of, as I call it, a framework, a guideline, an idea of what that city should be. And this session is very, very much about that. And we have a number of speakers who are going to make presentations who are well placed to do that and equally commentators from this city and other cities across the world to respond to that. I am chairing the session with Koran Gumos, who probably in this city is the most authoritative voice in the relationship, in the discussion and the public debate between, I think, architecture and its social responsibility. I think Koran has played a critical role over the years, very provocative, very tough, and very, very serious in the work that he has done both as an architect but also as a figure who's ready to put his money where his mouth is by being a director of architectural projects with the Istanbul 2010 European Capital Culture Agency. In a way, one of the key players in that. And we've had many conversations over the months of preparation about this theme. He will join me in the discussion and in chairing the debate with our colleagues around the table. The three people who are going to be speaking with slight inversion in the order between the first two are Peter Bishop, who is now responsible for setting a vision for the mayor of London, even though he started with a previous mayor of London, just like Richard Rogers and, in fact, even myself. He will be then followed by Andy Altman, Andrew Altman, who used to work with the mayor of Washington, who's here, Tony Williams. Then briefly went to Philadelphia to run that city, and then saw the light and came to London to run the post-Olympic development, which I think he's going to be mainly talking about. And then we are very fortunate to have Ibrahim Baz, who is in charge of the IMP, the major planning vehicle in this city, which is, in fact, just announced the master plan. And we are going to be in an interesting position for the first time in a way to have the, first time, sorry, in these two days, to have the sort of formal, official vision of what the plans are for this city set out before us. Clearly, this has been an ongoing process. The IMP has been in existence for a number of years, and much of the work was done by Ibrahim's predecessors and colleagues, in fact, some of whom are here, and it will be interesting to engage with them later. So that's how we're framing this discussion. We're going to ask Peter Bishop, as I say, director of design for London, and a key player in the London Development Agency, which is the mayor's arm in London to bring in inward investment and develop the economy of the city, not just the spatial structure of the city. That's, again, an important point that the chief planner, if I can call you that, is actually within the Development Agency. That's an interesting mechanism. So could you welcome Peter Bishop? Thank you. Thank you very much. I guess one of the paradoxes of London, that for a city which actually has a very mature, and at times actually quite an effective, planning regime and system, it is actually on the city scale, largely unplanned, and you could argue almost unplanable in terms of its political structures and its land uses. It has changed. In the last 15 years, London has achieved a transformation in terms of how it presents itself, in terms of its physical spaces in central area. It's even developed a cafe society, which you wouldn't have believed 20 years ago. And it's beginning to actually occupy its public spaces and actually value the streets, the public spaces, and the parks that create the kind of fabric for very high quality urban life. But like every city, it has its kind of rather wonderful dark landscapes. And it's damaged and derelict areas. And spaces where this actually is a temporary use. You might argue it's a rather poor temporary use. But we've become quite interested in the ways in which you can use these pieces of land, layering temporary uses to try and create the spaces where you can allow that kind of positive anarchy in a city to find expression and create the seeds for new things to happen within what is otherwise, quite a straight jacket that urban planning can give land uses. Three years ago, the previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, and Richard Rogers set up an organization called Design for London, an architecture design studio working for the mayor to try and actually understand and work out strategies for shaping a city as pragmatic and as chaotic as London. And one of the starting points was this. This is a kind of rather wonderful plan from the 1940s, the Abercrombie plan for London, the time when architects had watercolors rather than CAD machines. And what this tries to do is actually paint a picture of the character of London. It's immense diversity of a city that's expanded by absorbing very, very distinct patterns. And one of the targets for Design for London is to make sure that in forming strategies, we don't end up with London all looking the same. We don't lose that diversity. Similarly, as an open city, it has this immense diversity of population, approximately 330 different languages spoken within the city. And perhaps it is an element of acceptance which, as an open city, is perhaps almost the litmus test for global cities. A city where you can come, you can arrive, you can migrate into the city, and by definition, you can be a Londoner. And that's something which we didn't want to lose sight of. Then finally, we thought about how we could wrap in the environmental agenda and tie in land use planning and the kind of structural approach to change in the city with the importance of dealing with climate change. This is a diagram we produced very early on in our history and this just tries to explain the numbers of people who get involved in designing one piece of public space in the city. And it's not meant to clarify anything at all. It's just meant to say it's incredibly complex. And possibly out of this, the idea for a design team like Design for London came out. The fact that the only way you can operate in this complexity is to be small and strategic. We tried to recruit the bulk of the people into a very small team from outside the public sector. I was the only bureaucrat in the team. We had a very small budget, a budget which could commission, but which never distracted us by trying to build anything. And we had no formal powers. We maintained an ambiguity of power because we were the mayor's design team. But we deliberately said we do not have a statutory power. We don't want any statutory powers. What we want to do is use our position to almost broker and negotiate urban solutions between partners to subvert and infiltrate bigger organizations, of course, in the nicest possible way. And to think about very, very simple ideas that could frame the city and then break those down into lots of small actions to start to move the agenda forward. And we came up with two very, very clear ideas right from the beginning. The first was to say we give anybody an hour of our time and because we had no power, we couldn't enforce our views. At the end of the hour, people went away. They took on board advice and they didn't and that was absolutely fine. Sometimes led to a second hour, sometimes led to a project, sometimes led to a collaboration and that was also good. And the second thing we did was we took a very high degree of control over the procurement of architects and designers within London on a very, very simple premise that a good architect with a good client can produce a good public space and a good building. A bad architect never will. And then a year ago, there was a combination of design for London and it's the development agency and the link between the design team and the power of having about two billion pounds worth of public land at my disposal to develop and very, very large environmental programs. And to take this new agenda forward, we started a formulator series of very, very simple approaches. First of all, to understand the economic forces and work with them. Richard Rogers really shown the plan for London but there's these two big growth corridors. London's not gonna build on green space. It's gonna become more compact and more dense. And it's gonna develop in these corridors out towards the Thames in the old areas of industrial decline. Secondly, to use town centres and to really focus on design strategies and economic regeneration strategies around town centres as the key building blocks for civic life. Thirdly, follow the transport. We've had long-standing policies in London with this very, very extensive and rich public transport network. To actually focus development and density of development around the transport capacity. And increasingly now, with new lines going in like the Crossrail Line, which will link Heathrow to the centre, we started to look there around each station to put in very, very small detailed design studies to try and capture the economic benefits that the transport accessibility will give us. We're also looking at strategies to frame growth. This is where we also have us a policy role. Over the next 10 years, 650,000 new people are moving to London. And we produced a policy guide on housing. A lot of the housing we've seen in London was actually quite poor, high-density poor quality in the last 15 years. And we started off with a very, very simple housing design guide, trying to marry together things like space standards with a meaner tube with floor-to-ceiling heights with aspects without all space. And in the spirit of infiltration, the London Development Agency adopted this. Now the National Homes and Community Agency that funds the public housing in the country looks like adopting this as the national standard and looks like becoming the planning standard for London within the London plan. The fifth approach is looking at public space. We are launching this in 10 days' time, a new manifesto for public space in London, looking at how we pull together public space with streets, improvements to streets and infrastructure, public squares, green space and water space, and also a strategy for the spatial prioritization investment. And one aspect of this is a new launch of a new public space campaign called The Great Spaces. Encouraging partners, some of the smaller units of government, the boroughs in London, to come forward with ideas, we went out and we had 137 responses. And again, next week we're announcing 36. And the key move in this is, as we've said, that we will assist, we'll help with the procurement, we'll help with the design advice, but to get past the first hurdle, you've got to sign off your application by your political leader and your chief executive to show you're serious in following through the space initiative. And one example of where we're using public space, this is in barking. I'll be amazed if many people in the room know barking. It's a very rundown area, a very poor area of East London, very fractured. And we've used public space strategies to try and bind together this piece of the city, to try and tie in the public transport nodes with the shopping centers, with the civic areas, and with the open space. And this is a public space we've just finished. Actually, completely against the expectations of the local populations. Actually, rather grand, rather generous. And the image on the right was produced by architects, MUF, MUF. This actually is a flanked wall of a supermarket. They constructed this folly using material off the site. This was finished a year and a half ago. It already has the reputation of being the ruins of a medieval manor house. It's haunted. It has its own mythology and folklore. And finally, we're extending the barking strategy, working with the architects journal, working with the media to try and raise the profile in a series of competitions to the final bit, which is the integration of the public space. Andy Ordman is going to speak about the Olympics. The Olympics is a catalyst for regeneration. And the objective afterwards is to use it to transform the East part of London, to create a mosaic of spaces, to create communities, which will be just another piece of London. And for me, one of the key interventions is around the edge of these mega-developments. I think we learned the lesson in London in Canary Wharf, the second big commercial center, where Canary Wharf stands in isolation. It doesn't relate to its communities. It has no links with its hinterland. It's surrounded by roads, by severance, and by poverty. When I was working before on the development of the Channel Tunnel Rail terminus and the development of King's Cross, over six years with the developer, a company called Arjun, a very enlightened developer, we spent more time outside the site than we spent inside the site in the debates and negotiations. Again, on the very, very simple premise, that a good developer with a robust planning system should produce a good development, but it's only the public sector which will look at the fine stitching, which will link that with its hinterlands in a seamless way. And we developed a whole series of strategies which were not just physical, not just trying to bridge severance and actually make linkages, but to try and create the social conditions which would allow the people who lived in the very, very poor communities around King's Cross to start to think about this developer as being their turf, adopting it as their part of their city. And then taking this idea further, this is the work we're doing around the Olympic Fringe, and around the work that Anne is leading with the Olympic Legacy Master Plans. We've thrown six Fringe Master Plans, not Master Plans in the traditional way, but just looking for the sort of 70, 80, 90 small things we can do held together by a big concept which can incrementally do the fine embroidery to stitch this piece of city together. And this is one of the projects. We're looking now to open up the River Lee of a damaged, of a derelict urban landscape, link it in using what we've got, which is kind of small pockets of open space and linking it together with a single connection which we've called our designers, called the Fat Walk, working with a very talented young group called Fist Studio and with Latsen Partner. We're now developing a strategy where you better walk through this landscape in a space that's never wider than this platform, but opens up into different parks, with different functions and different relationships to each other and which will create a new landscape, new connectivity, and which will tie the Thames at the dock base that they're in the middle of the picture up to the Olympics. It will be about an hour and a half one of the great new walks in London and will create a very, very different set of conditions and link him with fast express the ferry services to the center of London. And the final project I'm gonna look at is a project we're doing to tie in a similar way. The city of London, the center in with the Olympics. We call it High Street 2012. It took a long time to get the copyright to use the date 2012 from the Olympics. And we're using it as again, combining the idea of links of town centers. A location is one of the highest insides of multiple deprivation. It's also an opportunity area. And a street which is actually one of London's greatest arterial roads, but which has been lost amongst behind the kind of conglomeration of piecemeal development. With a very, very poor community, very, very high degrees of first generation immigrants. And working with a team called Fluid, one of the techniques that they suggested to engage the local people in this design was to hire an ice cream van. And in return for a comment on the scheme you've got an ice cream. And we open up involvement and participation of people we normally couldn't reach. Again, a similar approach, a big concept, a new High Street, broken down into distinctive areas and designed up in detail in terms of very, very precise interventions. We're phasing this over four years. We're building it incrementally, but within an overall concept. To try and create a revitalized center for the communities rather than a barrier between them. And this is the final picture. This is where we're now moving ahead. And on the back of the regeneration potential of the Olympics. We're now putting together something called the Green Enterprise Zone. And here we're trying to pull the big urban picture together. We're looking at regeneration around green enterprise and the massive economy, global economy that the environmental industries can give us. We're looking to combine a new university and teaching faculty with research and development space with green industry for manufacturing and recycling. We're also putting in a decentralized energy grid to link it in with existing sources of heat and power. We're putting in very, very high degree of specification on housing. And we're looking to actually bring in a visitor attraction to try and catalyze this. To try and actually persuade people that this could be a new heart and to use that to pull the development that started. The start of a city east canary wharf has been pushed ahead by the Olympics to bring it further down. This will not be built, but it'll produce a different set of circumstances which I think will create a set of conditions which will see a different kind of regeneration flowing out of this within London. Thanks so much. Peter, thank you for that.