 Thank you for the introduction. I've been asked to speak about hyper-density as practice. I find that somewhat difficult, not the least, because I don't know what it means. But I also, in as much as I do understand what it means, I also find it difficult to do that in Hong Kong, because Hong Kong is such a default example of density, whereas questionable how many designers mingled with it, that is so convincing that any density by design would almost be an anti-climax. I would like to address another subject of the conference, namely the subject of health. And in particular, I would like to talk about the political health that is surrounding the current development of the city as a whole. So it's a very macro topic, and it's very, very broad. For the last 20 years or so, we live in a world that has seen the end of all overt ideologies in favor of economic values as the last remaining source of a kind of global consensus. We generally assume that this started with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist bloc in the East. This is a profound celebration of liberty at the moment when that happened. But one can seriously wonder if that's a triumph of liberty or, in the end, a triumph of liberalization. This is about a year earlier. Ronald Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev, teared down that wall. A victory claimed by, in a way, a neoliberal revolution, which has been set in motion, let's say, around about 1979, 1980, with the simultaneous election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, where the West, on the whole, made a sway towards the neoliberal agenda, which we're very much seeing panned out today. To some extent, I even wonder whether it's true that this revolution actually began in the West. This is yet again earlier, 1978, the previous American president with Deng Xiaoping in China. Deng Xiaoping, of course, known for changing China drastically, 1978 was the year of the Open Door policy, where basically China opened up to the West, welcomed free trade, and step by step dismantled a dogmatic communist ideology in favor of an embrace of the free market. He did that, and already then kind of that won him the award of the American Time Magazine as Man of the Year. Well, what happened since is well-known, well-documented and well-known. Since 1978, China's economic rise has been very, very, very sharp. And what is interesting to me is the extent to which this rise is actually linked to urbanization. The two seem inextricably linked to the point that you can wonder whether urbanization is a consequence of this economic development or whether it's a means towards economic development. This is the urban disposable income, the rural net income. It's very clear from this graph if you choose to be urban, you're going to be richer. In any case, leaving that question unanswered, in any case, it's very clear that from then on real estate became a very, very prominent part of Chinese propaganda. So I think that alone constitutes an answer to the question. In any case, China urbanizing rapidly by 2030 will have an urban community of about a billion people, not quite a cozy number. China's development in a way has been the model for many developing economies today. I think this is an interesting graph that shows the relation between GDP or state of development in GDP and city growth. And what is clear from this graph is that the lower your GDP, the quicker your cities grow. And the more your city grows, the actually the more you propel a kind of GDP to the point that one sees these are the most rapidly growing cities today, places like Kabul, Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, and much to my surprise, even a place like Mogadishu is now amongst the most rapidly growing cities in the world. This is the world. This is the world ranked according to GDP. It's very clear that the numbers of the fastest growing cities, which Ricky also showed in his presentation, to some extent play an incredible role in the catch-up that the dark part of the world is playing to the light part of the world. And one could argue that urbanization is maybe the means where the world in the end tries to be white in terms of being developed in the end equally. Better for whom was the question? And it's a very important question because the numbers are impressive. This is the world GDP per capita in US dollar. After the war, a sharp rise. From 1978, the number isn't entirely coincidental given the earlier part of the lecture. An incredibly sharp rise per capita. But at the same time, an increasing inequality in the way that wealth is distributed, to the point that you can ask whether an economic indicator is in any way an indicator of kind of great wealth for many, many people. An increasing asymmetry here, the more a larger part of the world lives on a smaller territory, the more also an ever smaller amount of people seem to be in possession of that wealth. Let's have a look. So this is urbanization. We know that recently, in a way, the urban surpassed the rural community in the world. Rapid urbanization, but an urbanization which is also rapidly neck trailed by, well, I'm not supposed to use the word, let's say, by the S word in terms of development. To what extent this is the city that we're supposedly verging towards a high density concentrated city. But the more city grows, the more this is the other inextricable part of the story. And the more globally this kind of happened. And in a way, there is a very weird neck and neck race to the aspirational model and the reality that comes with all the economic asymmetry that drives the system. The economics intelligence unit, economic growth stability health care culture on this list, and these are the United Nations criteria for human development. It's very interesting that basically the world's rapidly growing cities actually rank large. In terms of livability, it's places like Vancouver, Melbourne, and I think also Wellington who rank very high. Not the most exciting cities, not the largest cities, but kind of part of an Anglo-Saxon coziness that still apparently seems to be the dominant model, even though it's vastly outnumbered. Let's look at basically one of the largest growing cities in the world, Lagos. Lagos in Africa, a city built by the British with an infrastructure built by the British, an infrastructure that is meant to contain about a 10th of the population that it currently contains. Therefore, a city deemed in a way to a perpetual regime of improvisation. This is infrastructure. It's a cloverleaf. It's also the largest second. This is not a car park. This is the largest secondhand market in Africa. This is, well, I guess it's a traffic jam, but it's a traffic jam that never ends. Since the traffic jam never ends, people cannot travel to commerce, so commerce travels to the traffic jam to the point that this is not a traffic jam, but it can be reinterpreted as the largest open-air market in Africa. Let's move on. This is the fastest growing city set off against the GDP in the world, and it's largely in the areas of GDP that doesn't grow extremely fast. It's also in an area that doesn't really conform to our idea of democracy. In the office, we have a particular rather crude way of ranking the world. It consists of three categories. There is democracy. There you have elections. There is dictatorship. There you don't have election. And then there is an increasingly successful category which is called pseudo-democracy. That's where you have elections, but you kind of know the outcome in advance. A very tempting model. Anyway, one of the pseudo-dictatorships that we looked at is Dubai. Dubai 1990, almost no authentic community. This is Dubai 13 years later. None of the urban substance here is older than 10 year. About 85% of the people that live in this substance is not from Dubai, but here the city has really been an artificial construct to two minutes. Okay. I can also leave a very enigmatic ending, and okay, I'll speed up. An artificial con, the interesting thing here is that those who govern the country are actually the same people, the same CEOs of the development companies that build in the country. So the fact that they're the complete merger of a very fast model of urbanization that was also exported throughout the world at some point with a seeming degree of success, particularly to the part of the world that counted as least-developed and quickest growing. The fastest cities, the growing cities are in Asia. Asia now, in a way, the majority of the world population. This is another graph. It's in a way the growth in Asia from the moment it happened, from the 80s. And this is the most important books that architects wrote about the cities. There is a kind of rather inexplicable stop somewhere in 1978, which meant that as soon as that part of the world started to grow, the western or the most part of the profession stopped to think. Didn't only stop to think, but also, this is Jane Jacobs' last book, 2004, the famous, the dark age ahead. So in as much as they thought, they saw an extremely bleak future. That future is in a way now the kind of domain of a very atavistic claiming of consultancies, private consultancies. This is an orgy of visions on the city you find on the internet. PricewaterhouseCoupas, they're not urbanists, they're not architects, but they talk about the city in terms of value. Jonathan Langlis has real value in a changing world, McKinney value through transformation, where McKinsey reduces partly in a way the city to a set of performance business indicators. On the other hand, we have technology, private technology companies like Siemens who see it as the playground for technological inventions, largely developed by themselves. We see Bechtel who sees it as the domain for the acquisition of mega projects. We see water companies actually privatizing water. One wonders how quickly clean air will be privatized. Privatization of water also harbs back that however much you privatize in the end, the city is political and all is political. Political requires representation. This is a country that's the unit where we all go to vote. That's the standard unit that we know as a representational democracy. Two countries with their GDPs. Those countries are already outdone by mega cities. We now have mega cities with more people and more GDPs than countries. Interestingly enough, we have corporations which are bigger than mega cities yet again. And if power flocks through the largest number, I think it's this listing of numbers that precisely indicates the current problem, whether political seems to have no control over any events, whether it's climate, whether it's the economy, whether it's the city or anything. And that what in a way appears necessary, the first largest in a way, this is the world in terms of mega cities. I mean, if one is utterly serious about this statistic that in a way 3% of the Earth's surface accounts for 66% of all the economic activity, we can simply forget about a large part of the world. That's not to say that it's true, but that is one of the things that is slowly happening. That entire countries are being abandoned in the favor of competition between regions. It reminded us in a way of an old situation, it's 30 seconds, of an old situation in the antique world where in a way you had city-states, where in a way there was a large contested territory named after individual cities, but the borders were unknown. Polis, politics are intimately related. And what thing the megalopolis seems to ask for is a form of megalopolitics, a kind of new marriage between the spatial and the governmental. A new marriage between planning and administration and a new marriage between politics and urbanism. Thank you.