 So, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Thank you so very much for attending this Frinde van Kopenhagen lecture, already for the fourth time. And I was just wondering during the coffee, I was just wondering around a little bit and asking some of you, why are you here? What is it you will try to find this afternoon? What are specific questions or issues you would like to talk about? And then most of you said, well, there are two things why we are here. We are very attracted by today's theme about the pros and cons about urbanization, because well, if you just follow the news and the latest newspapers, then there is a wide discussion going on. When it comes to urbanization, but at the other hand, everybody of you said and replied immediately, we are here because now we can meet up and catch up with our old friends, which is of course a very, very important reason to be here this afternoon. Well, my name is Simon van Trier and I have the great honor to be your moderator for this afternoon. And one of my tasks is to make sure that there is some room and some time for Q&A. Because this theme, after having heard our keynote speaker and the elder men of the municipality of the city of Tilburg, I think it will be very interesting to also hear your opinion about what has been said here on stage. So we will start. And I am looking for, of course, director Magnificus for the Tilburg University for a true word of welcome as well as a short insight in this afternoon's program. So Professor Klaas Setsma, please step on stage. The floor is yours. You can give him a hand of the course. Yes. Well, thank you very much to start with. Welcome everybody. It is wonderful to have you all here today at the fourth Kopenhagen Lecture, which focuses on urban society. This event joins alumni, especially Vrienden van Kopenhagen and colleagues, staff and students. It gives me special pleasure to see so many alumni return to their Alma Mater on this occasion. The lecture is an initiative of the alumni network Vrienden van Kopenhagen and Tilburg University Society, together with our Development and Alumni Relations Office. It introduces highly innovative international speakers and contributes to creating a future proof ecosystem for Tilburg University. In the past years, we welcomed Dani Rodrik, who spoke on the rights and wrongs of economic science, Victor Meijer Schoenberger on digital society, and Anna Appelbaum. I don't know if I have to pronounce this as if she's German or American or English. Anna Appelbaum, I will say on democracy and disinformation. This year, we are proud to welcome Edward Glaser, and I'm pronouncing that name correctly, in our midst to discuss the pros and cons of urbanization. Edward Glaser is Professor of Economics at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he has been working since 1992. Glaser gives many lectures on microeconomics complemented by urban and public economics. He was Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappapur Institute for Greater Boston. He has published dozens of articles on economic growth and the law in the economy of cities. His work focused in particular on the determinants of urban growth and the roles of cities as centers of idea transfer. After the lecture by Professor Glaser, we will focus somewhat sharper on urbanization and aim the spotlight on the city of Tilburg. Beren Tevriese will provide us with this view. Beren is Alderman of the Municipal Council of Tilburg since 2010. He's also an alumnus of the Tilburg Law School of Harvard University. His portfolio contains economy, energy, transition and urban planning. Who else than Beren Tevriese can take us on a journey through Tilburg? I would like to elaborate also a little on our alumni. I can't ignore that, of course, and I won't. Today we have more than 70,000 alumni, which is an impressive number. In addition to now serving, so today serving 18,000 registered students on our campus, last year showed several records in the history of Tilburg University. One was that we received the highest number of donations ever, and that is something we applaud, of course. Another was that the highest number of alumni ever supported our students as mentor or coach or helping us volunteers with events. By sharing your skills, knowledge, networks and your feedback, you actively help advancing our students and society. Tilburg University is grateful for these efforts, and for the financial support received through the university fund. This fund creates scholarships for students and funds for research and education projects. Having mentioned your wonderful contributions, please don't hesitate to continue joining us by providing your experience, ideas, networks and funding. More means help us making ourselves even more useful by supporting people who need this the most. Ladies and gentlemen, alumni, thank you very much, all of you. It is heartwarming knowing that you are so strongly committed to your university, our university. Shortly we will start with the lectures. First I give the floor to alumnus Piet Heinroder, Chairman of de Vrienden van Kopenhagen. I wish you a wonderful and highly, highly enjoyable afternoon. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Klaas for welcoming us and mentioning the importance of the alumni network for the university. On behalf of the Board of de Vrienden van Kopenhagen, it is with pride and pleasure to welcome you all and have you here this afternoon for the fourth Vrienden van Kopenhagen lecture. As you all may know, for 28 years de Vrienden have been closely connected to each other and to our alma mater. As an alumni network we connect graduates of all schools and programs of Tilburg University. We organize various events throughout the year to strengthen our network and to connect to students, young alumni and employees of Tilburg University as we are today. Some events are specifically for members of our network or as we call them vrienden and some events we support as Vrienden van Kopenhagen and are organized by Tilburg University itself. On other events we organize together such as the coach cafes and today's lecture. Many of you participated earlier this afternoon in one of the parallel sessions addressing different aspects related to the theme of this afternoon, Urban Society. And I'm sure you've had an interesting session, at least I did, and good discussions on these topical issues already. The keynote however of this afternoon is a topical issue in these turbulent times. For example, many cities in the Netherlands have presented ambitious building plans to fulfill the growing needs for housing in the Netherlands. We're very honored that in cooperation with Tilburg University Society, as well as the Development and Alumni Relations Office, we have succeeded to attract the international renowned professor Edward Glazer this afternoon from Harvard University to give a lecture about urbanization and its pros and cons. Professor Glazer has been looking forward to come to Tilburg as he told me during lunch and to again spend time in the great urban environment of the Netherlands. And subsequently, Beren Te Vries, Alderman of Economic Affairs, Circular Economy and Spatial Planning will share his thoughts and discuss the theme from the point of view from Tilburg. Further, I would like to take this opportunity to show the events we have planned for this year. And as you can see in bronze, you will find all the events for the members or potential members. And in blue, all the events we organize together with the university. And specifically, I would like to mention the Coase Café in which the students can meet members, Vrienden van Kobbenhagen, and discuss with them what the Vrienden encountered in their careers, what their possible pitfalls were in their career, etc. What I also would like to mention is the boardroom meetings we have, and I think we have a very nice and interesting boardroom meeting at the company called Lightyear. One of the alumnus, Rens Melzer, is working there. They are manufacturing solar cars at the Hightech campus of Eindhoven. And last but not least, another type of event we organize is meeting Professor Baudwein Haverkort, who will tell us more about cyber-physical systems. So this really, I think, shows that we have a big variety in our program. And, well, I would like to encourage everybody who is not a member yet from the Vrienden van Kobbenhagen to enlist. And even our membership fee is text deductible. So it's really a bargain if you would join our program, giving all the lunches, dinners, and drinks we also serve during our event. Um, on behalf of the Vrienden van Kobbenhagen, I hope you will have an interesting and wonderful day at our university. And I hope to see you at one of the other events this year. And really feel free to contact me later today or one of my fellow board members to ask about the alumni activities that we yearly organize, and if you would like to join. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much, Pietijn Roerder and Klaas Heitzmer. Thank you so much. Text deductible. Yeah, that's fun. It must be at this university of economics. And I saw at saying like, well, this is Dutch to talk about these kind of things. But it's about time that we are going to meet at Klaas Heitzmer. Because, as I said, in the run-up to this meeting for this afternoon, well, I at least, I did follow the media and the news a little bit specifically on this today theme, like pros and cons of urbanization. And I must say that it's more cons than pros, if you do read the newspapers. We have white discussions when it comes to, for example, nurses and teachers not able anymore to find a living space downtown Amsterdam. They are forced to go out, although they are needed within the borders of the city. Then that tremendous nuisance caused by tourists, by Airbnb tourists, really disrupting the residential way of living in our cities. The enormous lack of, and it was already mentioned, of living areas. We must build. We must build one million units. Can you imagine what that does mean? All those kinds of things. And then often all these discussions are ended by the general consensus that people say, what has all this to do with the quality of our lives? Because apparently the quality of life is at stake. And that all has to do with these economics of urbanization. And that's why we are so very happy to have Edward Glazer with us here this afternoon because we kindly invite him to talk and share his latest insights when it comes about the determinants of urban growth. What is it? Is it something that just rolls over us because time goes by and world population grows? Or is it something which is intended or unintended the result, the consequence of our human behavior, of our policymaking? What is it? So there's a lot to discuss, there's a lot to learn. There are a lot of insights, and here he is for us here this afternoon. Please warm welcome for Edward Glazer. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you very much for those kinds. Thank you all so much for spending this time with me. It's been six years since I've been in Tilburg. I was here the last time talking about the incredible economic engine that is the Brabant region at the first Copenhagen summit. Today I'm going to be speaking more generally about the upsides and downsides of urbanization. But I do want to call out one very local thing that was highlighted in the introduction which is I'm a small reason why you're here. The larger reason is to connect with each other. That is urban density at work. And the fact that you value face-to-face contact with each other is a sign of what makes cities great and what makes cities important. Now I want to start by making the point that cities rest on a three-legged stool on a tripod. The first leg of which is the magic of human interactions. It's the fundamental pro of cities that on some level outweighs all of the cons. It's the fact that we are at our hearts a puny species when we are alone. Few people in this room could keep up with a decently-sized bear if we had no other help. But collectively we've been able to work miracles. Work miracles in technology, work miracles in governance, work miracles in culture. And I can think of few countries that embody the magic that comes out of urban interactions, the collaborative chains of creativity that have powered humanity's greatest hits from Athenian philosophy to Facebook, this is one of the world's great urban societies and when we think about things like democracy in its modern form that is something that is created by the urban spaces and the urban residents of the Netherlands as they rose up against their non-urban overlords in the late 16th century. Those interactions are captured in this slide by the old market of Jerusalem which captures one way in which cities enable people to become better than they would as individuals by buying and selling. But of course there are many other ways. There's a friend who teaches you something. There's the warm smile of a neighbor who makes your life a little bit better. But as the introduction emphasized there are also downsides of density. If someone is close enough to give you an idea face-to-face they're also close enough to give you a virus or a bacteria. And if someone's close enough to sell you a newspaper they're close enough to rob you. Cities have for thousands of years been trying to deal with those downsides of density and that is why cities need rules and one way to understand all these cons that are in the news today is that the public sector has not caught up with private sector success. That in fact dealing with the downsides of density felt like a much less difficult thing in the 1970s and 1980s when the urban world seemed to be over. But today we're in a world in which demand to be in Amsterdam is huge and so we need public policies that are around that. In my picture here I have this is an image of the Boston and Cambridge Police departments dealing with the marathon bombing from five or six years ago. It's one example of the many ways in which cities have to deal with these demons that come with density, what economists call the negative externalities associated with having people around you. The third image is the third leg of the stool which is the built environment. Economists are always fond of reminding architects that the real city is not the skyline. The real city is not even the beautiful homes along the canals that we all remember from Amsterdam. The real city is humanity. The real city is the flesh and blood that is connected by that density and structures don't work unless they actually serve the needs of the people but of course people do need structures and infrastructure. They do need houses, they do need space, they do need commuting areas, they need to be able to walk to places, they need to be able to drive to places in some cases and cities need to build to accommodate change and if you think about the fundamental reason for the housing crisis in the Netherlands, it's fundamentally because the amount of new construction has not kept up with the amount of demand for these spaces and I have no idea where the Netherlands should build, that's not my job to tell you where you should build how to figure this out and in many cases the challenges here are much harder than the US because you have precious urban spaces that must be protected. But not every urban space in the Netherlands can be precious and you need to find some areas in which now the high levels of density that are needed to allow cities to accommodate the people who want to come into them. So it's about this triad and now I'm going to take you on a tour, first a little bit about why cities have come back and then diving into the discontents of modern urbanization and diving into the cons. Now fundamentally the ebb and flow of urban growth is about a dance with technology. Cities are formed by the technological events during their era. This is one of the first great centripetal technologies. I'm going to differentiate between centripetal technologies that pull us together and centrifugal technologies that push us apart. This is an aqueduct, probably the single most important pro-urban technology ever because there is no more important job for urban government than providing clean water. This is the one in Segovia, it's also fairly splendid in its way, but this was a technology that enabled cities to form. Indeed the 19th century was a great centripetal century technology starting with horse drawn omnibuses, moving into steam powered factories that could be located in urban cores moving to elevated railroads and then of course the skyscraper this great invention that married a steel frame structure that enabled you to soar to the sky with the safety elevator that enabled you to travel up and down at reasonable speeds. This was an innovation that enabled cities to travel out in a way that was unimaginable before 1850. Of course the 20th century particularly in America was a centrifugal century because it was a century in which many of the most powerful technologies caused the death of distance. The car was very much a child of the city. It was a child first of all of urban Germany, something Americans tend to forget that in fact it was Germans who came up with the internal combustion engine not Americans but of course we did make it cheap. Detroit may have been the most productive place on the planet in 1950 and in 1890s it was a place no less entrepreneurial than Silicon Valley in the 1960s. It was a genius on every street corner. Not just Henry Ford but the Dodge brothers, the Fisher brothers, Billy Durant, Ransome and collectively they figured out how to make an inexpensive automobile for ordinary Americans. But this invention that came from the city was a deeply problematic child in that what the car enabled Americans to do was to rebuild their urban spaces around the automobile and that's exactly what we did throughout the entire 20th century. We left our old urban space and we rebuilt our cities around the car which is something that America still has to deal with and indeed the difference between the American urban structure and that in Europe reflects the fact that so much of our cities were built during the 20th century where the car was dominant and where transportation costs were low enough so you could have one large city surrounded by empty space whereas the cities of Northern Europe were formed during a time of very high transportation costs and so of course they have lots of little cities everywhere because transportation costs were very high. So cars and highways also had the effect of killing the older industrial cities. Every one of America's largest cities in 1900 was on a major waterway because those waterways enabled the flow of goods and indeed then rail cars then backed up this water power. The decline in transportation costs, highways, containerization, cheaper trucking, cheaper railroads enabled industry to leave those urban cores and move to places where labor was cheaper. So first it moved to the suburbs then it moved to so-called right to work states in the south where labor unions were not empowered. The work of Tom Holmes compares areas on different sides of state boundaries and shows how much more industry grew after the passage of the Taft-Hartley acts that enabled right to work states and of course it moved to lower cost areas across the globe. This was the largest industrial cluster in the United States in the 1950s was not automobile production in Detroit but it was garment production, the sewing of clothes in New York in the 1950s. This was an industry that lost 500,000 jobs in under six years just hammered by globalization and indeed when I was growing up in New York in the 70s this was very much a feeling that New York was a city whose time had come and gone and it was a dinosaur looking at the trash heap of history and of course this was not something that was unusual in urban Europe as well. This is an image of Liverpool from the 1980s where particularly older industrial cities felt as if they were completely headed for the trash heap of history. Now when I started in this business in the late 1980s there was a fashionable view that said just as containerization and highways had eliminated urban industry new forms of transmitting knowledge over space would kill off urban finance would kill off urban consulting, would kill off urban publishing would kill off all of the idea intensive industries that still existed in cities. And this was a deeply fashionable view this was of course the high tech information technology of the 1980s so just to remind you what that looked like. But I thought looking at that this didn't seem right to me that in fact this would not happen as the world got more technologically sophisticated and I've been pleased that I was right that in fact the last 25 years the trend has not been centrifugal and we see things like this is the Wallace office at Bloomberg City Hall this is the Googleplex in California we see the rise of urban spaces both in the US and in Europe and even more so in the developing world where massive cities from Karachi to Kinshasa show up in places that are both poor and sadly too often poorly governed it has been an urban quarter century it's been quite remarkable. So why didn't information technology kill off face-to-face interactions and the cities that enable those interactions? Well I think the dominant effect of globalization in new technologies has been to radically increase the returns to being smart to radically increase the returns to human capital right we have literally thousands of studies showing that being smarter is now worth a lot more than it used to be and we are a social species that gets smart by being around other smart people this is what cities do that matters and they always did this right they always enabled these chains of creativity but in 15th century farms or in 15th century brews for that matter that produced spectacular art but it did not create the economic engine the economic engine would have been around weaving right I mean it was about a much more not the chains of brilliance but the core economic function. In the 21st century those chains of brilliance right the chains of new ideas that's what powers the economy that's what makes Eindhoven work it's not about making ordinary goods more cheaply it's about collaborative brilliance another way to think about this is as the world becomes more complicated we have more complex ideas that are easier to get lost in translation right anyone who's ever taught knows the hard part about teaching is not knowing your subject material it's knowing whether or not anything you're saying is getting through to your students at all at all okay and we have these wonderful cues as humans for communicating comprehension or confusion that are lost when we're not in the same room with one another all of you surely know that if you're going to have a difficult conversation with someone you want to do it face to face not over Twitter okay you want to actually have some ability to see how it's impacting the person and adjust your message as the whole world gets more complicated as technology gets more complicated those face to face interactions have become more valuable not less valuable and you see this right in these two images so this is the Bloomberg's Wallace office at City Hall in New York which is based on the Wallace office at Bloomberg LLP his company which was based on the Solomon Brothers trading floor which Bloomberg ran before he went off and started his own business now trading floors are something of a puzzle here we have some of the wealthiest people on the planet who in a normal industry would be sitting in a large office protected by a giant Okan desk enjoying all the privacy that their wealth has made possible but here they are in a trading floor they're on top of each other they're yelling at each other they're getting food on each other it's all a mess right are they there well they're there because in their industry right knowledge is incredibly valuable knowing a little bit more of what's going on in the markets can make you a fortune overnight which is why finance tends to be so urban because the urban edge and transmitting information is so valuable there they're there fundamentally because knowledge is more important than space and that's what's happened over the last quarter century is that cities have come back because economic changes have favored knowledge they favored innovation and if you really thought that new technologies were making face to face interaction obsolete then what in the world is Google doing buying the Googleplex building even larger structures so that everyone's on top of each other buying a million and a half square feet in downtown Manhattan why are they doing all this because they know this is how their creative business works they want their people as often as they can next to each other they want no barriers between them they want the flow of information to be as complete as it can they want to create the experience of an urban work environment where knowledge flows quickly so and this is the background for what we've seen over the last twenty years so this is a map of the US and what I've done is I've taken the three thousand odd counties in the United States each one on average with about a hundred thousand people each dot takes one tenth of those counties so three hundred counties and I've sorted them in the basis of their density levels so what the blue line shows is the relationship between density and earnings and of course I've used density because at their heart cities are density they're absence of physical space between people and firms they are density proximity closeness and what the blue line shows is that the densest tenth of America's counties have earnings that are on average 50% higher than the least dense half of America's counties this is something economists call agglomeration economies and it reflects a lot of things it reflects the fact that sometimes people in cities are better educated it reflects the fact that you know there may be other forms of selection on attributes into cities but after thirty years of research on this I'm really convinced that this is actually a treatment effect that actually people who move to cities actually do experience real visible wage gains and they're not wage gains that happen overnight but rather year by year month by month workers who come to cities experience faster wage growth which is most compatible with the view that cities are forges of human capital places where people get smart by being around other smart people the top line the red line is slightly more surprising which is the relationship between density and population growth so whereas at the start of the nineteenth century Americans were leaving their dense enclaves on the eastern seaboard to populate the empty spaces between the oceans at the start of the twenty first century instead of spreading out we are clustering in this is the same graph for the European Union okay so these are the nuts three regions the blue line shows the relationship between earnings and density it is stronger in the European Union that is in the US so I said 50% higher in the EU it's double it's double at the top than it is at the bottom so the earnings gap is really huge it's weaker because in fact population growth is not driven by differences in fertility in Europe or the US it's driven by migration rates and Europeans migrate much less than Americans do I'm not going to mention as much about the developing world hopefully something will come up in the Q&A but many of the most exciting things that are happening in cities are happening in the developing world it is both saddening when you see some of the downsides of urbanization but it's important to remember there is no pathway out of poverty into prosperity that does not run through city streets 2007 we crossed this halfway point where the majority of humanity lives in cities and it's hard not to think that's a net a good thing because when you compare those countries that are more than 50% urbanized to those countries that are less than 50% urbanized the more urbanized countries have income levels that are on average five times higher and infant mortality levels that are less than one third and it's striking when we think about the quality of life problems in developing world cities that in fact people in urban areas in the developing world are actually happier than rural dwellers and that's exactly what this graph shows so what I've taken is this is from the world value survey it's from about 10 years ago more, 15, 14 years ago the gap here shows the difference between rural and urban happiness in the country so in wealthy countries there's no big difference you should not expect to be happier by moving to one place versus not by lifestyle consultant these are all clustered around zero, some places like Italy and New Zealand the urbanites are less happy than the rural dwellers rural New Zealand is pretty nice as is rural Italy and of course in Sweden as anyone can imagine what rural Sweden is like during January the urbanites are much happier than the rural dwellers but the place where you see really a huge gap is in the poor parts of the world India, Ghana, Mali, Moldova, Rwanda these are places where there's a huge happiness gap despite the pain of living in an Indian slum it beats the unending stultifying poverty of rural India the only exceptions are Iraq and Thailand, Iraq was in 2005 during 2007 experiencing what economists would call certain exogenous negative shocks to their cities other people call that bombing and of course Thailand I claim is I attribute this to Bangkok's traffic jams now the success of cities in the 21st century is not uniform it's not as if every city does well you know it's Detroit, Cleveland these are still places that are troubled Liverpool is not back no matter what you hear from the occasional cultural year that Liverpool experienced but some places it's easy to forget now but in 1971 two jokers put up a billboard a sign on the highway leaving Seattle asking the last person to leave the city to turn out the lights because just as no one could imagine a Detroit capital motors, no one could imagine a Seattle with a smaller Boeing before Amazon, before Costco, before Starbucks before Microsoft and this is Milan as well reinventing itself like Seattle as a former decaying industrial town into a cultural capital of the information age what is the magic sauce? it's education human capital is the bedrock on which national individual and local success rest right here I'm showing you the relationship between per capita GDP and share the population with a college degree across America's metropolitan areas this is not just the impact of individual human capital, individual years of schooling holding your years of schooling constant in the US your earnings go up by about 10% as the share of adults in your area with a college degree goes up by 10% this is something economists call human capital externalities this is the relationship between human capital and area growth across the US so you can see these areas which have the highest levels of human capital have population growth that are about 4 times, 3.5 times higher than the least educated areas if you want to understand why Detroit looks different than Seattle you don't have to look further than more than 50% of Seattle's adults have a college degree about 13% of Detroit's adults have a college degree they're doing exactly as well as their education predicts and indeed if you think that what cities are doing are enabling people to learn from one another education is so crucial because it means you've got more to teach and that you're better at learning now the most important things that go on in learning in cities are not the things that we teach in colleges and universities despite the incredible value of universities I just want to make sure the director Magnificat knows how much I'm on board on that and can I remind you that your deduction is tax deductible but beyond that it's the stuff that's learned at work, at the table on city streets what the great English economist Alfred Marshall was talking about when he wrote 130 years ago the mystery of the trade become no mystery but are as it were in the air and it's that idea of knowledge in the air that stands behind this now when it comes to these things that are learned on the street I can think of nothing that is more important and valuable than the knowledge and inclination to become an entrepreneur 60 years ago the economist Benjamin Chinitz was comparing New York and Pittsburgh and noting that New York was more resilient than Pittsburgh was even then he argued that this was a reflection of that garment industry with very weak returns to scale and no barriers to entry in which anyone with a good idea and a couple of sewing machines could get started and so it was a mother of entrepreneurial invention and the entrepreneurs who got started in the garment industry would go on to found movie studios would go on to build skyscrapers would go on to found banks over and over again you see these garment industry entrepreneurs going on to do other things and that is a bedrock that the city relied upon so when the industry faltered they reinvent itself because entrepreneurial human capital is fungible if it's good at looking for opportunities in clothes it's good at looking at opportunities in other markets whereas by contrast Pittsburgh has US Steel US Steel trains company men they're very good at solving short run logistics problems they're very bad at reinventing themselves it is amazing given how weak are measures of entrepreneurial talent are at the local level how powerful they are at predicting urban resilience in this case I'm just using average establishment size this is employment growth this is the difference between 160% employment growth and 30% employment growth these are the places with the smallest average establishment these are the places with the largest average establishment huge difference also I could measure this with a share of employment and startups in the initial period or I could look at proximity to coal mines or iron mines at the start of the 20th century which also predicts having larger firms I can look within industries I can look within geographic regions all of them show the same things lots of little scrappy firms they have a lot of resilience leads to urban reinvention a few monolithic large companies leads to stagnation now you can make up for that if you have an educated enough population so Boeing is large and Seattle is a bit of a monolith but it is sufficiently well educated that it does alright Detroit is also a monolith but it's a monolith with less educated workers and so it is still dealing with a hangover from that industrial success one last point about why cities have come back they have also risen as places of consumption as well as production there are places that have fixed goods like access to museums or beautiful spaces that we can enjoy and as the population of the world becomes more educated and more interested in higher end pleasures they want to take advantage not just of competition in urban labor markets but competition in urban restaurants among art dealers as well and so over the last 30 years we have the rise of cities as places of consumption which creates added pressure on urban housing markets because you actually want people not just who are there for their jobs but people who are there to have fun one example of this is the rise of reverse commuting the idea that anyone would live in Manhattan or in the Bronx and then commute out to Westchester would have been thought as completely bizarre in the 1970s you had to pay people combat pay to make them put up with Manhattan in the 1970s today New York is filled with people who are actually there and they're there to play and they go somewhere else to work and that is what a consumer city looks like that is some part of what we've seen is a great pro-city price tilt so this is using Zillow data over the last 20 years and the high dots there are the places that are right close to the center downtown and then you can see the price growth declining so you've seen a real tilt over the last 20 years whereas the suburbs which were the great hope of the 50s, 60s and even early 70s have stagnated the intra city the really close in areas have soared in price creating both winners and losers and when you think about why we think that building is a good idea it's not just because of the people who live in those houses it's because it reduces the pressure to gentrify older, cheaper neighborhoods that are close to downtown technological changes also made this easier Zipcar, Airbnb, Uber, well not in Tilburg there are a variety of different ways in which we have the sort of rise of a sharing economy now we shouldn't be surprised that sharing economy innovations help cities because cities have always been examples of a sharing economy what is an urban restaurant but a shared kitchen, a shared dining room what is an urban park but a shared backyard the difference is you can share more things so why didn't you have Zipcar in New York in the 1970s where you'd go to Times Square to pick up your car and there'd be like a dead body in the trunk or something and it was New York in the 70s for those who haven't seen Taxi Driver this is what the city was like and it would be a really unpleasant experience now with a technology that doesn't happen you're able to share more things and that just feeds to city's strengths this is the idea that you would have trusted a stranger to come to your house and pick you up this is what we thought licensed taxi drivers were like in New York in the 1970s let alone an unlicensed person who just randomly showed up and again the technology makes us feel comfortable with this now the downside of all the success is that the public sector has not kept up with private sector success in cities we have all of this demand for urban areas that put stress on the physical city on the infrastructure and on this sort of public side of rule keeping of regulation and the public sector has not kept pace with it and I'm going to talk about five different examples of this one of which is more of an issue in the US than it is here but it is an important thing everywhere which is cities seem to be providing productivity but not opportunity meaning that kids who grow up in urban areas are not seeing the same level of economic benefit that you would expect them to have secondly we're going to be talking about affordability of course and I'll be saying a little bit about Airbnb the evidence of the US third I'm going to be talking about non-urban areas the rise of jobless heartlands outside of this I'll say a little bit about congestion in infrastructure the traffic difficulties and rule of law in the city so here goes so this comes from this amazing data that my colleague Raj Chetty and Nathan Hendren have put together using linked social security data where they're able to link the income of the parent about 30 years later and so this gives you a measure of upward mobility across the US and with this data cities look terrible in the US so this is across city population I could put population density as well the larger the city the lower the upward mobility this is within cities right basically flat and then as you get to very high densities opportunity goes strikingly down the people who are living in these dense areas are doing less well this is at the border central city school district so we have this very sharp geographic definition of where you can go to school in the US this shows the mobility jump right at the border so there's a huge jump up and if you want something even more scary this is for African Americans this is the jump in the probability of being in prison in jail as an adult right at the central city school district so if you're inside the central city school district your probability is 6% that falls to 5% if you're outside it regression discontinuity jump right at the city border this is in fact cities have always been places of inequality and I have always been willing to defend urban inequality another word for inequality is diversity cities attract both rich and poor people they attract rich people with the ability to spend their money in a fun way they attract poor people with the promise of upward mobility with finding a better job with better social services but the caveat to that is that we only can love inequality if it's not permanent if cities are machines for turning poor people into rich people if they're providing an upward escalator then this is something to be admired if what they're producing is permanent pockets of joblessness and poverty then that is something to be deeply worried about and I think as the European population becomes more heterogeneous the risk of that goes up this was always going to be more common in ethnically heterogeneous US than in ethnically homogenous Netherlands but with different populations moving in you need to worry more about so I'll give you three different hypothesis for this first of all cities attract the poor and this represents unobserved parental human capital that is potentially compounded by neighbor effects in schools it's possible everything we've had suggests that that's only a moderate amount of it particularly for the within city variation urban density permits interactions permits people to buy and sell drugs permits parents to do things other than taking care of their kids so for example I live in an American suburb there's nothing for me to do other than make my kids do their math I've got no interesting leisure activities other than that and third, urban density enables more segregation and it is segregation that ultimately lowers upward mobility we've got a little bit of evidence that really shows that so this is the level of segregation and this is upward mobility for African Americans and so you really do see bigger segregation in America cities and you can imagine why that would be in a small town it's hard to be too far away from anyone the larger the city the more that you have these isolated pockets and one fascinating tidbit that comes out of the cell phone data is that adults even poor adults who live in poor neighborhoods do not live segregated lives they go to jobs where they interact with rich people when they interact with well educated people but their children do the children either live in the neighborhood or they go to segregated schools and so it's a very different world for the adults and for the children so this is challenge number one and indeed it's a challenge that's much more relevant in the US I would say it's the largest challenge facing cities in the US it's not the largest challenge facing cities in the Netherlands number two is around the built environment there is a silla and a caribness there are twin dangers around urban land use planning across the world one of which is nimbyism not in my backyardism the other is monumentalism building for the sake of building this is Mumbai which is a city which adopted this is complete insanity they adopted the British Town and Country Planning Act in 1968 as if any planning that worked well for Yorkshire or Dorset would be appropriate in urban India they had a floor area ratio limit of 1.25 which means on average you can only build to one and a quarter stories part of this was driven by a deep hope that this would prevent urban growth but of course it didn't prevent urban growth it just made sure that that growth was as dysfunctional as possible because instead of building reasonable towers it sprawled out it sprawled out and created dysfunctional underperforming almost slums that just ignored the rules this is Astana place number one for monumentalism nobody needs these towers there and of course you see in many parts of the world particularly less democratic places where there is building for the sake of building and that is also a mistake I'll give you a little bit on housing markets and how at least I understand them so this is a picture of the great housing convulsion of the 2000 to 2011 period along the horizontal axis is the growth in prices between 2001 and 2006 along the vertical axis is the decline in prices between 2006 and 2011 I want you to take away four facts from this one, there's huge heterogeneity in American housing markets some places had incredible booms and busts like New York or Phoenix and some places like Houston barely moved at all typically the places that build a lot don't have their prices move typically, typically, but not always the places that don't build are the ones where you get the big convulsions second thing I want you to take away from this the level of mean reversion this is normal in housing markets typically for every dollar a housing market sees its price rise over five years it goes down, housing prices then go down by 32 cents over the next five years so mean reversion is quite normal in housing prices but this is not 32 cents mean reversion this is 95 cent mean reversion this great price wave was a boom and bust that came out leaving nothing but financial wreckage in its wake third thing I want you to take away from this negative outliers well there's Detroit the one city that managed to miss the boom and still experience the bust and then there are the cities built on sand Phoenix and Las Vegas these were the places that never should have had a boom because in fact it is easy to build in Phoenix and Las Vegas there's no lack of American desert land on which you can build forever and these places have regulations that make it really easy to build and so for 40 years prices in Phoenix and Las Vegas were perfectly aligned with construction costs which in the US means $80 a square foot or $800 a square meter that's what it costs to build then all of a sudden these places became vastly more expensive and of course it was a bubble that was obviously going to burst and it did last outlier of course are the dense areas that retained value the ones that are above the line New York, Washington DC and that mirrors a broader pattern which is over the last 20 years if you ask yourself where did price growth go here I've ordered things on the density level and America's metropolitan area has been in the places with the limited amount of land another way of seeing this is that it's really about price growth has been driven by conflagration by the combination of demand and supply but supply matters much more than we would normally think or we historically would have thought there are a bunch of areas here along the x-axis is how much permitting there was between 2000 and 2013 so the amount of new building that was allowed by local governments is the gap between housing price and the physical cost of building the difference between the value that consumers place on this product versus how much it cost to build it what you notice from here is the places that are really expensive don't build a lot and the places that build a lot aren't expensive there's no repealing the laws of supply and demand if you have robust demand for an urban space and you don't allow construction it will get more expensive and all of the attempts at public policies to rewrite those rules will ultimately fail demand size subsidies, cheap mortgage rates for buying lending some form of modest amount of affordable housing units given to a favored few people who get to lotterate into it none of it is a substitute for having a robust private housing supply that makes sure that anyone who comes to your city can rent a home at a reasonable price and that only comes by enabling enough building now the problem is where can Amsterdam built and this is the challenge it's a difference between the US and the Netherlands because there are small parts of American cities that are historically magical and need to be protected but they're not huge there's a lot of urban Netherlands that's actually kind of magical that's kind of patrimony of the world and so I'm leaving this to you you've got to figure this out I am not going to opine as to which area of urban space is right for you to build on but you should just keep in mind a little bit of geometry which is I think projections argue for a million more housing units in the Netherlands over some longer time horizon at 100 square meters per unit that means 100 square kilometers of space at an F.A.R. of 10 that means you're building to 10 stories an average you can put that on 10 square kilometers which is just a circle with a radius of 1.8 meters so if you're building to an average of 10 stories that's just a 2 kilometer radius circle if you're building to 5 you need a circle with a diameter of 5 kilometers so just keep that in mind the taller building you are the more you get to keep this stuff so you get to keep this stuff if you build up but the lower you're going to constrain your housing supply the lower you're going to constrain heights the more you're going to eat up of this stuff or the more you're going to provide limitations on construction I just want to sort of remind you that there's also a profound social justice element to this every time you're saying no to new construction you're saying no to a family that wants to come and experience urban space you're saying that the families that remain there have to spend more and there's fundamentally no possible alternative to allowing more construction to creating cities that are engines of opportunity for a larger number of people now, Airbnb banning Airbnb is I'm not even going to call it a Band-Aid it's like an 18th of a Band-Aid that's put on to dysfunctional housing markets I'm not saying it's nothing and this is more generally about various bans on investment properties but it's pretty darn small there's a PhD student who's just graduating this year who is working on lots of protests on Airbnb rentals in the US and she goes through a fairly complex mathematical model of estimating this this shows you where Airbnb rentals occur in the US occur in New York this is where they're particularly in these downtown areas or in Brooklyn Heights she estimates that there is a welfare impact that comes from the reduction of housing supply but it's pretty small, right? per year the median renter loses about $100 per annum from Airbnb so all of Airbnb is costing the average renter no more than $100 a year and that's from a city with a fairly large Airbnb basis and not only that, and you can see this in the graph it's actually the rich people who suffer it's actually rich renters who suffer and the reason for this is that poor people in New York live here and live here there's no Airbnb presence there the Airbnb presence is in the sort of core areas which are where rich people live so it's modestly attacking where rich people live which is to say that you may want policies around tourism in Dutch cities there may be negative externalities associated with having people who are coming in or behaving in a disorderly fashion as I've tried to emphasize throughout cities need rules and particularly if there are tourists who are prone to large amounts of drinking on a weeknight you may want to impose those rules a little bit more strictly trying to outlaw this market which provides plenty of value in its way it isn't a solution to any kind of housing market it's just a convenient scapegoat because you don't actually want to tackle the real problem which is actually delivering large scales of actual affordable housing third point what about the areas that are left behind this is a map of joblessness in America and when I was born in 1967 5% of prime age males were jobless prime age in the US is defined as being between 25 and 54 years a definition which I increasingly find deeply offensive as I head towards the upper boundary of that in the past 10 years more than 15% of prime age men have been jobless this has been a tripling of that rate this is probably America's largest unsolved social problem it's happened and we have no idea how to do it and it's most certainly not geographically neutral what I've called America's eastern heartland which starts down in Louisiana, Mississippi ruches up through Appalachia and then ends up in the Rust Belt cities this is what the same graph looked like in 1980 again some of the same regional disparities occurred but it was just such a lower level and it's different than not working for women not working for women is a north south divide and I fundamentally want this discussion to be about men because men who are jobless do different things than women who are not employed women who are not employed actually do things like caring for children caring for sick relatives doing a variety of social things men who are not employed do one thing and one thing only which is they watch massive amounts of television four hours on average and they are miserable there's also a huge difference in the sense that women who are not formerly employed they may be slightly less happy than women who are formerly employed but it's a tiny difference men who are not employed this shows the gap this is earning more than 50,000 the share who are really unhappy earning between 35 and 50 earning less than 50 the important thing here is that working is related to not working is related to misery because in fact happiness is only vaguely associated with how much money you earn whereas not having the social support that comes from that job, not having a sense of purpose in this world that's actually far more problematic and that's why this is such a curse one of the reasons why this joblessness has remained so fixed is that of the long-term employed 30% of them are living with their parents and their parents don't seem to be willing to move to a better labor market to do better America has become more European in its regional landscape American mobility rates have declined precipitously so we've gone from having 6% of Americans move counties every year to under 4% of Americans moving counties when people do move the skilled move out and this is surely is true of rural areas in Europe as well that you have a brain drain so having everyone move to Amsterdam is not likely to be a feasible solution and in other ways we're getting a more a greater amount of geographic sclerosis which is also associated with the limits on building in new areas and you see pictures like this so this is the not working rate in 1980 for prime age men, this is the not working rate in 2010 and so we need at least some policies to deal with these permanent pockets of lower density joblessness the most important around this is education but in the US I've certainly come to a place in which I'm more comfortable with employment subsidies that are targeted towards high jobless areas urban density urban downside number 4 demons of density, most important of this disease, this is death rates in New York over the last 200 years a boy born in New York in 1900 could expect to live 7 years less than the national average that's about the same gap that's existed in Shakespeare's time between London and the rest of England today life expectancy is about 3 years longer in New York than outside this didn't happen cheaply it required above all investment in clean water America's cities and towns were spending as much on water at the start of the 20th century as the federal government was spending on everything except for the post office and the army but infrastructure is not enough and that's why I want to show you this the great piece of infrastructure in New York was the Croton Aqueduct and as a child I was raised on this story that said New York was filthy and then those wonderful engineers came in and they built the Croton Aqueduct which took the filthy water out and took the clean water in and then all of a sudden New York was a paradise well that story is clearly missing a huge part of the action because this is when the aqueduct was built and for 25 years the city was still having color epidemics in fact my great great great great great grandfather died in that one in the 1849 color epidemic and the reason for that was exactly the same problem we face in Sub-Saharan Africa today which is the last mile problem you built the aqueduct and the poor people still weren't willing to pay to connect they were too poor to pay for those connections and so they continued to use the the brackish water from the shallow wells and they continued to die it's only in 1866 when the Board of Health requires tenement owners to connect and it poses fines quality of life based rules that makes people connect that the city starts getting healthier cities need rules and in some sense in the Netherlands you have had such a wonderful urban society that has imposed things without any heavy handed government interventions for so long that you've forgotten that sometimes you actually can't just rely on the community to actually impose everything that keeps quality of life down you actually may need to have harsh rules particularly when they're not people from inside your society but people from outside your society you needed rules okay that's about incentives I'm just going to say one thing what is that grass show I work on clean water in Zambia and one of the things that's really fascinating is even though they build the pipes they break down constantly maintenance is a huge problem but they don't fix the pipes very quickly they fix the pipes mostly when people actually pay for the water when people pay by the leader rather than when they pay by the month and so you really need the financial incentives and that's what that shows when people pay for the water then the water company fixes it when they don't pay for it then they don't fix it in terms of driving it's again it's about incentives and infrastructure the fundamental law of highway traffic as identified by Gilder on Tom Matthew Turner shows that the number of vehicle miles traveled increases roughly one for one with a highway miles built if you build it they will drive it you can't just build more roads if you expect your cities to become livable you have to do something to limit the use of it it's called road pricing Singapore has had congestion pricing since 1975 it's the second densest country in the world and its roads move swiftly and if we introduce autonomous vehicles which lower the cost of sitting in traffic we will make traffic worse because people are more willing to sit in traffic unless we introduce road pricing from the beginning that makes them pay for the social cost of their actions I'm going to skip this in many cases in infrastructure there are two technologies in the developing world crime in the New York City of my youth crime seemed like it was the great problem this gives you just a homicides per 100,000 people over the past 200 years and you can see this is when I was born about here and we just experienced this since the city was out of control you still do not have a major crime problem I talked to Sylvester and he said you have to say something about crime we're having a big crime problem in the Netherlands there's no data that suggests that you're having a crime problem there's no real crime problems of either American cities or anything but I will say just a few things this is images from my youth a few things that we know about crime and fixing crime okay one of which is that so just two observations one of which is that the way that drugs are sold actually matters and this is a point that came from Brazil and it came from the impact of the upepe urban pacification program in Rio de Janeiro it turns out that drugs like most products you can either sell in the model of the dentist or a tailor whereas you know your provider and you call up your dealer and the dealer brings you drugs or there's a supermarket you go to an open-air drug market and you buy stuff now it turns out that one of those models the supermarket is vastly more prone to create violence than the other market and the reason for that is if you take over the supermarket because they're fundamentally anonymous you get the business and what the upepe did is they smashed the open-air markets did it do anything to drug consumption in Brazil? no, absolutely nothing because they converted relatively quickly to dealers but drug consumption is a second-order problem relative to large-scale homicide and so what it did is it deterred the homicide it reduced the homicide by switching the mode in which drugs were sold second point, community policing starting in the 1980s there was this vision of something called community policing in the United States which ended up taking two different modes in New York and Boston this is Ray Kelly in New York you can see he's a tough guy, he's a real New Yorker community policing meant getting tough on quality of life crimes, locking people up for using squeegees, using stop and frisk it was sort of a very heavy-handed approach maybe necessary given New York's large-scale but deeply unattractive and related to the enormous downside of locking up millions of American young men by contrast you can see this is Ed Davis in Boston Ed's like a big teddy bear and community policing in Boston meant getting friends with the community getting the community to actually tell you who the criminals are and it's harder but it's a much more attractive way to deal with crime and in case of Ed Davis a lot of it involved getting young women of color who are on the police force to be the first line of interaction with policing and when you see things like this in the US where you have this huge battle between the community and the policing I will say that's a sign that the policing has gone totally wrong because the policing can't get the community to work for them they fail and the tragedy so this comes from some work by my colleague Roland Fryer is you have these things going on the police are not doing a very good job to begin with then you have this sort of massive protest and what happens the police just shut down they just actually stop doing anything and as terrible as it is when the police are abusive the alternative of no police is pretty horrible as well and both of these things are awful and really there's only a model of this that is the policing actually connecting with the community I really don't have time for this but when rule of law fails in cities it's often the most vulnerable who fail most and some of my work on gender and trust in Zambia shows that in fact it is women who suffer particularly in these sort of weak rule of law environments this is showing the markets in Zambia so you can tell these are places of sort of urban creativity but also relatively low incomes what happens is in these weak rule of law environments women go into a few number of industries they're very low paid industries they can work with other women and when you ask them why don't they go into leather and allied product materials and say they can't trust the guys that they deal with men and the men are abusive in a variety of different ways we talked about the Alfred Marshall quote earlier about learning from each other in cities one shocking detail from the Zambia data is that male entrepreneurs learn from other male entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have to go to courses because again they can't trust working with the men and so they're cut off from the urban ability to learn from other people there's a rule of law in the markets where you have a rule of law institution so this is something that's called a market chief this is the trust gap outside of markets this is how much less women cooperate than men do but if you put women in markets they start trusting the same amount and particularly they trust even more if they're in a market that is dominated by women so in fact you can close this difference but you need a rule of law institutions that actually the women can trust if they're going to get beyond this and we actually randomly get to a good rule of law institution that had a very large impact for women and not for men okay I'm going to end here and I just want to end where I began which is there are lots of difficult things in cities, rule of law is one way in which cities get out of control bad urban schooling, ghettos that form that isolate people low quality of life in different ways but let's not lose our sight on the big picture for thousands of years cities have been enabling us to work together they enabled the people of the Netherlands to work together and create the first functional modern republic in Europe that model which is the model for my own republic 400 years ago those miracles happen in cities and when I look around myself whether or not it's in the urban Netherlands or urban America or even more so in urban Africa I say to you that the age of urban miracles is not done, it is very much around us but cities need public policies that can enable growth that can protect people from abuse, that can enable infrastructure to be moved smoothly and can create a city that is a city that empowers outsiders as well as protects insiders and that is the job for the 21st century, let me stop there but thank you very much thank you so much thank you so much Edward great, well I will invite you back on stage later on or is there somebody who has a very urgent question or remark for Edward for this at this very moment in time because I think you gave us a lot not only to think about but also to discuss further for example how to balance the private and the public sector because you say we do need rules, things are overcome but then yes how do we keep up from the public and the private sector well there is a lot at least I am going to ask you later on but for sure for sure I can imagine that you will join me with that maybe then the best is then to step immediately and to give the floor to the element of the city of Tilburg Birn-TVries and now we are very curious of course what your answers are to all the knowledge given to us by Edward please step forward because the floor is yours and what Tilburg is doing he says education is key education defines quite a bit what you are at the very end well then you are well done with the knowledge institutes here in Tilburg but give us some insights what is on your agenda how do you provide rules because that is apparently a key factor to success the floor is yours Birn-TVries thank you ladies and gentlemen my name is Birn-TVries I work as Aldermen, Vice Mayor or in Dutch and responsible for the economic, spatial planning and development of our city but more specifically I am responsible for the redevelopment of the P.S. Hafen district the Fehmar-Quartier Spoor Zone the Kennes-Aus areas of the city but more about that later it is a great honor to have been invited to speak here today after the inspiring contribution of you, Professor Glaser and to the friend of Koppenhagen I say thank you for the invitation before I became Vice Mayor I worked at the Ministry of Economic Affairs does this work? No we have to go back a bit someone this is a big part of the surprise yes, okay these are my friends the Mayor is in the middle I promised to show this picture to you okay before becoming Vice Mayor I worked at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and prior to that I worked at the LOL faculty of this great university and I am too an alumnus of Tilburg University although my academic career was fairly short lived I have been now Vice Mayor for almost 10 years and partly based on that experience I would like to talk to you today about successful cities and in particular the city of Tilburg but first and you saw it already start with some facts and figures regarding the history and the future of our city the history of Tilburg goes back a fairly long way the name of Tilburg appeared in the Libar Areas in 1191 when a document dating from the year 709 was copied which reported to have been written in Tilburg also known as Tilly Burgers in that time but despite 1300 and 11 years of history Tilburg as a city relatively recent phenomenon to be more exact Tilburg acquired city rights 211 years ago and still some people are not convinced of Tilburg's beauty as a city in Brabant we have cities like Dambos and Breda which have well preserved historic city centers whose influence dates back from many centuries and then cities like Tilburg and Eindhoven both cities with a similar history it was not until around the year 1600 that Tilburg started to grow in a serious way and that thanks to local sheep farming Tilburg became a prominent center of commerce in wool but the oldest known map of Tilburg dating from the 70s to the 60s it still shows that its agriculture was the base of our community the growth of our city really started to take off in the late 19th century due to the mechanization of the textile industry around 1871 more than 75% of the Dutch wool industry centered around our town employment in the sector reached its peak in the 1950s when there were 12,600 to be exact 25 workers I don't know but it's really in the industry but then a steep decline in the 1960s the textile industry went into decline as production moved to countries where wages were lower this loss was gradually offset by other manufacturing activities and logistics today Tilburg's economy is characterized by its strong manufacturing and logistics sectors the economic growth the continued expansion of our city goes back to the agricultural times but then in a few years you see cities starting to grow almost to the city today our city will continue to grow in the years to come just like other cities in Brabant our city will probably continue to attract new residents and the current projections are that we will reach a quarter of a million inhabitants in a few years this is the growth prediction all the municipalities in Brabant and the big four cities have a logo this is the growth projected for our city in the years to come and we'll reach 250,000 people but let's get back to the characteristics of Tilburg Tilburg is also a student city a city with a university and two universities of applied sciences and the first decision on this was taken over 100 years ago in 1912 the Catholic Academy was first set up in Amsterdam by Hendrik Muller this institution then went to Den Bosch in 1913 but they made a mistake the city council at this time were not supportive of Muller's ambition to establish a school of commerce as part of the academy the city of Tilburg was more open to the idea and made land available but was also willing to contribute financially and Tilburg School of Commerce is the precursor of this wonderful university the academy later merged into what is now known Phantas University of Applied Sciences the arrival of the academy was an important moment in our history as the future course of our city as a city for students a city of creativity that's one reason why there is today around 45,000 students living in our city 15,000 in secondary education and 30,000 in higher education for instance this university proportion of students in the city I think say something about the direction in which Tilburg is moving cities with more graduates are more likely to be home to more innovation and more new businesses but when I read the work of Professor Glaser it seemed difficult to see the link between the cities that are the focus of his work and the country we work and live in, the Netherlands the largest city in our country Amsterdam just has around even less 900,000 inhabitants that pales in comparison with cities like Tokyo, Shanghai or New York so how come the Netherlands even though it has no enormous cities is still able to create so much added value the Netherlands is 17th in terms of GDP per capita and the Netherlands also outperforms expectations when it comes to innovation in recent years we have been consistently near the top of the list of most innovative countries you can see here so one line of reasoning is that despite of its small size Dutch cities are so successful because if you zoom out a bit further you can actually view them as one large city with multiple centres or hubs if you take a better look at this picture the area of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are like actually one zone one big urban area with an amount of 30 billion inhabitants the Tri-City city initiative undertaken by among others Veno and Suwey the largest employer's organisation in the Netherlands is actually based on the idea that the entire Rhine-Muse-Schelder-Delta is one large city they have looked at this in an interesting way but you can also view it from this perspective if you look at the number of inhabitants per square kilometre you see that the metro area of New York has around 724 people per square kilometre in San Francisco 411 Los Angeles 210 and guess what the Netherlands has 407 people per square kilometre so we're sort of in the middle but our urban centres maybe a challenge are much less crowded in Manhattan there are over 27,000 people per square kilometre in a city like Amsterdam there are just around 5000 people per square kilometre and Tilburg, let's talk about Tilburg only 1,870 per square kilometre based on your work the work of Professor Glaser that would seem to be a weakness after all proximity is an important factor in the success of cities but at the same time I think the Netherlands is able to cope with the disadvantages because of the extreme proximity of all the other cities for instance if you look at New York not all encounters happen at one place it only takes for instance 12 minutes per train from here to Breda it only takes 22 minutes from here to Eindhoven and 40 minutes to Rotterdam Central Station at the same time it would take to travel from the World Trade Centre to the Bronx Stadium in Brooklyn at Bronx, sorry in 2017 Peter Tordwaar published an update of his earlier study about the commuting between cities in Brabant and you see a map that shows the movements between the cities of Brabant we see similar pictures for shopping, entertainment, healthcare and education there seems to be evidence of borrowed size the presence of several cities close together which reinforce one another because residents can make use of services that other cities have to offer the cities of Brabant form one large city network of around 1 million inhabitants okay but what does this mean at a local level for Tilburg I think it must it means that we must keep the investments up for excellent connections between our cities to mitigate the disadvantages of our more diffuse urban area there's also a need for collaboration especially between knowledge institutions and businesses but how do we do that what is special about this part of Europe how does cooperation occur in many regions we have triple helix cooperation meaning that innovation agendas of respect to the business community knowledge institutions and the public sector are harmonized creating plenty of scope for innovation there is knowledge transfer between knowledge institution and the business community the role of government is to encourage and facilitate the formation of these networks but then again triple helix collaboration can only succeed if the various partners are sufficiently on an equal footing the model only seems to work well in countries like us if you look at the US there is a more markets oriented model for instance China the government is more in charge but let's turn back to our region back to Tilburg along with cities such as Eindhoven Tilburg is one of the new towns towns that sprang up due to the industrial revolution Tilburg was initially based on the textile industry and Eindhoven was dominated by Philips once famous for its light bulbs and both cities have also reinvented themselves just like cities like London, Chicago and Milan Tilburg has overcome the decline of the textile industry in the 1960s and Eindhoven too after a major loss of projection from Philips has focused on developing its high-tech sector and both cities are home to strong universities which reformed and have expanded in parallel with their development and I think to a large extent these universities feed the innovation that is required in Tilburg many other manufacturing industries have taken the place of the textile industry and the logistics sector also boomed in addition a number of large insurance companies are based on their city as they said in the post etc and yet Tilburg is or was on a high-risk trajectory which is related to a low-skilled labour force first in the textile industry and later in the manufacturing industry and logistics fortunately we are in a transition from a less skilled manufacturing city to a more skilled IG producing city and given a robust knowledge infrastructure and associated large number of students 13 to 50 percent of our population is a student there are plenty of opportunities and there are lots of small sized companies the city's knowledge based is in areas such as business, social sciences digital technology data science, artificial intelligence and these are precisely areas in which successful startups have become fast growers in recent decades and most of the companies that we know today were set up by students, mostly students from this university but we still have a way to go a long way perhaps in the years to come we will need to provide space for these new businesses specifically in the sectors I've just mentioned because we have a great deal of in-house knowledge enough physical space for startups and programs that are generated through a close partnership with Brabant's Knowledge Institutes that also requires more intense cooperation between the Knowledge Institutes in Brabant's economic ecosystem Ladies and gentlemen I frequently ask myself how can I contribute to this in my local government because what makes our city attractive what makes how do we make sure that young people want to live, work and stay in the city the strategy of our city is to aim to provide a living and working environment that appeals to the kinds of people we would like to bring to our city while avoiding the pitfalls of excessive gentrification there are two examples that I would like to highlight, the projects in the Piershaven and the upcoming spores on the area I remember moving into a new home in the 1990s I was still a student those days and I was watching with a nice lady a nice old lady and I stayed in her loft in the Piershaven at that time the Piershaven was an area that was a really part of our city for those who do not know it it is located at the end point of the Wilhelmina canal and by the 1990s most industry had left and it wasn't an area one would particularly want to go to today is a complete different story the Piershaven has undergone a complete transformation over the last 10 years from a neglected backwater to a very lively part of the city there was no potential but they were not the only ones to play a role residents and private individuals also helped to forge a new role for the Piershaven today and the future not a good example is the spores on the area next to the railway line it is an area of 75 hectares right in the heart of the city close to the main railway station it used to be occupied by people who were shunted and maintained and now today it is a bustling area full of places to live and work there are also places for meeting and cultures such as our museums and of course you visited yesterday our renowned lock hall our city library which was recently proclaimed world building of the year the residents of Tilburg are embracing this location as the city's living room if you haven't been there yet go so you can experience for yourself what the power of social reuse can mean for buildings the other strategy of the city of Tilburg is to prioritize the transfer of knowledge from our knowledge institutions such as Tilburg University and Fontes and Alphonse I mentioned the triple helix agenda and this is very much our priority in Tilburg today our agenda drawn up with knowledge institutions and businesses focuses on digitization data science, AI these are important challenges alongside the challenges of climate change and the increase in digitization that will have a major impact on our society and the way we do business new business models are emerging and more as I'm concerned Tilburg needs to be at the forefront of these changes a good example of the agenda is the partnership between Tilburg University Fontes and Alphonse companies such as the Pers Group Swiss and Interpolis in the Mind Labs project Mind Labs is about AI and of course the partnership between Tilburg University and Eindhoven University of Technology Jats, which is about data science and given the scale and proximity of our cities close collaboration between companies and knowledge institutions from neighboring cities is a must and it therefore makes me very happy that both the universities and Fontes have announced that they are fully committed to cooperate on an agenda on AI with the support of a large number of companies and cities I would like to emphasize that Tilburg University is already involved in AI and has around 50 staff working on it but let's go back to Tilburg we are planning even more there is a good reason why a lot of people are talking about our city now in terms of spatial planning both the Spore Zone, the Kennesach us or knowledge axis that extends from Tilburg University to the city centre will feature that kind of activity in addition we will ensure that there is a constant mix of functions businesses, knowledge institutions residential units and places to meet to enjoy life and that also means building upwards West Point behind me was built in the 1990s the tallest residential building in our city and once the highest in the Netherlands but I have news more high rise buildings will be built in coming years and these are some of the plans that are currently being worked on Ladies and gentlemen I would like to draw my contribution to close I hope that I have given some insights into the strategy being pursued by the city of Tilburg we are well aware that we are a part of a whole a larger of a whole an important hub in a small country at the same time in my role as a servant of the city I see a transformation taking place in Tilburg the ambition and capacity to play an important role in today's society is something to work for and thankfully I notice an increasing sense of pride in our city I'm enjoying being a part of this transformation every day thank you for your attention thank you so much Birnd please Edward may I invite you back on stage wonderful well thank you so much for giving these insights please be seated I only have water I'm going to serve you a glass of water after having given your keynote I was wondering Edward when Birnd was showing us the picture of the density of the country he said the Netherlands it's not a dense country it's more like an empty city now what kind of discussion is this because I think it's often asked to you what does this mean because we are used to other numbers than you with your examples from the US or the city in China 11 million people where they do block and close now airports because of a virus I think he's exactly right this is certainly when I view either the Netherlands or the Netherlands combined with Belgium it's one large metropolitan area in a reasonable view it's one that looks different from California but of course it looks different because it was built on pre-car technologies and then connected by rail as opposed to one large car based culture but that doesn't mean it can't be perfectly functional incredibly robust urban system it's just one that's built in slightly different way okay ladies and gentlemen we have microphones or you can just yell, wave whatever to interact because I really would appreciate if you participate in this discussion is there somebody already who says well I take my time now because I have a question yes you great now I know that I have some of the colleagues from the Tilburg University who are going around but first of all I will run to you with the first question please present yourself and say to whom you would like to address the question thank you for the opportunity, my name is Angela I recently obtained my PhD from this university on sustainable cities and my question is to Professor Gleiser thank you for your presentation I saw in your lecture you mentioned words like cities of innovation, cities places as consumption but I'm wondering what your thoughts are if anything particular on sustainable development goal 11 for example and whether that is just a wish list or if that is something that cities can really aspire to given how important development and economic development is in contrast to environmental or social aspects so great question thank you and I cut my sustainability slide because it was already going on too long but that doesn't suggest that it is incredibly important the first order thing is that cities are often depicted as being the enemy of the environment but of course the opposite is true that when we look and I've done work together with Matthew Kahn currently of Johns Hopkins environmental economist and we assess the carbon footprint of households living in different parts of the US and the punchline is the places that look green are brown and the places that look brown are green and urban density is a recipe towards higher levels of sustainability for citizens one of which is just smaller distances traveled and in the US this means not taking the bus most of the time this actually just means shorter drives so it's driving 10 minutes instead of driving 50 minutes but that adds up in terms of gallons pretty darn quickly and secondly it's about smaller living spaces even holding income and family size constant so it's certainly true that taller towers are more energy intensive than large single family detached dwellings but typically people occupy much smaller apartments when they live in those areas and so they have to heat and cool those areas with much less energy so urbanization is not an enemy of the environment it's really a friend and one way to make these numbers more dramatic is if the great growing economies of India and China see their per capita carbon emissions levels rise to that scene in a sprawling United States global carbon emissions go up by 130% because of that factor alone if they stop at the level seen at wealthy but hyper dense Hong Kong global carbon emissions go up by only 30% so that's really a huge gulf and it says that urban density has really something to contribute towards taming our carbon emissions the second point is from a US perspective Europe looks pretty green to begin with certainly we've got a lot of work to go to catch up with you and probably has relatively little direct impact in terms of your carbon emissions on the future of carbon emissions in the world relative to what's happening in India China sub-Saharan Africa which are places that are poor have incredibly tough climates and we hope that they will become richer and consequently they will do the things that rich people do elsewhere which is they buy air conditioning and they buy cars and this will create vastly more pressure than anything that you do in Europe in terms of your direct carbon use which means that the most important thing that can happen in the Netherlands for the future of climate change is the solutions you come up with that will be stolen by Africa, by China, by India that in fact it is the ideas that are produced here that will be borrowed elsewhere that are what really matters so whatever you do don't add up like what are the carbon emissions here add up will this actually be translated and if it's translated how much of an impact will it have and I think that's the sort of central thing and I don't want to take away from the thing that carbon emissions are incredibly important and not that you shouldn't be working on it but you have to have a global perspective because if you're just adding up local stuff you're missing the main point and then we must make sure that it will not be stolen from us but that we do sell it at a good price if we do come up with the right technology don't we? that's right although I certainly an economist I believe in property rights but from an environmental perspective it's okay if it's stolen that is true now Ed Birndt was saying that we as policy makers we try to provide this is how you said it literally living and working environment to the people we want to attract and then you defined it further down that you said we want to be in the forefront of the new technologies like digitalization artificial intelligence data science and so forth is this feasible? is this the way things do go? can you say as a city the municipality government disses the people I would like to attract? well I think very much the job of city government is to attract and train smart people and then more or less to get out of their way that's the right economic development mantra I think it's not clear which are always the right people but certainly education is a pretty good predictor of something that you want unquestionably that certain diversity of skills are valuable I think with industrial policy you've always got to be a little bit careful because it's often difficult to figure out what was I mean I'm 100% on the view that Tilburg wants to be at the industries that are cutting edge of the world that's clearly right other universities as well absolutely and it's not totally clear what will be but so it's you need to be a little bit careful with industrial policy but I think in general this cooperation with universities is part of the training and attracting mission that I think is a sensible thing for local government but you're right, you're competing with the world that is absolutely right but you have assets, you have great universities you have smart people, you have a great quality of life all of these things are ones which make you I think globally competitive I think that I but maybe I'm wrong but I think that you said to us that cities in the very end should be able to pay for themselves did you say something similar to the social cost of their actions but I think it follows from that mostly that cities should pay for their costs too are you able to pay for yourself as a city? well we are in a situation that we do not fund ourselves because that's organized on a national level but for the expenses that we have but I mean also tax wise because that was what you were saying as well you should pay for usage if it's land, it's buildings if it's roads, if it's whatever are you able to do so or is the Dutch structure so is it hampering this? well there are quite a few problems with how we organized our government it comes from the times that we drove horses and not cars so the way we created our government is dates back from those times around the 1950s around that period so there and if you look at our government from a perspective of a city we're not well organized because most cities have relatively small part of what you may call the metro area of a city which they are allowed to govern and the rest is governed by municipalities province and even our national government so it's not a very efficient and focused way of governing but we've tried and discussed redesigning government in the Netherlands for ages so I'm not very optimistic about changing this okay there's a great question I want to say so the Netherlands has a large national share and often local expenses are funded by transfers from the national government it is appropriate that national government pays for expenses which are by and large redistribution to take care of poor people in fact if you make local governments responsible for all the poor people that live there typically the rich people just run away so in order to avoid having to pay those expenses so you really do have a national focus on that for other expenses typically economists think that a greater local share is actually advantageous that means instead of using national tax transfers having let's say for example higher property taxes to pay for local infrastructure improvements and indeed for many cases having user fees fund them and I think I'm glad that the Netherlands is thinking about that it's certainly worthwhile to have analyzed such an option there's this discussion going on right now but I'm not very optimistic about the results okay now you were emphasizing on the fact that we should try at least to better align the public and the private sector because if not then we do cause problems at the very end and then for sure quality of life will be at stake now one of the answers I think you were giving to this challenge Berend was that you said we try to work as much as we can in the triple helix so we try to align government with knowledge institutes with the entrepreneurial part of our society even maybe with society in itself the citizens is that the answer would you say to this very important task that we better align the public and the private is it in the triple helix or the quadruple helix so let me tell you what I heard the triple helix let me tell you what I thought was so useful about this what it seemed to me was this was a government leader who was making the case that for thinking about growth for thinking about not just current businesses but new businesses for not being focused as economic developments are so often are on can I get this one factory to open and so they marked themselves in one factory rather than creating an ecosystem that is part of that and that was absolutely great the thing that's not part of the the alderman's remit which is critical to this are other elements of quality of life which are then critical to attracting employees and to attracting businesses and to attracting lots of public policy that relates to attracting businesses that's not called economic development policy often quality of life policy is economic development policy policing policy is economic development policy because in fact if you don't have an area that is exciting to live in you're not going to attract the type of people that are going to start businesses that you want to be started okay yeah yes oh there is somebody there's one of the representatives what you would like to ask good afternoon my name is Geed Lammerichs I'm an economics master graduate student of this university thank you both for your presentations I was wondering Mr. Glazer in your presentation you talked about the importance of cities in that you can talk to other people you can learn from other people and also education and within the Netherlands and also in the US there is an increasing segregation within school districts I was wondering what the segregation in learning has a foreign effect on the prosperity of the city and the future in growth and then making the connection to a more developing world I was in Uganda in 2016 in 2017 and there you saw that a lot of people from the rural areas were moving to the more urban areas because they felt as if they could learn more but if that segregation would still hold because in a new city you can't really get into the economic heart of it very easily so what does the segregation there mean for economic development okay segregation school wise and with newcomers so I showed you the graph I consider that comment to be entirely right on I showed you the graph it showed lower levels of opportunity in more segregated cities in the US and it is absolutely true that more segregated cities have typically failed in American children I would say more generally America's system of schooling where you live determines where you go to school and if you want a better school you move to the suburbs has been an absolute curse on providing opportunity in urban areas typically European cities and cities in the Netherlands have not fallen into the same curse your schooling particularly for poor kids is much better which is why upward mobility is much higher than it is in the US but obviously you always want to watch for that you always want to make sure that your cities are providing schools not just for the smartest but also for those people who start with less and certainly the rising immigrant populations create more challenges but at least from my perspective I understand I'm supposed to like tell you to give you solutions but I think we have a lot more to learn from you than the reverse I mean in fact you seem to be doing an incredibly good job with immigrant populations relative to let's say the United States so it's it'll behooves me to give out lessons on this but it's a really important thing now Uganda the movement of rural to urban migrants is of course one of the great phenomenon of the 21st century particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa what we do know from Afrobarometer is that kids who spend more time in cities end up being more literate and end up being more educated so despite the failings of city school districts in Sub-Saharan Africa there are a lot better than rural schools the issue of distractions is still there so one graduate student I advise works on street children in Delhi and one in some cases those cities those children actually get less educated than they did in the rural areas because there's more money to be earned begging on the streets in Delhi than there was in the rural area that they left behind despite the fact that actually Delhi schools are better than other areas but this issue of making sure that cities are not just places of current productivity but of long-run opportunity is absolutely central and segregation is part of the answer but it's also about making sure that the bottom the lower end of education everywhere no matter what neighborhood you're living in is lifted in the urban area particularly for the most vulnerable citizens particularly for immigrants okay thank you okay you wave at Mia if you have a question I was wondering you said more than once in your keynote that cities do need rules we do need a set of rules how to get along with each other how difficult is it to set rules also when it comes to urban growth well we are in we're living in a very regulated country where our province sort of dictates what we can build based on demographic models this sounds so sad yes but then again it's not bad completely bad because in the end it just follows what the market of consumers or people who don't want to live somewhere does one of the problem is that the model is not right at the moment that we have to use it because there's a time difference between when things occur and lots of migrants go to our province for instance and then a few years later the province reacts and then we have to build we have to build houses now so that's a slightly problem but then again we don't want to have the problems that Spain had in the recession they build houses and build houses and then the whole market imploded that there needs to be some set of rules but we over-regulated it a bit because it's quite difficult to set exactly the right set of rules and not to hamper the growth because that is the risk you do take constantly you're absolutely right so let me be more precise you don't just need rules you actually need the right rules not to put random rules down and expect that they do well obviously I've made it clear that in many cases there are too many rules on building new housing and it is not in any sense I want to be clear about this I'm not an advocate that anyone should live in a tall building I'm an advocate that there shouldn't be as many rules to prevent people from building tall buildings when it's appropriate when there's a way to demand it in the case of most forms of entrepreneurship I think almost surely most of the markets that I've looked at prevent entrepreneurship and what is particularly appalling and I believe this is true in Europe but it's very clearly true in the US that we regulate the entrepreneurship of poor people so much more strictly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of rich people if you are a smart, well-educated MIT or Harvard or University of Tilburg student you can start your internet phenomenon in your room and there will be no regulators looking over your eyes and in some sense the internet cyberspace has created this vast regulation-free zone of entrepreneurship by contrast because they're not coders kids who grow up in poverty a few miles away they have to be entrepreneurs in the real world and in the real world there are a lot of rules and so if you're five miles away from Harvard and you want to start your grocery store that sells milk products you need 15 permits to go through to get through and doing that and that is somewhat outrageous and that's sort of getting that balance of right the area where I think it's sort of clear there are a lot of issues and you can decide you can ask whether you think this is related to firecrackers on New Year's Eve in the Netherlands itself but for example one of the issues sort of you wander through the Dar-e-Vee slum of Mumbai which is one of the most entrepreneurial places on the planet and it's entrepreneurial in part because no one's imposing any rules on anything and you know it's full of people doing amazingly creative things and you walk out after seeing one of these entrepreneurs and you see a child defecating in an unpaid road and this is a real issue in urban India and this is open street defecation often it's not that there aren't latrines that are available it's not that there aren't stalls but the children are just choosing to defecate on the street now there are a number of interesting economics papers about changing culture but I don't really know how to change culture I know how to impose rules and so I think actually a reasonable model is when a child or anybody defecates on a road that there's some penalty now because I try to be reasonably humane even though my kids would tell you otherwise the proposed solution is that when a kid defecates on an unpaid road they have to spend two hours doing math homework in a community center which again if you were my kids you would argue that's cruel and inhumane punishment but I think probably the downside is relatively limited but you need something that is about limiting the sense that we can cause harm to our neighbors and we need some set of rules about that and you can make up yourself about the firecrackers yeah maybe we it's free okay yes please I'm Florian Snickers I'm an assistant professor of economics here at this university thank you for your talks I have a question to Professor Glazer you spoke about the centripetal and the centrifugal forces for cities the complexity is likely to remain do you have any predictions for possible centrifugal technological developments like how is the self-driving car going to impact or is public transport more likely to improve much more in cities so that cities are going to be even more attractive what do you think of these balances and forces for the future so self-driving cars I alluded to I think of them as having two paths depending upon whether or not we regulate them properly if they are regulated inefficiently meaning if we just let people sit and drive in them I think they will make cities worse because by lowering the cost of sitting in traffic because you can now work while you're sitting in traffic and urban traffic jams will get more problematic consequently they will probably be centrifugal technologies if that occurs meaning that what you'll see is more people will actually you know self-driving cars will still be able to function on low density highways and so people will be driving long distances but not in cities because they're just crowded out of existence if conversely they are handled in a functional regulatory regime that installs a GPS based road tolling system at all points that actually makes sure that actually they can move effortlessly around the city enabling road sharing in a smart way then they could certainly be a very effective centripetal technology instead and provide urban mobility in a quite effective manner but the choice is up to the governments there are two paths which can be followed in terms of public transportation more generally I tend to think at least in the US context a big open question is buses that in fact it's unlikely that given US density levels that rails are the future and there's not a lot that you can do with a rail that you can't use with a bus on a dedicated lane after all bus rapid transit has been one of the great transportation innovations in the developing world that has provided mass transit at a lower cost for ordinary residents of Brazil and elsewhere and the question is whether or not we're going to see a revolution in autonomous buses autonomous electric buses autonomous electric buses on dedicated lanes that have constant wifi and are fun and exciting that could work and that could be something that could provide even more mobility throughout this amazing urban region and you currently have the rail that's sort of smaller town so you have the rail comes in and then you have autonomous buses connecting to smaller urban centers or areas within Tilburg that are not quite at the rail center but it connects off of it but again it depends on the right regulation and visionary public leadership hmm yeah we have tests like this that the automotive comes yeah there's another question here is there anyone over here in front yep thank you hey my name is Robin Kuipers and I have a question for our elder man so a few times during your presentation you mentioned the knowledge access or kennis us and now in many university cities in the Netherlands you have the university sort of scattered throughout the city there in the building there whereas in Tilburg it's really focused on a campus at the city basically and personally I really like the feeling that you're walking on a campus and that you're really walking on college grounds but this idea of knowledge access kind of draws the university into the city center so I was wondering what's the purpose of this, what's the vision behind this idea some of what's on the knowledge access in the discussions with the board of university we concluded that this university is growing, expanding and in the end you can build this beautiful landscape with beautiful buildings and add new buildings to it or you have to expand you cannot expand into the woods because it's a monument don't touch the woods so the only way is to build in the direction of the city center the whole idea of the knowledge access and the study with it we did is that the beautiful environment you have here will be copied in the direction of the city center but with one exception that it will be more a mixed use area than it is here and that has one advantage is that we know that these areas are more well the chance of more innovation and mixed use probably going to help that that's why we want to have the mixed use environment in the sports on it for instance so in the end with the beautiful sport park in the middle I think about this area as one big campus not now but in 10, 20 years to come and then you can wander on you can walk on college grounds from here to the city center I was wondering I was wondering because at the end you were showing us in fact a bit of the new skyline or what Tilburg will become because apparently decisions have been made that new constructions will be high rise now you are in this function for 10 years could you have imagined 10 years ago when you started as an elder man that now Tilburg would construct and build high rise buildings well we have already the westward building but no we were building the so called Dursum boning do you know what the Dursum boning is? I don't have a translation a typical Dutch building and the thing is just a house with a small front yard and also a small backyard but the living room has one window at the street and one window at the backyard and you can look through Dursum so have you heard the explanations the translation we will do at the drinks but we have been a champion of Dursum boning we have in the 50s, 60s, 70s 80s, 90s I show the map build those houses in various forms and the choice is do we want to add more urban space to our city if you know that there are less people living in a house that means that you have even lesser people in a square mile or a kilometer services will be difficult to organize in those places we already have in some places difficulties to ensure that there is enough shopping available etc so the choice is do we keep on building Dursum and end up with a city that is not functioning well go up sky high you do agree with this idea there is beautiful landscape around our city which is fun to be in so that's you have once stated too many people too close to nature, it's a real risk for nature I have said that I often tell the story about Henry David Theroux in American environmentalism he also burned down more than 200 hectares of forest land because he was having a picnic in the middle of the woods the point of this is that we are a destructive species and often if you love nature you should stay away from it as indeed Theroux could have done which is something of an argument for urban consolidation if you move people closer together they emit less carbon and the households mean that you can't support local services you can't support and there's just a lot to like about the ability to build up and this doesn't mean that everyone should live in a high rise we're not trying to socially manage things but when demand is there for higher density dwellings when demand is there for higher building you're going to have to work hard to convince me that you shouldn't allow those buildings to be built great it is you are the one who will ask the last question because it's about time there is a colleague coming over maybe there are other people who really do insist in asking their last question or giving a remark but first it's up to you thank you my question is about who are you? my name is Viviana I live in Rotterdam but I'm from Ecuador but my question is about the public space and how it affects the economy the encounters in the public space are very important as well so for example if you compare that people is together in LA but they go in the car and they're together in a small building in California it's totally different to what happens in New York where you have those encounters in the street so how much should cities and should developers pay attention to the way in which they develop the public space in order to create these human interactions that make cities so valuable it's a great question it's a great and important question and there are questions about sort of the parks that we love and when is the right answer to have a large park like Central Park that creates sort of a real vast oasis or small parks that are scattered throughout when is it right to actually require buildings to create plazas in front that people then use as public space this is one of the big decisions of New York City's zoning law in 1960 was they used to have a system in which all the New York City buildings had to get narrow and this was because the primary fear of the 1916 zoning law was to create more light on the street after 1960 they moved to an area in which you got hyped by creating plazas in front which is why when you see the sort of modern buildings in New York they often have these plazas there's a great book by the great Holly White called The City which actually details his work of sort of showing how much these plazas are used and what different spatial attributes are lend the plazas to get more used and less used we're just at a place in which we're actually getting a social science of this meaning that we now can measure using cell phone usage of how people interact with each other let alone the sort of larger question which is how much does it change someone's worldview if they're constantly sealed up in a world in which it's car to office and going home versus if they actually are interacting with people on a subway or in a space so social science is still a long way from being able to give a hard nose to this and in fact we often have to go off of the intuition of planners and architects but I will tell you personally my sort of feelings of a city and sort of my observations suggest these public spaces are incredibly important and that you don't know a city unless you walked it and you don't get to see how a city works unless you see how people interact in these magical public interactions which are unplanned and are going on in those urban areas so I think you're exactly right I think it is actually important but I also wanted to sort of say from the social science perspective like this is a huge agenda for the future it's sort of shocking that we don't actually have hard data that tells us the impact of these things beyond sort of the very narrow things like what is the impact of Central Park on local property values nearby I can tell you that answer and it's positive but I can't tell you sort of the more interesting questions that go beyond that great well some investigation to be done huh on this subject yeah okay now I look once more if there is a final question a remark if yes then I think you will be the one and then we go to the second reason of being together and that means networking my name is I'm Dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences I'm not an expert at all in this field I have an open question I read these days about things like urban agriculture and urban manufacturing small scale urban manufacturing and I would like to hear whether Tilburg has a view on that or whether there is a more global view from Professor Glazer on this okay who goes first Billent we don't have a policy on that subject we do support initiatives now and then but there is some small scale with low impact on manufacturing and food production for instance but sometimes a high impact on social interaction so that's why we sometimes support them but that's the main focus we have on this issue okay so I certainly don't have any problem someone who wants to buy space on the free market and use it for agriculture or any form of manufacturing in cities it's less clear that this serves some larger social good and I'll take both of them in turn manufacturing was a natural urban phenomenon when the space used in manufacturing was modest so when Henry Ford started his plant we had about 20 square meters per worker now manufacturing plants like that are typically 200 meters per worker so that level of space per worker is deeply non-urban and that is the form high levels of machines, robotics that modern manufacturing looks like so any sort of large scale manufacturing for the global market is unlikely to be urban and especially since the one time advantage of cities which is proximity to the transportation networks is largely eliminated and we shouldn't be wishing to get that back for 30 years we spent time wishing to get that back and that was a foolish chimera if there's a bunch of small scale manufacturing of doing some soaps in the urban area and people think it's special because it's soap that's made in Tilburg I don't have an opinion on that but it's not going to be a source of no it's nice but it's not a long run economic thing one way or the other it's sort of a small scale niche product that may exist I feel the same way about urban agriculture which is if you want to have some local community gardens that educate kids this is where your tomato comes from this is whatever that's great I mean I think it's wonderful for kids to see plants I think a little bit of greenery is a great thing but don't pretend as if urban agriculture is some solution to actually feeding either the city or the planet and it's even kind of large scale agriculture is kind of terrible from an environmental perspective to put in the cities and the reason is that the carbon involved in moving food is very modest the carbon involved in moving people is huge and so if you use land and you put the land in the middle of where the people live you're pushing the people farther apart and you have to move them a lot more and so the overall carbon impact of saving this trivial amount that you say by having the tomatoes right there as opposed to move a couple hundred kilometers is overwhelmed by orders of magnitude from the fact that someone has to commute an extra couple of miles just every day in terms of this so you know it's fun it's nice but don't think it's sort of suddenly we're going to have wheat fields in the middle of Tilburg and that's going to look sense of it. Well thank you for this answer. Well thank you so much. I think we have something to talk over during drinks. Is this a okay answer to your great open question? Yes. Well then I I'm going to thank you all once more for attending this lecture of Te Vriende van Kovach. It was great to have you all here. I hope you have gathered some new information some new insights when it comes to urban growth as well from the general perspective and then we had the finest men I would say here with us in person of Edward Glazer. Thank you so very much and also Bérent Te Vries we all know everything now about a strategy from the city of Tilburg. Thank you so much. So I do kindly invite you because I don't think there will be a final address from somebody from the university know is it to me to invite you all for the drink that's then what I will do kindly invite you and I ask you to give a last warm round of applause for these two gentlemen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.