 Before we move on to our final two contributions, I want to come back to Soli because what Enrique has just proposed in some ways is maybe even a reinterpretation of what some people would consider the compact city and for the sake of the argument let's use compact urban growth i.e. you do extend the city but you do it public transport oriented and as you've seen in most of those images you do it with flats you don't do it with small little houses you don't do it disperse and you don't do it car dependent is there anything wrong with that? Well first of all I view the preparation of arterial road grids on the peripheries of cities as essential to expansion and this is what we're driving towards because we really do believe that the future is to connect these areas to the metropolitan job markets and the only way to do this is with arterial roads that carry public transport so the core is yes to have public transport very similar to what Enrique is talking about throughout the expansion area. I don't think it has anything to do with densities because low rise and high rise as we will hear later from Serge can incorporate high density in Jiangzhou in China 22 story buildings have an FAR of 2.2 I mean this is ridiculous because that's just bad planning so I don't think it has to do with height or with multifamily single family I think it has to do with the way cities grow and the way they grow is they become dense over time but they have to start with the low density before they become high density. I would like to hear from Miss Jennifer Mozissi who is the executive director of Kampala capital city a different perspective something some flavor from Africa and I understand planning is needed I understand efficient planning is needed we have to identify tools but I also understand that's difficult you might have several constraints to play in a city that face economic challenges in a country or social challenges and also you have political forces in the city right so if you could share thank you very much indeed the terrain in which this discussion takes place in Africa and I think a lot of other developing economies is very very different we do have a lot of limitations in terms of the same take the example of Kampala Kampala city is 189 square kilometers but within this area we have about five different land tenure systems including private land public land and land that's just squatted on so that makes planning particularly challenging because the policies that affect one land tenure system may not necessarily affect another one and in order to do any comprehensive redevelopment you have to have the approval of all these different five land owners in the city so that makes it quite complex the other one is the complex urban and national legislation and policies for example we have a law that exempts owners from paying property taxes in the city which is very very challenging because a lot of these owners actually the biggest consumers of the services that the city provides but the law exempts them for some reason from paying taxes property rates to the city so that makes it that much more difficult and then the other one is the size of the city much as would like to spread out in terms of providing services and increased facilities the city space is limited to the 189 kilometers so the only viable solution for us would be densification at this point because we do not have the flexibility to expand the city beyond the boundaries that have been set in the law the other one of course is limited funding we want to do a lot of things infrastructure social services but the funding is very limited so the prioritization sometimes becomes a challenge then the other things like the social social acceptance of government programs the cultures the political terrain in which we work gets to be quite quite challenging and then the different cultures coming with different practices as far as land use and land management is concerned so we find that the discussion for African urban centers starts from a different terrain so to say from where it starts in the western urban centers because we have to first of all address all these other challenges the social economic political challenges for can address the real issues of planning the compiler right now does not it has an approved physical development master plan very elaborate but we cannot implement it because it has to go through a very long political legislative process which is not within our control so much as we'd like to do the detailed designs and the planning we are restricted in timing and implementation and funding by other levels levels of authority and power so those are some of the things that come but having said that we are doing as much as we can the institution heading has been in place for five years now basically to try and transform the city amidst all these different challenges we've made some progress but there's still things that we need to work on in these different areas to get to real planning and driving the city to where it should be the conclusion is that your choices are limited very very limited thank you what I would like to ask Serge Salat who is the president of the urban morphology and complex systems Institute Paris to provide his insights about having or not having a choice and if we do have a choice how can we well which kind of tools we can use for that back to the case for planning of Jean Claus because I think the case for planning is extraordinarily important and I would like also to follow Philippe recommendation to take fast-growing cities so we'll take the example of the most fast-growing city in the world and the most successful city in the York in the world New York actually but New York started from 33,000 people in 1776 then 100,000 in 1811 when the plan was there the commissioners plan was done then 800,000 in 1860 then 3 million in 3 point 2 million in 1911 so you see the tremendous increase of so the instruments were obviously planning but kind of very clever planning the Manhattan grid which is you know these urban blocks are on the north-south direction 60 meters wide so you see the granularity of planning MD plots which are 200 square meters planning plus market so then you have these super high flexibility with the right building rights transfers in New York where it created a lot of diversity the smallness of the real estate developers who all the estate developers who created public space gardens small gardens pocket gardens churches to create neighborhood complete neighborhoods so it was a mix of planning and energy and a very important thing I was hearing Saskia complexity and incompleteness or incompleteness so actually any complex system is incomplete because complexity is created by dynamics far away from the equilibrium which are cities but which are also our brain our thinking and all that so this combination of planning and flexibility which allows self organizing processes is highly beneficial plus the fact that you have like in Singapore or like in Venice an island which constraints in a way I'm sorry for that the developer but then the cleverness of the planning was so high that even when expanding at the beginning of at the end of the 19th century is agreed in Long Island there was already a culture of planning for making room for urban expansion in a clever way so if we put it in a synthetic way of course we should have urban intensification urban redevelopment and New York is reinventing itself by rezoning 73 blocks in Manhattan New York is evolving Singapore is evolving by creating Marina Bay and Marina Bay Gardens one billion investment so all this urban redevelopment and the topic of that identity also it's we were not nobody's saying that we should have 60,000 people per square kilometer but also very interesting insight that everybody loves Venice I am suppose everybody around the table and in the room loves Venice do you know that Venice human not density is above 60,000 people per square kilometer not to risk people living people living residents so it depends on the way it is density is managed at micro scale of course if you have big buildings big towers poor public space but if you have high micro-scale quality urban life everybody loves it you know you know it's really everybody's complaining about the tourists but obviously the tourists love to be here it was the most powerful city of the during all the middle age in the Mediterranean so there is no contradiction between this and Venice was constrained then it's not really expanding on the on the land but all the story of Venice for 300 years has been consolidated in the island and also making room for an expansion so in a sense there is no contradiction it really depends on the quality of the planning basically and you have choice these cities had choice these cities that high quality planning Singapore Singapore 50 years ago was one of the poorest cities in the world you know with malaria Seoul Korea Korea was among the fifth poorest city in the world just look at Seoul now and they made it in one generation but once again very clever planning accessibility to transit a high variety of density around transit nodes density varies from FR above 15 or above 20 to FR about around two or four just nearby for mixed use so you don't have because people think about density just like a very high plateau of super high density if you have like in like in New York you have very close super high towers have nothing against towers against but you should have intimate neighborhoods nearby and you should have this high variety which some cities and if you look at the most successful cities in the world Tokyo Seoul New York Singapore they even London London is reinventing itself within within London so no contradiction everything is possible but just follow this case for planning and not only like a rigid planning but planning plus flexibility and plus market response okay can I just build exactly on this point where you said there's no contradiction because what I've heard from mark we have a contradiction we have a history where I actually wonder how much we can learn from that history for the future because if we are considering these issues serious about the resources and about climate it doesn't matter whether history was on the side of the compact city history so far has also not been on reducing climate emission or carbon emissions so there needs to be something which is potentially much more disruptive than in all the curves and all the choices we have seen and it's not a coincidence that you know urban sprawl has been referred to as the biggest market failure because the prices aren't right I mean we know all of these things mark what what's your response to what you have heard about the realism which solely demands from us I think I think a focus on density defined as average density over the space economy leading to a discussion of compact city or not is a complete red herring it completely masks the real economy and how it works it's the language of the spatial planner which we know now for certain after 20 30 years of critical urban studies has masked the logic of urban capital accumulation the bottom line is that we need to focus not on average densities and compact city that language we have to focus on the strategic intensification of selected urban nodes in a hierarchy with transit oriented development investments to ensure the proper infrastructures are in place so that you do not go the car based mobility route exactly what Enrico is talking about so if you want to call it expansion or not as a result of doing realistic calculations like Enrico is doing in his city and therefore certain strategic nodes are necessary beyond the current boundary do that properly and go for TOD rather than TRD. TRD is where you do transit oriented transit investments by traffic engineers to solve congestion problems and the property developers buy up the land on around the nodes and make a killing that's rain seeking. Transit oriented development is where you connect your invest you do your transit investments for urban regeneration and development purposes where you capture the land values increase in improvements around around the stations. If you do TOD properly and you have carefully selected your strategic hierarchy of nodes that are critical for your economy you can guide the market. If you have if you say prepare for urban expansion oh and by the way let's it's good idea to do densification along the way you can have all the property developers and the financial institutions clapping their hands because underneath that they can go they can make a killing and I have real problems with that we have to prepare for a post financialized world we have to prepare our cities for people and for effective mobility just like the mayor and the deputy mayor talked about this morning that's the kind of politics we need and the deep illiterate language of spatial planning masks that that's what I'm worried about. Yes great Mr Klos I would like to ask you a question after all we heard the political difficulties in African cities are the limitation of Latin American cities already built on Latin American cities the price of the land and the limitations of spatial planning mentioned by Mark so coming back to Habitat 3 discussions I come from Brazil you know well that Brazil is divided about the compact city because of realistic and pragmatic reasons so how do you see this debate moving forward into in this Habitat 3 process about compact cities within the nations the countries. Well we are we are asked by the General Assembly of the United Nations to provide some kind of focus Habitat 3 agenda something that the decision makers they can understand and hopefully they can implement because if we look at the outcome of Habitat 2 agenda the outcome of Istanbul it's totally modern we can sign it now because it's about values it's about you know very principles and we agree with that and nothing has changed in this region the problem is that since 96 to today the practice of urbanization has not followed the 96 urban agenda at all then of course if we are only intellectuals or that we don't care much about the implementability then that's good no problem but if we want to improve the organization of planet earth we need to be able to promote an urban agenda that provides some kind of pragmatic orientation and we are defining that in a couple of questions who should do what improving urbanization because in many parts of the world is not clear the who and is not clear the what and I am questioning myself if academia and intellectuals we are providing any guideline for that or any help in this conversation who should be done or who should be doing and what for example if we take the case of Kampala you know to improve the condition of Kampala what it's needed and who should do it and when you address the you and you focus on this kind of questions there's another a very different set of language that begins to emerge because you know you immediately go to a very substantive roadblocks okay legislation is fundamental legislation should be addressed in Kampala if you don't change the legislation there's no way that ever you are going to do any rational plan in in that city and probably in in also in in in in a in a bogotite happens the same then who should change the legislation is that the mayor or we need to recognize that in the current state of things there's a new need of especially for developing countries I'm not talking about our cities in the devil of war because our cities we are very rich and we can adapt and no but the problem is that the real poor cities that they are urbanizing very rapidly I have a deal with many cities like Kampala several and when you say well but why don't we try to change the legislation so no impossible impossible why possible no because this is impossible no just there's no even there's no even but for example I tell them in the West a hundred years ago when changing the legislation was very difficult very impossible in some countries we invented this idea of doing the law for the capital city the specific law instead of changing the law of land of the country which will represent the civil war then why don't we limit the problem and you say let's change this the law of Kampala let's create a special law for the capital and that can be the same also in Bogota because you know you need to be able to acquire public land without expropriation you need to address the five regimes of property of land and we if we don't create specific tools that by the way doesn't generate the civil war we need to be creative but in situ not not theoretically you know the Kampala cannot be in question cannot be resolved in theory and it is a question about Kampala and links also to Bogota whether there is isn't there a unique opportunity where at the moment of making Greenfield land available for urban expansion you're not only laying the grounds for you know the basic infrastructure in a system of city for the years to come you're inventing institutions at that point you're inventing the if it's formal even the plot sizes and you're setting something in stone which you know a lot of people refer to have enormous path has enormous path dependencies and lock-in effects so you want to get this moment right and the question for Jennifer in that regard you said the city can no longer expand you're now facing a situation where you need to change the existing system is this working or is this just a complete nightmare because you have locked into a system that wasn't steered at the moment of Asian initially being urbanized without saying it's an absolute nightmare it's still a challenge doctor close talks about making specific laws for Kampala land acquisition urban centers in Africa are political hotspots in addition to being social hotspots and economic hotspots so whether you take an action to do with the society or social issues or regulation more than likely it will end up as a political issue so talk of civil war it always ends up being a political discussion so whereas we have laws for the city and the beach to make regulations for the city there are national legislations which override the city legislation so whereas we may make these policies they have to be approved at a higher level to fit within the national law which is not within our control a lot of the time and take the example of the making laws that work for the city like the one and mentioned on the exemptions of owner occupied properties we have as a city made the proposal we want this revenue to come in for the city but having made it it then goes to the national parliament which then has to amend the legislation to enable this to be done that is where the challenges begin first of all because a lot of the members of the legislature actually personally affected by this change and so the discussion takes on other dimensions a lot of the time so those are some of the the challenges thank you very helpful and now Enrique the obvious question how do you ensure that your urban extension piece has the institution in place or the institutions that it doesn't fall back into the more conventional pattern of peripheral urban development no I think first of all you have to have a plan as John says second I think clearly it cannot be done as I mentioned either by private developers or by local municipalities it has to be a regional plan some kind of authority but first we have to know how much will cities grow now we're talking about Africa in Latin America while the country's population went from 50% urban to around 75 to 80% urban the population from 50 to 75 or 80 the population of largest cities grew by more than 1000% all our Latin area and the cities grew by more than 2000 percent why as Soli was saying because people want larger homes but more important than that because households become smaller so if you go from five people per home to two you need twice as many plus also as cities become richer there is much more non-residential building shops offices buildings then another thing that is important to have clear when you consider redevelopment simply is not economically possible because it's too expensive and the more you restrict urban expansion the more you increase the land inside the existing city and the more difficult you make redevelopment so clearly that is something else that is necessary just one thing in Bogota for example the national government makes a road invests one billion dollars in a road from Bogota to a nearby city in bridges and tunnels these roads has 3600 trucks every day but we are willing to invest one billion dollars over the last five years in order to save 15 minutes to these trucks the new city that we are going to build will generate not 3600 truck trips daily but more than 5 million trips daily and no institutions are ready to invest money in making the city grow in the right place and nothing is more important for mobility than that the city grows in the right place just a short thing one thing that is clear is that private property does not work well does not produce good results in the case of growing cities because different from all other goods as prices increase supply does not increases so the market does not work so I just say I agree that we have to plan some kind of city planning to a giant arterial roads not for cars but for pedestrians for bicycles for buses also for a few cars parks there are some things we cannot do later on it's very difficult to demolish a hundred hectares of city to create a park afterwards so I think that clearly is necessary that we have to grow on greenfield land with density but again I say we can do a totally different kind of city even much better than anything that exists today but there is so many myths around this there is the myth that is possible to make more density there is the myth for example in Bogota we created this green belt completely arbitrary but then later they made up the story that this was the most valuable ecological piece of land in the planet even though it's full of greenhouses and buildings and but then there is many resistances even people just they don't want to admit that the growth is necessary and so while we are talking here the cities are exploding crazily everywhere without any planning okay thank you Soli I wanted to also come come back to you and maybe you can link your contribution to also the following question let's just come clean about one fact or one question so we have seen that there is currently an urban expansion coefficient of three point four five possibly even higher so the ratio between population growth and land growth do you think we need to bring this down or not at a global level thank you Philip I think again to yes I'll answer your question and I think I have to follow up on what Sarah was saying in some places trying to increase densities is a ridiculous idea in Bangladesh Dhaka for example has the same density as Hong Kong but with people living in 120 at the floor space it's highly overcrowded and the densities there are increasing over time other than decreasing which is the global average so not decongesting Dhaka is a ridiculous idea and to follow on what Serge was saying before when Manhattan was developing in the 19th century densities there tripled and it became very overcrowded and part of the planning for expansion had to do with taking over four more counties creating grid plan for the rest of the country and bringing in the subway system in the early 1900s so that made for realistic decentralization and decongestion so you might you're getting to a point that we wanted to discuss and never got to is whether there are such things as optimal densities in some places they're clearly densities are way too low that they can't support public transport so for example if they're less than 30 or 50 people per hectare we can't support public transport this is not the situation most of the developing countries so when we talk about urban expansion and mark I'm actually surprised says that this is going to be a boon for developers when we talk about urban expansion in a lot of the cities that we're working in Ethiopia there are no developers we wish there were developers there are people building their homes so it's not a matter of making these places affordable so the developer make a bundle but that the people who want to integrate themselves into the urban economy are able to to afford housing is the global urban land take at the moment too fast or not is the global urban land take the space the time and the pace of urban expansion of land take is it too fast yes okay and the reason is again that we have different ideas about compactness some of these developers and some of them they're public authorities I actually want to go very far into Greenland to have new projects that do not interfere they don't actually want to develop in a compact way immediately adjacent to the city that's what Enrique has just said they want you to develop yeah go 50 kilometers you can develop the whole idea is to make cities more compact by forcing the development to be adjacent to the present development and by changing the rules here Jennifer is saying the rules don't allow that in many places minimum plot sizes 500 750 square meters yeah that creates problems and that's in a lot of cities in Africa Papua New Guinea 500 600 700 so we need to be able to change the rules and I really worry together with Dr. Kloss I really worried that the rules are getting in our way and that we're not this is this place is the place to come to some understanding that the rules need to change we cannot continue with a present set of rules to create the kind of cities that we need which are more compact more held together better public transportation higher densities we're allowing this to go by and continue in this disorderly manner and we cannot afford to do that anymore footnote for for said I was just wondering if this expansion is being caused by the big corporations by the higher incomes or by the informality so who is actually but says your footnote does it work yeah comment but we cannot afford we cannot afford for the planet we're going to fall for the resource but we also cannot afford financially because very something very clear we have discovered is that we're talking about density we're never talking about a concentration of the economy concentration of jobs accessibility to jobs and something we have discovered is that the economy in cities is highly concentrated you know jobs in Genjo in China in London in New York in Paris are following a gradient like this where you have one-third of the jobs 33% in 1% of the land area and basically you have a Pareto principle where 20% of the land area in any city produces 80% of the city GDP that doesn't mean that you don't need but so that you have a long tail of urban land which doesn't produce GDP and the success of cities like Singapore or Hong Kong has been to cut the long tail and Venice also because a really very simple reason you are constrained so you don't have the question is not to avoid expansion is to avoid to have a long tail an excessive long tail of urban expansion the multiplication by 3.5 of the land area which is obviously not necessary but what happens is that this service land costs to the to the to the cities and you have the amount of investment in roads water networks amount of investment in networks doesn't decrease like the GDP either per square kilometer or either per capita so we have a profile like this you have a high concentration of GDP then a long tail of thousands of square kilometers in some case of land urban land urbanized service not producing any economic value which costs in terms of infrastructure and that's a problem you're going to face if you don't control I understand you need to be conscious in the center of the city everybody would agree of that we are not density freks but you need urban expansion but this should be planned and this should be in a certain sense managed and this should be reasonable and if you let the city expand whatever in the form of real estate development or in the form of slums you will end up by the need of servicing this area which is not going to contribute to your economy so and you have some kind of break event point where the city expands and this is a case in China and one of the big reasons of the slowdown of the economic growth in China is that it has been built upon urban expansion big massive infrastructure investment and this massive infrastructure investment and this massive urban expansion is not producing economic wealth anymore so you spend on one side you don't produce economic wealth and this is overall global risk we will end up with a huge amount of service land which is going to cost a tremendous amount of money in infrastructures and which is not going to contribute to economic wealth of the cities Mr. Honglo. Yes, I think that fortunately enough with with a sample of cities we are going to be able to produce hard that about that is not a question of being opinionative. I think that in the next month we will be able to provide that by now the average density of the extensions of the cities that they are built around the wall they have very low density this is something like densities of 4,000 or less thousand inhabitants per square kilometer and this is unsustainable. Forget you know that is very interesting for the market it seems that the market the real estate market it's very happy because probably they sell well this kind of urbanization the organization of 4,000 people per square kilometer but this is not productive in sense of urban productivity or agglomeration economies of agglomeration the cost per capita of the service is very high then is unsustainable in terms of cost per capita and of course as most of the energy that we use is fossil fuels this increases the risk of the climate change then apart for the theory and and you know the debate the nice debate that we can have here in the table if if it's good or bad etc what is happening every day is that the market is producing is manufacturing urbanization like a machine of making sausages very rapidly at 4,000 inhabitants per kilometer square that is what it's sold to the market and this is unproductive very expensive and unsustainable stop the market or drive the market I like to make clear that when I say expansion is necessary it's not low density suburban expansion it's exactly the opposite is the way to prevent this kind of expansion because what we we need to offer the people who are going why are people going to the low density suburbs the house with a garden it's not because they are stupid it's because they want to play with plays with green where their children can be play safe they can ride their bicycle safe so I think it's possible to invent a different kind of city which is dense where we can offer what they are seeking in the suburbs the green the safe places for their children to play that means high rises with hundreds of kilometers of bicycle highways greenways large parks but in high density so I think it's very important that to understand this that is not when we are talking about density expansion is not this kind of low density but it's exactly the opposite and the only way more than more the way to prevent this more than to ban this to restrict this to put the developers in jail is to offer something which is better something which is high density where where they will find what they seek and it's much better for them with transit-based development etc well unfortunately the debate is excellent we have to close debate will be the audience will have the chance in the next session to be part of the debate but thank you panelists thank you the audience for sharing the world of the possible thank you