 Let's just talk, try and get some exchange going between the two of you and then let's open this up for wider discussion. I was just, I'd be interested in both your reactions to this. I was very struck about your images of the gated community, the protection of private space, which inhibits people kind of living out. I was thinking about it personally in the context of the constituency that I represented for 23 years, where in the poorest parts of the constituency what people long for is precisely that. When the debate is about what you spend on a housing estate, what people want are entry funds, they want secure gates, they want a way of, if you like, sort of locking themselves in instead of living out. This sense of, which I think is incredibly attractive of living out that you describe, is something which in my experience, and I'd be very interested to hear other views, is something which is created by mixed communities, people from a range of social backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, age and experience. That really is the absolute prerequisite, because it's that that creates a sense of safety. Safety is a sort of prerequisite to porosity and this sense of opening up that you describe. I was interested in your references to Daraf i, because I know, I've got to know, so you know, Daraf i quite well through the work I do with a charity which works in the communities there. And there are contradictions, you know, the contradictions are family shacks in which ten people live, which are spotless, beautifully ordered, but where the order within the shacks is constantly threatened by crime. But there is plenty of living out, because there isn't enough space for ten members of a family to live in. So, I mean, there are all sorts of contradictions here, and one of the contradictions or the facts I think it's important to build is the universality of the appeal of this, which builds on certain absolute prerequisites. One is safety, the second is actually a respect for property, what is mine and what is not shared. And then I think the third is the availability of space to live out. Now, you know, which takes me I think to the final point, which is, you know, where is the state in this? And you see the only state intervention in Daraf i is to spray the rubbish in the summer to keep the unofilus mosquito, which brings malaria at bay. But if you think of communities in our city, and I suspect in New York, what private places schools are when the kids aren't there, what private spaces, PFI hospitals have become where the community can't use them, except with the consent of those who own the school. So, I think that, you know, I think that sort of empathetically, there's such enormous appeal and a sense of warmth in this. Underneath, there needs to be a discipline of organisation which realigns the relationship between the informal community and, if you like, the property of the state. And it's the state that has to let go and trust the community. Yes, I think the way I... Do you want to think about that for a minute and maybe, Suket, Suket, I've had this bug and I know how wretched you could feel. No, it's all right. Absolutely, how rowy. Double whiskey, we'll see. No, I'll respond to you about this and something you and I have talked about. And I'll respond to you in a very personal way about this. I grew up in a housing estate in America, unbelievably grungy. I guess what you call in this country a sink estate. I mean, it was a place called Cabrini Green in Chicago in which people lived behind locked doors, two or three of them. There was nobody out in the lawns of the estate. People were afraid to go up and down the elevators and so on. There were plenty of eyes on the street, you know, the Jacob's thing. But there was nobody to see. The city had abandoned us. It was really... I'm not very romantic about poverty. We were something they wanted to disappear in time after 40 years. It was a huge project. At one point, people in the community, since cops wouldn't go in, ambulances wouldn't go in, hired security guards to be out in these open spaces from five to seven every night. And people, because they're these armed, it's America. The security guards are armed. They're willing to shoot to kill. It's not Britain. People felt safe to come out. Those two hours, which had formally been sort of adolescent criminal playtime, became the least dangerous hours. The least dangerous. Because there were people out and about. And what disturbs me about housing for the poor, I showed you something that the World Bank did in Delhi, which was appalling, which is create housing for the poor, which replicates what went on in Cabrini Green. It shuts people up inside. It puts the security as presented to them as a matter of a defeat of a boundary than porosity. To me, this is an issue about people think if they've got five locks on their door, they're safe. But they're not. If there's nobody about, they get in the elevator, they're going to get mugged. Or walking on the street, going to a convenience store. They're going to get mugged because they're the only person on the street. It's been sold to them, for the poor, that a gated community will actually make them safer. To me, this whole issue of security is a kind of, it's false, and it's a kind of very bourgeois notion of what makes people secure. That if they can only lock their doors and nobody can come in, that they'll be safe. I thought I have to say that. I spent a lot of time in Darwin researching my book and then going back since. I also spent a lot of time in the Brazilian favelas, particularly Rio. I looked at the whole programme of specification. The difference between the Latin American and African cities and Indian cities is that we don't have drugs and guns. This crime, and I've lavishly documented it in my book, but it tends to be more organised. You're not going to get mugged in a Bombay slum. You won't get carjacked. What happens in Darwin is that most people leave their doors unlocked during the day and often at night too. I remember going to a leather workshop in Darwin. He lived in a two-floor shack and his workshop was on the ground floor. He had four stations where he hired people to make little leather goods and purses and bags and so forth. He lived with his wife and two children above the workshop. He worked 16-hour days and he sees his kids for 10-15 minutes in between breaks. The government wants to demolish Darwin and there is this scheme that they've come up with called the Slum Rehabilitation Authority. 70% of the people in an area designated a slum and there's no heavier word in the English language than the word slum. Once you impose it on a group of people, they're finished. If the residents of what the government designated a slum 70% agree, then a builder can come in and demolish the entire neighbourhood community and create luxury housing along with replacement housing for the poor. Now I've looked at these replacement buildings and I know you have too Richard. They repeat the worst mistakes of council housing elsewhere in the world. As if we're beginning from first principles, we've learned nothing. He told me that the government offered him a 270 square foot flat which has its own indoor toilet which it doesn't have right now. It's brick and mortar. It's not bad, but they're not giving me a workshop in the same building. If I want to see my kids, I'll have to commute for an hour. As I walked around the area, I realised that they've actually built a community there. It's not easily transferable somewhere else into blocks of high rises. That community protects them against crime. They leave their doors open. They know who their neighbours are. In Bombay, this kind of anomied alcoholism drugs, you mostly see it in the transit or replacement housing for the slum dwellers who have been evicted from these places. The narrative of crime in cities all over the world, in Lisbon, there's a place called Calvado Moro, a group of people from Cape Verde. I went over there. It's a piece of the city that the developers want because it's very central. There's all these stories in the Lisbon papers about the crime in the barrio, in the tabloids of the police coming in and drug dealing in the barrio. In all of these places, I think the narrative of the crime is much more lurid than the crime is more lurid. It's exaggerated. If you compare the statistics to the perception of crime, we see that in the US as well. As soon as the Black Lives Matter women started going on, the police forces across the country started spreading a kind of propaganda about shootings increasing, the streets being given over to groups of rioting young black men. If you actually look at the statistics, New York has never been safer. So that perception of crime, I think, serves certain interests. When we read these stories, we've got to be very careful about if it's really the poor that want five extra locks on their door, or are they being convinced to put five extra locks to guard against some sort of unseen enemy. Let's just think about how this sort of transition from the, if you like, the kind of anxious community is achieved to, we achieve a transition to the kind of porous community. I think you're absolutely right, Suketu. I think that there are many geographic areas where the risk of crime is overstated. But it's also overstated by other people who live there because they feel unsafe. So there is this, if you like, this cognitive dissonance, but the cognitive dissonance is very destructive of what the kind of narrow place kind of experience Richard. The fact is that all over this city in New York and so forth, there are communities that show this kind of resilience and ability to, I love the idea of minimizing the importance of home because people live out more. And that is a very, I mean it's a rather wonderful ambition, but I think the point is it doesn't happen by chance that there's a contradiction between the impulse that creates it and the pretty clear dissonance. You know, I think one way to think about this, and I should have said this before, but one way to think about this is that we put, I think too much, if we think that a porous city is going to make everybody mutually tolerant and they're going to be nice, you know, it's rubbish. But because we need to learn from why it's rubbish, which is that there are dimensions of urban order which are purely physical and which are nonverbal. And the kind of porosity that I think ensures the kind of urban order is a bodily comfort being with people in the midst of people who are different. It's something visceral. It's, you know, the hand extended to the stranger who's trying to get to work. A lot of, in my experience, I mean one of the things that's terrible about academic urbanism is it translates the physical into the verbal all the time. And there are lots of translations that don't happen. People have a physical experience of the city. They have nonverbal knowledge, which they can't put into words. If you're comfortable being pressed up against somebody who is sweating profusely and you're in a carriage together, very familiar to any New Yorker in the subway, you're practicing a kind of civic order. But you couldn't put it into words. And I'd like to see urbanists concentrate more on what can't be represented or symbolized in the way of saying these, you know, talking about diversity, talking about community. I think these are things that are made with our body, you know. And the whole really comes from the agglomeration of fragments of behavior. I was observing exactly this this week getting on to from the northern line where you kind of bend over and you've got somebody's head in your armpit to the Victoria line where cues form. And people, I mean, in this chaos, there is a kind of order about, you know, if you wear a backpack, which I do all the time, you take it off because then one more person can get in. And the way people fit themselves into each other, I mean, that's a pretty universal experience of living in London every day. But let's open this up a bit. And have we got microphones? Let's invite your questions or your challenges or controversy to Suketu or to Richard. Yes, gentlemen in the middle who's holding his. That's you. Hello. Thank you. Brilliant. Speak up nice and loud so everyone can hear you. Wonderful talk this evening. I feel very humble sitting here amongst the company. I have one question I'd like to put back to you, Suketu, with regarding to your three rules. Don't exclude anybody from the conversation. I say or ask that in relation to my own personal experience as chairman for a residence association that is currently under proposal for a regeneration. We just don't seem to be getting anywhere talking to our housing association and feeling that our views are being heard. What could you propose in light of that? So the question is that I understand that you're chairman of a residence association but you're being excluded from the conversation of the housing association. We're being condescended and patronised. Is the housing association wanting to do to you and your community things you don't want? Yes, yes. For example, it's a hot potato at the moment, isn't it? All over London everybody's talking about regeneration and I'm mindful of the fact that our estate needs it. I don't deny that, it's undeniable. But I feel we're not part of the conversation. Our thoughts and views just aren't being actioned upon. This is where you start reducing London's livability index by democratic protest. I think if they're not letting you into the conversation you have to live there and so you have to take control of the conversation. Really there is no other way other than democratic protest. This is that if you look at community boards, my son in New York just became a member of the community board of Park Slope. He has these meetings and there is a role for the gadfly. I'm all in favour of gadflys who go up to these meetings and declaim. At the very local level, like the housing associations, this is where it's really inspirational to see democracy in action. I'll give you an example. I've been following a group of a South Asian housing rights organisation in Queens. I once went with them to a building full of Bangladesh's in Woodside in Queens. It's a whole building full of recent immigrants. They're paying very high rents. The landlord is Greek himself an immigrant. I went to a meeting that the housing advocates had called. All the Bangladeshis got down in the lobby and there was the Greek man, the landlord in the back with his arms crossed, just watching the tenants as they were trying to organise themselves. This young woman gave this incredibly stirring speech about the nature of democracy in the US and how it really begins with this residence association. These people from Bangladesh should come from a place of great political volatility but they also understand that democracy, civic action can get them things. I went into the apartments and I saw the kind of accommodations that they had to make. For example, there was an air conditioner that had been left by the previous tenant but the landlord wouldn't remove it. It had been painted shut into the window. The residents put a big gift wrap around the air conditioner. It stuck out but it became part of the ornamentation. There were many of these compromises but ultimately what they wanted was to lower their rent and get services. When this housing advocate went there and explained to them, brought them into the conversation of civic engagement, they mobilised. They took the landlord to court, their rents got lowered and in this case there really is no substitute for legal action, civic engagement. That's what I think the whole Black Lives Matter movement is about. If you're not going to listen to us, then we'll make you listen to us. We'll stand out your window and shout as loudly as we can until you listen to us. Good. Okay. There you are. So who'd like to follow that? Yes. Can I see all the hands because we'll get as many as we can. Okay. We'll take your question and then we're going to take all those contributions. Don't anybody else put up your hand and then we'll be able to get responses to all those before eight o'clock. Okay. So my question is to Richard. Richard's on it. It's not a Richard. Although I would like to read. Anyway, Michael, I really think this concept of porosity is a fantastically useful concept and I love seeing these illustrations of borders and boundaries. But what I was trying to understand is are these borders and boundaries physically constructed or are they also socially constructed? They may not have any physical manifestation. Well, I wouldn't put it as an either or. That in the case of the Van Eyck, that's an architect, a great great architect who has a social vision that children should learn the city and thinks what could I do in making these parks to make these kids learn the city? How can I make them street smart? And there are physical means he does it. I don't think he ever, he was a very dower Dutch. I don't think he could play with the child to save his life. In that case, it's, I mean, he enabled something physically to happen. And indeed he pushed it that way by not, you know, by leaving these edges unprotected. I don't think he was, what I'm saying about this is we often think that, you know, communities or environments that are design driven are somehow against the way people live. You know, they're not expressing people's way of life and so on. And that design should follow dwelling. I think that's just too simple. With gated communities, for instance, you know, well, as a designer, I'd never do one of them. I think it's immoral to do that. It's something else, unethical to do it. But I think the object of design should be to take them down. Some ways you can do that are economic by making housing in covenants which exclude people racially or religiously illegal. That's a way to create a boundary condition. Sometimes you can do it as has been done in some communities in Latin America. By getting this great lesson of Bogota by taking away highways and just physically letting communities grow into each other. I mean that's a physically driven design but it has a social point. So I don't see it as an either or. What it takes as an urbanist who is not a servant of its developers. But works with the people. But once you get to that condition, it's not an either or. Right, thank you Richard. We're going to do, you've got about 20 seconds each to make your point, to change the world. So we'll move around quickly with the, let's start over here. Good evening, thank you very much for both of your talks. You'll need to speak up. Okay, hi, thank you. One of the things that I would like to ask you both, Suketu and Richard perhaps to play off against each other is Richard I really theoretically enjoyed your idea of living out as a way of developing a porous city. But the part of me that has been harassed and had friends harassed by the police for being out had a heart attack. But I did think Suketu of your first rule of being able to be inclusive, which is to be inclusive in the eyes of the law. And I wondered how you would both work together and to resolve those differences between living out and policing and the law. Okay, let's go up to the right-hand side. We need to worry about time. Okay, the gentleman who's got his hand up. Actually there are quite a few of them come to me. Tess, we can't do this because we have to leave here at eight. Thank you very much for your insights. I would just love to go back to the point about the narrative on crime and the narrative about porous. I'm a planning student from UCL. I'm just wondering how can we unwind this kind of forced narrative to convince people that mixity and porousity are actually good things for a city. Thank you. I've just been reminded that we actually have to be out by eight o'clock, so I'm afraid we're going to take two more. And then we'll ask for final responses from Suketu and Richard. The woman right in the back row, and then have we got anybody in the middle block? Yes, and woman here, just keep your hand up. You spoke about the vibrancy of poorer areas, but I was wondering whether you thought there was any way that the people who were putting out that cultural capital of vibrancy, so the poorer people could benefit from that, rather than just wealthy people who come in and have cheaper rents, but actually it costs the poorer people more and they don't really get a return. Thank you very much. Final contribution. Since this isn't talk about inclusion, I was just wondering what are you views on the refugee crisis and how can we make sure that these people are included in cities? What's the role of politics versus civil society? Right. Thank you all. Suketu, do you want to… It's a broad spectrum of questions, but I'll try to… Especially solving the refugee crisis. Yes, exactly. We'll do it tonight. You're actually right about the vibrancy of poorer areas. One of the ways in which slums are blighted is by saying that they are economically unproductive, but anyone who's walked into Dharavi knows that it's a tremendous production. It employs more people than the rich areas of the city. This is where… There's all kinds of little industries and it's not just in places like Dharavi. If you look at music in areas of New York where hip-hop has come from. Hip-hop is a cultural product which brings real economic value to the country. The same sort of thing in the Comunidadias of Brazil. That's a tremendously vibrant culture which translates into money. The thing about… You made this, I think, very valid point that being a woman in a Bombay train or a porous community on a street, this risk of getting harassed, you're actually very grateful for police protection against some of these people who are out to attack you. We need security, whether it's private or public, and we need laws. I grew up in a building in Jackson Heights in New York, which is the most diverse neighbourhood in the United States. I grew up in a building full of Indians in Pakistanis, Haitians and Dominicans, Jews and Muslims. The building was owned by a Turkish man and the super was Greek. All of these communities, these were people who were killing each other just before they got on the plane. So what happens when they come to New York? It's not that we start loving each other. We say horribly racist things about everyone else in our own homes. But there was a central court here where all the kids played together. So there were a couple of factors at work. One was that we understood we were all there to make a better life for our kids. But we were also sending money back to hate groups in our countries. But we couldn't act out on that hate in America because we realised here the law won't let us act on that hate. This is the benefit of things like hate crime laws. There is a role for a certain amount of state supervision. Refugees, I think it's going to be the defining issue of the 21st century, this kind of mass migration. Also because the other defining issue is the great surge of wealth upwards, the fact that the 80 richest people on the planet today own more than the bottom half of the world combined, and it's only getting worse, that there's going to be a channeling of the outrage onto the refugees as we see massive numbers of people on the move. So we're going to have to find some way of accommodation. And I think that Tessa has read another piece that I've been writing where I talk about interlocals, that is people who are not nationalistic but they have an allegiance to neighbourhoods, to the neighbourhood that they came from and the neighbourhood that they are living. And it's a beautiful way of belonging where you don't have to be necessarily British or even a Londoner. You could have an allegiance to Evelynton or Brixton and also to Anderi in Bombay. And you move between these and your allegiance is to the locals. So I think it's those local allegiances that might be the answer. Richard? Well about this refugee thing you bring up something that's very personally painful for me because I worked in the UN in the 90s. About resettlement of refugees in Lebanon, which had a 14-year civil war. The rates of displacement were like those in Syria today, which by the way I'd be amazed if it's less than a 14-year war. But what I learned about that, we made refugee camps because there were hundreds of thousands of people who were displaced. And we shouldn't have. We should have straight away gone into ways of filtering people into local shelters using found spaces. We should not have these, the standard way of making a refugee camp is to use a military model. They're all orthogonal, they're very efficient provision of services. And they usually make the experience of being a refugee worse because completely isolated. And the big challenge now, not in this country because you're very ungenerous about refugees, horribly. But in Germany, not something to clap about, deeply ashamed of, but in Germany which has been generous. The problem with dealing with those 680,000, that's our latest count of refugees is how to get them out of refugee camps. And the Germans are, I must say, it's really inspiring to me that they've understood that the whole problem is how to not incarcerate a refugee in the mentality of being other. But I don't think as a whole Europe is going to manage it that way. The idea of porosity I have, I guess is also built on that. That when you suffer a terrible wound like displacement, the thing you want to do is not be embraced for suffering you. But to be absorbed into another culture where you can get on, you know, most refugees incredibly hardy. It's people who went across the sea and the grease, these aren't shrinking violets, you know, they're hardy. But for them, the politics of dealing with their situation is to get into an environment which is porous, rather than isolates them as suffering other people. So thank you very much for your question. OK, so we finish on perhaps the biggest challenge to porosity. And can I just say thank you so much, Richard and Tsuketu? I mean, I think you've given us the most stimulating, optimistic, but also challenging presentation. And I think everybody's going to take that away with them and keep on thinking about it. This session is going to have a long afterlife. So can I thank all of you for your questions for coming? And there we are. Thank you.