 So, before I ask our respondents, our panelists, to comment on what they've heard, I'm curious whether our first four speakers maybe have questions for each other or comments in relation to each other's talks that they want to flag. One of the issues that I thought, Mark, was interesting in terms of what you raised was the democratic deficit and this challenge between the need for leadership and purposeful institutions to deliver the innovations, I think, Vim, you were talking about in a context of, let's call it, democratic malfunctioning. And I'd be curious, Vim, what you thought of that comment and from your experience in working in a wide range of democratic and semi-democratic contexts, what your reflections were when you heard that comment. Yeah. So, my first learning is that there's not one model. That's in China, we always talk about scaling. In India, we talk about how to spread, that's a complete different way of thinking at things. But I think, you know, whatever system we have, we have to come to informed decisions. I think it's two minutes to 12, you know, we can study forever. In the meantime, there are still 3 billion people living on the planet of a dollar or less a day. There's malnutrition, people have no access to health care, no access to education. So what I've learned specifically in India, that I have to develop products in a different way. If I develop products in the mature markets, I develop for features, for specs, for convenience. The first products I've developed in India are for footprint, are for scalability, and are for energy management. And then we have in a frugal way, but the point I tried to make, the question, we have to come to informed decisions. And whether this is democratic or not, it's trade-offs, and it should be informed. Question that I would have to all the big tech companies who have really identified this market as an opportunity to move IT and smart grids into the management of infrastructure is whether they would be prepared to enter into a dialogue of this kind with a range of researchers, NGOs, community groups and so on, around the longer-term consequences of these techno-fixes, which are being offered to developing country cities where governance frameworks are weak. So for example, Siemens is flying to Munich, mayors and officials from my country and other sub-Saharan countries, where kind of razzle-dazzle, kind of imagery of the techno-fix, quick-fix solutions, including financing, are offered. What are the consequences of that if it is accepted with relatively limited understanding on the part of those mayors and officials for those cities in the longer run? Who gets excluded? And can these cities really be planned? You know, there's that old saying, if the only solution is a hammer, all your problems will be nails. The problem in African cities, even when it really is a nail, you're not sure. Thanks, Mark. And I know Simon will come back to this theme, and I know in the audience there are also some members from this community of private companies who's interested in that space. We'll flag that question for now. Julio, do you want to come in on this discussion for now before we move on to our commentators on the panel? Yeah. I think very quickly. I mean, first of all, sorry that my 10 minutes was 15 minutes crammed into 10. It was very fast. But if anybody could do it. One of the things I found very... It was riveting, so it was fine. Okay, good. One of the things I find quite fascinating is how actually technology can simply mask a problem and make us feel better about it without actually fixing the underlying problem. Now, using technology for personal security, which is something that you mentioned in the first talk, if you don't tackle the underlying problem behind the insecurity, then the insecurity is still there, you're just finding a way of hiding it away. And I've always wondered, certainly traveling around African countries in brand new, shiny landrovers that have air conditioning, I mean, it's almost impossible to live in some of these places without air conditioning. Should we be even thinking about populating places where it's impossible to live without technology? I think that's kind of, sometimes to me, is a fundamental question we don't really ask enough. Just a thought about that a lot of the case studies that we looked at or have you mentioned have tended to be large metropolitan areas, and really the next demographic transition, urban transition will be in medium-sized cities. It will not be in the Mumbai's. It will not be in the Chennai's. It will not be in the São Paulo's. It will be in satellites, which are located within a certain distance of those and probably will benefit from that growth, too. But to echo the point that Mark made earlier, that was made earlier this morning as well, are these cities, unlike Medellin, that can actually cope with that transition, that have the human resources and other resources to resist, for example, the siren calls for sort of techno fixes, was opening up that, or filling, rather, that democratic deficit. And that's what I find interesting about Medellin, is it's probably a one-off example, unfortunately, but it's a city that has, for reasons which are too long to explain, but it has a very strong institutionality. And I wish that other cities of that size, or even smaller, also had that to say. That's where the transition is going. That's where the country, the world is organizing. Thanks, Julio. Well, I'll now move on to the last part of our panel discussion. And I will ask Wang Xi to start off reflections. Of course, in the case of China, you have the issue of scale. And Mark, in terms of your question, can planning actually happen? And I think China has an interesting recent experience, or track record, with that regard. Surely, where there's also been the challenge to combine both a more resource-efficient way of creating cities, but also dealing with a massive demand for accommodation and for housing. So would you share some thoughts with us based on the inputs that have been heard and some of your own experiences? Thank you. Okay. How the role play the emerging country, especially in China? The McKinsey report on how to reduce emissions in China has been suggested maybe for the next 30 years, that for 50% they use the law technique, so that the central government of China will be happy to hear that, because the law technique means that the law applies. And in my opinion, in China, maybe that if you use the high technique, maybe that high price. But I think maybe that not only all of our middle tech suggests a traditional industry, like the property developer, they need to use a lot of materials, such as timber, cement, steel, water, electricity. As the developed country, there are material techniques, electricity, such as the prefabrication that can reduce the use of timber, 85%. And as you know, that on the world, eagle and illegal, they cut the timber from South America or Africa, that 70% import to China. And in China, 70% of the timber used in construction site. And in construction site, the 70% used as the residential property property. So our company as the host introduced as the biggest residential property developer in China, not only in China, but also on the world. Last year, our company produced a residential unit, 100,000 units. And this year, we'll project 120,000 units. So that I use a lot of timber. And I remembered, six years ago, I visited the agents of Greenpeace in Beijing. Asked him, how can my company deal with that problem? That chief of Greenpeace surprised. Because normally, the company avoids meeting them. And I met them, and they arranged an Amazon rainforest. So that travel gave me the surprise. Because some destroyed, some protect. The rainforest protect that were there. Some areas of the Amazon rainforest destroyed badly. And that surprised me also how linked between that destroyed the rainforest, the China construction site. So that began that 2007, that our company deal with how to produce the green buildings. Of course, as the middle technique needs price. So also, that was higher, but our company promote to produce green buildings. And now, in China, as the national stand, green building stand, that name three, three is done, the buildings. On all the market, 50% of the field at the stand of green buildings, green star buildings, that 50% are produced by our company. But our company only share the market 2%. So I believe that only one company to do that not enough. So our company now that promote, stimulates, that are prefabricated method for whole industry. And also our company that every year, we follow the kind of pattern. But if other companies use our company's pattern, that make companies policy for free. Because I think that the more and more companies to do that, that they can change that, now changing the situation. So maybe some ask me, why are you generous? Why are your patterns are used for free? I think they're very simple. Because as the company is stated for three states, the fourth product, the produce product, second for brand, third for stand, for our company for the future, for the enterprise stand that may. Great, thank you. Excellent example of some of the discussions earlier around the need for smart or strategic regulation and questions of new standards for new sectors, as John Ari earlier intimated. I'm now going to ask Nikki Gavron to share some of her perspectives based both on her experience, but also her responses to the presentations as well. Well, first, the challenge, you asked me to talk about challenges, affordability. So I thought I might just take one aspect of what we've tried to do in London. Because we came in in 2000, after 14 years of no London government, you might remember Mrs. Thatcher, a Polish London government, so with a huge backlog of investment. And in all the infrastructures that are very important in terms of CO2 and resource effectiveness, that's transport, water, waste, energy. Now, I can't take all those, but we were absolutely locked in. Lock in has been talked about quite a lot. We were locked in to the wrong kind of infrastructure. How on earth can you make London in an accelerated way, because that's the name of the game, acceleration, how can you accelerate the transition to a low-carbon resource-effective economy? And the way we saw it was that we absolutely have to use our leadership. We had to have vision, and we set our division to make London an exemplary sustainable world city. I was just strived to do that, to learn collaboration from all sorts of other cities, particularly we learned from small cities, and small cities seem to be able to innovate much more easily than the large mega cities. And we were the first industrial mega city, and we felt we had some kind of responsibility to try and be the 21st century version of the mega city, a concept, the very high carbon city that we exported to the rest of the world. So we had this massive backlog, and what were we going to do? We decided the first thing to do was you must have a part from the vision. You must have a very, very strong policy context. And you've got to set the policy framework, and you've got to use every tool at your disposal. So regulation, as you were just saying, is absolutely crucially important. And we set all our policies out in what's called the London Plan, which is a spatial integrated, spatial strategic plan in terms of integrated investment, integrated infrastructure. But one of our main aims was to accommodate the big growing population of London, and I know it doesn't compare with what's happening in the global South, but our population, we've underscored, and we're going up by a million over the next decade, and that's a lot for London. And so how are we going to manage with that? And we set out a framework which said, we are going to become a compact city. We're going to go for vastly extended public transport system. We're going to build high density, and we're going to build green if we can, new buildings. It's much easier to do green in new buildings than existing buildings. And we're going to redress the imbalances between East and West. We just heard about Hackney and the Olympics and so on, so try to do that at the same time. And the main aim of this, and to build, by the way, to higher density, and mixed use, and something that hasn't been mentioned today, mixed income neighborhoods, because if you, you know, you're not going to have a vital city in any way. You're not going to have social mobility. You'll eventually get unrest if you don't have mixed income neighborhoods. You can't get our eyes the rich and the poor. And it's this, and we have to watch the way demographics are changing. It's really crucial this, a compact city which isn't mixed income, you know, isn't really a sustainable city in any way. So we wanted modal shift in the jargon. We wanted people to get, we wanted people to have choice and to get out of their cars, but there was an equity issue because 38% of London households didn't have a car. And they were stuck in the traffic just as the business vehicles were stuck in the traffic. So there was a sort of consensus about what we should do. Now I'm going to talk about one bit of this, which is congestion charge. And I'm mainly talking about it because of its affordability. And because now Beijing's ringing us up, you know, we've got to do congestion charge all over the world. People are thinking, this is what we're going to have to do because the economy is underpinned by transport and because it's so polluting. So it's a really big issue. So what we did was to, first of all, we did the short-term thing, which is the bus. Now we tried, I mean, we vastly extended the bus system. Draconian enforcement of bus lanes. Very, very simple stuff. This is almost old technology, isn't it? Not even low tech. Our buses, our buses, we moved from putting a filter on them to filter out PM10s. We then moved to a filter to filter out NOx. We then are now moving towards hydrogen buses. We're looking at the Chinese electric bus with a lot of interest. Anyway, just a bus story. Now, you had to improve public transport before you could bring in congestion charging. Congestion charging has really worked. 23% are exemptions. We've managed to catalyze an electric car market just by actually exempting low-carbon cars. And the other points I would like to make is that now the bus gets around much faster. There are many more of them. And whereas before, the bus was, as Mrs. Thatcher said, the bus was only for people under 30. If you use a bus, you're a failure in life. But now people use a bus, not just women, not just students, not just people on low incomes, but everyone, because you get there much quicker. And what we've seen is that a charge, that a charge has actually changed behavior, and that's changed attitudes. And that is a really crucial, I think, interesting thing about the congestion charge. Now, the payback. The thing about congestion charge is that we had 147, no, was it 100? No. We invested, sorry, 250 million, got to wind up, 250 million, and then another 100 million in complementary measures around the edges. And it was paid back in a few years. And that really matters, I think, that we use a very old technology, really, vehicle license place and cameras. And now we're moving to the next stage. And we're looking forward to the Galileo system. We're looking forward to GPS working properly, which it does in the city. And now what we would do, this is me personally. This is what I would do. I would have a congestion charge, road pricing, differential charges for different times of day, different engine sizes, and different lengths of journey. And I would have it across the whole of London. And then, of course, you could use GPS because you wouldn't have the problem of the high-rise in the middle. And the payback, of course, would come just like that because the revenues would be so enormous. Meanwhile, everybody can get around the city easily if you invest in good public transport. And the bus is the cheapest form of that. Thanks so much. So we've got some really interesting provocative ideas on the table and a wonderful, historically-grounded story. I'll ask Abba to share some of her reflections with us. Thank you, Ed. I think we went through a nice yin-yang of discussion today, starting from the morning where we looked at cities with smaller houses, smart houses, smart cars, everything happening based on technology, people working out of rural areas and so on. But we know today that it is actually not the truth. So I think this discussion grounds us very much into where we are. And just to put some sort of what we call killer facts or hard facts for the audience and for the table, today we know that by 2030, there'll be about 2.7 billion people moving into cities. And 90% of this is going to happen in Asia and Africa. And it's not going to happen in the Rio and Sao Paulo and the Mumbai and Delhi of this world. It's going to happen in small, middle-weight cities. These are the cities where we have the weakest institutions and the weakest capacity. We also know today that, especially in Africa and in India, 90% of the economy in the large cities is an informal economy. The housing is informal. The livelihoods are informal. There are no safety nets for the poor. So in all of this, where we have peak urbanization and we have weak capacity and weak institutions, how do we use technology? How do we use technology to give voice to the poor, to build communities, to build networks, to make cities livable, inclusive, sustainable, and equitable? So we look at what is actually happening with what we call ICT. So we're not talking about very advanced technology. We are talking about simple things like mobile phones, cell phones, and internet. Today we know that about 5 billion people in developing countries have access to mobile phones. In the year 2000, that was about 200 million people. So you see how this penetration has grown. Although the penetration of internet is only about 21%. And we keep all of this in mind and say, if we're looking at voice and accountability in cities to make them livable and sustainable, how do we use this? We also find that in the World Bank projects now, and in our policy advice, at least 75% of our projects will have an ICT component for governance and for voice. And I'll give you some examples, and I think Ken brought in some really nice examples, of using open data or available data for citizen participation. Using geospatial mapping for mapping slums. Where are your water points? Where is your health clinic? Has the waste been picked up or not? Which roads are totally flooded? Open data, open budgeting and participatory budgeting. If a city opens its budget and citizens can say, well, we thought you were going to build a school in this area. There is no school, or there is a school, but there are no teachers. This is actually, sorry, I think this is my alarm somewhere. This is the sort of voice which brings in accountability from citizens. Just give me a second hand. I have it somewhere. I had nothing to do with that. She still has two minutes. I should have turned it off. Time to get up. And then we also note today that people in the developing countries do not use phones just for talking or for playing games like our children do. They use it to find where the best fishing is, that day's fishing. What are the prices in the fish market? Who is doing illegal logging in the forest near the village? And so it's a completely different way of bringing in voice, bringing in accountability and actually creating virtuous circles of citizen participation and demanding of governance. And I think that's what makes the city inclusive and livable. The other thing is when we talk about sustainability and the fact that the infrastructure needs in India alone, and you may know this, run into trillions of dollars if we were just thinking of putting roads and so on. We also know that with the rising middle class, there are aspirations. We can talk about bicycles today here, but every aspiring African and Indian and Pakistani person wants a car and wants to ride that alone, irrespective of the bus or public transport availability. How do we bring in sustainability there? I still have the picture of Beijing with a million people on bicycles and today 200 mile long traffic jams on the same roads. So how do we change that culture? And then coming to sustainability and climate change, I want to say that you can also use low technology like mobile phones and other applications to actually map precarious hazardous areas, especially where the poor live, are near water areas on precarious slopes and you can have very simple interventions to make these cities adapted. That's how we want to look at technology. We want to see it in terms of making cities inclusive, making them livable and making them sustainable. And given the resource constraints, we just have to think differently and I just wanted to say that we've done some fantastic competitions, global competitions, apps for climate change, apps for development, hackathon for sanitation. We just finished that last weekend. There were about 300 software engineers globally on the phone thinking about how can we solve problems of sanitation in very, very simple ways in developing countries. So that's how I see technology taking us and making this world more inclusive. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'll go straight on to our final commentator, Simon Giles. Thank you very much. One observation that I've made through the course of today is just how big the gap is between the large core technology companies, and I'd include Accenture as one of those, and the field of urbanism. And I think it's reflected in a lot of the discourse that we've seen around smart cities and a lot of the trust in, or the lack of trust in the development of the smart city industry. And hopefully what I can do in the next few minutes is talk a bit about how we might be able to bridge that gap between urbanism and technology, because technology could be a huge accelerator to development, especially in developing countries. But I wanna make sure that we are able to bridge that gap, so I'll give a couple of examples, mostly from work that I've done over in Mexico with my team about how to address some of these core issues. And the issues for me that are holding back the development of sustainable economies in cities around lack of innovation in institutional frameworks, lack of innovation in business models and financing models, and lack of innovation in the way that we do master planning of cities. So I'll touch on the last one first, so the point about master planning. A lot of the work that my team have been doing has been in an interdisciplinary master planning approach. The traditional approach to how we do development in cities is the city looks for an area to redevelop. They sell it to a master developer at a relatively cheap price. The master developer goes out, develops it, maybe sells parcels out to secondary developers, and then takes the lion's share of the economic profit. And most of that starts with a real estate plan and then goes directly into a master plan, a physical master plan. They're calling the architects, they're calling the urban planners, and they develop a physical model. What we've tried to do in Guadalajara is say, actually it has to be much more holistic than that and interdisciplinary. We need anthropologists and ethnographers in from the beginning. We need to understand the context, the cultural context within which we're developing. We need to understand the level of ambition. And we need to create a strong economic ecosystem that will support the development. This isn't just about developing real estate, this is about developing sustainable economies and sustainable communities. So the starting point is, what does the economy look like that you're trying to generate? Then we say, well, what does that mean in terms of the human capital that's required to make this community work and to make the economy function? And then understand, well, what does that mean in terms of lifestyles that you need to deliver? And then what services enable the lifestyles, and it's only then, at that point, that we try and work out what's the physical and the digital infrastructure that's required to enable that. And taking a much more holistic and integrated approach where we're bringing teams like myself and that do economic and service development planning with anthropologists, ethnographers, and digital designers, all at the table in an integrated process can change the way that we do physical design. So that's the first point. And the second point is about institutional innovation and business model innovation. And what we try to do is a much more, a very different approach to governance of how you do master planning. So I talked about the fact that most of the economic profit is captured by the master developer. What we did in Guadalajara say, there are 70 something hectares to be developed here. Can we set up an institutional form, a foundation trust that can be funded to acquire the land on the behalf of the community? And then they take control of the development process represented by trustees that represent the whole of civil society. They then sell on parcels of land for development under their control, repay a lot of the financing, create a sustainable economic ecosystem. As the economic profit is earned over time, there is a very clear covenant within the foundation trust structure that says that all economic profit has to be reinvested outside of the development area and the surrounding communities, because it's those surrounding communities that are servicing that cluster. And that's a way of reducing some of the income inequalities that we see. We don't create this reverse ghetto effect, but we actually say that there's a symbiotic relationship between the communities in the center and the communities that are being serviced so that all of the economic profit is reinvested in social enterprise schemes, education, healthcare, and housing to make sure that the children of the people that are developing on the periphery of the development will be the people that will be working within the development in the future. The final one is about reframing business models for development. Most developments that I see are predominantly based on a real estate development model and normally short-term real estate development models. And what we've tried to say is, as a master developer, as a foundation trust developer, can we identify other potential revenue streams, other services that can be delivered that supplement the real estate revenues and allow this to become a sustainable community where the private sector allowed to play a role in the development of concessions to reduce the capex burden on the developer, but under the license to operate that's held by the trust. And I think that is really what underlines all of this innovation that we've been trying to drive is social justice, protection from the vagaries of electoral cycles. Often we end up in situations where at the end of an electoral cycle, the development grounds grinds to a halt or gets put onto another person. And then finally, how do we create trust for the community in the institutional frameworks that are representing them in the development process? Great, I feel absolutely awful having to cut all of you short because I'm deeply fascinated and intrigued by what you're saying. And specifically in terms of the example you mentioned since I've studied local government for a long time. Very interested in what that means for the role of municipal government because in a sense you're trying to bypass that which of course is great from a democratic embedding point of view but of course again at the end of the day we do need functioning local authorities to sustain these processes over the long term. But I was curious though Mark whether you thought that answered your question about whether there's still a role for planning or not very briefly. And then just to say we've got five minutes before we've got to wrap up the session and I wanna make sure that our keynote speaker has an occasion to share some final thoughts after he's heard what he's provoked. So yeah, I was just because you put a very provocative idea that maybe we should abandon the idea of planning given the complexity and the conditions that Abba was describing so I was curious whether particularly innovation that Simon was referencing as something that helps us to think beyond maybe some of the questions you were raising. Yeah, I'm very much the last person to suggest we give up planning. What I think we need to give up is some of the underlying assumptions of planning that it is possible to compile a plan that everybody is going to rationally engage with and follow and that it's based on the assumptions that cities are planable. So what I like about what is being suggested here and there are many examples in developing countries is there's an investment taking place in capacity in institutions that make it possible to manage the flows of investments and new ideas and innovation, rather than assuming that that capacity is there. That capacity is there in many fractured and quite often opaque forms and it's actually quite, as you probably discovered, quite easy to mobilize that into the building of appropriate kinds of institutions that are not just copycat imitations from other contexts, but kind of work with the natural grain that's there if you can connect into it. And if you can connect the planning processes to that, then I think you have a much better recipe for success. Thanks Mark. Thank you. Yes, a lot has been said and I tried to articulate it from a technology point of view, solutions are possible, but it's the human beings who have to get it done. And it has to be done with social responsibility, trust, and specifically I would say collaborative, that if we have all the constituent around the table, if we make a master plan with the municipalities involved in different models, because we have different models around the world, the Middle East, Africa, China, India are different models. But how can we get a representation involved and to come up with a collaborative plan? Time is ticking and that we have a lot of people of living one or two dollars a day who have no access to nothing. And I think that's that urgency that I still miss. And then how can we get constituent together as a call for action and to get a hundred cities being built of a million people and more and to get inclusive growth in rural areas? Because the solution is close.