 Colleagues, we're moving seamlessly on to the final panel of the day and in about an hour and ten minutes I'm going to be introducing Wolfgang Novak to close the conference, but before I do that we have, as I said, a stellar cast of city leaders to bring to you. So I want to invite to come and join me here on the stage Dr. Joan Close, the former Mayor of Barcelona and of course the Executive Director for the United Nations Human Settlement Program. Dr. Close, please come and join me. My partner in crime who's just joined me on the stage is Andy Ortman, and recently Chief Executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation, former Deputy Mayor of Philadelphia and a leader of urban transformations in New York, Washington, D.C. and many other places. I'd like to invite Carl Sederschold, Mayor of Stockholm from 1998 to 2002, as Carl. Welcome to Carl. First Deputy Mayor of London, Isabel Deadring, Isabel, please come and join us. Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, Anthony Vives, and then former Mayor of Washington, D.C., and now CEO and Executive Director of Federal City Council of Washington, Dr. Anthony Williams. Please welcome our city leaders. Well, an awful lot has been said in the last two days about the important leadership implications of the electric city, but we haven't yet had a chance to explore those leadership implications in detail, and we haven't yet had a chance to talk to a group of serving and recent city leaders about that, so Andy, what do you think of the key issues or questions we should put to this really distinguished panel? I think there are many, but in the time we have, I think one of the key questions that's been very interesting that's come up in the past day, and it came up yesterday and we heard the panel this morning, is this, I'd say, sort of tension or discussion between the, on the one hand what's needed yesterday called the sort of command and control aspects of what's happening in terms of technological change in cities, the systems of cities, the efficiency of cities, the running of cities, the kind of top-down nature of systemic change with panels such as this morning where we're talking about democratization of technology, how technology can be used to promote more participation and putting technology in the hands of users so they can transform their city, promoting social movements, promoting innovation, and I think it's an interesting, I think, balance and tension between the role of leadership on the one hand and large system change, and on the other hand, you know, this kind of grassroots movement and enabling movement, and I think we heard a lot about that in the different examples, and I think mayors and leaders of cities uniquely sit at this very critical kind of juncture between the two, and in a way at the most sort of, you know, local governance unit and place really straddle between trying to have, you know, the vision for their city, some of the notion of restoring a sense of, you know, utopia and aspiration that we heard Tony get into talking about earlier with having at the same time the kind of control centers we saw from the Rio examples on the board, how do you actually make your city work efficiently to, you know, how you also as a city enable, you know, democratization of technology, open data, the platforms that will allow innovation that you can't control, which may in fact run very counter to the very agenda you're promoting. So I think it would be very interesting in a sense to, you know, to have that discussion and to have the different leaders here, how they've dealt with that challenge and how far actually can one take it as a mare in terms of using that platform for systemic change and long-term change in your city. Well, that's a wonderful place to start. So the system of cities, but the system of the city as well. How can you manage both of these things? Dr. Close, will you begin two or three minutes, your top of mind thoughts, and then we'll invite your colleagues to continue the discussion. Okay, thank you very much. Well, to create this magic moment in a city where there's a kind of far-reaching consensus and people move more or less in the same direction of improving the confidentiality, it's quite difficult. It's sometimes it has, I think, an irrational component because, of course, as it has been said during the conference, the modern society allows all the opinions to be expressed and you see a lot of voices around in the territory. And then to have the lack of finding a common view that allows to generate the strength to move ahead, to move forward, it's not easy. We did that in Barcelona for the Olympic Games, for example, because of a crisis. We had a huge crisis of huge unemployment, huge deindustrialization, huge inflation. It was the aftermath of the 73 crises of oil, the price of oil, and then our industry, because Barcelona was an industrial city, our industry became obsolete. And then we reached a point where we needed to transform the DNA of the city and of being a dark city, it was called the Manchester of the Mediterranean, sorry for Manchester, and then now when you see the effects of the change where Barcelona is clear, it's nice, it's open, it's light, but for example, we decided one sector that should be promoted is culture, culture, because we need more museums, we need an auditorium, we need attractiveness other than industry. Our tourists or our visitors were industrialists in our hotels in the 60s and 70s. And then recently, after the crisis, we invented this kind of tourism of cities, city tourism, which in the 70s and 80s was a kind of novelty. And by the way, the touristification of the city has highly criticized in Barcelona. People is against the tourists, because the tourists, they do a lot of noise and they drink and they do a lot of bad things, but now with the financial crisis, tourism is the only booming industry in Barcelona. For example, I remember that we had a fight with the hotel industry in Barcelona. For the Olympic Games, we talked with the hotel sector, all the big bosses of the hotel sector, and we told them, okay, we want to increase the offer by 300%. We are going to multiply the bed, hotel bed capacity of Barcelona 300% for three, and they said, no, that's going to be a fight. And in fact, it was a fight. We just invited the international change to come to Barcelona to invest, but when we invited the international change to invest in Barcelona, they were frightened by the locals and they didn't came. Just they didn't came. They were, you know, afraid of investing in Barcelona, Hilton, Sheraton, all these people. Finally, we need to took a very strong decision. For the Olympic Games, we did something that is very, if you think about it, it's very strong. We took five pieces of land, which were public land, and we cataloged these five pieces of land, hotel service sector, and of course, that was for a socialist government at the moment. It was quite, but in order to break the monopoly of the offer, we needed to do something like that. And, you know, then, but why all that was possible? Because the general consensus came out of the crisis was there. Then never lose the opportunity of a good crisis. Thank you very much indeed. It sounds like you've said something very important about motivational mechanisms and devices, a crisis in Olympic Games, but you've also said something about the necessity of conflict to change. It's very important to have that. Andy, I think if you agree, we should hear from Dr. Williams, and then I'm going to ask you for a comment. Washington, DC, when you took it over, Dr. Williams, was a place that was perceived to be having a certain kind of crisis. What do you think the city leadership implications are of the new electric city that we're talking about today? Well, first of all, thank you for promoting me to a doctor. I'm really not a doctor, but I'm happy to receive the appellation. But is that medicine you gave me earlier? Okay, good. Washington, DC, I think of Washington, DC as a planned city as Andy always said, it didn't exist before 200 years ago. So to compare Washington, DC with a city like London or an ancient city, we're just a baby city. It's still a evolving experiment. But I think of Washington, DC, and I think of when I came in here on the plane, it was an unusually clear day. At least for me, it was unusual that most of the times I've arrived in London was always, you know, cloudy. It was a crystal clear day. And you know, coming over the Irish Sea through Liverpool and Birmingham made that sweeping right turn to head down the river. And you could see all the commercial and political and entertainment monuments all beautifully lit. And it reminds me why people come to cities. They come to cities for a vision, for a better life, for their families. And when you're in political power, that's really your fundamental responsibility. And the way I always analogize it is you're building a bridge. In Washington, DC, building this bridge was very, very difficult because nothing worked. So what's the first thing you're doing? You build a bridge. You have to build a solid foundation, solid foundation of settled expectations for investment, for people leading their lives, for public safety, for public services. How about answering the phones? All those basic things have to be in place. That's your foundation. And then once you have built that foundation, once you have with your constituency, that faith and that trust, then you can actually start building a bridge. But you can only build the bridge so far. If you don't create a span that's large enough, what's the point? If you create it too far, and there are many examples of this in politics, the bridge will collapse. So you have to lead your public only so far. And what I found myself doing over eight years was having this conversation, building this bridge. 70% of the time I'm building foundation, keeping people satisfied, building that trust. And then 30% of the time building that span. For me, a big part of building this span and pulling people was to say, we're going to make a major initiative in the city, the Anacosta River. And the reason why I knew the Anacosta River initiative was successful was when I started, people were saying, what the hell's the Anacosta River? What is he talking about? And by the time I ended, and no one ever says how great a job you've done when you're mayor, you only know you're successful when they criticize you in your terms. So by the time I left office, they were saying, well, the mayor hasn't achieved enough in the vitally important Anacosta River initiative. He hasn't done this. He hasn't done that. That's when you know you're successful because you've successfully built this bridge. Well, you know, one question I would ask is, you know, it's interesting because of the Barcelona and we'll hear more about Barcelona, but the thing that always strikes you amazing about Barcelona, which Mayor Williams, when you're in Washington, learned a lot from, which was the sort of the big moves about the city. And a lot of discussion today about the big vision for the city, the big interventions. I remember the roof from Barcelona was always, you know, use a project to motivate change, very much about project driven kind of planning, if you will, and urban transformation. I'm struck by that with the balance of how far does one go with the kind of the sort of the big visions, the master plans, ideas. And what we're hearing a lot about and I think the discussion today is this very different balancing of the thousands and thousands of ideas and how much we actually empower through technology that's allowing more and more people to engage in the dialogue about their cities, ideas about their cities, and how to bring those forward and balance those with the big vision, the sort of the top down, bottom up tension and how far one is willing to go between that line between where leadership is and how much one is led by those ideas. Because as I think Dan pointed out in the last presentation, sometimes you may have a lot of different ideas coming forward, but they may actually not represent actually democratic input. It may be technologies being manipulated in a certain way. So how's that balancing act between Barcelona and Washington both have had big visions and that kind of balance of how far one goes and how you facilitate the thousands and thousands of ideas that come from what technology can enable in terms of democratic action? Let's have a short, yeah. Short break. This is a problem for the leadership. When you are there in front, there's one day that you need to take the decision. And in that day, you are very alone. Because a lot of people gives ideas, opinions, etc. You know, that's very, that's for cheap, very cheap. But there's one day that you need to say, Okay, I'm going to do that. And it's going to have this color. And it's going to have this size and this impact. And then that is a very difficult moment. There's plenty of occasions where that is not done. When this final responsibility of saying, Okay, let's do it. And that way, this is a very tough question. You know, it's quite often, and easy to criticize the politicians. I think that even the way that now the idiom that we are using about politics is very, you know, politicians are those kind of stupid people that are there in front. You know, what are we doing that I think that this is, this is very poor, you know, thinking, we cannot blame the politicians, you know, if you want to just present yourself and take you the decisions, you know, it's it's, I would say, and I'm sure that the mayor will share that that there's one moment that you feel very alone. And it's when you need to risk even your political career and decide what what should be done. But you need to trespass this friendship. It's like the book of of the joint of Conrad transpassing the shadow, I think is the name of the book. You need to win it one day, you need to say, Okay, we are going to do so. So this really brings us back to Anthony Gooden's point about risk, and also your point about conflict. I just want to see if Anthony Williams wants to comment further. And then you're going to come in, please. I think you should be able to do that. You can't be risk averse and be a leader. You have to be able to have the negotiation with your publics. If you if you see public services martyrdom, and you're basically there to dictate and people either believe in the truth or not, like they're going to church or something, then you're going to fail. And if you just simply, if you simply function, you see public services being the matriot and taking dinner orders, you may not nominally fail, but substantively you fail, you've got to be able to do that. And I think that's a risk reward. And I think knowing that balance and having the right kind of cadence, I think is important. In other words, if you're looking for a safe haven and calm waters and you shouldn't be a leader, you're going to be in the heavy weather and you've got to be able to kind of ride that out and deal with it. I think that it was Henry Ford who said, if I was just listening to my clients, I will be a leader. Yes. No. There's a moment that you need to. Yeah, you don't need a faster horse. Now, Carl Shudderfield, you were mayor of Stockholm during the period that Stockholm became a kind of iconic first mover city in many of the things we now call the smart city movement. So what kind of leadership did that electric city require? Well, I think I am a sucker for history. So I always start with the historical perspective because I think that's extremely important if you are to understand what's going on now. And actually, Stockholm had a bit of a luck because we were organizing the UN environmental conference, the first UN environmental conference since 1972 in Stockholm. Well, that was a conference. Fine. But what happened was that media were full of environment for months. And I think this created the basis among the stock homers. It made them aware of that there is something called environment. And there are obviously problems with the environment. And how does it look here at home? Well, the water is not that good. The air is not that good. So there was a feeling very quickly that something had to be done. And in Sweden, we have a saying that's when you're facing a problem. We have a saying that said, start digging where you stand. And that's what Stockholm did. It started digging where it stood, taking investing in sewage, water sewage treatment, investing in districating. And then we went on to this hammer research, first start which has become sort of international example of everything. And I think one, today, the most interesting thing about how I'm sure start is two things. There was no contention, although it's a rather radical project between the citizens and the politicians who wanted to do this. People were sort of saying, no, this is a sensible idea. This old dilapidated part of the harbor should come to good use. And although they impose strict measures and rules regarding energy and waste recycling and things like that, well, it's good for the environment. So investing a lot of taxpayers' money and still the majority of the citizens said that, well, fine. It's sensible. And I think there is another thing that we have been able for a long time to create a working majority regardless of whether we have had a center right or a center left coalition running the city. That this should be done. And so you have this long-term vision and also the security for the politicians that they knew as far as they handling these matters, it will not affect whether they are reelected or not. They may be thrown out for other reasons, but not for that reason. And that is, I think, is absolutely basic. And many people have said that already, that you have to have a lot. The leadership has to have a long-term vision. As Schwankruhr said, be ready to make decisions at a certain point whether you have all the information or not. And I think we've managed to some extent to do that. And so it's a process that has gone on for a long time. And I think this is also just to finish now. This is also one of the reasons, and I must say personally, I was a bit surprised, that the Stockholm, as in connection with the general elections in 2006, voted in favor of congestion charges, which of course made it much more easy to implement the system afterwards. There is also one other point in that which is important. And that is that in the suburbs of municipalities around, they were not very happy about the vote in Stockholm. So what the new government did was that the new center-right government did. And what they decided, yes, we have had a referendum. There will be congestion charges in line with the trial period we've had. And the net income of that system would go to improvement of the road infrastructure in the Stockholm region. And after that, total silence, no opposition. Very good politics by the sound of it, Andy. And what you've said, Carl, I think very importantly is creating this space in which you can both build a consensus and politicians can act long term. Is this kind of critical catalyst? If you can do that, you can take decisions that might otherwise see you drummed out of office in another city. Later on, I think we want to come back to you to the question which will be relevant for Washington and for Barcelona as well as to whether there are advantages or disadvantages in being one of the first movers. If you like, Stockholm was in a sense one of the first smart cities. Has it proved to be good to be a first mover? Or have you had some costs and consequences with that? And if you agree, we've got two serving deputy mayors here who've been listening to the wise who are now out of office, but two people who are actively running their cities, Anthony Vives in Barcelona, Isabel Deadring in London. What's your view of the challenge for leading the electric city given the vantage point of 2012 and everything you've both got to do in the next period of time? I was just going to come back to your question earlier, Andy, about the sort of technology component. I'll just shuffle forward, that's fine. Thank you. Some of these things are sort of hard to comment on because they're very live in London at the moment, but what we're seeing certainly on a number of fronts, some air quality is one area I'm involved in, also step free accessibility in the link to the Paralympics and cycling and the road network, where increasingly we're seeing the agenda not just influenced but actually shaped from below, so on Twitter, through blogs, etc. And the risk I think for very large institutions is that suddenly from having to sort of manage, say, 80 institutionalized stakeholders, they suddenly are trying to use that approach to manage eight million people who have gotten opinion or say two million people who are digitally aware and having an opinion digitally. And the institution has a kind of nervous breakdown and needs to check itself into a clinic because it can't handle that kind of Twitter activity and the way that debate is taking place in the way that you would traditionally manage, I use that slightly derogatory term to manage stakeholders in the way that we've traditionally done. So the institution, certainly where we are, it's changing probably a bit slowly, but you can see the institution trying to respond to that dynamic of how do we engage with people and initially I think the reaction is one of terror and the walls all going up because we don't really know how to engage, but on some of these subjects now what's happening is that you actually meet the people who are blogging or on Twitter actively and you draw them in and help them bring them in to help you solve the problems that you've got. And in fact ideally, as you say with the crisis, you know, you can in a way your enemies can be your best friends because they're turning up the heat on something that you want to do anyway. That is a good thing. So ideally, whilst initially I think it's seen, some of the digital change is seen as an even bigger threat in terms of trying to manage so many voices, ultimately it can be a much more effective way to get change and generate that point of temperature where everybody says, you know, we really need to do something because instead of having three voices saying it, say three institutionalized lobby groups, you suddenly get, you know, 3,000 people saying it, if we can get into that place, but we're not there at the moment yet, but you know, that's where I think the trend is going. The risk for big institutions, I think, is that they're just not, you know, they're not designed to think in those kinds of terms and, you know, every incentive is to kind of, you know, put up the walls and, you know, well you need to deal with us through our stakeholder management process and our corresponding system, which obviously isn't going to be the way that's going to work in dealing with some of these issues. So you've got a digitized citizenry, but you don't really have a digitized city government? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, ultimately, rather, I think there's probably going to be some process where initially it's seen as a major threat, then it's kind of, oh, we're sort of getting ourselves digitized, you know, like Transport for London recently launched a Facebook page, which just felt so tragic to me, because it was like, you know, let's not look at how many people like and don't like that. And then, but then ultimately, could you move to a position where it's actually a benefit? You know, that's where we need to get to, but you feel it's going to take at least a few years to get into that kind of a position. Great, thank you. Tony. I might be a bit disruptive, but that's not unusual. I've been listening to most of the people talking here, of course, here in the table, but before, and I've heard a lot about management, but I haven't heard almost anything about politics. And I am a politician, very bad as a technician. I'm a horrible manager. I'm a lousy internet user, but I have a couple of ideas. And I love to see more people talking about politics in here. Ideology, vision, this is what people pay us for. And most of the time, we try to talk about things that are some other guy comfort zone. And because we listen to them, we finish talking about the issues they're interested in rather than the issues we should be talking about. And I want to talk about things that interest me. I think that we have to face it. We're living the end of a capitalistic cycle. In our capitalist society is reaching the last phase of, I'm sorry for my English, we are in a mature phase of the capitalistic cycle. And we have to understand that this is happening now here, here in London, in Barcelona, in Cape Town, everywhere. And if we don't face that, this system based on, how to say, freedom, liberty, democracy, representative or participative, I don't care, is going to fail because there's going to be someone out there saying, hey, this is the path follow me. And anyone will know where the guy is taking all of us. And we have to face that. And my feeling is that if we don't go back to basics, which means in terms of my responsibility, at least in Barcelona, if we don't go back to the police, understanding that the citizen, the new citizen that we have is a full person with a very strong capacity to decide by himself or herself, we are lost. What we've seen these last hours is that we have very capable citizens, very capable society. And the only answer that we have for that is what I call these post-Sartrean existentialist, post-Freudian attitude towards the current situation in which we ask people to go out and find some mother because I don't feel right. And people want to go out to the street and we think about Facebook. What the hell, this is bullshit. This is very typical of a tired society with no vision at all. Let's talk about ourselves. How do you call this thing that we have in here? No, the guts. No, this hole that we have. Talking about your belly. The navel thing. We need a doctor. And the other and the other reaction, this is the first reaction. And the other reaction is let's become smart and everybody is happy then. We are very smart and you have those companies selling us bracelets and mirrors like conquistadores are reaching Moctezuma. And yes, they can make us fail because Ernan Cortes did it with 500 men and some horses. I have enough of that. Enough. And I think that we have to, of course I don't agree with the guys that said that the history is over and neither the guy that's saying that we're living dantimes like this Siege philosopher. I think that there's a new future here with us. We have to generate a new vision based on what? On progressiveness, social cohesion and industry. And it's going to have a new phase. Industry doesn't mean chimneys going back to the center of the town, but we need industry right in the middle of the town. We need distributed industries. We need what we call fabrication at an EMS. We need a new civic implication. We need a new democracy for sure, but we also need the participative democracy. We need all that now. Otherwise, we will have to close it. That's my question. Well, there's a lot there. Let's pick up on a couple of things since we've gone around once. So it's interesting, because you raised this idea so there's this idea of, you know, vision and leadership and politics and not just this being about, you know, sort of management per se. And we've heard a lot about, you know, the different ideas that are proliferating about the city and how to manage that tension. So it really raises a very interesting question. I mean, Tony Gooden's talked about this sort of bringing back a kind of utopian aspiration and a kind of utopian realism. And of course, the role of mayors, you know, as being in a way the chief planners, the chief architects of the city, a visionary for the city, you have that opportunity. At the same time, the tension of, you know, you're elected for how long could be four-year term and changes to the city are the long systemic changes are long term. So for me, I guess a question I'm very intrigued by this raises is, you know, do cities, do you as having positions you've been in or are in, how does the city understand, do we understand what it means to be the electric city, to be the green city, how the city of the future, where does one get those ideas from for your vision, for your leadership that allows you to, you know, take forward what could be very large change. Do we even understand the infrastructure of the 21st century, right, that it is not just, what does that mean? We had an interesting even little debate this morning about the announcement yesterday, well, if you had 50 million pounds, you know, if you put it in, you know, what was announced here, people talked about, well, why would you Wi-Fi or there are 30, 50, hundreds of ideas, right, all those kinds of debates, when you're the mayor of a city, you have to make a decision. You have to understand your city, you have to decide a vision that you want to put forward if you want to be a visionary leader. Do we understand the 21st century city, do we understand what the green city is? Or do we get caught, which can happen in one fad or being sold one particular product? We heard a lot of different products over the last couple of days, people who would be coming into your door to sell you different products, many of which could be good and helpful. How does one sift through this in an information age, the massive amount of ideas that are out there to go forward and understand what it is for the city that's going to lay that foundation? The answer is no. The answer is no. And the problem that we have is that we are not real clients. We are caught by the industry because the industry is interested in selling what they already have, more horses, faster horses, while we haven't generated, regenerated ourselves as real clients. That is why and we are caught by two paradigms, the pilot programs. We have Barcelona full of pilot programs. I have some of them here. And the other part is best practices. Everybody has best practices. We have, we see, I am fed up with the Rio best practice by the way because everybody is talking about that. The problem that we have is that we have to become clients. And I want to go back again to the vision thing. We have to know what we have to ask for. And Greg knows it very well. That's why we are developing a world movement that we call the city protocol in which cities by themselves have to decide what a good city is. And a good city is not the addition of the best Joan and the best Anthony and the best Andy because when you have the best of each of us, what you get is a Frankenstein as I always tell you. What we have to have is the best Joan by himself and the best Anthony by himself, which means the best Washington and the best Barcelona and the best London by themselves. Provided that, we understand that our metabolism is the same. So the basic metabolism of a city stands the same for Tombuktu and Barcelona. If we don't understand that, this ideological, which means that the south and the north go together by the hand and then we are going to be able to ask for what we really want, not more mirrors, neither bracelets. Thank you. So one way to summarize it, you've really said it, is that cities all have the same metabolism, even if they have different DNA. And that creates the opportunity both for exchange and for differentiation. Anthony Williams. I have a big shtick that cities only share a fraction of the information that non-governmental and private sector organizations share. I work for a company that was a $600 million company where basically the leading companies in the world shared information. Now, even though private sector has got an existential threat and my business can go out of business, I still share information with other businesses because the notion is we might as well compete at a high rather than a dumb level when I think cities, notwithstanding this plethora of best practices, can do a much better job of sharing basic information. So I work with a governor of Detroit, a governor of Michigan about the collapse of Detroit. They're doing the same things we did in Washington. We're doing the same things New York did. We're all paying top dollar to basically do the same things rather than sharing basic bottom line information. The other thing is transparency. People think of transparency as got you. I got some information about something a politician did that's stupid because they were given a $30 meal as opposed to the limit for a $20 meal. And wow, jeez, I got this information and that's transparency. No, to me, transparency is everything ought to be out in the open. If you're the political leader, everything ought to be out in the open. And then the last point I would make is I don't think there's a dichotomy between running your city well and being a politician. This conversation I'm talking about is a political conversation. You know, I inherited a city that was a wreck because there were plenty of people who gave great speeches. They had a great vision and there was no connection whatsoever between a vision and execution and a reality. And part of leading a city is, yes, dealing with the politics, but connecting it to real people and real lives and real outcomes. So the point you're making is about how cities learn to combine vision with execution. But you're making a broader point about how city leaders learn anyway and whether any kinds of exchange are valid. Karl wants to come in. So does Joanne. So and then Isabel. But I agree with Tony as far as a vision is a basis for, because you have to sort of orient yourself in reality and decide for yourself where do you want to go. But then this vision has to be, as Anthony was talking about, you can't just talk. You have to establish real goals, define real goals. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. And we're going to do this. And we're going to do it because all. So and this means that there has to be a sort of, when it functions well, it has to be a sort of continuous process of exchanging of information between the stakeholders, business, universities, academia, citizens and the political leadership in the city hall. And my experience from 23 years as a full-time politician in the city hall of Stockholm was that you do as best you can. And you try to get as much information that you can. You hopefully employ intelligent people in your staffs that can analyze trends and information and from what you have and where you stand, you make decisions. And that's the only way to do it. And sometimes you succeed and sometimes you're lucky and you obviously got hold of the right information at the right time and you made the right decision and things starts to move. That's the only way. I am one of my sort of, which I always stressed and nagged about in the debates we had in the city council of Stockholm on energy policy. Should we have congestion charges or not, et cetera, et cetera. And that I was always opposing those people who said that there is one solution, big A, to the problem. I said, if we go for one solution, big A, whether it's waste management or traffic control, we're really in the shit. So what we had to do and what you have to do is pluralism. And of course, it's obviously sensible to use combined methods in whatever you do. But there is another factor in it inherent in Andy's question on that with the information flow you have today. And you don't have all information at any time. If you're not being pluralistic, you're heading straight down into the ditch. Thank you. Chuang Klos. Yeah, if I can give some new inputs in relation to my position now in UN Abit that we are supposed to be the global, the planetary observatory of organization. And you know, because if we come out of the Electric City Conference with this kind of optimism, a little bit irrational optimism that everything is going well, I think we are wrong. Or you are wrong. Because I can tell you from my observatory that what we are seeing is that organization in the world is not going well. That the prevailing organization model that it's been done in the emerging cities, the ones that are growing, it's substantively wrong because it's not sustainable. It's not equitable. In fact, we have the worst symptoms of organization prevailing everywhere. You know, the huge success, commercial success of the gated community. If you want to sell a piece of land in an African city, you sell a gated community and you will make a lot of money. And this is the end of the city. This is the end of the street life, the factory of conviviality. This is the end of this paradigm that we are selling here, that with tech, we are going to connect everybody and we are going to be very happy. No, no. The cities that we are building now, the cities that the industry of building cities are building, it's a wrong model. Another, sorry, finally, just the price of residential units in the developing world, it's unsustainable. There's a crisis. Nobody in Nairobi can buy with their own legal money an apartment. It's too expensive. In a poor country, then carefully, there are things that they are not going in the good direction. Thank you. And he's gonna come in, then Isabel and Tony, then I'm gonna ask everyone in the room if they wanna make some points. So we could have the microphones ready, that would be good, so. It's exactly the question, I was next thing I wanted to ask you because in the current role you have, where you see so many cities around the world and put aside your former Barcelona role, which is, it's one thing for us to talk about Washington and Barcelona and London and Stockholm and places that have sort of global cities and sophisticated governments and the expertise that Philip showed on the Board of Urban Planning Expertise to deal with these issues, but the hundreds of cities, right, where millions and millions of people are coming to every day churning where that expertise may not exist, where they're growing at a rapid, rapid speed, where the rate of urbanization is just kind of unfathomable. How do the cities that you see out there that are growing so quickly, how do you affect that change? How does this kind of conversation that we're having today, how do you see this translating there on the ground in terms of what ultimately will determine from a kind of larger global perspective, sustainability, green cities, these are the cities that are gonna have massive influence on the direction that we're going globally and from your vantage point, the United Nations, how do you see the role of that knowledge transfer, what's happening at the grassroots and what's happening with these major intermediaries, the World Banks, the UN, all the others who are out there, what's happening there in terms of that connection and that influence? Just very, very short. We are not well-equipped to help them now because we come with ideas of the developed city and we come from the modernism, urbanism of Le Corbusier and poor nightmare that who died yesterday. And this is what, they don't need the tower in the garden, they don't need the super block, and they don't need these kind of things that we are building very well and that there's a very good business, real estate business. This is not what they need. They need some political help in order to learn to create city institutions. We are trying to convince them to create nation institutions, but if they don't know even before to create city institutions because there's no city institutions, they fight for the land as mad. For land, they can even kill each other. And this is the real problem, that the social conflict, they are the GDP per capita, it's $1,000 there. And here we are $35,000, $40,000 per capita. Then we should be thinking in our cities when we were $1,000 per capita. And this is the 17th century, okay? Then it's a kind of a problem in translation. We are lost in translation, that's true. Thank you. Let's have a comment, please, from Isabel Deadring and Tony Vives, and then from our delegates. Yeah, I think I was gonna sort of probably disagree with the point that the metabolism of cities being common. I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the point, but I feel we spend a lot of time fending off either people selling us stuff or people saying here's some best practice that just isn't appropriate in our governance structure. Yes, New York and London look very similar, but the powers that we have versus the powers they have and the way the whole city works and the political dynamic within the city is completely different. So I think that's the North-South issue as well, but there's also even between any individual, two individual cities you have that problem too. So in certain developing settings, you know sort of I've always been an advocate of enlightened despotism and you might want more dictatorship in certain scenarios because it's gonna be more effective in achieving change and the governance structures are far more significant than the policies themselves. So I'm not sure you can say that there's this dichotomy between vision and management because if management is a tool for either delivering a better vision, which is what you were saying, or also kind of hoovering up vision from below and then kind of executing it, then I'm not sure those two need to be mutually exclusive. No, thank you. I didn't say they were exclusive at all. I say that when you only got management, you have the what we call in Catalan the blind cow. The cow is eating grass until it ends, but she never knows why it ends. As long as she's having a good time. Well, it's not a matter of having good time, it's a matter of having progress. I'm going back to the city. I want to go back to what Mr. Colos said before, before we're going to talk about African society in the very extreme. He's absolutely right. The right to the city perhaps should be the first right of some of these societies. But going to more stable societies such as the affluent countries, you know in Barcelona we get an average of one official visit per day and they come to us to learn theoretically how a good city is built. And I haven't made the real test or the real research on that but I'm sure that almost 98% of the guys that come to Barcelona, they take back to their cities two liters of beer, perhaps a love affair, but no model at all. Because when you go to their cities, you discover that you always get Los Angeles in a way or another being built there. So the problem is why these, what Mr. Colos said, why the current city production model, though being wrong, is prevailing. That's the real question that we have to vote. And the question is again related to the alternative because we haven't been able to build a sound alternative. And in order to be sound, we live in a world made of capital. We have to build a real new business model and demonstrate. Bjarke Engels touched very well. I think he was very good when he said that we have to build alternatives not based on the hammer on your head, but based on an alternative that has to be viable, that has to be business oriented, and that has to be of course embedded into it socially oriented. I think that's the real quest that we have. Thank you very much. So people may dream of Barcelona, but they end up building Los Angeles and something to do with the absence of the toolbox and their understanding of how to use it. I wanna come now to our delegates. We've heard about stabilizing the city and open leadership and management. We've heard about the DNA metabolism nexus. We've heard about the challenge to translate vision to real execution and implementation. We've heard that most of the urbanization that's happening in the world is wrong. Wrong? Yes, yes. We're doing it the wrong way anyway. Absolutely right. We're going the wrong way. No bovine metaphor seemed to solve the problem as far as I could tell around the table. And so there's an awful lot here to be discussed and what I'm gonna ask our city leaders to do is listen carefully to the remarks from the room and then pick up on a couple of remarks that you really want to follow up on. What I'm gonna ask our delegates to do is do not give us your life story. Do not make a speech, one remark please and I'm gonna look at people who weren't looked at earlier. So anyone down this side of the room. Dan, you've had a speech so you're not gonna go first. Hang on. Yes, sir, you're first, you're second. Oh, did he? Okay, someone who hasn't spoken already. So when Nicky Gavron has spoken already, you haven't spoken already, you're first, sir. And then you're second, sir, with the beard. If you've spoken already, keep your hand down and we'll come to you later. Right, keep your hand up and the microphone gets there a little bit quicker. And if we can have two microphones working, that will be even faster. My name's Ben Allen, I'm an architect. Just, there was a lot to talk about political vision and also yesterday of the last two days talking about technological vision and one of the things as an architect, I've sort of missed this talk about design vision and I think that of course as an architect I think that we kind of potentially hold the sort of key to bringing these two things together. And as a kind of European, of course, I like my cities like most North Americans being kind of 19th century cities, but I think the kind of vision of the future city is something which should be sort of very exciting to see more visionary ideas of the Asian city and sort of South American city. And in a way to bring, to provide solutions between these two sides of political vision and technological vision, I think that would be, that somehow the kind of missing ingredient is the design solutions. Thank you very much, design solutions. Your next, sir. If that microphone could go over here to Cristian Lefevre, that would be good, yes? Mark's willing from South Africa. I just want to engage in this discussion from the point of view of cities in sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of residential dwellings and structures are built by people themselves, not by states, not by companies. And this gives rise to a particular form of urbanism which is predicated on the assumption that the most valuable capability is flexibility. So that's really about learning and unlearning in a blink of an eye as context shifts. And this creates very vibrant societies and a set of capabilities for adaptation, evolution, and structuring complex environments which is very similar to the kinds of values that Richard Senad was talking about this morning which is necessary. And it's completely different to the sanitized, well-planned images of the city that comes, that has pervaded quite a lot of the discussions in the last two days. And this is quite a contrast. And I really think we need to rather value what's emerging in these cities and work with these trajectories because it's exciting. And may well produce the kind of urban cultures that we need for the kind of world that we're heading into rather than the very structured, inflexible environments that are set in many northern cities. Wonderful. Now I'm sure Joanne Close will respond to that. Colleagues, it's not compulsory to be mailed to ask a question or make a point. This gentleman's next, but you will go next, sir. But then after that, I'm gonna issue a gender bar, okay? So, Pierre Laconte, University of Louvain and Foundation for the Urban Environment, Belgium. So my question is, there is a uniform kind of push to coastal areas. All the cities around the table are examples of that. All are threatened by what Professor Giddens has said at the previous session. That means a surmountable increase of natural catastrophes. So my question is, in face of that threat, is there not something that can unite the opposition of cities and the majority of cities to get a kind of common master plan for the most important and urgent investments that have to be done in the cities all over the world, particularly in the hot zones, as they are called, in order to protect themselves against and get the resilience needed to resist to the coming threats of the New York type of typhoons. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. So that microphone, there's a woman over there who's got her hand up. That could go to her. This microphone to this gentleman and then it's going to Pam Alexander. Thank you. Hi, my name is Alex Feldman from U3 Ventures in Philadelphia. My question is, we've heard at this conference that cities are taking the lead in sort of leading their own destiny, more so than national governments having a policy that sort of is in favor of cities. Can cities do this on their own or is there a need for a strong national urban policy that really drives city development? Or at least a national policy that's not anti-city perhaps. Yep. Thank you. Paula Hearst, I work for a firm called Maza. We advise on business models for cities and financing of new development infrastructure. And my question really relates in this current time we're in the financial crisis. You alluded to the opportunity for disruptive innovation. The Deputy Mayor of Barcelona talked about how we need different models and we need to think about doing things differently. That's never clearer than in the financial industry at the moment. And the question really I have is if now's the time, what do we need to do to get there to do things differently and how can we just make it happen? Okay, thank you very much. That microphone needs to come over to this side of the room. Pam, you're next. Academy of Urbanism also on the board of Kress Nicholson and the Design Council. And I think like all good conferences, this one's about to leave us with all the questions that we want to answer tomorrow and we're all going away. For me, one of the most exciting things that I've heard is about the possibility for thinking globally and producing locally because of what digital fabrication could do. And I think we've talked about the three, two of the three legs of the stool. We've talked about social city. We've talked about the environmental city. We really haven't talked about the economic city. We've talked about the economic city. We've even talked about the force dimension. We've talked a lot about what technology might want to do to a city, but we actually haven't talked about what a city might want technology to do for its economy and what that DNA is and what that fabric that we might all learn from is and what the DNA of individual cities can tell us. And I'd love to take that one forward. Wonderful. Sir, you're next. I'm Rajesh Mushra from India, located in a city of developing society. I fully agree with the point that urbanization is going the wrong way. But what I feel that is not a problem of the tension between execution and vision, but also there is sometimes contaminating visions. Visions biased or loaded. Sometimes national vision locally biased. So would you agree on this count? So the bias within the nation or towards the nation? I'm also contaminated by the grounding of local political leaders. They're grounded in particular groups, classes, and they're biased. And therefore urbanization often go a wrong way. Okay, so is it a corruption of local leadership that leads to this wrong urbanization? Sir, you're next. Hi, I'm Sebastian, I study at the LSE. Think about this debate about sustainability. There always comes this point when people say you have to change behavior, you have to alter consumption patterns, you really have to change the lives people lead. And I'm interested, you as politicians, do you think you actually have the right to do that? Do you see yourself capable of saying this is what you're allowed to do? This is how much you're allowed to consume? This is how it should lead your life to be sustainable. Do you think you have the right to really change lives to that degree? Great, so we've had eight questions. I'm gonna ask our leaders to comment on these ones first, so sorry about that for those who wanted to get in. The last question was, do you really have the right to tell citizens and to show citizens how they should change their behavior? Before that, we had, isn't design the real integrative thing here, won't that do the trick? What about the flexibility that's inherent in certain kinds of systems that are organic? Actually, isn't that flexibility part of what we need? Do the shared challenges of the cities in the coastal areas provide a basis for some kind of mobilization? Can cities do it on their own, or do national governments need to be more active in all of this? What needs to happen in the context of the economic crisis in terms of what cities do next? What about the economic city and how does it want to use technology? And then is the bad urbanization to which Zhuang Close refers the product of poor local leadership? Those are the questions. If you take two each and give us your comments, before you do that, what about your question, Andy? I think there are enough questions. Let's do it. If something's missed, I'll come back. Okay, Carl. I would like to comment on two of these questions. The first one is, can cities do it by themselves or do they need support from the national government? Yes, Greg whispered here that at least they shouldn't be counteracted by the national government, but they need support from the national government in two ways. The first way is legislation, because if you want to do new things that hasn't been done before, you can be pretty sure that this is not accounted for in the law book. So there are certain rules that have to be changed in order to facilitate the implementation of the vision you have of a green city. So yes, the second thing is that usually the cities will need financial support from the national government, at least in order to get started with strategic projects and get starting also to get revenue for what they're doing. So they need the government as a sort of midwife in order to get going. The second question is, what about the economy in talking technology and environment, what about the economy? I think the economy is totally dependent in the future on using ICT technology and working from a standpoint of sustainability because otherwise we will not create new jobs. And I can take a concrete example from Stockholm with the cheese cluster of mobile ICT. It was not planned by the city hall, definitely not. But it happened because we supplied a basic infrastructure in that area, which made it easy for Ericsson, Yulet Packard, IBM, Nokia, whatever, to establish themselves there. And from nothing, Stockholm was not even in the ICT business before 1976, seven, eight, nine. From there, from zero, there are over 30,000 people working in developing many of the things you can do with your iPhones and your computers have been developed at Chista, so which goes to show that the new technology and the fight for a better environment can really revitalize an economy. This time in local economy still. Thank you very much, Carl. It sounds like you're saying the platform and the climate are the responsibility of the city government. Isabel? Yeah, I was gonna come onto the design solutions point. And I think a lot of times when you listen to these kinds of debates, it's easy to blame the politicians, people talk about lack of political will. But one thing I've experienced is that, having been a bureaucrat, the bureaucracy doesn't produce interventions in the language that politicians understand and can sell. Both, they think in terms of KPIs and pie charts, this is going to reduce lost customer hours by 23%. I don't even know what lost customer hours are, but that you can't sell to anyone. And I think design can really transform debates by saying here's a three-dimensional color image of what things are going to look like. Think about the Olympic park or any of these things that can really suddenly engage people with something that they wouldn't engage with previously. Even if it's just one example, and you're trying to do something in a hundred places, that can really transform the debate, which, and I don't think we're making enough use of that. And I still don't think institutions understand how to produce what politicians need in order to be more visionary, in order to trigger some of the decision-making that we would all like to see happening. The other one- So design promotes dialogue of a different kind. And it can lead you to a much better, and if you wanna say more visionary outcome, because otherwise, when you look at, I was talking to Amanda Burden in New York, she was talking about giving somebody a map, a zoning map of an area. It doesn't tell them anything. In fact, it looks quite terrifying, whereas if you can show them what the area is gonna look like, it sounds very obvious, but it's not a tool that's systematically used because the institutions that are producing material aren't necessarily thinking in those terms. The other point I was gonna come onto is the business models point. And I think one thing you were talking earlier about how we can, you know, it's almost easier to deliver a big project than to deliver a hundred small projects. And being able to look at trials and kind of finding a mechanism to pump trials out would be much more effective in terms of generating change, trying new approaches, but institutionally, there'll always be a preference for a cross trail over 100 small interventions that cumulatively might have a much more significant impact than cross trail. Maybe there's something to do with the way money's organized that affects that as well. Tony Vives. Yeah, very, very quickly. I would say that rather than talking about the economic city, which was a very interesting point, I would be talking about the new economy of the city, which is, in fact, I think the new opportunity that we have, that's a real revolution, based on four legs, very quickly, I would say the city has to become energetically self-sufficient and we have a revolution there. The distributed 3D digital factory, that's what the new city has to become. Citizenship implication combined with representative democracy, both can live together and both complement each other, which means asymmetric institutions and asymmetric governance. We could have a full debate on that. And at last, jumping from the current PTO model to the DDO model, or jumping from the product interest out current model that we have in our cities to the data in, data out, new model that we have to face for the new if. And that's the metabolism that you're talking about. Yeah, Dr. Close. This, the city, the model fails because everybody knows how to build a building and everybody understands the business cycle of a building. The business plan for building a building is very easy. You get the permission, you build, you, as soon as possible, you sell, you get rich and you go away, as fast as you can because then the clients doesn't blame you. Then what it's lacking in most of the world now, it's the business model of building a city. Then instead of building cities, we are building in the developing world buildings and this is a mess because there's a proliferation of buildings. It's a proliferation of buildings, by the way, with very good architecture and very good technology and there's no city at all. Because the business model of building the city is not there. No World Bank, sorry, which are my cousins, knows how to build a street. They know how to build a hospital even or massive construction for poor people, but they don't know how to build public space. And the city, it's about mainly public space. Then I think that the cities in the developing world, they are going to show us the direction because they are the ones which are facing, as it has been said here, the real problems, but they need institutions and they need to understand the concept of common goods. The concept of common goods and also in the other side, the problem of the free rider is something that still is not understood. And that makes the thing a little bit complex. When I talk with the mayors of the developing world, and I said, what is your first problem? What is your main problem? For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 65% of the urban population lives in slums. I repeat, 65% of people live in slums in Sub-Saharan Africa. And when I ask the mayor, what is your problem? He doesn't tell me the slum. He says, my problem is youth unemployment. There's no way, you know, what is the median age of population in Sub-Saharan Africa? 18 years or something. 18 years old, yes, you are right. The median age of urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's 18 years old. You can smell hormones everywhere. You know, and they are an employee. Careful. Thank you very much, Dr. Close. So I'll take a couple of questions. A question on what gives us the right to tell people what to do in certain circumstances. You know, in many instances, you have a quote unquote Republican form of government that's not a direct democracy and for certain limited number of things. You need to be careful about this. That's what people elected you to do. People used to say I was patronizing because at community meetings, they'd say here's what we're going to do. If you don't like it, don't reelect me. And they would say, well, that's patronizing. I said, no, it's not condescending. It's actually ennobling. You actually have now a notion that elections have consequences. I'm a big believer in that. This notion of technology and the economy. I find it a wonderful thing because I take this, most of the time now, I take this bus to work. It's called the X-True Bus. This goes down H Street in Washington, D.C. And it really traverses all the different zones of the city and all the different classes and it's a marvelous thing to get on this bus. And now people no longer, they used to bother me like, Mary, what are you doing on the bus? Like, I'm there for a photo op. I'm there to go someplace, right? So I'm on the bus now, everybody's cool. So we're on the bus and all different walks of life are on the bus. And I think it's really the power of the city that the welfare mother who's taking her children to daycare can see the former mayor on the bus. And that's a role model. That's a powerful thing. And right, and only on the bus could you get on the bus with all these different walks of life and then get off at the Hay Adams and go to breakfast. It's only in a city can that happen. And that's the power of the city which leaves me with this last point. So the Financial Times had this article about how after each recession, right, the economy is coming back slower and slower. It's creating fewer and fewer jobs and the jobs it's creating aren't as good. So it's really the fundamental responsibility of the leader of the city to create an environment of success where that economy can succeed. And this is where the electric city and technology comes in powerfully to me because the old way of doing business was top down. So for example, you would change government top down by for example, putting in performance measurements throughout the government and you know, we're still waiting for that all to happen. But then there's the second way of doing things bottom up disruptive, right? Well the same way of bottom up disruptive can be I think a powerful way to enable people, give people capacity to use new techniques, use technologies to create the commerce, to create the marketplace, which is really the ancient role of a city to provide that job, provide that livelihood so that the people on the bus are going somewhere when they get on that bus. Thank you very much indeed. Andy, we've come to the end of our session and we need to introduce Wolfgang to close the conference in a minute. But what have you heard here that has made you worried and what have you heard here that has given you some hope? Well, I think you can't help but not be worried by what Jean-Claude said. I mean, I think if something strikes me because of everything we've heard today in terms of what's happening out there and the cities that are developing and how they're developing and I think yours is a very stark call which is we can have a lot of interesting conversations but on the ground as cities are developing at that pace, that scale and the number of people affected and that the institutions there aren't there yet and that this is where kind of the future is going as we talk about the urban age. So if we're gonna really affect the urban age, it's one thing to have different models of how congestion pricing or other good ideas might work in some of our global cities but there's a huge number of cities that haven't even been developed yet. So I think that's a kind of wake up call that's been there throughout but I think you've put it in very stark terms. I think the positive again, as you sit around, I think and hear about the role of leadership and the role of what cities. I think the role of mayors again is always reinforced as it has been through the urban age which is mayors with a vision which talked about what happened in Stockholm, what happened in Barcelona, Washington, obviously here in London is that mayors continue to be, I think the place where have the opportunity with the right set of circumstances to be able to really affect change that you, while you do need support at the national level and you do need the kind of a framework that allows that, nonetheless don't have to be entirely dependent. Mayors can be drivers of change and innovators and actually have a lot of tools at their disposal to foment change and foment innovation and can actually create that platform. I think the challenge of what I've heard today is how one, I think how mayors who are in that position or leaders who are in that position, how they learn, how they learn in a way that on the one hand respects the DNA of their city, what's unique about their city isn't just copycat around the best practices and cities going from place to place but nonetheless recognize that there is a new infrastructure out there. There is a new platform to be created and I don't think we really totally understand what that is and I think that's a question which is we can talk about it and you hear a lot of different things over two days of proliferation of information whether it's presentations about smart grids or smart homes or intelligent systems or command centers or you name it. There's tons of stuff out there and the field is moving absolutely rapidly. There was an interview about a week or so ago on a talk show in the United States with Charlie Rosehead with Jeff Bezos of Amazon and he said, where do you think we are in the technological revolution? What do you think we've seen? How far along are we? He said, you know, on the spectrum. He said, I don't even think we're at 0.0001 of what we've seen in terms of technological change. So much is happening so quickly and I think the caution is how leaders of cities begin to understand the new infrastructure, begin to have that knowledge base and put that platform in place, not trying to predict what that outcome or specific application is but the new platform because that's what's gonna create the opportunity for change and I think that's very optimistic and hopeful but requires a new knowledge, a new urban knowledge and a new knowledge of how cities work, operate and can change and the political leadership that's necessary to effectuate that. Thank you very much indeed. So, colleagues, we come to the final act. I'm gonna ask you to do two things. As Wolfgang Novak who's the managing director of the Harehausen Society comes up to close the conference, I want you to join me in thanking Tony Vives, as you're one close, Carl Shedifold, Isabel Deadring, Anthony Williams and Andy Altman. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.