 I hope that the conversations that you had within the policy discussions this morning and over lunch have stimulated your thinking and encouraging further exchanges. We now move to plenary 3 and will continue to hear our presentations covering the thief strands of the summit. Can I ask Bazma El-Husain to present cultural policy in places of change? Bazma El-Husain co-founded the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and is the current managing director of cultural resources in Egypt, an organisation aimed at supporting young artists and writers. Presiding Officer, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. It's a little strange the feeling I have for being here to allude to what Simon Holt said yesterday. It looks like I'm on the planet of good countries. Last night I was thinking about the ranking of some of the countries in my region in the good countries index and found it rather a scary thought. But I'm not here to talk about the differences between our worlds and there are huge differences. I'm here to talk about cultural policy. Or rather to share with you some of the dilemmas people like me have around this topic in the hope that maybe as I share these ideas that things will get clearer in my head, or maybe some of you would propose solutions that we did not think of or that you will find in what I say one or two ideas that might be useful in your own context. The term cultural policy is now widely known in the Arab region, but back in 2009 when we started the first programme in the Arab region to survey cultural policies in Arab countries, the situation was different. The term was rarely used and was not easy to find researchers or scholars in this field. At that time there were no official cultural policy documents in any Arab country. In 2009 we surveyed cultural policy, the fact of cultural policies in eight Arab countries unpublished this research in English and in Arabic. Then we held the first regional conference on cultural policy in the Arab region in Beirut in 2010, and after that we formed and supported small groups of cultural operators, artists and writers in different Arab countries to analyse the defect of cultural policies and propose improvements. We also encouraged these groups to invite cultural policy officials to this process and to seek official support. This programme was supposed to be a productive effort and to lead to positive developments and changes within two to four years. But then in early 2011, waves of massive protests swept across five countries in the Arab region, removing their heads of state and causing repercussions across the rest of the region. A lot has been said about the causes of these uprisings and many international political analysts occupy themselves writing about their consequences. Today, sadly, these waves have either been suppressed by forces that belong to the old regimes or have been transformed into violent armed conflicts by regional and international powers causing shocking destruction and death tolls. It's not impossible in my opinion to think and talk about cultural policy without considering the political contexts that encompass them. So please allow me to take a few moments to reflect on the political situation in some of the Arab countries and in particular in Egypt. As with complicated and violent political situations in many parts of the world, there are many readings of reality. It's almost sometimes like a Rashomon. In Egypt, you could find some people who would argue that what we have now in the country is a democratic regime headed by a democratically elected president. Subscribers to this argument would usually go on to explain the toppling the other democratically elected president who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood and the following massacres, arrests and bizarre death sentences was in fact inevitable and necessary to avoid the horrible oppressive and theocratic rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. My reading of the situation in Egypt is different. I will not elaborate on this further since this is a public session and that's also broadcast on the internet. The present moment in Egypt is a very difficult one. The economy is very weak with a huge internal debt and a rising budget deficit. The political horizon is gloomy, social tensions on the rise, human rights abuses are reaching unprecedented levels. Just yesterday, the two representatives of human rights were detained at Cairo Airport for 12 hours on arrival and deported out of the country. And for us working in arts and culture, the freedoms of expression and association are challenged with more restrictions every day. Having said all this, I must hasten to say that my personal view is that the story of the Egyptian Revolution that started in 2011 is far from complete and that there are many more chapters yet to be written. Many of you know, especially those who lived in fast-changing political environments, and I see some people maybe, cultural policy becomes dependent on political developments in a way that cannot be avoided. In fact, among the many power battles between the old regime in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, the one that marked the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood is the one around the position of the Minister of Culture. It was also the one that was easiest for the old regime to win, simply because of the fact that the majority of artists and writers and cultural practitioners were strongly opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood. I can give more details about the political situation in Egypt, but it's perhaps too much talk about politics. Now it's time to talk about, again, cultural policy. How does one think and talk about cultural policy in such a turbulent and hostile environment? How can we as practitioners cater for the needs of our societies to express themselves creatively and to enjoy the moral and emotional spaciousness that the arts and culture offer? I don't really have a clear answer to this question. In lieu of an answer, please allow me to share with you three questions that are boiling in my head. The first question is about government structures and their effectiveness. In a state of political instability, such as the one that followed the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, it's often the case that there are frequent changes of Ministers of Culture and Senior Culture officials. The positive side of these changes that they can shake off the long-standing practices that are based on corruption, and oppression of freedom of expression. The negative side is that it becomes very difficult, even almost impossible to get any government structure to commit to any plan or action on the medium or long term. Another effect of this state of instability that Ministers and senior officials feel vulnerable and not empowered enough to take decisions. This applies to both very small decisions, such as using public venues for one event, and big decisions like funding independent cultural projects. Furthermore, in situations like the one in Syria, the mandate of the ministry itself is ambiguous. What about more than one-third of the population who are displaced outside and inside the country? What about the parts of the country that are controlled by armed fanatic groups that are hostile to any artistic activities? For the past three years, the UN estimated number of 9 million displaced Syrians have been living without any kind of cultural activity of service, or service. Similar questions arise in the cases of Palestine, Libya and Iraq. Although the problems faced by each country are very different, in such cases, ministries of culture and their policies lose much of their credibility. It is difficult to talk about a national cultural institution or a national cultural policy when the world national itself is being contested. So, my question is, to conclude this question, can we talk about cultural policy without effective and credible public institutions? My second question is about the value of culture. At times of instability and violent conflict, culture gets pushed down further, gets pushed down further in the list of priorities, even more so than usual. In terms of the local and international media, the news are dominated by the clashes and the killings, and the art pages shrink every day. No one is interested to know, for example, that there is a monthly popular festival that has been held in public spaces in Egypt since April 2011, attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and that it is totally organised and funded by private citizens. The festival that you have been seeing pictures of, most of these pictures, anyway. The past one is in Tunisia, but the ones with the big crowds are all in Cairo. With regard to public funding, culture is the first victim to budget cuts that need to be imposed because of the flight of capital outside the country, the cancellation of tourism contracts, and other economic problems that contribute to increasing the budget deficit. When the budget of the Ministry of Culture is cut, the salaries of the employees remain untouched, so the negative impact is all on the programme budget, which means fewer and poorer cultural activities and services. On the other hand, at the same time, paradoxically, it is reassuring to note that the general appreciation of culture in the five countries that have started some sort of political change process has remarkably improved. The visible increase in popular demand on cultural activity is a strong statement against conservative views that artistic activities are immoral or at best wasteful. But how do we get this change in appreciating the value of culture to be reflected in the media and in public budgets? How do we get the society in general to recognise that this change has happened? Second question. My third question is around the role of the civil society, and I come from a civil society background, so I'm not neutral, I'm biased. Can the civil society play a leading role in defending the position of culture and enhancing the recognition of its value, both in the society at large and in the severe competition over the diminishing financial resources? Can the civil society provide alternatives and substitutes to the almost paralysed ministries of culture? The cultural civil society in the Arab region also termed the independent cultural sector most widely used, more widely used this term, is small in size, it's not a very big sector. And it depends on international donors who are most all of its funding, or 90% of its funding. There is no accurate source of information on the number of culture NGOs in the region. My rough estimate from experience is that there are around at least 100 effective cultural organisations in Egypt and around 50 in Tunisia. These are the two countries with the highest concentration of cultural organisations. However, it is this small sector that has been most active and responsive to the needs of Arab societies since the 2011 uprisings, producing plays, films, festivals, exhibitions, publications that reflect on the past very eventful last three years. In my opinion, for this sector to fill the many gaps left by the governmental sector, at least for a transitional period until things are clearer and to possibly play a major role in cultural policy formation on the long term, there is a very important prerequisite to organise. The sector has to organise itself in a way that makes it possible for other players to recognise it and interact with it. And at the same time, this organisation has to truly reflect the many differences among civil society organisations. Organising the sector is no easy task, especially within the existing legal and political restrictions. In many countries, registering an NGO is almost impossible, like in Algeria and of course in Syria all the time. In Egypt now, there are many, many obstacles put in the way of registering an NGO. But it is, this organisation is a crucial task. How do we go about it? Are there any lessons that we can learn from other experiences elsewhere? This is my third and last question. To conclude, I don't think we have the luxury of waiting until the political battles have been settled and the ministries of culture get stabilised. In fact, it would be wrong to do so. Because the cultural civil society is itself part of these battles and it can play an important role on the side of those fighting for freedom. This does not necessarily mean that artists should be expressing political views in their work all the time or at all. In societies where the vast majority of people have had no experience, such as attending a theatre performance or a music concert, the simple act of making art and exchanging it is a political act. Because it challenges the very way the society has been unjustly organised and it encourages individuals and communities to question the long-standing norms and traditions. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish beautifully puts it, against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility, like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by. Thank you. Thank you very much. We are now going to hear from the Welsh funding agency SESC. Danilo Santis de Miranda will talk about the agency's unique private public funding model. And we have translation from the floor. The presenting officer, my dear friends, I respect in Portuguese because it's easier for me and I can explain better my ideas. I am helping by Liliana, who is from the British Council, to help me here voluntarily. OK. Very well. I will speak in Portuguese. I hope that some of you can at least understand me and Liliana, who is on my side, will help me with the translation. In the first place, I would like to compliment everyone and thank you for this extraordinary opportunity of being here, talking to you to discuss the issue of funding and the functioning of our institution. I especially thank my friend Jonathan Mills who invited me. So, good afternoon. First of all, I want to greet everyone and thanks for the opportunity to be here and exposing a little bit of the funding model that Saskie plays in Brazil. I want to thank you personally, Jonathan Mills, for the invitation. OK. I would like to... I would say that I am communicating these questions as a manager responsible for this institution. Therefore, I have a point of view of someone who is in the administration of this organisation for a long time and in Brazil, therefore, with the typical characteristics of Brazil, and I will talk first a little about the situation of Brazil and after my institution. So, as the director of Saskie, I want to give you a context about Brazil and where we stand at the moment in terms of economic and also social profile so I can actually go to Saskie more to explain what my institution does in Brazil. I know that after the World Cup disaster, it's a challenge for me to be here and explaining about Brazil's situation to you. But it's important to explain to you what are the issues, the major issues Brazil is facing now, especially on the negative, the down side of things and the positive side of things as well. It's important to remember that it's an emerging economy so we are included in the BRICS countries. So, of course, we are a rich country in terms of our biodiversity, for the nature landscape we have, for the economic growth we are facing, so we have a good perspective in terms of Brazil's future. So we have also had a significant increase in terms of population access to the market, and not only cultural markets that you will tell later, but in terms of people consuming goods and services in Brazil. On the other hand, we have big inequalities in terms of social income and massive differences in our society. We have a massive gap between the wealthy and poverty, which makes the urgent need to have public policies in place to address and to tackle those issues. We have also territory inequalities, so we have poor regions, and on the other hand, very wealthy regions inside the same country. We have issues with urban violence because of the narcotraffic and that causes lots of issues around urban violence. So we have issues around mobility, that's one of the major issues we're facing, especially in Sao Paulo, because people usually take individual transport and this is becoming a major problem for us. We have also problems in health, education and culture as well. I would say education is a national issue alongside infrastructure problems that we are facing. We have great efforts for the government, for the society, for the companies, for the workers, and for the government, for the government, for the government, for the government, for the government, for the civil society, for the government, for the civil society, for the enterprises, for the population, for the third sector, for the NGOs. As part of this effort, Seschi, which stands for social service of commerce, plays a key role on that from the society perspective as it contributes to social inclusion and culture and education. O Seschi swergi nos anus 40 dwi'r secrw pasadu yn poes gherra ddweud o'r dditadur a Vargas, yn momentu mwythysbysiol, quando o Brasil inisi a un prosesu diindustrialisau, diurbanisau'n intensa. Seschi was born in the 1940 after post-war, after the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, and basically at that time Brazil was facing a massive growth on industrialisation and urban movement as well. Oes di a'r syddad cwnta cwnta cwnt 12 miliwns diabitantys, sem cwnta'r involtad de Sao Paulo, mas oltra syddad chi cwmponio ma'r regiwn metropolitana di 20 miliwns prasgwyd. Nw mesnw ystante, a urbanisau'n syddad i wneud cael caotica, disorganisada, criandw'r syddwaith mwythyseriais, comwnais ffavellas i asperiferiais ddweud. Nw sydd wedi'i dweud o'r ffavellas i'r bwysigio a'r adyfiadau a'r adyfiadau sydd wedi'i gael ffavellas i'r brasgwyd. ar y ddechrau sydd gen i'n cyfnodol yn ydyn nhw'n ysgolwch ar gyfer am ysgrifoeidol ar gyfer amser a chwilpa, fod y ddweud o'r cyfnodol ar gyfer amser yn y ddweud o gael, wrth gwrs datgwyd hwnnw, oedd yn hynny oeth yr ysgolwch. gyda'r Fawr? Mae oedd ymdweithio bryd o'r gyhoedd y gweithio ymddiadau gyda'r Fawr? A ddyn ni'n gwybod gyda'r Fawr a ddyn ni'n gwybod a'r ddweithio'r gwybod? Dwi'n propon ei gweithio'r Fawr i ffordd o'r cynhyrchu cyngorau ...cynnwys i'r llweithio'r llweithio. Mae'n cyfrifio'n llweithio sy'n cyfnod, sy'n tuen i'r llweithio i'r llweithio sydd wedi'i'n llweithio'r blomwys a bod nesaf ysgolwyr ymdweithio. Mae'n debyg yw o'r gweithio aam amall y rhaglion cynnais. Mae hwn yn gweld i siw sydd at yna unrhyw deall... ...ynddol, o boblie yma, am ei wneud o ddod... ...o'r ailfabeta eich cyfrifio'r llweithio yma... We are talking about rural population with high rates of illiteracy coming and at that stage it was more than 65% of the population on that. Felly we have two influences in some ways to look for solutions. One influence on the economic character, that seeks to seek resources to prove and provide these institutions and those transformations. mor ydyn nhw i'r cymhredu o'r datblygu hwysigio ar gl connects? I yma influencer di carater umanistau yn y sent wordend comprobar ar gyhoesio peisio fwynt yma eich sydd ar neud sydd ar hunain elu cydweithio y proses ac ymrysiau cysylltiadul yng Nghymru. Yde beth yn yn ddigon i'r ynmêr yn bwysigio i amdano i'r unig o ddechrau sydd ymweliadau i ddyn nhw i'r fiser sydd ar gywyaid i ddweithio ar gyfer y dyfodol of this new concept, of this new system? those enterprises they proposed at that time that 1.5% of the payroll coming from the employees of those enterprise is added to a pot of money to a fund that will help those institutions to be born and operating. It was created in 1946 and that exists until today even with the support of the federal constitution, the Brazilian constitution and develops a vast large social welfare programme. This contribution is required because it is in the law, subsequently created for this purpose, therefore it also has a public character. Public use. So this compulsory tax supports the fund that SESC provides health, education, sports, culture, dentistry, nutrition and recreation services for the enterprise but also to the general public in Sao Paulo. We can see some images. I think they were showed that gives you an idea what SESC operation looks like. Two very important aspects I need to point out. The first one is we have regional administration so every state has autonomy to decide on how they want to operate. But, on the other hand, it is important to highlight that there is a public control of the country's account to know the adequate use of these resources. It is important that we are audited and controlled by the government, by the public power because they want to check when and how we are spending the money. The historical point of view is important to highlight that SESC started in the 1940s in an assistantialist and paternalist perspective. It is important also to remember you that in 1940 when SESC was created we had a more assistantialist role and in a way a paternalism role as well. Over the years it became more focused on the development of people's autonomy and on the development of education as a resource, an important resource for citizenship. Today we can say that culture seats are the heart of SESC. In a wider spectrum when we say culture. Culture in a way of including arts, sports, social well-being and other meanings as well. Culture is present in all human manifestations. Ok, we can say that the programs aimed at culture contemplate national and international actions and at the same time training programmes aimed at the preparation of future creators. It is important to say that our program is a national, international and also very focused on capacity building, preparing people for the culture, preparing people for the arts. So we have a massive scope of work in SESC. We have an action across the country in all Brazil. In the state of São Paulo, there are 35 seats in the state. In a network of theatres, sports, cultural centres and a network for health, dentistry and elderly people services. We have a big international connections. So we have loads of theatre companies, artist companies performing SESC and also we provide the support to take Brazilian performers outside of the world. We have a big international connections so we have loads of theatre companies, artists companies performing SESC to take Brazilian performers outside of Brazil. We have strong links with cultural organisations like the British Council that are present in Brazil. For us, those international links are really, really important as they foster new links, their respect to diversity, their respect culture in its broader way. So I'd like to emphasise that, in my point of view, culture is the only way on which countries can grow, can develop and can be successful. Thank you. Many thanks, Daniel. May I ask Paul Carter now to present placemaking and storytelling. Paul is an accomplished artist. He is Professor of Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Paul. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Thank you to distinguished delegates, my distinguished colleagues and to the members of the public who have taken the time out to spend the afternoon here. It's an enormous privilege to be able to speak in this place of democratic decision making. It's a privilege, it's a great responsibility. The resources that have gone into organising this magnificent event would, I was doing it on my mobile phone, translate into the purchase of something like 20,000 hectares of Amazonian jungle. I'm working on a cultural development project in Peru. It's an attempt to try to bring together traditional agricultural practices, traditional art practices and to see what can be made of these in the context of a seemingly ubiquitous palm oil culture. So I preface this mark I want to make now with that observation. It's the full moon, it's a time for reflection. It's also relevant to understand how arts and cultural production sits always within that larger reality of nature and the environment, and I will come back to that, but I was particularly touched by Robin Arch's concluding remark in her brilliant paper, where she made a comparison between cultural ecology and the rainforest. And it's a very good one. Because when I talk about placemaking, I'm not talking about a 19th century white male centralist and utilitarian notion of the grid. I'm thinking about what has happened as a consequence of displacement. What has happened as a consequence of the clear felling of cultures under imperialism. This is the context in which I would like to pick up on some of the remarks that we had yesterday and earlier today about urban culture. I come from the country, and I'm well aware that the history of the city has frequently been the death of the country. It's not the case that cities are sustainable because they sustain themselves. Generally speaking, they leach out the best stories from other places. So one of our responsibilities in understanding the new commerce of public space in the city is to remember that moon side, that dark side, the actual cost to cultures that do not wish to be urbanised. So I want to put before you a concrete situation where the role of culture is clear. And this is the situation of urban development and in particular the planning of public space. We will just worry about that phrase in a moment. And we have heard how important urban cultures are in promoting civility, intellectual, moral and spiritual growth. But we all have in our countries, and we've heard this eloquently in the last two presentations, cities that lack identity, atmosphere and emotional interest. Such cities may have good communications, high rise icons and even department stores. But they lack public space, they lack vision, they lack scale and under the impact of rapid urbanisation they produce an astonishing isolation. Now I do want to suggest that public space provides the body of social life, heart, lungs and head. And I wouldn't even go further. When we hear about the challenges facing humanity, I often want to ask on whose behalf do we presume to speak? Whose interests are we defending? And I come to the conclusion that ultimately we are defending the possibility of coexistence, of meeting and sociability. We are defending the world we have in common. So I also want to share with you the challenges of inclusive, socially equitable and sustainable placemaking. So my background is as a migrant, a voluntary migrant, if you like, somebody who made a decision, you could say an extended romantic weekend, to move from Europe to Australia many years ago. But it led me to reflect increasingly on the challenges of displacement historically of contemporary racism associated with the manipulation of transnational migration, the recognition of the impacts of cultural as well as physical genocide, and in particular to think about the relationship between all of these and the erasure of memory from the landscape. I wrote a book called The Road to Botany Bay and what that tried to do was to look at the poetic mechanisms which cultures of invasion use to create the landscapes they need to inhabit. And what that did was also show that if you look at the names and the stories that are told, you also have a mechanism for going back to start with different stories. Acts of memory can also be acts of amnesia. This led to a public art practice where I tried to translate these discoveries about the relationship between storytelling and the creation of sociability and living together into public art and public space design. Because as we were told yesterday, the nation state has very often been an instrument of imperialism. This is the point that Professor Saskia Sassan was making. So in other words, the simple assumption that one can associate public space with the emergence of the nation state is extremely suspect. I'm also suspicious of the model that perpetuates the nation state in relation to such quotations or phrases as exchange and bridges of understanding. Even cosmopolitan cultures live in states of tension. Culture is not a pastime. It's an essential mechanism of governance. In the city it's the ambience, the shared symbols of association and translation. It's very hard to audit. Globally it is the federal model perhaps that remains quite attractive. So it's very complex, this network of shared meanings which hold us together and hold us apart. It's constantly being produced and reproduced. It is the work of cultural production. It's Vico, the 18th century philosopher's labour of memory, imagination and invention. Always stretched over the abyss of violence and strung with amity. And in fact to be provocative, I am suspicious of culture. What has your culture ever done for us? My noongar colleague asks in the context of the new civic square that we're designing in Perth. Culture is not necessarily a bearer of trust. In many countries public space means the space of the coloniser. So to make places where we can live together involves remembering, imagining and inventing differently. It may also be the case that we do not want to live together. I've just published a book called Meeting Place which constructs a dialogue between indigenous understandings of the role of meeting and Western, broadly European, philosophies of sociability. My point there is that two very different traditions, two different philosophies of conviviality exist but we tend to forget the indigenous one. In which we meet in order to part. In which we meet in order to be able to keep open the country that is our common care. It's not about an endless beehive-like collection in one place. What this means in terms of placemaking over the abyss if you like is that we need to understand what the symbols are that we care to employ. It certainly means caring for what Saskia Sassan referred to as the urban code. It was a very nice expression like that. Spacing and timing are essential if we are to conserve the public domain to plan otherwise is to abandon the rest of the world to death. I can see it in the Amazon. But the artist, the designer, the engineer and the planner who all write code script the city in different languages and currently the goal of these codes is always, as we heard yesterday, simplicity. But the kinds of project I work on urban renewal, public space design, cross-cultural placemaking respond to complex situations functional, psychological and social and I use symbols, myths, stories, gestures drawn from history, science and belief to find convergences, coincidences. In this way a co-appearance occurs as friends but it doesn't depend on a tribal or kinship-based relation. Then I find people stop talking about identity and they begin identifying with a new shared reality. So this is what I've done and what I'm doing and the challenge for you as delegates empowered to support cultural activity is to change our culture of planning into a culture of placemaking. It is not simply to find mechanisms to raise cultures political profile it is to advocate for new tools of dialogue embedded in richer processes of placemaking. The situation I'm working towards is one where there is a triangulation between arts, sciences and design. Currently most governments allocate public monies to the arts. We can think of plenty of examples both in the academic sector and also in the tourism sector. They also have significant scientific research and development budgets. Again we can think of plenty of examples of how that operates. Finally and perhaps most significantly all governments however short they are apparently of money invest heavily and enormously in infrastructure. But these three sectors of investment in the future are built to one another. In the new model planning would be an act of collaboration a process where the incompleteness of the city is embedded in the process and the result would be cities that were legible, generative and hopeful. They would fulfil the potential of a city to be a cultural event that is to generate new stories new literacies, new senses of place as projects of arrival translation and welcome and therefore of a world of growing archipelago of such sustainable endeavours and notice I use the word world not globe I'm interested in recovering the meaning of the world the world has roundness it has limits in its infinity it accommodates darkness as well as night it remembers those who've passed as well as those who are present and above all it reminds us of the future body. So that is in essence what I wanted to share with you this afternoon and I'm a rather nervous string figure operator but I thought it was important to be able to materialise the gesture. I'm working at the moment on a project in Perth which is based on the commemoration of an early Aboriginal freedom fighter who suffered a hideous murder but now through the combined efforts of the Nungar people and the Premier of Western Australia site surprisingly has given his name to the new civic square an immense responsibility for us to create a new body and the dominant figure that we're using to understand the tension of this new place this new opening in the herbs is the string figure this is the string figure and the point about the string figure is that even if you begin to make it it produces a triangulation this is a triangulation I want to communicate to you between the arts the sciences and urban design it's a new alliance that would allow us to think about the empowerment of creative activity through a reconnection to an understanding of such arcane topics as new materials and nanotechnology it would also allow us to work to improve the design of infrastructure so that the city does indeed become what it could be a great artwork and above all one that is responsive to the natural world on which it depends and the key to the string figure when it's applied to the urban environment is it holds together because it holds apart and therefore I submit it's a way of understanding unity that allows, permits and indeed encourages biodiversity Thank you Paul, thank you very much our concluding presentation in this plenary is from Kent Larson he is the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of Media Labs changing places group and Kent will present on City Science Kent Thank you It's great to be here in this fabulous city and experience the festival and I'm thrilled that one of the themes that we're focusing on is cities and thanks to Jonathan for inviting me into for setting this agenda I would like to start with my very brief history of cities which often started with a settlement around a scarce resource like a well and they were limited in size to how far someone in this case could walk carrying a pot of water on their head and you see this pattern if you fly over Germany or India or any rural area you see a series of villages that are a mile, a mile and a half apart because that was the distance you could walk conveniently to the to the fields and if you look at medieval cities I love maps I collect lots of maps you find that quite often they're about a mile in diameter you can walk that 20 minutes there's something very fundamental about that dimension and you can literally find hundreds and hundreds of these examples not only in Europe but in Latin America and in Asia you can see it here in Edinburgh where of course you have your royal mile and so we've been we've been exploring this notion of the neighborhood this urban cell which is a compact community where you can live and work and play and engage generally and in most things that are necessary for activities of daily living Paris it consists of the 20 arrondies a month basically that pattern what's great about Paris and actually most other cities in Europe that evolve before the cars you have a very even infrastructure of amenities so every dot here is a cafe or a physician or a pharmacy it's just the opposite of what they do in China they'll put the hospital district down in this quadrant and this creates a very walkable livable city then we had technology street cars that then would allow dispersed functions to be connected and trains and then of course everything changed when the cars hit and we started to design for the needs of machines rather than people and in fact in the city where I live in Boston we took this really ugly cut through the center of this historic city fortunately we've now taken it down and this is the kind of the model of urbanization that's being followed now all over the world this is Los Angeles low density sprawl dependent on the private automobile you have the same thing in China it's a little higher density but the same idea we're building these single purpose ghettos they may be high very expensive condominiums but they're still a ghetto in that they're not a community that is connected to other communities without the car this is what you're finding all over the world I took this video out the window of my taxi in Beijing last year on a really good day because that's green and yellow up there there's no red so the traffic was flowing nicely that day by comparison this is Sao Paulo you find the same thing okay and then you I spent a lot of time in Beijing recently the pollution is extraordinary a combination of coal and cars stalled in traffic but it's so critical that we get the design of cities right and we are not doing that because 90% of population growth will take place in cities most of the innovation takes place in cities but the world is not flat in that respect the patents are filed where these green circles are on the coast of the US Northern Europe Korea, Japan cities that have the qualities that support innovation we think looking at the data that there's a really interesting relationship to density good things and bad things so if you see that lower scale as population increases millions of people that aids and crime goes up non-linearly along with patents and GDP R&D investment energy efficiency water efficiency arts activity they all go up together good things and bad things in fact this is a study by a group in Singapore not surprisingly looking at livability on the bottom density going up the left Singapore is the most livable high density city by this analysis but you can do density well or you can do it poorly this is density related to energy transportation energy Houston is about as bad as it gets because it's a low density city depending on the automobile Hong Kong is about as good as it gets because it's not dependent on the private automobile and its high density it's interesting to look at new developments I was just in Dubai in the downtown area which by the way is about a kilometer in diameter it's very high density but it's low diversity low social diversity mostly high end condos for rich people if you go to Rio to how do you say that? La roquina it's about a kilometer in diameter high density but low social diversity same as Dubai just on the other end of the spectrum you can find high density high social diversity but low enterprise diversity where I work in Kendall Square it's high job density but low residential density so there is very complicated so we've been asking this question what enables innovative entrepreneurial high performance cities and we're exploring this formula we haven't solved it yet but that density plus diversity plus proximity if you get it right equals innovation quality of life and sustainability also equals a lot of other things like equity so we're working on this notion that if you can up the density generally in cities social tie density residential employment density all the third places density you add to that diversity not just demographic diversity but enterprise diversity big companies, little companies, startups research center housing diversity for young people, old people families, activity diversity eating, socializing etc and then add urban interventions so you manage the problems that otherwise come with density and you proactively increase diversity then you eat equal a high innovation potential and then following that are all the eco things that just fall by the wayside as a byproduct so start with people that's our theory so let me I just want to go through what we're doing in these areas because we like to build things this is this is our notion of what a city should be it's really just a city of micro cities that are connected by these red lines which are trams maybe 25 to 30,000 people in each square kilometer maybe the cars around the perimeter but you don't need cars when you go into that we decided to model this approach with LEGOs of course so we have LEGO units, it's a data unit that smallest little brick up there that could equal 300 customers per day if that's a Starbucks and then we can rapidly go through a design process if you know the code where yellow is retail black is housing, white is office you can very easily see how these things go together we took a new city horribly designed city in China Nansa and these are one square kilometer neighborhoods you can see the parties are very different, they use the same number of bricks the same functions but the experience and probably the economic performance and the cultural performance would be very different it's very hard to know what that would be though so we're trying to understand that we're looking at mapping then experiences to these pre-architecture designs we just formed a partnership with Moray builders that did Rwfongi Hills so I'm very interested in that there are three layers to this building there's mobility layer at the street that's where the Gucci's and the Pradas are and the cars then there's this upper level this beautiful garden footpath, terrace level and then you have the functional layers these office buildings, residential buildings that can just be extruded up nobody really cares, you don't really see them that can just sort of parametrically tune the density we're interested in mapping great public spaces and so on one of my favorite projects where they took down their highway put this beautiful stream very poetic gets more and more natural as you get down towards the river and Manhattan we did essentially the same thing only we went up to the elevated train tracks for the high line new ways, these are sort of super highways for pedestrians through the city and great experiences for people so we can map all of these kind of things then we decided we needed a better decision support tool and I very much like this from the movie Avatar because it is a platform where you visualize complex three dimensional data in new ways to make decisions about how to kill people better and so we thought maybe we can do the same thing with urban planning so this is using a Lego bricks we're studying Kendall Square which is cited as one of the models for innovation districts it's actually kind of dysfunctional everything in green is what we're adding because 3,000 people live there and 40,000 people work there every day so you have these inflows and outflows of people that's very dead at night so this is a a platform that we built with projectors where we can do what's called 3D projection mapping this is the satellite view and then run all kinds of models this is the easy stuff solar radiation, wind flows but we're looking at I think more interesting views into the city this is where all the venture funding is by industry segments so that reveals some interesting things these are all the mobility modes including the new shared bike systems that we have this is Ira who's sitting over there he's tweeting hashtag city scope and so he's in the media lab building so that lights up and then his tweet is there and so we can use this as a real time data visualizer and it's very interesting that this is a proxy for the activities of young people so the media lab building which is up there on the top and the artificial intelligence lab are brightly lit the Sloan business schools usually pretty dim I don't know why Cambridge Innovation Center with more startups than anywhere else on the planet is always lit up so nice proxy we're working on new tools this was just a hack a student did one weekend to paint the model just using his hand and so we're looking at new interfaces I show that just for fun you can look at land use yellow is housing see how little housing is the darker blue are the research labs we've built a number of these different tools we had a group outside of Brisbane building a new city came to us said they have a walkable city so we decided to model it with where red or the business is blue are the houses you can see the population and the number of jobs you can get a walkability number walkable the red is less walkable you can dynamically tune the density and how far someone can walk here we're moving jobs closer to houses and you see the walkability score goes up so we're interested in these real-time tools that can give feedback to non-experts we'd like to embody these tools with expert knowledge that allow them to be used by non-experts so this was the planning commission I think we caused them to re-evaluate their zoning ordinance because it didn't meet their stated expectations we tested it in a new district in Riyadh in a workshop that was kind of interesting this is a tool that we built actually for use in our workshop which is coming up next where in this case IRA adjusts for one building the mix of uses and the density and maps that to a building forget about the form, it's not important here this is all about function and then he can very rapidly build a city but he's building a city with data so as you add these building elements you know precisely what the number of residential units are et cetera so IRA and Caleb videotaped this last night after they had set it up so we'll see it a little bit later we're now working separately on modeling interactions so in this case these are two office buildings you can think of them as force fields so people move about them they're attracted to residential and cafes and shops and you can begin to see the interactions of people and what's critical for innovation is to trigger interactions because some percentage of those interactions will be creative which then leads to innovation so if you dial up the density you have to then find alternatives to cars otherwise you have traffic problems so we're working on what we call mobility on demand alternatives to the private automobile so this is our vision of a mobility on demand system that you have all of these shared use modes you use the right mode for the right trip at the right time the most important one is up in the upper left which is walkability but then you have shared bikes you have trams that connect each of these micro cities you have electric bikes et cetera all available with a single card or probably your mobile phone this is a little three wheel vehicle we're working on right now that's shared use to be integrated into a bike sharing program ultimately we think these will all be autonomous vehicles they will come to you and they may deliver packages autonomously at night for Amazon and FedEx and the like this is a little city car that we designed a few years ago the essence of this is that you get rid of the engine of the transmission you put all the mechanicals into the wheels you have robot wheels so you have drive motor steering braking suspension all in each wheel to plugs in like a USB port it's all drive by wire you can go nose into the curve the length of the vehicle is the width of the conventional car the front door opens you step directly out you get three and a half of these to the space of one conventional car in a parallel parking situation people thought this was just a crazy media lab idea we actually worked with Ford and GM and then a startup in Spain to commercialize this this is on the streets of Vittoria in the Basque region by the way the yoke can pivot left or right so you can use it in Paris or London the same day we presented this at the EU headquarters in Brussels that's Barossa who presented it as example of US European urban innovation our happy sponsor that's an old project we're now in that we finished it last year we're now looking at this that we think this is the future it's a combination of autonomy with vehicle sharing with electrification all tied together through new sensor networks and if a car can park itself and charge itself in an out of the way place you can serve about 5 times as many people with a single car sorry about 10 times as many people with a single car parking you get a 5 to 1 ratio so you have a 50 fold efficiency and land use for parking and you keep these vehicles in use more so the value proposition is quite strong where we are looking at new ways to collect data these are people moving through San Francisco or more accurately mobile phones moving through San Francisco so what we're doing is we're classifying them as members of a nightlife tribe and then mapping that back onto the city and then finding what else they have in common they tend to buy the same shoes and buy the same cell phones and have the same diseases and so we're using this kind of information to build a model of autonomous shared use vehicles in the city so here you see the vehicles that create each other the purple areas are fixed infrastructure in the city that communicates with the vehicles that creates a very what we think low cost scalable shared vehicle autonomous vehicle system and if you do that you get rid of all traffic lights no parking lots no turn lanes integrated with other modes in other words everything changes any city that's being designed now is not facing reality this is just that study that I'll now project onto the three dimensional model of Kendall Square and by the way some of the most innovative mayors like the mayor of Hamburg has announced this they plan to be car free by 2034 I think what he means is private car free but we're working with them eventually we'll get to this because it's really too dangerous for people to be behind a 4,000 pound vehicle computers are probably 10 times safer we will not have humans driving cars within 20 years I guarantee it we're also thinking about food for cities in China about 20% of the land is contaminated by heavy metals we're depleting the aquifer they're going in the middle east they're going to be huge problems related to water food security is a big issue this model of industrial food production really does not scale so we decided that there was nowhere on the planet no school thinking about food technology there was good agricultural schools good plant scientists but we thought well MIT should be a good place to think about food tech so Caleb who's here with me also is working on this project which is how to grow food in new ways in cities near where it's consumed so that's hydroponics and aeroponics we now are building a new laboratory to look at building integrated aeroponic and hydroponic food production using new sensor networks where we can skin facades of buildings like this and serve markets create jobs directly in the city with great efficiencies we think a one story ray may have something like a hundred times food production of growing in dirt with 90% less water 60% less fertilizer we have to prove that we're also working on a new model for housing problem where the cities those innovation cities where young people want to live and work they're getting priced out of the market this is Mayor Bloomberg from Manhattan former mayor standing in a little conventional micro apartment 300 square feet that he was advocating that had a pull out sofa bed and about 3 feet of closet space not a very livable model so I challenged our students to design a space that had a big living room a handicap accessible bathroom a queen size bed a full work desk dining for six and a full size kitchen and to put that in the smallest package we could fit it in so this is about 19 square meters or 200 square feet and we were with this experimenting with transformation so we're using three types of interfaces one is gesture another is voice and a third is touch so to of course take a shower you have to move the whole wall out of the way and we're having a lot of fun with this we think we can make this work actually we think it can be cost effective because the cost of space is order of magnitude greater than the cost of this technology and by the way it can be really fun for young people that's not the home I want by the way but that's that's what they want this is a work we did for a developer you can see it's 300 square foot and it realizes the Bloomberg apartment with a big living room that converts to a big bedroom which converts to a big dining room for 10 people or this can be where your startup is so we decided to test this this is the graduate student that did the city car now working on transformable essentially architectural robotics for apartments so table comes down from the ceiling we've got that pretty well figured out this is in his apartment with his wife where the living room converts to a bedroom and we even actually have this linen management system so you don't have to make the bed it just flips everything out of the way and we actually have started a little startup to try to commercialize this kind of technology okay and number five cultural events I think this is a really critical urban intervention to particularly for these anonymous new cities that are being built all over the world to enhance identity and expression and social ties speaking of social ties this is the work of Sandy Pentland who works with me at the media lab he looks at how broad is your network and how deep is your network so these are people in the workplace so the bigger circles with more connections are people with stronger social ties the same thing is true in a city and those are the people that are the most creative and the most productive the outliers without connections those are non-productive disconnected people and you can use technology to evaluate that so I know there's a lot of Australian people in the room Melbourne so this is one of my favorite cities and one of the reasons is because they didn't design for change I think now we need to design for change they just happened to take advantage of an opportunity to initiate change they flipped the main streets with the cars and the people such that the people spaces are now the old service alleys that used to have dumpsters the laneways of Melbourne where it's narrow for cars so the message is we need to design for people not machines and we need to design for change thank you Kent thank you very much for your presentation so we have heard some absolutely wonderful presentations this afternoon and I hope the thoughts that you have been left with will help to guide you in the next instalment of the policy discussions I'm going to once again pass you over to a member of the summit team who will give further instructions about your movements to the next venue and event so thank you for your attention, thank you for your presentations and I'll see you all later