 Thank you so much, Tessa, for that generous introduction and to Thomas and Richard, who I've been reading since I was an undergraduate at NYU, where we now both teach, so it's a great honour to share a stage with you. And thank you all for coming. I've been spending a lot of time in New York's Coney Island because it's the capital of fun, the people's playground. If you sit on the boardwalk in Coney Island and watch the everyday carnival of all the races of the earth strolling together without knowing much about each other, the hipsters in leather, the Bangladesh in hijab, the Russians in bikinis, then you realise the great secret about why Coney Island works. It's not that everyone is included, it's that no one is excluded. It's not that you'll get invited to every party on the beach, it's that somewhere on the beach there's a party you can go to. New York, like Rio, like Mumbai is booming. Things seem to be going well for these cities, but who exactly is it going well for? To build a great city, a just city, we have to look at who's included and who's excluded. Then we should follow three principles, don't exclude anybody from the law, don't exclude anybody from the conversation and don't exclude anybody from the celebration. There's a store near where I live in New York, in Soho, where you can buy a Swedish bed made of horse hair for $135,000, not including delivery. It's called The Vividus and it comes with two metal plates affixed to the mattress in your choice of nickel or brass inscribed with your name and your bedmate's name, so that if you stumble home drunk you can look to see which side of the bed you're supposed to be sleeping like a place sitting at a dinner party and who you're supposed to be sleeping with. Fifteen minutes walk from this store, I can take you to a tenement in Chinatown, where you rent not an apartment, not a room in the apartment, not a bed in the room in the apartment, but an eight hour shift on the mattress in the room in the apartment for $200 a month. It's called a hot bed, because the bed is never cold. When you wake up there's always someone else standing over you waiting to come home. What does it mean for a city in which people sleep in such radically different beds? It means, Bill de Blasio gets elected mayor of New York in 2014 with his powerful message of two cities. So the first principle, don't exclude anyone from the law. The most important form of exclusion these days is in housing. Who gets to live in a city? The great success of New York also begs the question, what happened to the good people who stayed through the bad times? What happened to the people in Fort Greene, Astoria, Bedford Stuyvesant, who kept fate with the city through decades of crack, bankruptcy and garbage strikes? When I lived in the East Village in the 1990s, the area still had a number of squatters who were living peaceably in the buildings abandoned during the crack epidemic of the 1980s. But crack was on its way out and so the squatters had to be too. One day the NYPD brought in a platoon of cops in riot gear, some of them riding in an actual tank and cleared the hippies out. The parking lot next to my building turned into a luxury condominium, rented out to energetic young white people who went off to work in law firms and banks downtown. The lobby of the condominium now displays giant black and white documentary photographs of the grungy Lower East Side of the squatters and derelicts that the building displaced. All around Lower Manhattan, older buildings, often rent control tournaments, artists lofts or garment factories are being torn down and condominiums coming up in the West Village on the Bowery in Soho and across their facades in prominent fonts, the city's inequality and your poverty gets rubbed in your face. Quote, 12 individually curated residences starting at $3 million. When thousands once worked, a dozen will now get to live. And they won't even live there full time. Many of the owners have multiple such residences around the world so very few of the lights will be on in the building at any given time. The text in the ads for these buildings makes for fascinating reading like a love letter addressed to you if only you had more money. A brochure for a real estate firm, Corcoran, slips out from my morning paper. Among the offerings is a 4,000 square foot apartment in the Time Warner building for $50 million. Quote, finding a new home can be like taking a new lover without leaving your current one, the brochure says. There is nothing like falling in love. Can a city be too successful for its own good? Where the crime is low, the subways run on time, the culture is world-class, the restaurants Michelin starred. Yes, for that means you won't be able to afford living in it. It is one thing to be excluded if you're a newcomer to the city. It is another to be excluded in the city where your family has lived for four generations by people who are just getting off the plane from Berlin or Paris. I recently walked around the slum close to the river in Istanbul which is fast-genrifying. I spoke to the owner of a long-established cafe there who told me, I want my kids to be the fourth generation to be born here. That seems unlikely because right across the street from him was another cafe popular among the new artists who've been coming into the area. He told me that the artists have their own cafes. They don't mix with the neighborhood. They bring their own culture to the neighborhood. They don't participate in the existing culture of the neighborhood. That made me think, if I were living in a rent-controlled apartment in a rough neighborhood and I wanted to make sure my rent would continue to stay low, I would shoot the first artist that moved onto my block. Because after the artists come the bankers that want to date the artist and pretty soon your rent doubles. I think there's a Hoxton contingent here. It's not just poor people who are getting excluded from the city. When you have the second child, you're out. An upper middle class friend of mine in Brooklyn noted, it's become punitive, said another friend, a relatively well-off mother who can't afford private schools and doesn't trust public schools. Will the children of suburbanites, after they find a mate in the city, stay in the city when they have their own children? Cities like San Francisco and Berlin are finding that families with children are fleeing the city to find bigger houses in better schools. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of children below 14 actually dropped in US cities of over half a million residents. The biggest drops were in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Chicago has 145,000 fewer school-age children today than it did a decade ago. A city without children is a melancholy sing, like a forest without songbirds. Should a city feed control of its limited real estate to people who don't actually live there? According to the Census Bureau, 30% of all the apartments between 49th and 78th streets from 5th to Park Avenue in New York are vacant at least 10 months of the year. We are seeing this phenomenon of empty quarters within cities all over the world. The causes vary, rents frozen by law in Mumbai at 1944 rates, apartments bought by overseas speculators in New York and London that they prefer to keep empty, the takeover by social protest movements of whole buildings in downtown Sao Paulo, buildings which everyone else then flees from. In real, there are lots of guards now in the newly pacified favelas. The state specification program which has liberated the favela residents from the despotism of the drug traffickers has also made them safe for gentrification. Rents in some cases have tripled after pacification. I've met young Europeans and Americans who are living in Cantagalo and Hasinia, enthusiastic about the great views and the vibrant cultural scene. All that is wonderful, the favelas need to be more integrated into the rest of the city. As long as the young Europeans and Americans and the young Brazilians from outside the favelas don't push out the people who kept them alive and vibrant when they were dangerous and drug infested. Quote, gentrification is like cholesterol, points out friend Amanda Burden who as head of city planning under Mayor Bloomberg resumed one out of every five blocks in the city. There's good gentrification and bad gentrification. We need to take a look at who is included and excluded from the law. Great cities flourish when they permit an accommodative illegality. The problem right now is that the law can be stretched or even out flouted by the rich as we see in the epic land grab taking place in the Mumbai mill areas. A land grab retroactively approved by the Supreme Court but is inflexible for the poor. The poor live in a state of permanent legal insecurity, never knowing what law will be enforced when as we see in slum colonies all over the world. The second principle, don't exclude anyone from the conversation. The conversation around urbanism these days is like the Latin mass laid in with jargon reinforcing the barriers around a professional guild. The debates of the planners sound like buildings talking to buildings. As a result people don't listen to good and smart planners in Mumbai or Mexico City because the planners don't speak in a language that people can understand or they speak only international languages like English and Mandarin and not local languages like Marathi or Fujianese. I know of no joint programs between university departments of urban planning and departments of journalism. I know of very few writers or journalists who really understand the workings of cities. And the ones that do don't know how to translate it into a story that will grab ordinary readers leafing through the gossip pages. Meanwhile the real estate developers invest in professional storytellers to sell their glass towers and shopping malls to a gullible populace. If philosophers or literary theorists write incomprehensible jargon it might hinder the rest of the populace's ability to comprehend philosophy and literature but it's not really going to affect the daily lives. But when it comes to urban planners their dreams could become our nightmares. The rest of us have to walk in them sleep in them live in them. We need to understand the story that's selling us. It is critical for planners to go out from the academies into the public sphere to tell people in Mumbai why you can't fight traffic by building a giant new bridge because all it does is get you to your traffic jam faster or to tell the people living in gated communities in Istanbul which is one of the safest cities in Europe that if they actually look at what they're paying every month for security guards they would realize it's cheaper to get mugged every month. I'm arguing for the critical importance of the urban planner as public intellectual. Because without political will all our grand city plans will remain on the drawing board and political will can only be generated if we get the public informed and excited about planning. The third principle don't exclude anyone from the celebration. Cities are enormously unequal places today. The richest 5% of New Yorkers earn 88 times as much of the poorest 20%. The paradox is that in spite of this moving to the city is the most effective way for the poor to improve the standard of living. In the US cities like Detroit and Baltimore places that don't have a lot of diversity in terms of ethnicity or that have tied themselves to a single industry are stagnating. But cities like New York which actively encourage immigration are doing better than ever before. Two out of three New Yorkers today are immigrants or their children. Cities could be reaching out to immigrants putting out the welcome mat. The value of ethnic diversity like culture is one of those intangibles that are difficult to measure in economic terms. But many of the software engineers and designers in the creative class that make cities attractive are widely traveled and want to hear many languages spoken on the street. They want a choice of pucus or parathas for dinner. So ethnic diversity can revitalize these old industrial cities across the richer countries, make downtown central again and add a new spice in the mix. And human beings like our city spicy. Our young people come to cities in search not just of love but of danger. They go out of their way to walk through the possibly threatening part, have drinks in the sleazy nightclub, live in the dodgy immigrant area. It is part of the thrill of urban living to those who have grown up in a suburb where the greatest danger comes from cops raiding a party in search of potheds. Metropolitan excitement, a chaotic sense of possibility, flouting of zoning codes, shops spilling out into the sidewalk, a frisson of danger. All these things collectively make up what distinguishes a city from a suburb, Habab. By this late date in human civilization, most of us in the safe rich countries are bored. Suburbs are boring, so programmed are they, so controlled by laws and codes and rules that the human being withers. When I walk about the city, I'm alert for the eccentric, the unpredictable, even the manageably unsafe. Every time I get mugged, I get a story out of it. When I go to cities around the world, I seek out this Habab. So the lists of the world's, quote, most livable cities compiled by the financial magazines are a joke. They are made for expat bankers. Seven of the top ten countries in the Economist Intelligence Units 2015 Global Livability Ranking are in Australia or Canada. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year resulted in a 3.2% decline in the livability ranking. Quote, Hong Kong's livability has been hit by the disruptive protests that took place last year, pronounced the EIU Furway Editor. So democratic protest means a city is unlivable. By that standard, the ideal city would be Pyongyang, Canberra, Geneva, Calgary are beautiful and deadly boring. They do well on the lists because they are mostly cleansed of immigrants, the poor, the necessary chaos that is the first marker of big city life. The expectation that, in Joan Dedian's words, quote, something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. A great city has the ability to, as Bob Marley urges, stir it up. The two great forces that are going to stir it up in the 21st century are mass migration and inequality. You think four million city refugees fleeing from war is a big deal? What happens when climate change really kicks in and Bangladesh gets flooded and a hundred million Bangladeshis look for dry land? They'll be coming soon to a city near you. And as they do, rich people all across the globe will look to channel popular rage about inequality at the most vulnerable scapegoats, migrants. The greatest challenge facing cities worldwide is accommodation, in all senses of the word. Greater Bombay has over 20 million people and parts of the inner city have a population density of over 1 million people per square mile. How the hell do all these people live together? New York is panicked because it's projected that it will add a million people over the next 20 years. It will go from 8 to 9 million people. Bombay adds a million people every year. I realized when I was doing my book about Bombay that the way Bombay survives is by a series of solidarity networks among the poor. The manager of Bombay's suburban railway system was once asked when the system would improve to a point where it could carry its 6 million daily passengers in comfort. Not in my lifetime, he answered. Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover's embrace was never so close. My friend Asad Bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloging numberless communal flare-ups and riots, seeing firsthand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from Bhagalpur in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid. Asad, of all people, has seen humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about the human race. Not at all, he responded. Look at the hands from the trains. If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals. And as you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you. You'll probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened. Your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment. Having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your hair if you miss this train and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for this belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in the city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or Jogeshwari, whether you're from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you're trying to get to the city of gold and that's enough. Come on board, they say. We'll adjust.