 Our next presenter, Alejandro, who's going to speak about cheapness and democracy. Cheapness. Cheapness. We'll let Alejandro's fix the question. Okay. Knowing that I was going after Richard, I decided not to talk too much about sustainable cities, because I cannot compete. So I tried to find a kind of deviant argument, which is this cheapness and democracy, which in a way is a discussion or a series of questions about the possibility of whether this city that is growing out there in Istanbul is sustainable as a democracy, whether those urban growths that we have witnessed happening in the city in the last few years can sustain a democratic practice. And what does this mean for architecture, for design, for things that perhaps have to do more with getting close to the making of these objects? So some of these photographs were sent to me actually by Omer, who kindly sent me some examples of what is happening around Istanbul. Let me see if I can find out how to do this. So this is how the city is growing. And the question, which is a question that very rightly Saskia has put, I remember, in the first session of Urban Age, are these things urbanizations, or do they have a certain level of cheapness, as she called it? Are these, this is actually not Istanbul, but it could be. Maybe it's a little bit more dense, it's Korea. This type of city is growing everywhere. And I think the question that Saskia was putting forward is, are these structures that would sustain a democratic practice, a democratic life, or on the contrary, they are just machines to accumulate population and engage this population in this kind of capitalist machine. So at the same time, we have to admit that these things, and this is one of the reasons why I'm interested in them, are making available to increasingly larger population possibly the most desired good that we can provide, which is the access to the life in the city. We've seen during these past sessions how people in the city are wealthier than people in other areas, and therefore it is very important that we are able to grow the city. The question is, when we grow it, or once we grow it, can we actually make it sustainable as a community location where decisions are made in a more or less democratic manner? So why cheapness? Let me first go into the reason why I choose the argument for the talk. The reason why Istanbul is growing so fast, or one of the reasons as many of these other cities is because it's still cheap. It has a large market, and like most of these other emerging economies, it's a place for people to invest, to make business. And I think it is likely that this will be the way in which Istanbul will keep growing for the next few years. So it's worth thinking what are the aesthetic, what are the architectural implications that this type of development may trigger? What can we do as architects to ensure that democracy, if not enabled because probably that exceeds the expertise of architects and the capacity of architects, it is communicated, presented as an experience in this new urban landscape. So now that we inhabit the hangover of late capitalism and globalization, I thought it was worth reflecting on the opportunity that is opening before us to regain a certain level of political agency for material practices, to stop perhaps being subservient to political discourses. Now that ideology is losing currency and there is a massive drift to swing voters worldwide. If we look at the discourses that shaped the current notions of democracy in the second half of the 20th century, and this is not a kind of exhaustive list of visionaries, but there are some of these visionaries. So the main theme that you see across these visions is equality, equalization. Now after these guys, we have now these other guys. Starting from Alan Greenspan, who basically made available cheap money to Stelio Saggiano, who made available cheap flights, we see a shift from a kind of ideological performance to another type of performance made by a number of agents that are no longer occupying political and elected offices, but are operating from a business perspective and producing things that are cheap, and therefore, I mean, cheapness in the sense is a kind of surrogate for democratic in the market economy. And that's also the reason why I thought that cheapness was an interesting thing to look into, because I think if we were able to understand, because I don't think these people, I mean, these people have, even if they are not operating from a political office, they have an enormous effect in the politics of the contemporary city. And so if we were able to understand how do they operate, how do they produce goods, and what are the politics behind this type of operation, probably we would be in a better position to put ourselves in a more, to basically re-empower the discipline and material practices as an activity. So from the practices of these guys, I was most attracted to those that are more related or that affect more directly to the construction of a social body, that is cheap clothing manufacturing and cheap flights. Those are products that in a way shape the way the social body is organized. And when we see, I mean, I did this diagram to show, I mean, it was a kind of also metaphor for architecture. Architects are still educated and trying to operate in the kind of higher level of the visionaries, who are supposed to put forward a new vision of the world, where I believe that the most effective political actions are happening on the other side, on the kind of low-cost side, which is what everybody wears. Let me see if I can. And the same thing happens with airlines. So there are the kind of glamorous TWA, which doesn't exist anymore, Air France, British Airways, and there are the kind of low-cost, no-frills airlines, which I think is interesting because those airlines have managed, for example, to the class, the aircraft cabins, so classes have been abolished. And therefore, there are certain potentials that make me think, hopefully, about all these developments that are happening around Istanbul, even if customers are treated like livestock. And actually, thinking about ECJET, I remember the discourse of Giorgio Agamben and his description of what he calls bare life as a kind of status of diminished citizenship, where citizens have been deprived of rights by a state of exception, and yet that situation of bare life is maybe, in Agamben's words, a potential for resistance, a potential for political action. So this Homo Sacher, which is the way he refers to a kind of old legal figure, can be actually a way of utilizing cheapness in order to produce certain new political effects, which perhaps can be enacted in all these peripheral developments. So politicians have immediately capitalized on this, and now we know David Cameron proposing the EC Council, and likewise, Ryanair is using the political discourse as a way of advertising, so there is a kind of fluid relationship between these two worlds of producing cheap goods and making politics. And thinking further on what may be the aesthetic potentials or the aesthetic consequences of this no frills production, I thought that the kind of the lingo of the low-cost airlines, the idea of the frills, could perhaps give us a handle on how to address the aesthetic potentials of these cheapness strategies. So frills are epithelial excursions that are contingent, that are not structural, that are there in order to seduce or to produce a certain sensual effect. And I thought that the word gives us a very interesting entry into perhaps the aesthetics of low-cost. And so I tried to think about the history of frills in architecture and found out that modernism, police frills out of architecture as being superfluous, regressive, and ineffective on the grounds of economy, on the grounds of costs. Not on the grounds of style, because no style in modernism became style. And that produced already some problems. For example, Mies van der Rohe deciding to make the seagram bronze because the client asked him to make it more expensive looking. So postmodernists came in and kind of redeemed frills on the grounds that even if their use value is negligible, their exchange value offers a surplus in respect to their production costs. And therefore in the late capitalist economy, style becomes a free-floating commodity without any attachment to structural values. So frills are an economically legitimate practice. So this puts us now, after this kind of brief history of frills in architecture into a situation where we have to choose certain options in order to operate and to exploit aesthetically this idea of frills or no frills, one of them will be cheap frills. And this is something that we can identify, for example, with manufacturers like Sara, where the idea is not to remove the frills, but on the contrary, be able to produce them at a lower cost by tampering with the kind of procurement of these clothes, etc. And these, of course, these frills are heavily structured and grounded on a very powerful infrastructure. This is the logistics depot of Sara in Coruña, which is one of the largest in the world. And there is a number of architects that have been practicing frills on a kind of cheap level. Probably the most important one is Frank Gehry, who from a very early stage was interested in cheapness and the proof of that is his own very own house. And that out of that early interest in cheapness developed something a little bit more expensive, which basically what Gehry does always is to detach the rain screen from the waterproofing. And so therefore the structure, the enclosure of the building is detached from the expression of the building. And by accepting that contradiction and that lack of integrity of the product, he's able to deliver things that are quite astonishing at relatively modest prices. You see here the two layers of structure and that kind of contradiction that is embedded into the detail of the building. The other option is what I call the no frills cool, in which the removal of the frills, the kind of going back to modernism but not as no style, becoming style, but as a new cool style in which cheapness becomes the origin of this new style. New aesthetic of the cheap emerges from a careful consideration of how to eliminate excess, the exceptional, the precious, the overpriced and the exclusive. A certain acceptance of the generic is, in a way, embedded into this possibility. Muji, for example, will be an example of this approach to design. This is not Muji, this is a Japanese fabricator that is called Final Home that makes clothes almost for homeless life, where you can fill the garments with newspapers. So it's a kind of new Rusonian inhabitation of the city that I think is very much part of this aesthetic of the bare life. I mean, that goes back to that proposal from Agamben. Rem Kulhas is also an early pioneer in cheapness with the famous motto of no money, no detail, and maybe the use of low-grade concrete systematically to produce a certain aesthetics in Lille. So I think I'm running out of time. Let me show you one more example of this. Pali di Tokyo from Lakaton Vassal, who are architects that explore extremely, interestingly, the possibilities of recycling, for example, a building, stripping it bare, introducing... I mean, this is how these buildings look like. Clearly trying to make a new style out of... cheap materials, industrial materials, introducing nature. Nature, again, with this kind of neo-Rusonian approach of the no frills Kul is something that is, again, fashionable. And I actually had a few examples that I'm not going to have time to explain of our own work, but maybe what I would like to end up by going back to the issue of sustainability and saying that what is interesting about the problem that is posed upon us architects when having to address this issue of sustainability is the possibility of using it, and sustainability, again, goes back to this idea of nature, the kind of re-addressing of nature or incorporation of nature into architecture. So there is a possibility of going back to these no frills now that we are trying to incorporate all these technologies of sustainability as a kind of new aesthetic of explicitation. This is a kind of slaughter-like term that implies that perhaps this economy, this chibness, that sustainability is going to force upon us, can be used rather than using all these lead-labeling afterwards as a way of justifying certain architectural decisions. I think the great potential that these technologies have for us is precisely to make expressive from the beginning of the project these new economies that are going to be imposed upon us in the very near future. That's what I believe the territories to be explored lie ahead of us. Thank you very much.