Urbanism in the 21st Century

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Louis Jones. I am a Managing Director of JP Morgan Chase and we are proud to be the sponsor of the city track here at this club - Ideas Festival. The city everywhere or even it's in the 21st century. These are things that resonate of our firm as well. Just a few quick points, you have heard in another break out session Jeff Immelt's comment that "Green means green". For JP Morgan, we we embrace that convergence. The opportunity to deploy capital, and sustain our environment is both the right thing to do for our country, but also the right thing to do for our share holders. Just a few data points and then we will get into the program. Last year for example, we raised one and a half billion dollars in equity for the wind power market. We have a billion dollars in our own port folio for investments in renewable energy. We are a significant investor in farm - of wind farm investing - two billion dollars in 2003. And recently we announced that we would be building at the World Trade Center site of the World Trade Center, a $1.3 million square foot facility to house our investment bank that will be lead platinum. That's the highest level of certification that a building can get in terms of being sustainable. And from the part of the world where we manage the money and invested of institutional investors or my colleague Doug Lawrence here and I have a good fortune in working a real estate division. There we until we have some $50 billion under management. But we are really excited about because dough and I would be not really involved in this latest strategy as the large of a fund that will focus on river markets of first ring suburbs. But has that part of essential strategy being green. We too believe that this is a convergence of necessity and opportunity. So enough of the infomercial, lets get to the program. Our solo practitioner for this session Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University. His recent book "The City: A Global History" will be available outside after this session here and he will be available for signing. A veteran journalist who has become an exceptional writer, he is also currently working on the study of the future of the New York middle class. He lives with his family in West New York City often known as Los Angeles. It's my pleasure to introduce Joel Kotkin Joel. Well, thank you very much I what I would like to do is, I am going to try to run through a lot of stuff and from since I am originally from New York as you might guess, I can speak very fast and since I am from Los Angeles I don't care whether you understand me or not. So I am going to I am just going to try to employ what I think is going to happen with the future cities, how we got to where we are, and then just throw out some pretty, and hopefully provocative ideas and then lets have an exchange, a lot of the things that I am going to say are somewhat contrary and then some what against what you might read everyday in the New York Times. And I have nothing against the New York Times, I was a columnist there and I like them very much but. Some of these things that we hear about because we have talked to our friends and therefore we believe they are true like you know, it's like the old thing about Pawan Kell was being surprised when Richard Nixon was elected because all our friends didn't vote for him. And you know, if - I wonder and I would think well, you know, most of the people in the world are you know, are short Jewish guys from New York who like sushi. So you know, you have to try to use a little bit of analytical strength and also a little bit of ability to look at statistics and long term trends. Well, first of all why is this issue so important? But the first thing is this - Cities are where humanity is going, this year interestingly enough. I don't know if anyone has mentioned, so first year majority of people in world live in cities. That's really amazing when you think about it. In 1,800, less than two percent of the people in the world lived in cities. And in 1,900, five percent. So in a little over a century we went from five percent to 50 over 50 percent. Now most of those people live in the overcrowded, congested cities of the third world and you know, their urban dream is often a nightmare although I think it's important to understand that for them living in the city is still better than starving in the country side. So but that's where the most the population is, and so the question is "how do we create a better urban paradigm?" And the way I am going to start is to try to figure out how we do that in a way that's really more friendly not just for the environment, but for those strange by pets called humans. And how we can make a urban environment using new technology that is much more sustainable overtime. Now I am going to focus mainly on what's happening in the west and in the United States. But I think what's happening here over time will be applicable to these other places because one of the thesis in the history of cities was that cities everywhere are have more in common than are different about them. And that throughout history, they could all be some more or like, the book starts in Tenochtitlan which is where Mexico city is, you know when they made the subway in Mexico city, they ran into a lot of Tenochtitlan and this diary of a Spanish soldiers Spanish soldier comes there, no contact with Spain, no contact with any civilization that he knew and yet he could recognize in Tenochtitlan, a city which had the things that he saw, it had it was sacred, it had a temple in the middle, it was safe, it had walls around it and there was a huge market place sacred, safe and busy. So cities have certain things in common about them, no matter where they are. Now if we translate this now into the 21st century what we are going to see I think is a year in which individual's family's businesses who have ever more freedom to locate where they want to live and how they want to live. And the process you are going to see a lot of diverse environments. One of the things I say in the book I am writing now about how America is going to be in let's say 2050 even when we have 400 million people and that's the reality, you could shut down the border tomorrow. The process is there, we are going to have another 100 million people and how we are going to live with them. And I think what we are going to see is less and less about is there going to be, a dense urban future, is it going to suburban future, is it going to be a ex urban future and really the answer is going to be more about and than or. When you have a 100 million people you are going to have to come up with lots of different kinds of environments. Now what's going to drive this geographic diversity more than anything else, thought changes in transportation and telecommunications which is going to allow for the spread of urban culture to the most remote parts of the nation and I think over time to even the most remote parts of the world. So when this configuration I think we are going to see, something very different happening. Now historically most culture was formed in the largest possible cities. The bigger the city, the more important that city was. In the 21st century, what we are seeing now is that a small place can be very very important and sometimes more important than a much larger place. And I will just mention some places like well where we are right now or Park city or Jackson Hole, there is probably more influential people, may be more decisions, steering capital in those small places, than there are in many medium sized or even larger cities. If you look in the developing world or in the new cities that have been build since the 1940s, you can see it or have grown since 1940s, a Singapore or a Tel Aviv is much more influential in the world than cities, lets say, Cairo, five times ten times as large. So what I want to do is give you an idea about this process of diffusion that's taken place and then explain how it happened starting with the movement to suburbia, second to the movement of the multi- power cities and then toward Serbia and finally to a place like Aspen which can and in a sense even though its in the country side is actually really part of this global city, this represents a radical shift in how we should think about things, because it really tells us some thing very very different. Historically speaking, the city was - where all our culture ideas took place and where they were discussed. There was no Aspen ideas festival on ancient Greece. The - this took place in the agora in the market place. The - in contrast, the periphery the country side was the domain of localism, Kin ship families, folk religion superstition, this what Karl Marx talked about the Idiocy of rural life. Nothing interesting happened in the country side. In contrast, it was the city were every thing interesting happened, Socrates expresses this sensibility with a remark. The country places and trees don't teach me any thing and the people in the city do. So there was a very strong sense and that sense really existed in almost all cities, and almost all societies into the 17th and 18th century. The country side might be a convenient place to go to escape from the city, but it wasn't, where things happened, it wasn't where ideas were, it wasn't where culture was, it wasn't where decisions were made. I mean that was true of Tenochtitlan or Rome or Constantinople, Baghdad or Cairo, or Kaifeng or Beijing or Tokyo, the city was where all the action was. This process spread - I believe reach its apex with the Industrial revolution in Britain, the first country where the majority of people actually lived in cities. With the Industrial revolution did, it changed the nature of how cities were built and how big they could become. The technology of railroads, the technology of the telegraph changed every thing. So really you can almost take European history and say, it really is a tremendous continuity all the way up to about 1,800 and then it radically changes. Now what change was amazing productivity, Detolf talks about going to England in the 1830s and he said, every where I turned, there was things that would make a tourist's heart leap. These bridges that - the steel bridges and the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, but there was another side of it and I think this is where we began to see the move towards dispersion and that is if you go to - you can see it today, if you go to Mexico city or Bombay, the kind of misery that the Industrial city created. Berger Anglais, wrote about this, I always make my students read the condition of the working class in England, because it is one of the great books of urban history and the world that he describes is really horrific, there were amazing health problems. And historically, cities have had the higher death rates in the country side, but they went to a tremendous extreme in the 19th century, the death rates in the 19th century Manchester, was three times higher than the its running country side, and you think about it, Manchester had Doctors and the country side didn't occurs that might have helped them. But the difference is the tremendous diseases that were, in these places were amazing, then there was a social dislocation. The treatment of young children in the Industrial revolution, one of the things now I will get back to the end is, Industrial revolution broke that familial tie where the the children and very often the spouse spoke with the husband in the house hold and that was - and people may be they walked a little bit to work, but this separation that took place, where we yanked young children many times 10, 12 years old out of the house hold and had them work for complete strangers, this was un thinkable, in the past. And there - so in the book, I remember reading some of these, I did a lot of reading of diaries and there was a West Indian slave holder who comes at the city of Brad Ford, the Industrial city and he comment that he thought it was impossible for any human being could be so cruel as to require a child of nine to work twelve and a half hours a day. This was a slaver and he was talking about, what he thought was unquestionable cruelty in Industrial England. So what we saw was, this terrible ranching of the human spirit and this is what towards some of the great the great German sociologist wrote about this excitement that the city had. You were autonomist, you weren't tied by family, you had freedom to do things and at the same time a kind of psychic pain and that was something that when you read Sigmund Freud in Vienna around the same time, similar was in Berlin, he would talk about civilization and - civilization and it's discontents, about the pain of this transformation, what he called the cultural frustration of people who would come from building up cultures saying that culture completely destroyed. And I think this is basically where we begin to see something change in the nature of cities. One of the things is that historically the allies always lived close in the city and actually as we still see it in Addway today and certainly many European and Latin American cities, the very elite live in the center. This began the change in the industrial revolution, because you know who wants to live next to a toxic place. So what we started to see for the first time is the city was seen as a place to make money but now where you would spend your leisure, not where you would socialize. So what you found was that the owners of the factories as quickly as they could moved out the cities where they were making their money and they moved to the country side, they found the the daughters of faceless aristocrats, and moved to a bigger state then they got a masterpiece theatre and became very sensitive. We always wonder what these people will live in this tremendous wealth. They never work, did you ever notice this? Any of the none of these people ever work and they could really worry about being sensitive, but meanwhile they are you know, they are the ones who are indirectly sending the nine year old student to work 12 hours in their factory. Now the middle class didn't have that option. They had to run the factories, they had to be near the train stations, near the telegraph, so they started to do what made it sense, they moved upward from their stand and they started the first suburbs. And the beginning of suburbia's, we know it today. That the idea that the middle class would move out of the inner city, started with the industrial revolution. In the past by the way suburbs were seen as kind of day class A where the poor people went because they couldn't afford to live cost of the center. And of course the people were really suffered with the working class. And the working class was stuck in these, in these places for a very long time. But overtime through their own political struggles and in alliance in some times with the middle class, they began to say there is got to be a better way and in England I which really was the crucible of all these new ideas. They began to think about, may be we shouldn't put people in the cities so densely. The cities of the industrial era were about three to five times denser than medieval cities. And because you had people living on top of each other in a way that you had never seen it before and the British thinking became, may be we should try something else. May be we should move people out of the city and give them a chance to live in a different way in what Ebenezer Howard called Garden Cities. He suggests self contained towns of may be 30,000, it have there own employment base neighborhoods, a pleasant cottages and be surrounded by rural areas. Howard wrote "town in country must be married and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization." And this is really where we begin to see this great move of the suburbia. Interestingly enough the beginnings of suburbia are not seen as a reactionary step. They were into us by H.D. Wells, by Berger Anglais, by Thomas Carlo. They were seen as an enlightened way of reacting to the problems of the industrial era. So this period obviously came very popular in the United States. United States was particularly well suited for suburbanization. For one thing it had a lot more land than England. And America has a great ethos about owning property and the opportunity to own property was very important. So even as America became more urbanized, the desire for something else a connection to the country side, a place to buy where you could buy a home, became greater and greater. So basically Americans began to look for something different. And I was asking you know, when you want to see how why that happened? You can go, if you were in New York City, I was just you go to the Tenement Museum in New York. I Took my oldest daughter there, recently. And you are really and may be 400 500 square feet a family of four, five, six people and very often living and working. She was amazed that that's how people lived. You know, our ideas today, we regain think that all of these dense urban neighborhood, they were great, they were everybody looked out for every one they were really wonderful. Well I took my daughter to a greater authority my mother and my mother grew up in a place called Brownsville. If any of you are familiar, - anybody here from New York, well, no Brownsville. I won't use her colorful language exactly, but she said it was crummy neighborhood then than it's a crummy neighborhood now. How did people live in Brownsville? So I asked I had my daughter talk to about, oh well they lived in a two bedroom place with five children, two parents, and of course the only wild life they saw was what you didn't want to say, and so for my mother and for almost my entire family, and I think this is basically what happened in many American cities, the idea was let's move further out. Now in some cases that move was further out and broken enough into queens, in other places, it was to move even further, but the idea was to get a house, a little bit of space, a little bit of territory of your own, a little bit of privacy. It wasn't a huge dream, but it was a big dream, it was a it was an important dream and it was some of the people wanted, so what happened was first people would go to where they could walk, then they started having transit and people went out there and then of course you had automobiles, so what happened was once people had this choice, they moved to suburbs, now there were post modern historians - that they were brain washed into the suburbs, they really didn't want to live in those, you know two room apartments with five kids. I don't think that's what happened. I think people move to the suburbs, the government made it more possible for them to do with that for sure, but that's where they wanted to go and they made sense from the go, so if you look at the 1950s, about 84 percent of all the population growth, took place in the suburbs, and now many would say wow you know the suburbs, they are they are stupefied, they are culturally barren, they have home erases, they have been claiming for the declaim of - I mean I would love these some times New York is really make me love, you know they are really funny, some times they say well, they are responsible for the decline of the inner city as if people were had to be locked in conditions they didn't want to live, or they are they are responsible for, that the widening of peoples, baselines there the cause of peak oil, they brought us into Iraq, basically any thing bad is as part to the suburbs, but I think you we should look at it in a different way. It was really some thing that was I think essays of DJ Woodley purposed it was a rough Communitarianism back by economic prosperity. Now there are many things wrong with suburbs and I talk about those and how we can correct some of them. We have to understand some thing. We created the first mass middle class in the history of the world, where people actually own their own land and own their own home. In 1940, 45 percent of Americans owned their own home, in 2005 it was approaching 70 percent. If there is any thing basic to the American experience and to American successes been this. Now, is this coming to an end? Well I think the process is continuing, in 1920, 20 percent of the population lived in the 30 densest counties in the country today about 11percent do. In the first half of the 2000s, nearly 90 percent of all growth in Metropolitan areas took place in the periphery. So we take a population increase in all 54 largest metropolitan areas of about 10 million of the past five years suburbs and exburbs accounted for all about 82,100, slightly over 92,000 - 92 percent. So basically what we have continued is this trend despite every thing you read in the news paper about emptiness or just moving back into the city and all the real estate speculation, your growth is been in the suburbs and the growth is been both entering suburbs and particularly outer in suburbs. Now why is this happening, I think the biggest reason is again what one historian called the Universal aspiration and its interesting in the same trends are happening in places like Japan and Western Europe where this great trends of systems were gasoline cost $6, about $6 a gallon, despite all those it isn't some thing in human spirit and particularly the American spirit that wants to live in some degree of privacy and some space of their own. In the United States this process is greatly accelerated by the fact that population is growing much faster and than than virtually every advanced industrial country and actually is beginning to grow faster than China's. Why is that happening, well I think that's really you know interesting question, I a friend of mine a demographer Bill was in Japan recently and they said well Bill, we don't understand how does their population grow faster than ours and Bill said well you know a few have ask like questions you have got more problems than I think, I mean fundamentally Americans are you know procreating more than other people in part I think because we have more space, part because of immigration - and part because of a kind of essential optimism, so what we are seeing now is a creation of cities that are different in other sides, they are more suburban, they are they spread into larger and larger areas. What we are seeing is a very serious change of how cities look? The conventional view is a city is New York city or Chicago it's got a core and then neighbor hood out side of it and then neighbor hood further out, but every thing runs around that core. We are really living in an era with the fast majority of the urban growth in America takes place in completely different kinds of cities. We are not creating more New York's and Chicago's, we are creating more Los Angeles as much as you might ate them, that's what happening, Ally is the original of the Xerox machine, all the growth in America looks more like Ally than New York, the amount of growth is taking place in gentrified urban course is so small as a percentage has to be relatively insignificant from a economic point of view. Like the suburbs more urbanites don't like these kind of cities, Los Angeles is always been hated Shelby my former editor of the LA Times knows about how unpopular LA is, in the 1930s it was called the anti city or 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis, Lesser city than a perpetual convention, all this actually called it the city of dreadful joy, well William Faulkner called that the plastic ass hole of the world, which I am sure many of you agree with, and now I think these views are short sited, just as the Industrial city was different than the classical renaissance city, the city of today, the LA, the Phoenix even to some extent the Denver is different. Fundamentally different because it was born in a completely different era, an era of air transport, an era of the automobile and now the era of the internet, so it's completely different kind of thing. Now what's very interesting about it is this new city is basically a multi polar city other words, you take downtown Los Angeles, it employs may be four percent of the people in the LA area, whereas the Manhattan employs 50 percent of the people in New York, almost all growing, American cities have between five and 10 percent of their employment in their urban course. So we are seeing some thing very very different. Now I would think what's interesting about these cities is all though they are more spread out, they are following a pattern that that predates the Industrial revolution, if you look at the great cities of the past, if we go to London, Paris, Tokyo, there is no downtown London, downtown Paris, downtown Tokyo, there are series of different polls some of which have different functions, one area might be for books and other area might be for finance, another area might be for government, another area might be a religious center. They are not all in one area, in fact the notion of downtown - this idea that we can create of downtown and we'll open choo choo trains into to it and that's how every body will leave and, every thing will be determined by how far we are from the center is actually or fairly new concept. It also the first mention the word downtown was 1836, it was not in common usage to 19 early 1900s. So what we were seeing is a - not a break with urbanism, but in some ways a return in a different form - the ways cities had been formed before. That is multi powered with many different places. Now where we going with these multi powered cities, this I think was perhaps one of the great ways that cities will grow in the future, that if we take a used in the Phoenix, Los Angeles what you are seeing now is a densification process, not going all to the downtown, but lots of different centers even like if we go to a place like Irvine I was working on a project where they were starting to build some more higher density housing and Irvine was actually doing quite well. What you are seeing is new housing and lets say the inner brings of used in in the third ward, in African American area, new kinds of Urban growth, there are not urban growth in the way we have seen it in the past. The new kind of urban growth is diverse protean, it doesn't follow the traditional urban hierarchy, the prevailing characteristic is their diversity and the range of functions, one of the great things about it if you go to a city like Houston is the way that ethnic groups are able to express them selves in the way, that's very very different in terms of building business centers and multi powered business centers there is the Galveston corridor which is kind of a auto reliant casbah run predominantly by Asian import export companies. There are districts that are that are run by people from Vietnam or India, Latin America, so what you have seen is this new kind of translation of relatively dense notes in these urban areas and I think over time what you are going to see is a whole new kind of urban life totally different than what our ideas of urban life like I love New York, I am a native of New York, I like visiting it, but the model of this developed New York, San Francesco and Chicago is not going to be able to accommodate even those part of the population about 10-15 million, we are going to want to live in cities out of the out of the 100 million that are going to be coming on line. So I think that the urban growth is going to be in Phoenix and in Houston and places like that and it is going to have this very very different form. Now the other thing that I think is going to happen is that most of the growth out side of these cities will take place in mainly the areas that are - are the out skirts of all the big cities, but particularly in in the sun belt. Now why is that happening? I will just give you a few reasons why that's going to continue to happen. One is, you don't want most people like the suburbs, I have looked at every survey I can get my hands on, we were specifically looking at cities. I have looked at Kansa city, Los Angeles, Delhi, Philadelphia, and in every case people who lived in the suburbs felt better about their communities, than the people who lived in the city. It just seems to be the case. Another big factor is single family houses, about 80 percent most survey just show want to live in a city, and they want to live in the single family house, so if they live in the city, if they can do it and have a single family house they are going for. If they have to move to the suburbs they will also - lot of them just say oh you didn't know people would like to walk the things, and that's true. But will they give up a single family house, and live in a small condo so they can walk the things probably enough. But the two things, I want to focus on right now, and understanding these terms are the two big demographic forces, one is ageing boomers, the second one is immigrants and minorities. In 2015 nearly one or three children in America would be a immigrant or the child of an immigrant. The overall, the total percentage of immigrant households in America, has now reached about 15 percent and is going to go a way over that. One thing is because the Immigrants are having children. What's interesting when you look at the surveys of what the immigrants want? You know some of us second, third, fourth generation people might have the stain for suburbs and we are going to slow them. If you want to see the real growth of suburbs in America today, you got to look at what's going on with immigrants, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hispanics go into into Southern California the movement towards San Gabriel valley and what we call the Ibelin empire very heavily driven by immigrants today in the Washington DC area about 87 percent of all foreign immigrants live out side the district of Columbia. So what you are seeing is immigrants overloading with their fee and they are voting for suburbs, that means the suburbs are going to be very very different places. Increasingly in most regions in this country, you want to find a good Indian restaurant or Chinese restaurant you are not going to find that in the inner city, you are going to find it, in this I the in the suburbs. If you want to take a look at a friend of mine took me recently out in Fort Bend county out in the outer reaches of Houston and that saying some thing and he took me towards huge new Hindu temple which has been assembled piece by piece from India into this very distant suburb of Houston, virtually all the growth in the middle class for the among immigrants is taking place in the suburbs, so I think that's really what's happening. The other thing what we were seeing increasingly is the African American population those who are making it into the middle class, they are also moving into the suburbs between 1980 and 1994 the percentage of African Americans living in the periphery grew by about 50 percent, now was more than one out of every three. So when you think about America in 2015 you think about where am I going see this amazing diverse country and many ways you are not going to see the urban glamour zones of Manhattan and San Francesco. San Francesco by the way is loosing African American population, its working class Asian population middle class Asian population is also moving out its Hispanic population again those who don't have lots of money, they are moving out. In many ways, the inner parts of the cities that are recovering are actually less diverse than the suburbs that are all round them. The other big source of growth is going to be the ageing boomers, I just did a show for the Minnesota public radio on this, one of the great trends of cool aid that are taken by real estate developers as well you know they are all going to sell their home and somewhat they are going to move to the city. Working is just on the study, every study I have done every study where that shows most boomers are not going to move to the inner city. Why first of all the nice one the few ones exist are very expensive. Most of boomers have lived and they suffer all their lives. They are not likely to want to live in a dancer environment they also they have a house that they have a house that they paid for. And they are going to spend a lot of money to live in a very, very expensive place and take on a lot of more of that. And another big thing is what happens when we ages and I hate to talk about this in personal terms but it says and they say. You know, we just, just slow down a little bit all those hip cooled bars and stuff don't mean as much more when you are 55 as when you are 25. I am sorry I think that's pretty much okay so I am - I know there are always those guys in ally with pony tails driving around in posh - I guess and there is always Jerry bus, but but the reality is that people as they age they they want to slow things down a little bit. What are the two biggest activities they grow as we get out older? Gardening and bird watching. I don't think are you are going to do that in a condo so the fact of the matter is most of the boomers are going to stay pretty much where they are, also many of them are going to work, continue to work its also where their churches are. It's also where their children are. And so I think if we looked over time we are going to see that that the boomers are going to continue to stay in the suburban and they are going to be a big factor as in creating more and more opportunities I think for companies in in that area. Now if the boomers go anywhere they are going to go further out and that's almost everything we see happening and I think what's going on that you are seeing a lot of migration away from the suburban cities beginning to move the country site, now if I am going to take a wild as prediction which I I cant tolerate that totally support like everything else. I think they will be continue to moving into the country side we do see lot of movement of we are basically two groups one the empty nester baby boomer types its sometimes moving home to take of elderly parents sometimes are because they want to slow down their life sometimes who are equity refugees otherwise they sell the house in Silicon Valley that's more than 1.2 million they buy a place in St. George, Buta for 400,000 and they live on the on the difference. There are lot of reasons why this is happening the other groups seems to of the age 30-35 people are also begin to see living in in these new places, this is going to change the nature of urbanism again. Suburbs are going to change, cities are going to change, but the countries are not going to change I will all think to do Fargo now that's the place always bring some laughs. I first started to going to Fargo, it there was really kind of dieing about 10-15 years ago. In the last and 15 years has become a major hi-tech center, its going populations grown 25-30 percent. And the whole place changed it was dieing small town when I started going there. It was so bad I used to bring my own coffee because the coffee was a terrible now its filled with people who are educated they are very nice cultural institutions you know, you go there and you will go there and you, you don't go to the downtown there will nice boutique hotel and you will have a closing store for metro sexual so, you know, some of these happening in far ago I was there the other day and we had dinner in a restaurant which was quite expensive and there are filled with people dressed in black in their 30s and 40s in Fargo North Dakota, I think what you are going to see overtime is the continued movement of people into small towns I think baby boomers in particular will dominate them immediate don't understand the cost problems for young couples trying to buy a house, trying to get a start and the countries either I think it is going to be very, very attractive to that, and as they moves to country side the country side will become more urbanize. Same thing with baby boomers. Baby boomers moving the places in the rocky mountains in the apple agent trail in all these other places the Ozarks they are going to change the nature of those by just and you are starting to say urban sophistication connected by the internet in these places again you have to understand the importance of the internet all those when I used to start going to the small towns 10-15 years ago you couldn't get the Wallstreet Journal, and the New York Times or it came 3-4 days late. Today you can sit in Forgo in North Dakota have the same information as somebody working in downtown Chicago. So there is really being a fantastic change that's going on, and I think this means it's not the end of the cities, but a change in the nature of the cities, and what we consider a city? So as we think about this next 100 million Americans, I want to think about a future where that would for families and for the middle class and I think that future is going to be a new, what I would call urban archipelago it will have the traditional city, it will have the multi power city, it will have the suburbs, the exurbs and increasingly the country side. Now I think what's what's going to happen to some of our cities and I am thinking particularly of new certainly Manhattan, San Francesco, Boston, is they all probably going to continue to buy for gate, in other words they are much too expensive for the vast majority of people to live in, I was interviewing a developer in New York, and we were doing a study of middle class you know we are really spending a lot of time in Brooklyn, Queens because you know really middle class Manhattan is just not going to have much future and he said what do you mean my friends Son just moved to Manhattan and they are middle class and I said yeah, and he said yeah, he just pulled an appointment here and said oh yeah, I said how much did you spent. He said oh 1.2 million and his father brought it for him, I said, you know what if your father can buy you $1.2 million apartment, you are not middle class and but you know those are the perceptions, but I think what you are going to see is these place is becoming very expensive and in many ways very bifurcated, with a population that services this very wealthy population As a friend of mine said about San Francesco, its become a cross between Parma and Calcutta, and I think that there is going to be some truth to that now I just want to say briefly I don't think this is the way, it has to be I think the cities that the basics would port schools, neighbor hoods, they could retain some of this middle class but frankly, I am not sure most mayors are going to be serious about it, easier to get a architect museum built in and to have a block of Jazz clubs and say I turned this city around than have to do the hard work that most mayors don't want to do. But even if they do it right, most of the growth in the future will not take place in the European core, it will take place in these communities that I am been talking about whether they are in the country side, the exurbs or the suburbs. Now what I think will be happening in these places will become more and more like cities, other words they will begin to have centers like you see a lot of them even most being transformed into sort of urban life style centers are they are building housing around around them. You have many of these small towns that became suburbs, now redoing their downtowns to give them a sense of identity, and a great example is Naperville I don't know of instances, is one of the places have done it Falltown California were the what used to be just pure suburb that surround that kind of funky all downtown that no body liked, now that downtown has become the urban core for a surrounding basically suburban village part of that archipelago, some cases they are building the villages from scratch like in the Woodlands out side of Houston now lot of people say well this isn't authentic, this is the traditional city Jane Jacobs wouldn't like it. But you know as a friend of my architecture, David said you know European visitors came to New York and they went to Chicago and they went to Cincinnati in 19th century, they took American cities were pretty damn looking too and they didn't understand what was happening either. So what I would like to do is leave you with the idea of lets try to imagine what this future is going to look like with its 100 million more people, and I think what we are going to see is a spread of urban culture like we have never seen before. You can see it for instance in the growth of regional theaters, there have been about 335 regional theaters developed in the last 10 to 20 years, they are also to the new cultural institutions being built whether its or county or Orange county California, and these places are now in many ways competitors with traditional urban centers in terms of culture. And I think even more important is the movement of what I would call the sacred space of churches. I have been following of the movement of churches and trying to understand how the cities doing one of the first things what I am sort of trying to understand the city is how the [0:44:22] ____ catholic church is doing, are they expanding, or are they contracting? If the catholic church is expanding that city has, it's generally healthy because they creating catholic schools which are one of the tools of up ward mobility and part of the social network. What we were seeing increasingly is the catholic churches, the mega churches, the masses, the synagogues because I mention the Hindu temple, the small Christian churches and particularly the African American ones now moving to the suburbs and that becoming a new part of of what knits that community together? So we are not seeing it as the end of urbanism, the death of urbanism, because I have been attacked for saying these things as as been and I said I think it's a new kind of urbanism, an urbanism that's spreading into more and more and more places as these places begin to become more interesting places to live. Finally I want to talk about what this means for families and how what I really see here happening over the next 20 or 30 years, and I think what you are going to see is Suburbs and exurbs beginning to develop as job centers even more than they are now and becoming places that people actually consider their city. I think you are going to see more and more people not computing from the suburbs so I think the bed room suburb is going to be out of fashion in 10 to 20 years. First of all the tremendous numbers of people are working at home that is growing very rapidly today if we take the New York city there are now more teller computers than there are people they take the most trends. I was talking the other day with Jane to pray at IBM consulting, it are over 70 percent of the area 6000 people who work for IBM consulting work at, many of the most progressive companies are doing this, I think in the future have you have tried to attract young talent. They are going to ask you why am I computing and I have to go from one computer screen to another, it make absolutely no sense. Now this going to change everything what I see is people living closer to where they work or working at home having the distance between work and life began to breakdown and this is in many ways reminiscent to what we had before the industrial revolution so what are my principle is the post industrial society works much more like the pre industrial society than we would have ever expected. And I think that, that we are going to an enormous possibility for new kind of urban life. Finally I just want to talk a little bit about because one people say well what about global warming blah, blah, blah. What we are going to do about all about energy and should we change and live in denser spaces. This one of the one of the big principles new urbanites will now use because I guess peak oil didn't work and I guess people's base lines didn't work either. Well I think if we think about the environment we should begin to understand that high density development creates what's called heed ions they actually are not necessarily very environmentally friendly, what I see happening is a archipelago somebody calls smart pro, they goes over large amount of space but nevertheless has a lot of green space in between, usually basically lower density on housing which by the way it also tends to use less energy and less water than the denser areas. One thing you don't want to do by the way is do with the city of ally that build in the middle of a hot a real heat Island to build a [0:47:54] ____ reflecting metal roof. I saw one in Phoenix the other day I couldn't believe how much how much light was being brought back so I think what we are thinking about is really a new kind of urban futures here in the United States. I think we need a little more ebonies would a little less a little less Manhattan penis envy and a lot more potential to human scale. And I think that we can start to see this urban archipelago going with people working at home or close to the home with lots of green space in between as being a really human solution to the century of in which the majority of people live in cities, and I really see a enormous potential on this. Finally I just want to say what is this mean long term to the rest of the world, rest of world listen to America obvious and so I have being looking at the cities around the world and but some work with with a client who is doing a lot of work in the middle east and I think that what we need to see is that trying to take the industrial age model of Western urbanism and putting it in the third row, its probably not that good an idea its very energy consumptive, it tends to create tremendous concentrations of wealth and poverty its it makes it very difficult to get to work even as an effect on birth rates and if you go to a place like Seoul Korea which is one of the most dense concentrated cities everything that you know, urbanites would like you know, 40 storied high raises every where. They have the that now one of the lowest birth rates in the world so I went a Buddhist Seminary and I asked him about why is this cases as well if you have to wait till your 40 to buy a 400 square feet and then you have to get on a train to go sow out of your 400 square foot apartment you are too tired to have children and I think that this is one of the things we are creating, we are creating things that look great that architects like to build you know, like they have to play with these giant recto sense. When I am thinking about how human beings really need to live how they want to live and I think what we need to do in the developing world is being create a more dispersed kind of existence and I think it's begging to happen. Recent surveys are showing that in the mega cities like Buenos Ares, Calcutta and Mexico city have actually more people leaving and coming. I think if you look in Mexico you want to feel good about Mexico you go to some of the small that are running cities because those are places where life is much is more worth living as one person at Mexico cities beloved is rob that of its economic logic, people are looking for different environments they are looking for smaller cities that will can run more officially as supposed to these mega cities again Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv are worth much better than Cairo, Bangkok, Dakota and Minoa which are much larger. I think people are beginning to look at the question of decentralization and dispersion as something that works, there is an enormous appeal to this model for people and because all you have to do is go to the San Gabriel Valley in southern California and see how many people from Taiwan are living in single family houses and what you might cross brow people are looking for a different way of life and not necessarily sure that putting people, and particularly families in high raised buildings is going to work over time I don't think it's socially sustainable and I think there are questions about its environment so ultimately I just want to suggest a whole bunch of ideas which are probably completely contradictory to everything else referred about cities but at least I continue to think a little bit about it. And I think these issues are going to be very important because we live in a in a an age of global cities, we live in an age in which the city is a center of the global society, and I think it's time for us to think very seriously of the alternatives of how to make to that that global majority live a better life not just here in America but every where. Thank you.