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JULIAN BEINART: It's going to be a strange new rhythm, not
turning up here on Tuesdays and Thursdays endlessly.
It's been an incredible saga.
We have a minute, because Thursday will not
be a good time for doing it.
I'd like to spend five minutes or 10 minutes with you.
I can't ask for advice as to how to do it better.
Thank God I won't have to.
But I'd be interested in your general comments
about what we tried to do.
I'd like to pass it on, too.
Since 1956, this class has been taught every year.
That's 44-- 57 years.
After 57 years, it should be retired, which it is.
Whether it will continue in any form or another
is not up to me.
There's a rule, thank God, where that if you retire,
your successors are independent.
They have to bear the burden of their predecessors.
And fortunately, this class will be
recorded for archival purposes, so they
won't be able to get rid of me that easily.
Let's just spend a few minutes having
a little discussion about this enormous problematic area
dealing with the non-European, non-American world,
and non-selective Asian world.
It's called, in some terms, the developing world.
Now, the new name for it is the Global South.
That is the term which has been appropriated by the newest
attempt to galvanize international and professional
interest in an apparently new way of doing things.
You must recall that I said that 1950 was the first time
a book in English--
and probably in any language--
appeared on the subject of the so-called world
of international poverty.
This was not Freidrich Engels writing about Manchester,
or what could be seen as its equivalent.
But Charlie Abrams at MIT was a lawyer who had worked in India,
and decided to come back here and write about it.
He was a New Yorker writing about the emerging problems
of population growth and poverty.
It's curious that when looking back
on the situation in Manchester in 1830,
when the young German could write about and analyze
the industrial poverty, that the sudden leap of economy
had taken in Great Britain only since some 80 years before,
if we count 1750 as the beginning date.
Engels and Marx were--
Engels particularly was dissatisfied with the pace
of recalibration in England.
He dismissed the moves of the Chartist Group
as being ineffective.
The British move first through charity, then
through the state and the nation,
paying attention to what is called social housing.
It was definitive.
It was the first nation in the world
to tackle this problem systematically-- not
systematically.
Partially.
But had Engels waited around in England until today,
he might have seen that it had measures of success,
despite Maggie Thatcher's involvement
in the interim over a period.
And keep on remembering that the British are
slow but determined.
I quoted sir Joseph Paxton, the builder of the Crystal
Palace, the gardener who said, we do things
by common sense and technology.
Almost everything was commonsensical,
and even in regard to science and the development
of massive waves of technological innovation
the world had ever seen.
Above all, I remind you that what happened
was the first destruction of the Malthusian trap, which
is fundamental.
As urbanists, you should remember
as one of the key factors in human development.
In my little talk on Friday, I'll start with, I think,
the first, and that's the increase
in human brain size from 400 cubic centimeters to 1,450,
and what caused that.
The Malthusian trap, you will recall,
equated population growth with death.
The stable size of population was all
that agricultural innovation could supply, or could
forestall.
And the sudden capacity to unleash a population
to move relatively freely with the advent of the larger
migration patterns that I think that we see now, where--
anyway.
London became the largest city in the world
in a very quick manner.
We're not lecturing about London,
although it's tempting to recall London.
Such a great story.
Engles took to the road.
He and Marx were in Paris in 1848.
And then Engels spiriting himself all over Europe,
nurturing, evolving Marxism, until eventually, of course,
after his death, Russia succeeded in attempting
to transform the world.
That transformation was built on the image
of industrial poverty.
No advertisement-- I mean, the book
Sotsgorod, written by Milyutin, the Russian architect
and bureaucrat, starts off with a photograph
of the industrial city, smoke belching out of pipes,
workers disenfranchised.
I can't think of anything else that
forced the publicity of the attempt to nationalize poverty.
The story of the so-called third world is different.
The battle against poverty in Europe
was on the basis of a history of development.
There are very poor people in Vienna today.
Vienna, since the liberals took over from the royalty in 1870,
1860s, went through various exercises, including the rabid,
the rampant, period of Red Vienna in the 1920s after
the '14-'18 war, which produced the Karl Marx-Hof,
Matteotti-Hof.
It's interesting that the reaction of the major cities
that we looked at, the five major cities,
each produced a specific housing type.
London produced the residential square.
Paris produced the boulevard house, the Haussmannian
boulevard house.
Vienna produced the [INAUDIBLE],, the first large palace-like
condominium building, and the hof.
Barcelona produced the square block
of Cerda and the Ensanche.
So it's extraordinary that every major attempt
to reformulate the form of the city
produces a new housing type in its wake.
Chicago-- I don't know what it did.
Chicago probably didn't produce a housing type.
The genesis of the American suburban house
is old and starts with the British conquest.
So [INAUDIBLE] we switch back and then
analogically to the condition of poverty
in the developing world.
Of all the demonstrations of international cooperation,
I argued that the Olympic Games stands out as the most
regular and beneficent.
Nobody objects to the Olympic games.
They should have in '36, but they didn't.
Certainly, the Americans didn't.
The Olympic Games has been held, in all of its years since 1896,
only once in a city in which the majority of people are poor.
That's Mexico.
It's 1968.
The funding of the Olympic Games is either
in favor of a national economic gain,
advertising yourself on the international economic platform
or, at best, gratifying a national impulse
to be worldly and international and, even more at best,
to satisfy perhaps a plangent ambition in all of us
to be part of a good world, which is seldom available,
where people run in peace against each other
as they did in 1896 in Athens.
But the options for the developing world are few,
because of two meta-conditions--
first of all, the residue of colonialism
and the emancipation of wealth from sources such as Mexico,
from sources such as India through the cotton trade,
from almost every African country, gold and diamonds
and uranium from South Africa; secondly,
particularly in Africa, the incipient tradition
of tribalism.
Tribes were-- the world was born in Africa.
The first species of protohuman was discovered 1,000 miles
from where I was born.
So I'm one of the ancestors, Australopithecus africanus--
that's 400 million years ago.
Cities have only been going for 20,000.
What fraction of 400 million is 20,000?
It's a tiny percentage.
Could somebody calculate it?
20,000 out of 400 million--
what percentage?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] is one in 200.
[INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: It's 5%.
AUDIENCE: 0.5%.
JULIAN BEINART: 0.5%.
Yeah.
I conclude from that we've not even
started sorting out urbanism.
We've got a long way to go.
That should satisfy all of you who are young enough
to rejoice in the finding.
Tribalism is difficult--
AUDIENCE: How much do you think that urbanism
will attain a sort of maturity or homeostasis
because of the population rather than time?
JULIAN BEINART: Population projection is uncertain.
I'm going to read you a number of quotes from various sources
about this phenomenon.
The one that I find most dramatic touches
on what you've just asked.
"Urbanization in developing countries
may be the single greatest change in this century.
It is projected that developing countries will triple
their built-up urban area between 2000 and 2030
from 200,000 square kilometers to 600,000 square kilometers.
These added 400 square kilometers constructed
in just 30 years equal the world's built-up urban area
in 2000.
One could say humans are building a whole new world
at about 10 times the speed in countries with severe resource
constraints--
natural, fiscal, administrative, and technical."
Now, if this is correct, it's impossible.
Even China cannot build at this speed,
nor does the developing world, by its nature,
have all of the resources to do it.
Slum population in the world is expected--
is now stated at about 1 billion people
and is stated to double within the next 25 years.
Let me just-- perhaps I should have gone through some
of this material with you.
I always forget.
The world's largest cities is one
of the indices of not very much other than population size.
New York was the largest city in the world in 1950.
It's now sixth.
That's in the year 2000.
Of course, this is assuming that these measurements
are constant.
What constitutes New York I don't know.
As far as the standard metropolitan area,
I don't know how that compares to Kolkata's area.
But you can see the major European cities, New York,
London, Rhine-Ruhr, Paris, Chicago,
have diminished in relative size as the growth of cities has
taken place in Latin America and Asia--
not yet significantly in Africa--
certainly very large cities.
The second two pages are just cuttings from newspapers.
We saw John Snow's 1854 discovery
that cholera was waterborne and not miasmic in nature.
Here you see cholera now being used as an index
to determine 19th century conditions.
Feeding on 19th century conditions cholera,
spreads in Latin America.
Another phenomenon from this world, "A Lovely Madness--
Argentina Builds New Capital in Patagonia."
They didn't build the capital, but they proposed
building a new capital.
One of the urbanistic outcomes of large population growth
and independence has been the notion
that you need to establish your status through the building
of a new capital.
These have become famous icons in the world--
Brasilia, par excellence, but less significantly,
Chandigarh, in the Punjab, after the division
between Pakistan and India left the Punjab without a capital.
AUDIENCE: Islamabad.
JULIAN BEINART: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: Islamabad in Pakistan.
JULIAN BEINART: Islamabad in Pakistan, yes--
but the Indian part of what remains of the Punjab.
I did some work on Chandigarh with Charles Correa.
We published a piece in a book we edited on Chandigarh,
published in India in English.
The story of Chandigarh is very much
the story of trying to find an appropriate form
for a post-colonial post-native city.
Gandhi didn't leave any instructions
on how to build cities.
Neither did Marx.
The great minds of social change didn't take cities
into account.
Nor Sydney were they building belaboring questions
of architectural form--
they were too busy doing other things.
Chandigarh emerged as a complex mindset somewhere
between Indian leaders imagining India to be on a progress
transect towards modernism.
There, after all, were few Indian architects old enough
to be practicing significantly at the time.
They chose British architects, who
in turn said they weren't capable of doing the work
and recommended a French architect by the name of Le
Corbusier, who came to India, traveled around India,
and decided on a sectoral plan, which
he had played with in Bogota before coming to India,
without telling anybody, and evolved
a plan which is based on a series of five highway systems,
although there were no cars in India at the time.
I checked on the car population of India in 1950.
It was close to zero, except for a few thousand cars.
Chandigarh also didn't look into the future
as far as how people would develop from a designed point.
First of all, we have no way of dealing yet
with immigration as a result of building an economic growth
point.
There's an informal sector of Chandigarh--
both in Chandigarh and in the neighboring towns--
which outnumbers Chandigarh now.
Land control is weak.
Although the national government superintends over Chandigarh,
it sells land illegally north of the Capitol Complex
and in parts of the famous drawings of Corbusier
in the Himalayas in the distance.
I can go on at length about Chandigarh.
There is no attempt to look at the genius of Indian urbanism,
native Indian urbanism.
Nobody looked at Jaipur and tried to make sense of Jaipur.
Everything was to be, in the grasp of modernism,
a modern project.
At least Louis Kahn, when he went to build in Dhaka,
looked at the way bricklayers laid bricks and built
horizontal stripes in relation to the terraces that
were finished each day.
Chandigarh is now a center which is historic in nature, much
like an Italian hill town, and a periphery, which is a chaotic,
apparently.
It's two cities-- the one envisioned
by a single man and his cousin, the other
built by the free will allowed.
Some of Corbusier's regulations still stand today.
They are meaningless in relation to a bicycle shack
on the periphery.
Anyway, that's so much for Chandigarh.
Chandigarh will stand as an emblem of India's attempt
to calibrate itself.
And in that sense, one should feel proud of it.
It could have been better.
A generation later, some Indian architects
would have done the same thing.
There are buildings that are going
to stand for a long time--
the law courts, for instance--
whereas the governor's palace was never built, leaving the--
oh, I'm getting into too much detail.
You know Chandigarh, or you should know it well.
Next page is the page of optimism from a Toronto
newspaper arguing that things are
going very well in the world--
sharing graphs of decline in warfare; falling fertility--
not in the poorest countries, but in inhabited countries;
change in life expectancy rising everywhere--
sub-Saharan Africa, they're still under 50;
the environment shows an enormous drop in the production
of chlorofluorocarbons.
At best, the Third World does fairly well--
and so on.
Next page gives a projected number
of slum dwellers by region.
Next page shows projections for world population--
population growth losing 25% in Eastern Europe.
As you go from east to west in Europe,
population growth loses drastically
to the time we get to England, where it's relatively stable--
Northern Europe, Western Europe losing 0.2%.
At the same time, the major population growth in the United
States, plus 33%, is due to migration more
than anything else.
The worst conditions are in Western Africa, plus 127%--
122%; middle Africa, plus 175%; South Central Asia, plus 55%;
Western Asia, plus 79%; Japan, minus 17%.
People migrate to cities because there's a better chance
in life than where they are.
They're not dumb.
The notion that people are animals and behave foolishly
in going to cities is a foolish proposition.
The life lottery is large in cities.
It's always been that way.
Your daughter can go to school and marry a rich man.
It's unlikely to happen in a village.
There's a sanctity numbers which you cannot deny.
Number two-- staying in the rural areas is no blessing.
If only the rural areas is what our romantic vision of nature
suggests--
beautiful landscape, low involvement in work,
sitting on the porch, drinking rum at sundown,
all images from the colonial tourist world.
I grew up in South Africa with Afrikaans literature
being filled with images of this kind--
farmers sitting benightedly on their porch
whilst their black laborers slaved away in the distance.
And the young daughter who'd gone to the city
comes back with an illegitimate child,
and they all mourn the fact that the country's
been going to the dogs.
[LAUGHTER]
There's no real-- much though even the Russians
and many ideologies sanctified the country as well
as the city.
The Communist Manifesto says, develop
the country and the city.
The fact is that nobody has really effectively developed
the country.
The United States is producing more food
on 7% of the agricultural population
than it started with.
And that's not the correct statistic.
I haven't got the statistic in front of me,
but it's something like that.
In South Africa since apartheid, there's
been enormous attempts to increase
the amount of agricultural land owned by Black people.
I think they still own less than 20%.
Brutal land reform, such as by Mr. Mugabe in Rhodesia--
not Rhodesia, Zimbabwe-- has produced
appalling economic results.
We haven't found a formula for making
the land productive outside of heavy technology
or corporate production, which the United States leads
the world in.
There are signs of migration from rural to city
in India suggesting that people do both--
have part of their families in the country
and work in the city and migrate selectively between them.
These are an intelligent form of migration.
But it's not yet considerably large.
So whereas the British, by the Enclosure of the Commons Act,
took land away from poor people, forced them into cities,
today the process is that nobody is taking the land away
from you, except there's nothing to do on it.
Migration is not a new phenomenon.
We started off as migrants.
We settled after 400 million years--
took a long time to settle.
[LAUGHTER]
We've only settled for 20,000 years, at best.
But the rural parts of the world are becoming
more desolate, less inhabited.
The problem with Central Africa and the highest migration rates
is a combination of high fertility
rates and urbanization.
You put the two together, and you have a lethal combination.
AUDIENCE: Aren't there are also factors of desertification,
desertification a lot of agricultural land,
and that's part of that migration?
JULIAN BEINART: It depends where you are.
I mean, in Israel, agricultural land is so valuable.
In Cuba, agricultural is so valuable
because the territory is so small.
In this country, one flies over agricultural land endlessly.
And there's no pressure of densification.
AUDIENCE: Desertification.
JULIAN BEINART: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: Desert.
JULIAN BEINART: (LAUGHING) Oh, sorry, I thought densification.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: No, no, no.
JULIAN BEINART: Oh, desert.
Yes, the enormous ecological problems.
Untended land tends to get into no good
when it's been tended already.
But ecologists know so much more about this now.
The knowledge of what to do about dammed rivers,
and undamming rivers, letting them travel freely
is a major new ecological thrust.
Population growth is not held to be a good religious thing.
For the Catholics, contraception is
forbidden as it tries to convince the world that it
has an Argentinian pope who's a man who
stood up against the military.
I'm not sure about that, either.
[LAUGHTER]
But whether that's true or not, modern man though he is,
he still believes in the sanctity of life.
So a new world must look to being
able to cope with poverty at a mass scale--
urbanized poverty, not rural poverty.
Although, rural poverty will remain a phenomena.
There are people who will remain on the farm,
remain in small villages.
But they won't be a significant part of the population.
That's the sad part.
I'm just going to read you a few figures from these texts.
The two best graphic texts are the exhibition book
from the Cooper Hewitt exhibition at the United
Nations last year.
You should have seen the exhibition.
I had a little bit to do with it--
not saying so because I want to be proud.
And the book of the Rockefeller Foundation,
Century of the City--
I refer to both of these in your reading.
They're the two best recent publications.
I'm just going to quote here and there from them.
Many of them are amped up about figures.
"In a report on the future economy of India,
Goldman Sachs projects that 31 villagers
will continue to arrive in an Indian city every minute
over the next 43 years--
700 million people in all."
Now, how do you incubate 700 million people,
which is more than twice the population of the United
States, over 43 years?
We'll see.
I won't be around to watch.
Joel Cohen of Columbia University--
"The world will have to build one city of one million people
every five days for the next 42 years
to accommodate the massive rural-to-city migration."
One city of one million every five days--
a lot of work to do.
I'd be very happy in your profession.
You're going to be deluged by professional responsibilities.
It goes on to talk about climate change.
60% of the world's cities are within walking
distance of the sea.
"The coastal provinces of China experienced a net in-migration
of 17 million people in just the five
years between 1995 and 2000.
African-- half of those cities, including Lagos
and [INAUDIBLE]"--"-- they've shifted to Africa--
"are in the low-elevation coastal.
Much of Mumbai, India, home to the largest slum
settlement in the world, is built essentially on landfill--
city is a continuing target for weather disasters."
We'll look, in a minute, at a few positives.
"Almost half the global population lives on less than
$2.50 a day.
That is more than 3 billion people, almost all
in developing countries.
Even more shocking, the proportion of people below
the $2.50 per day poverty line has remained more or less
constant between 1981 and 2005.
According to the World Bank, the richest 20%
of the world's population accounts
for 76% of all consumption.
The bottom 40% account for only 1.5%."
I want you to look at some cases of optimism.
These are small situations which have
improved through the energy of workers themselves.
Before that, this fits into the new paradigm,
which has emerged over the last few years, in which theorists
of developing countries and activists
have argued that the only resource that people have
is themselves, that what we call sweat equity or human labor
or adapted human intelligence is all that people have.
So international organizations, like Slum Dwellers
International or the various regional branches
in India and in Thailand and so on
have the ambition to not sit around and wait
for charity or benevolent dictatorship or any
of the other modalities, but to harness,
to use their intelligence and their capacity as human beings
to do something about it.
The problem with all of this--
yep?
AUDIENCE: Can I read a quote from [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Sorry, I can't hear.
AUDIENCE: Can I read a quote from one of the papers
that I used for my paper--
JULIAN BEINART: Yes, please.
AUDIENCE: --that is related?
JULIAN BEINART: Please, somebody talk.
I'm tired of talking.
AUDIENCE: OK, it is in reference of the case
of the slum [INAUDIBLE] in the South African Cape
Town, Khayelitsha.
JULIAN BEINART: Khayelitsha, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, Khayelitsha.
So this person was the director of development services.
[INAUDIBLE] Talked a little [INAUDIBLE]
this paper about the people.
He says, talking in reference [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, just read us the quote.
AUDIENCE: All right.
"If we do not start immediately with meeting
the local communities' most urgent needs,
we are going to lose our legitimacy
as a public administration.
And if we do not do it in the most participatory way
possible," and this is the most important part,
"we will waste the most important capital we have,
the dedication of the people themselves
and their will for change."
JULIAN BEINART: Good.
I think one of the most impressive examples so far has
been the 300,000-person suburb of Sao Paulo,
17 kilometers from the center of Sao Paulo, called Diadema.
Fortunately, they've published a book called
Diadema and the Informal City.
I don't know-- I don't think the library has
a copy of this book.
It's a detailed case study of how Diadema went about
from being one of the most violent cities in Latin
America, having one of the highest crime rates,
have having one of the lowest educational rates,
being one of the worst slums in Latin America, to being,
now, a town which attracts industry,
has its first shopping mall.
And it's a story of workers galvanizing into groups,
exhibiting their power in the election of city officials,
forcing assistive procedure, and to create in poor people
a sense of trust by making things happen in a very
slow but deliberate way--
paving a street, for instance--
slowly building up in its dimensions until it
can tackle major issues, such as national financial
intervention.
They go back and forth with the military over a period of time.
Then Lula gets elected president.
He's very sympathetic.
And they have enough evidence to show that they're
worth investing in.
And slowly, infant mortality rates decline, all of this
happens.
New housing is built. Older housing is renewed.
People are part of a process which--
there's teaching in schools about crime.
Guns are taken away at school.
I mean, a whole network of things
happened which probably characterize a good town.
And they know they're very proud of the fact
that they've emerged from the worst conditions of slumness,
slumhood, to being a--
along the way were a couple of themes.
Trust-- poor people don't easily have trust.
They've never been brought up to trust anybody
except some intimate relationship, if they're lucky.
They don't trust the government.
Our government bypasses them almost completely.
They have no prospects that anybody
is going to be able to change the system.
Slowly, the system does change.
And a generation of people grow up who start believing.
All of this is true in the other case in the reading, which
I took because it's a man who deals with housing
finance in Bangkok, who writes very explicitly about how he
changed his method of working by allowing people to take part
and using [INAUDIBLE],, teaching people
how to deal with their money.
Learning how to deal with money is something to be learned.
Nobody ever taught me.
I still don't know.
It's extraordinary.
You arrive in a modern world.
You've got to buy a house.
Your parents were too old to--
uneducated to-- in this kind of game.
Where do you learn?
Where is the social instruction?
This is in a middle class situation.
When my son bought an apartment in New York,
he was lucky to have a wife who is an accountant.
So he could remain being a theorist
while his wife took care of all the financial stuff.
It's a wonderful combination.
But not many people are lucky to be married to accountants.
So that piece deals with the enormous capacity
for microfinance to generate both a sense of trust.
It's analogous to the invention of the mortgage
system in England in 1830.
The mortgage system took the business of borrowing money
away from a crooked landowner person, put it
in the hands of a bank.
A bank may crook, but it has to crook on a very much
larger scale than you.
And the mortgage system enabled trust
in the purchase of housing in a way
that had never existed before.
You were always at the behest of your landlord.
You get these stories of La Boheme
and La Traviata in Paris, artists
living in the top floor of a Haussmann Boulevard house
and the knock on the door, saying
haven't paid your rent for the last few months.
What are you going to do?
And you're starving of tuberculosis.
So that image is no longer present, or not largely present
in the mortgage system.
A microfinance system is analogous to the mortgage
system in the building of trust.
98% of the loans engendered in India in microfinance
have been repaid, which is an incredible statistic, given
the general condition of poverty and the lawlessness
that it insinuates.
OK, the trouble with seeing good things happen
is that sometimes good things need
to happen at a very large scale for them really
to make a big impact.
Scaling up Diadema is difficult. How
do you get the idea to occur in Tanzania, or in the Congo,
in Darfur?
But at least they are a small model.
Now, maybe we will not need massive international
cooperation to generate new models.
I despair, given the track record
of League of Nations, United Nations, atomic energy,
and climate carbon control agreements.
As long as you ask the poor world
to subdue their economic activity, industrial activity,
on the grounds that they are contributing to climate change,
they rightfully can point to the United States
having built up its economy through smoke and railroads
and now, being the largest client for carbon production
in the world, complaining.
Even the United States wouldn't sign the Kyoto Agreement,
in Copenhagen got no further.
So I leave you with optimism and a kind of foreboding.
A combination of climate change and poverty
is a disastrous combination.
Its effects will be particularly felt
in water-borne cities like Dhaka, in the Himalaya region.
The Himalayas control very much of the flood and drought cycles
in the areas it reaches.
Wealth will be able to withstand climate change, by and large.
It will modify behavior, but it will increase migration
pressure on the United States and on Europe
and on established countries.
I don't think United States television
could stand having children floating
in water in Bangladesh without changing its migration
attitude.
Migration is now under debate in this country.
As a migrant, I myself, of course
I'm in favor of migration.
Statistically, we have built this country.
There are more foreign-born professors in this school
than there are Americans, I think.
I don't know.
There'll be one less soon.
[LAUGHTER]
These are all trajectories for the long future,
but not so long.
It's already 2013.
Some of these predictions are for 2030.
And there's no respite except for the people
who believe that science has no way of forecasting change.
Anyway, these are dull topics.
[LAUGHTER]
There's not much that you can go out and do about it except
buy yourself a hybrid car and eat green.
The trouble with climate change-- it's too invisible.
It's not dramatic enough to stir the public conscience.
You think of the German Holocaust.
In 1936, when Berlin had the Olympic Games,
there were concentration camps within miles,
on the outskirts of Berlin.
Avery Brundage, the leader of the American delegation,
castigated New York Jews in The New York Times
for making a story of it.
The United States refused to take
in a boat of people fleeing the Holocaust because they weren't
legal citizens, and so on and so on.
The demonstration of the Holocaust
over 10 years of visibility was neglected by almost everybody.
I don't have much trust in the universal consciousness.
The world doesn't have any conscience.
It only has selective consciousness,
often in service of private good and national good.
The more Boston goes on about being strong,
the more I read a kind of perverse nationalism creeping
in--
again, identifying yourself as able to be a Goliath
withstanding the treachery of two young men.
Anyway, these are my personal positions.
I don't know what you think about your future.
[LAUGHS] I grew up with the advantage of being a modernist.
And the world was very attractive--
if only we could slay all those 19th century devils.
It's amazing to me to know that--
to think that I studied modern architectural history
with Sigfried Giedion at Harvard.
In Giedion, in all of his teaching to us--
after all, he wrote Space, Time and Architecture, which
was a big book at my day--
Giedion only referred to the terrible ruling tastes
of the 19th century, that it wasn't producing
architects of any consequence.
He never mentioned anything to do with a city,
not in all of his evocation, class after class of modernism.
He'd said, oh, it's attractive that we've grown up.
At least I think we've grown up.
We're beginning to grow up.
We talk about architecture being inseparable from urbanism now.
And yet we don't teach urban history at all.
This is the closest class you're going to get
to dealing with urban history.
And I know a historian, and he uses a sneaky method
to introduce history.
[LAUGHTER]
Not being sure of the detailed facts myself,
I have to conjure up clever, tricky ways of convincing you.
There's no architecture curriculum
in the world that doesn't require architectural history
as a major element of its discourse.
There's no field in the arts--
literature, painting, music-- that
doesn't require an understanding of its predecessors.
You can play the horn as much as you want to,
but you better know Mozart, or at least one symphony
of Mozart, in your exams.
You can be an architectural graduate
with not knowing one city plan in history.
City plans are difficult to remember,
and I wouldn't want to be given an exam asking
me to draw 10 city plans.
Chandigarh is easy.
Manhattan is easy.
Once you depart-- anyway, so go and finish your work.
Have a great summer.
And I'll see you on Thursday if you have the time.
So much for the world of--
the developing-- Ricardo, what do you think
is going to happen in Mexico?
AUDIENCE: Ooh.
[LAUGHTER]
JULIAN BEINART: No, in relation to our general discussion
this morning?
AUDIENCE: I think there was a lot of discussion
around Mexico City.
But I think that most people tend to neglect
what's happening in mid-sized cities in Mexico--
so not necessarily places like Monterrey or Guadalajara,
but actually places like Puebla, [INAUDIBLE],,
which are a big part of the backbone of where Mexico lives,
places like [INAUDIBLE].
And they fear that they're often thought of as basically
an afterthought.
But you see cities there, like Tijuana, like [INAUDIBLE],, who
are really experimenting and pushing things forward,
for that population, is very interesting--
not necessarily the following the model of [INAUDIBLE]..
So it's interesting that they are--
JULIAN BEINART: Is there any movement
that combines these efforts?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
Yeah, there are some programs.
There are some programs by the federal government [INAUDIBLE]
urban sustainable development.
And within each city, there tends
to be a local grassroots movements that
are sort of pushing the urban development.
AUDIENCE: What is it mean?
AUDIENCE: DUIS.
It's easier if you just look at DUIS.
AUDIENCE: But what does it stand for?
AUDIENCE: It's Wholly Sustainable Urban Developments.
AUDIENCE: Wholly Sustainable Urban Development.
AUDIENCE: Wholly?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
It's a program from the federal government that
finances housing [INAUDIBLE] Mexico is building
about 950,000 houses a year.
So there is a lot going on there.
It's interesting times down there,
as in many places in Latin America, actually.
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
Well, let's hope.
This class was not to depress you.
AUDIENCE: Sorry?
JULIAN BEINART: I said, this class was not
designed to depress you.
[LAUGHTER]
On the contrary, you could simply say, over 10,000 years,
we achieved achieve more than 400 million before us.
And there's many benefits that have come
from urbanization in our time.
Maybe it will continue--
but hopefully, less selectively than it's been up to now.
There's no law that asks you to be a social animal.
You can't drive into somebody else's garden
and get away with it.
But there's nothing that requires
you to see your own condition in the light of other people less
fortunate.
Charity was invented by the British.
Well, charity has been with us forever.
But at the end of the 19th century,
charity was seen as the major involvement of wealth.
It still is in this country.
I get upset every time I get a phone call
asking me to donate something and trying to reconstruct
my own ideology, which is not in favor of charity at all,
but charity being only a method of conceding the government's
inaction.
There's no-- I don't know.
It's very complicated.
It's very fundamentally complicated as to who was--
why was I statistically born to have enough money
to come and study here and then have enough energy to stay?
I'll never be able to answer--
as opposed to a child growing up in the Congo today.
What statistical right do I have over that child?
These are questions philosophers have argued with.
They may be tedious.
But Marxism didn't solve the problem.
Marxism only introduced a new form of power,
despite all of the grassroots sentiments,
it didn't result in anything.
OK, see you next week--
I'll see you later this week.