Okay, we can begin. Welcome, everybody. It's Gordon Clark from Oxford University beginning this webinar, this what is in effect today long event, honouring Patrice Darrington and her most wonderful book. With me as well is Richard Florida, who is the co-convener and co-conspirator about this project. And as we go on, we will have of course many others join us as speakers, but also I expect the audience to build and build as we basically go through the process. There are quite a number of speakers and you might notice that I'm speaking to you from Oxford in the UK. We have one of our guest speakers is a course from Belgium, and we can go Belgium, Oxford, we go then to New York, to Illinois, to Chicago, to Los Angeles and Stanford. So we've got quite a spread of speakers here today, and more particularly people who really understand Patrice's project, which actually is quite remarkable on many dimensions. Very crudely, size and scale really astounded me when I first saw her. But equally, she has said something fundamentally original about actually real estate, and she's been a diligent historian bringing to the fore many aspects of the project that the books based on. And I don't think there's anything quite like it in the social sciences. And that's saying a lot when you think of all the academics out there, specialised in this kind of research. So welcome everybody, and welcome to speakers, welcome to the audience. We've dialed in for the occasion. Welcome to maybe your own. Okay, so I've caught Richard in dispose. So I'll turn it over to Patrice, who will also say hello, and so might make some remarks about where she started from, at least very briefly, historically speaking. Over to you, Patrice. Thank you very much, Gordon. I'm humbled by your very kind words of appreciation of this. Yes, it was a long project, but one I just thoroughly enjoyed. I'm sure like many people on this at this event, and many, many people worldwide, we love real estate. We love talking about real estate. We love being in our buildings. We love arguing about it. You know, real property, the things we live in every day are very, very exciting and, you know, definitely material for lots of juicy comments. So having been fortunate to put together an education combining architecture and then an MBA business degree, I have practised in real estate for many, many years. Then having the opportunity to go to an academic institution, wonderful ones like New York University and then now Columbia University, and be responsible for teaching young people, young future professionals about real estate development. I realised how is it actually done? We go and do it. We try to do it well. But have we ever really thought about what are the essential principles? What are the essential motivating dynamics of this activity? And so I started looking back to see where we were doing this, where it had happened. And this took me way back to the 17th century and Covent Garden. Thank you for having me. Welcome. I'll turn it over to Richard, who will now make some introduction. Oh, I'm just sorry about that. For some reason, my connection dropped off for a minute. So I ran the Hardy speed test and found that I have enough bandwidth to carry on. So thank you for bearing with me. I want to echo Gordon's comments. I, well, I've known for his treats for a long time. We were colleagues at Carnegie Mellon at the beginnings of our career. And I think somehow brought there together. I've talked about that by one Gordon Clark. An incredible person and an incredible scholar, but an incredible, Magestral connector of people and human beings and scholars. So, you know, I have been an urbanist. Most of my career trained in Columbia University. Rutgers is an undergraduate Columbia University works pieces as an urban planner in the mid 80s. And late in life, late in life, late in academic career, I came to the belief that real estate was important to urban development. That sounds so simple minded. When I, when I say it, it sounds almost ludicrous, but I took up an appointment. And I believe Patrice also overlapped with me there as a distinguished visiting professor at the Shack Institute of real estate at NYU. And I did that particularly to try to educate myself about real estate. And I learned nothing. And I'm not kidding you that I found in our field. That there was, there was commentary like David Harvey's important work on the spatial fix, but there was very little commentary about the central of real estate. And particularly in a knowledge economy, there was the belief that real estate in space was no longer important. And, you know, then Patrice's book arrived first into electronic format, and then an analog format. And I was literally blown away because Patrice brings real estate, bring it. She not only provides this incredible history, she brings real estate back into our discourse and situates it where it should be at the center of urban theory and gives us, she has, I mean, in many ways she's answered so many questions. But I think Gordon would agree with this and many of you would agree that she sets the table for so many of us to ask other questions, to think deeply about how real estate shaped cities. And I would say even more than urban development shapes capitalist growth. So I just want to echo Gordon's comments. I'm honored and I feel honored and privileged to be involved. I wish I could, I love the city. I love New York City. Even Gordon compared to Oxford to London, it's still my favorite city in the world. I wish I could be with you here there today, but hope to be visiting with you in New York soon enough.  Great. Thanks, Richard. It's worth also saying that in bringing together the commentators today, we were very, we were mindful of the disciplines, we were mindful of, if you like, the critical perspectives, analytical perspectives that people bring to the table. And that I think is also some measure of Patrice's accomplishment here. She's been able to talk to a lot of disciplines and a lot of scholars who, you know, in their own fields may have made significant contributions themselves. And as we went around recruiting people, everyone jumped to say yes. So it's quite a compliment personally and professionally. One thing Patrice didn't mention was, yes, she was in industry. Yes, she was in banks and investment groups on real estate. And I think it's fair to say she met all kinds of people in that search and I was particularly struck hearing one time a while ago a story about going to see somebody who actually owned a casino or seemed to own a casino. I think it's actually more in the latter, seemed to own a casino and seemed to owe a lot of money to banks. And that man unfortunately didn't seem to become president, but he became president. That's just a shocker. But there you go. Patrice has seen rogues. She's seen remarkably talented people on the investment side of things. And she has also been able to conceptualize something whole that most of us otherwise look at in part. So with that, I'm sort of conscious of coming up to 45 minutes. That is to say 15 minutes into the presentation. We're going to, of course, start with the first presenter at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I think I'm right. No, sorry. I'm very confused timing here at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. But before we do that, we are also going to run a tape from Larry Summers. Professor Summers was very gracious in agreeing to make some preliminary comments. He has also read the book. And unfortunately, he can't be here today. I believe he's in Singapore. But nonetheless, he's also a person enormously impressed by the book and enormously impressed by Patrice's accomplishments. So Patrice, how do we go about getting Larry in the frame, so to speak, to get him his comments displayed? Gordon, I'll play the clip right now. Excellent. Thank you. Welcome, Larry. We'll open this symposium in celebration of Patrice Darrington's book, Built Up. You know, there are important books. There are deeply scholarly books. And there are books that are fun to read. There are not very many books that meet all three of those criteria, but at least for me, this was one of them. It's famously been said that we shape our built environment and then our built environment shapes us. If that's even close to true, developers are some of the most important people determining the destiny of our shared spaces, therefore the destiny of our cities and therefore the destiny of all of us. What they do and how they do it is profoundly important. It's not just the stuff of abstract models or present value calculations. It's the stuff of dreams. Persuasion, sales, motivation, vision. These are as important as financial calculation or carpentry or physical instruction. It's the great strength of this book that it tells real stories about real things and therefore makes the mechanics, the abstractions, come to life. That's why I enjoyed reading it. That's why it gave me a greater appreciation of the work of the developers. I know that's why it caused me to think differently about the malls, the buildings, the office parks, the projects into which I step. And so I'm only sorry that I can't be present physically for this symposium. I'm sure it will be as great a treat as reading this book. Okay. Here we are again. Now I'm conscious that we are 10 minutes away now, just or 15 minutes away from the schedule start. So I thought in this period of time I might make some other comments and then get Richard and Patrice to also make some comments before we introduce our first speaker. So I'm going to start with some of the topics and sort of reinforce some aspects of the debate about real estate and property in modern cities is the, if you like, the flux and flow of what happens in cities. And in my own commentary, I talk about how to conceptualize what happens in one neighborhood, one neighborhood, the same city, and how they join together if not directly in terms of adjoining land, but indirectly in terms of the financial market pricing of one parcel of land versus another parcel of land. And indeed actually what the future value is of that land looked in not just a local perspective, but also in a global perspective. And for someone like me who has been involved in real estate, but also as an investor through what a major institution in the UK in real estate, it's brought home to me actually many of the issues that I hear investors come into our discussions and explain how they value one parcel of land over another parcel of land. And it's really basic sometimes it's, you know, is the land situated in the right place and in the UK. That means being in the midlands at the intersection between major freeways going north, south, east, west. But equally, it's sort of very basic, you know, what is the shell that is the building on top of that land? How does that have an intrinsic value? Does it have a use value? Is it actually not valuable at all except in the sense that it occupies a space of land that can be converted to something else altogether? And that's actually many respects what I learned from reading Patricia's book. That sort of sense of contingency about land, about property, contingency on markets, contingency on ambitions and aspirations of those people who hold property or will hold property in the long term. The last comment I make about this is it's too often to think, you know, when you, when you sort of speculate about speculators, what they have in mind is, is the return tomorrow or the return in a year's time, the return in five years time. But in London, there are, there is a landholder whose time horizon is almost infinite. It could be a thousand years out. So the crown of state thinks in terms of centuries, has a rate of return target over centuries, has a claim on space well beyond actually the building on the space, which is either owned or leased by somebody else. And to listen to how the crown of state thinks about urban space is completely different to a speculator thinking on the price of land today and tomorrow and the building that might reap a rent. The crown of state in London around Covent Garden is also thinking about what's its intrinsic value over a hundred years or 200 years. How can we get people to pay not just for their current use value, but actually their use value in 50 years or 70 years. And indeed, I'm in an organization that had to decide recently in response to the crown of state whether or not to hold the lease for 50 years or for another 100 years. And we decided to hold the lease for another 100 years. That says a lot about actually the footprint of human activity and how thinking about real estate is not only in the short term, but it can be that enormous, very long term. And that's why I think Patrice's historical perspective is so revealing. So revealing. Covent Garden then and Covent Garden now. This is an expensive real estate was then was is now. So I'll just pass it over with nine minutes to go to Richard to see if he has any last comments. And then we'll take a brief comment from Patrice before we move on to Professor Derek Bourjik. Of course. Thank you, Gordon. Just a couple of comments on my reading of why Patrice's work is so important. As I mentioned earlier, there are great predictions and punditry about real estate being no longer important and economy of innovation and knowledge. And in fact, what's so interesting about this is that land or clustering or real estate have become probably more important to capitalist growth and urban development now that at any point in history and a couple of facts that I just included in my commentary. In the United States, just four metropolitan areas, the Bay Area in New York, Boston and Seattle accounted for something like 90% of all innovation job growth over the past couple of decades. And across the world, just six metropolitan areas, the Bay Area in New York, London, Boston, Beijing and Shanghai accounted for more than all of the half of all the venture capital startups that have been created over the past decade. Moreover, there's a recent McKinsey report, which I find really fascinating. The study, which just came out last week and was reported by Runaful Corp in the Financial Times finds that real estate today comprises more than two-thirds of the world's entire net worth, looking across 10 advanced countries, the U.S., U.K., China, Germany, France, Canada, Sweden, Australia and Mexico. And in earlier studies, I found that the total land value in the United States was $23 trillion. Now, that's increased. That's 160% of U.S. total economic output at the time. A new study from Zillow suggests that the total cumulative value of U.S. homes is nearly $30 trillion, also exceeding the total value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. So, really, the U.S. state and land is really important. And also, I think real estate is going through another, the ownership, the capitalist control of real estate is going through another transformation. I think part of this we see as investors gobble up, not just commercial real estate and multifamily homes, but single-family homes. I forget the statistic, but I believe it's a third of the world's home purchases over the pandemics. We're purchased not by individuals, but by institutional investors. And looking out a little further, I think one of the changes we'll see if the 1980s and 90s gave rise to the securitization of real estate. I think we're looking now at the digitalization of real estate coming pretty quickly. And so real estate as a basic asset class is going through this. And so real estate as a basic asset class. But one that's not only a historical asset class, one that could be traded in new ways, is really fascinating. And just one remark on theory. I cut my teeth as a kid at Rutgers and Columbia University on Marx and Neo-Marxism and theories of the state and theories of capitalist development and have been very influenced by Marx through all of my career, although I'm taking a page from the great Christopher Freeman, who I asked this when I was an assistant professor, he said, you may be influenced by Marx, but if you talk about people like Schumpeter, you get your papers published more easily. So I've tended not to echo that so much in my formal writing, but my insights have been shaped with Marx. Marx and Patrice and I were talking about this, and I think we want to do more to jointly understand this. Marx more or less famously talked about Schrift and he lumped the world of capitalism, I'm staying very crudely, into a model where there were two great classes that drove the mode of production forward and in struggle. Capitalist and workers, which was the in proletariat, he didn't have much time for real estate and in the commentaries I've seen really derided it. But the person who like Patrice put real estate at the center of the equation is Henry George. I want to draw your attention to Henry George. Land was Adam Smith's first factor of production, the classical economists like Cantillon developed the land theory of value, Ricardo was very influenced by rent, but it was George who put land at the center and real estate at the center and where Marx, and I'll say this very briefly, where Marx saw the capitalists as making off with the surplus generated by workers. I don't think it's right in this, but I think it's a fascinating view. If you read his work very quickly, not just the book progress and poverty, but the report he did before that, which is trying to estimate US land values. If you read that very closely, what Henry George is saying is that it's real estate owners who make off with the surplus generated by both capital and labor. And why I think that's interesting today is if you look at land views across the board, it seems increasingly that much of the productive advance or innovative advance or surplus that we generate in these places simply gets plowed back into rising real estate values. And that I find to be quite fascinating how this classical factor of land or real estate, which Marx derided is not that important as kind of a fetter, how over time and well into the 20th century, Marx over time and well into the 21st century, it continues to be a critical factor and indeed in much larger fetter that sort of forms a contradiction in that as more and more surplus is generated, increasingly it appears that that surplus is plowed back into real estate and the holders of land. And I think that is Patrice's really remarkable contribution that she forces those of us who work in urban economics, land economics, spatial theory, urban geography, city and regional planning that consider ourselves urbanists to really think about real estate in a different and in a more important way. So again, thank you Patrice and I look forward to your comments and the comments of others throughout the day. Okay, thank you. Look, I've been confused. The first speaker will in fact be Manuel Alves from Belgium and just in case Derek Forzik and Manuel are confused. I was confused. Sorry. So I would like to see Manuel come on video please. You should be able to see me now Gordon. Welcome Manuel. Sorry about that. No problem. Okay, so Manuel and for all of those who were listening in you've got all of 20 minutes. You could take five minutes for questions thereafter, but we always are looking for five minutes of grace period at the end of your time to the next speaker which will be Derek. So just looking at the clock as it goes down, we've sort of got one minute to go. I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing the speakers because in so many ways well known for everybody. So I will basically give you half a minute, Manuel if you would like to sort of pick up the gauntlet and begin speaking when you like. Okay. Yeah, thank you very much Gordon. I am ready. I don't need to half a minute I think. Can you all see my screen? Yes, thank you. Okay, good. That's that's always good to know because sometimes you think you're sharing something and you're not. Only just yesterday I recorded a lecture for my students of more than an hour only to receive an email this morning that they could all see me but that they couldn't hear me. So I still make these basic mistakes so I wouldn't want to be talking to you for 20 minutes without you being able to see my screen or be able to hear me. Okay, so Gordon thanks a lot for the introduction thanks a lot also for inviting me. I'm happy to comment on Patrice's her book. And I'm not going to do a long praise of the book. I'm going to keep it rather short the praise part because I want to see where we can move on next. So Patrice Darrington provides us with an excellent historiography of real estate development since the 16th and 17th century in London. She takes us through the 20th century in New York City and then takes us into the 21st century discussing not just New York but also places abroad. What I find quite remarking is that the book didn't exist yet. You would think someone would have written this book a long time ago. I think Richard said something along the same lines. You would have found someone would have written the history of real estate development. So only when the book was announced I was like, yes, I've never read that book. That is weird that the book doesn't exist. So I'm very happy that the book is being written. I'm very happy. I hope that you like it. I also wish we could have been in New York City. I used to live in New York for 3 1.5 years and about half of that time I spent in the planning department at Columbia University. So it would have been very nice to see some of those familiar places which I still hope to visit next year when I hope to be back in New York. But for now, let me focus on some of the contributions that we find. Let me see. So as I already mentioned Patrice starts from 16th and 17th century London and what struck me is that already in that early affairs, in that early history of real estate development that real estate development was already not just an economic but also a political affair. It was very clear that if you wanted to do real estate development you didn't just need the capital, you needed the connections, you needed the network, you needed to be able to get the state the local state very often in a way to be okay with what you do. This also may be one reason why a lot of theories of real estate development fall short. They are either emphasizing these economic parts or they're emphasizing the political parts but they're not so good in bringing this together. So what I would like to do today is to go a little bit into bringing them together more. Starting to think from Patrice's work and then trying to bring in some other work to see if we can bring them in dialogue with what Patrice has been telling us and how that could work productively. So Patrice herself builds on both the real estate literature and the urban studies literature which I think is quite nice. It sounds quite obvious to do that if you talk about real estate but it doesn't happen that often, that those literatures are being confronted in the way that Patrice does. There are separate chapters even discussing sort of the critique coming from urban studies to real estate development as a discipline. So the approach she falls is quite interdisciplinary and I would like to go along today and then presenting some sort of political economy of real estate development although some people might say maybe it's more of a sociality of real estate development because they will also be relying on the work of some sort of big names in sociality to make my argument. So if we look at the book at the end of the book in a conclusion Patrice is formulating three objections of real estate development. In a way we could say it's a conclusion rather of real estate development. It's the conclusion of the history of the description of this history of four or five centuries of real estate development. What we find is the first objective is the professional shelter for occupants and the community as a whole. The second being the creation of financial assets for capital markets and the third being the contribution to urban topography and the profession of urban amenities. I was thinking a little bit about these objectives and then I tried to reformulate them a little bit and I came up with these two and both of them actually have two elements in them so you could say I have formulated them into two objectives or into four objectives. The first one being the real estate development has both use and exchange values. This seems pretty obvious but it basically translates to some of the things Patrice says in her objectives. The second being maybe a little less obvious and the real estate development may create both direct and indirect use and exchange value. So let me explain the difference a little bit there. If we think of the direct use and exchange value, the direct value of the house department where I'm sitting right now is that I can sit here, that I can sleep here, work here and do other things. The exchange value here is that I'm actually renting this flat so that there's an economic value that's being generated through my rent payment to my landlord and that my landlord if she wants she could resell the house at some point. But there are also indirect use and exchange values. So the indirect use value is what Patrice calls the community as the whole, the contribution to the community as a whole and what she calls in one of the other objectives, the provision of public amenities. Which is in a way the question how do non-occupants benefit or are afflicted by a building? How do people benefit from my building being here? Well, my building is a pretty nice one from the outside so maybe people would benefit from this building. There is a bar on the ground floor of my building. There's also a dentist on the ground floor of my building. These are facilities that people in the neighborhood may benefit from. These are also facilities in the neighborhood that people might be afflicted by. My building is larger than most of the buildings in the neighborhood. It may take away sunshine from some of my neighbors. The bar may cause some noise. It's not a particularly noisy bar and there are much noisier bars in the neighborhood. But it's also important here that this use value can also be a negative indirect use value. Patrice's focus is mostly on the idea that real estate development could have a positive value for the community and that is great and that is sometimes the case but I think it's important also to realize that real estate development and the existing buildings can also have negative indirect use values. If we look at the economic value that we get from a juice, it's already the example I mentioned my landlord benefits from me paying the rent and I usually pay it in time so that's nice for her. She can resell the building in the future. Also good for her she might be able to make some money there or she might just get her investment back. So in this sense real estate is rather unique. Real estate provides both a stable income and it provides a stable question mark. It's not always that stable. We can talk about it a long time but I won't do that now I'll just leave the question mark up there. It provides investment potential. This means also that real estate has both commodity and asset features if we look at the site from development and construction into the lifespan of the building. Real estate is also of course spatially fixed and this is the key here to the indirect use and exchange values. These values are of course derived from the land. This is no surprise I assume everyone knows this in this room I'm not pretending I say anything new here so location is key we all know that location, location, location are the three important things for real estate as we're often reminded. But this means that the value and price of real estate and the land underlying it or the land potentially being used to develop real estate is derived from the values and the prices of nearby real estate and lands. So the value of real estate, the value of land changes as a result of the changes in nearby plots. This again seems quite obvious but this is quite important for how real estate development is being done. This means also that this is how the indirect exchange value is generated. The indirect exchange value here is about how it influences real estate values of nearby plots. What's the effect of new housing coming up in my neighborhood? What's the effect of the building across the street from me being fixed up and being rented out for higher prices? Is this just one building with higher rents or is this going to have an effect on the rent in the neighborhood? Is this going to lead to possibly a gentrification process? Is it part of it? So the real estate values are always influencing the other real estate values in the neighborhood which means that real estate development always has an indirect exchange value. It's not just about the building that's being developed that has these exchange values and the economic income coming also from rent. It also means that it influences not just to use but also to exchange value of the buildings around it. So this means that developers as well as investors have an interest in increasing investment in a larger area. You would think that if you have two real estate developments next to each other that they're competing with each other and this may be true to some extent. I'm not saying they're not competing with each other at all but actually these two real estate developments next to each other or 10 or 20 or more than that are also working towards the same goal of increasing the indirect exchange value of these buildings. Of course they're trying to maximize their own exchange value by making sure the building can be rented out for more money, can be resold for more money, but also trying to make sure that if the whole neighborhood is lifted up all these buildings benefit from it even in theory the ones that are not necessarily being developed or really developed. So here I'd like to take a step back and look at the work of the sociologist Max Weber one of the great sort of classical sociologists and he argued that economic exchange is not simply about competition but also not about competition between suppliers and competition between the demand side but it's also about coordination and especially coordination between suppliers. So coordination Max Weber argues and many markets might be more important than competition hence the title of the slides to the left. So there's a power struggle between different types of actors rather than just between developers and developers here have a joint interest in enlarging the markets and Patrice refers here to urban policies, I can also think of lobbying she refers quite explicitly to the idea of the growth machine coming from Harvey Mulloch at the New York University and you could also think of the pro-growth coalition that John Malankov at CUNY City University of New York discusses and these are sort of more the critical urban studies literature people from sociology, political science, geography discussing these kind of issues but this is in a way a step back you can think like this is why this is important that actually developers may be working to coordinate with each other because they have this joint interest in the land values coming up. So then we have another possible sociological perspective here one of the more recent big names in sociology the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu he speaks of different forms of capital economic capital social capital, cultural capital symbolic capital and Bourdieu argues and we're going to simplify here that these forms of capital exist side by side and that to some extent these forms of capital are exchangeable but also foundational to each other it doesn't mean that you can by definition exchange one form of capital for the other but it means that to some extent it is possible to use one form of capital to further another form of capital. So economic capital in case of real estate development that would be obvious to everyone so I'm not going to discuss that. The social capital was actually also quite easy but trees discuss its networks between developers so this is also clear if we extend this social capital a little bit we start thinking about something that becomes cultural capital and this has to do with a club like nature of real states and Bourdieu argues that clubs have a spatial basis and they construct relatively homogenous groups they also keep intact these relatively homogenous groups and these groups are both instruments of inclusion and exclusion so it means that within the club it can be in a conclusionary measure to have a joint language joint ideas but also joint lobbying and things like that but it's also a measure of exclusion of excluding other groups from real estate development other actors that may have an interest in real estate development but are not developers themselves to exclude them here and Bourdieu argues that if this happens quite effectively if actually some of the how you say it the use of cultural capital is some of the use of cultural capital in combination with economic and social capital is almost taken for granted and if the effects are not necessarily seen as a fact of having these different forms of capital then he actually speaks of symbolic capital these are the effects of any form of capital when it's not perceived as such other social theorists may speak of hegemony here but actually some idea of symbolic capital in a way is a little bit sort of a less big concept than hegemony because hegemony seems to be almost like a black and white situation where symbolic capital was always in relationships to these other forms of capital and Bourdieu argues that this form of symbolic capital the use of it where it's actually not being recognized necessarily may also result in symbolic violence this could be for instance when there's development at the expense of the community referring back to what I earlier called negative use values so then let's see if we can confront Bourdieu and Derrington a little bit more in built up Patrice shows that land owners realized that the use that not only the use but also the direct and indirect exchange values of the land in a way she shows how this happened in 16th and 17th century London how before it was all about use value this land owner started to see we can do more with the land we can use it in different ways make more money on the land use it more productively and this is how she basically tells how the first land owners became the first developers you could say in Bourdieu's terms that these first developers used economic social and cultural capital to seek favorable public investments which then became the hallmark of their symbolic capital and this is how real state development was born and in a way how it gave shape to modern and contemporary real state development this is where I could end but then I thought there's another interesting thing to say and if time is still on my side and I think it is I can go in one other perspective here in which one of the great names of political economy also could be put in dialogue with Patrice Derrington Patrice in a way and this discusses the discovery of direct and indirect exchange value again my terms but my reading through a sociological or political economy lands of her work and this reminded me of the work of Fontunen Fontunen is famous in lands economics, real state economics but also in economic geography for his model of agricultural land use I will show it in a minute but what is interesting here is that Fontunen himself was a junker, a junker sometimes translated to English but this is basically a form in Prussia of the landed nobility it doesn't translate necessarily directly into a proper English term but it is one form of the landed nobility it's not the highest form these were typically large land owners and it's a little bit similar to what Patrice describes in London where these first real state developers were also large land owners and these large land owners in London as Fontunen did in Prussia discovered in a way what they could do with their land and what Fontunen did is he developed ideas about land use and how to reap rent from them, how to make money on the land he had he already owned some land and then in 1810 he bought a large estate in Mecklenburg, Sweden a part of what is now Germany and he developed what he called a model farm there in 1826 so that is 16 years later he wrote a book basically about this and theorized how you could use these large land holdings and make the best of them the book was called the Isoliertestat in der Beziehung of Landwirtschaft with National Economy the isolated states with an eye on you could say land economics and national economics so you see here the connection between the land economics and the political economy already developing and basically he asked to question how to develop agricultural land according to its highest and best use if you take out the work agricultural it just seems to be the question in a way that many developers ask themselves so here you see the model what is most famous from the model is this lower part of the model these rings they're known as Fontunen rings for concentric rings about where you would find different land use so I'm not going to discuss in detail I hope many of you will know it what is actually the more interesting part is the top part of the model where Fontunen spends a lot more time about and this is indicating how by having different land uses you can get more profit out of the land and in a way how it works within sort of the horizontal line you look at which of the different diagonal line is the highest ones and that is how much farmers would be paying to leave the land from Fontunen so this is assuming that there's a large land owner and he and in most cases it would be he is renting out this land to farmers leasing it to farmers so what we saw here that Fontunen organized the land according to the economic potential of the land use it was not so much about how to reap crops it was about how to reap land rents it wasn't about the fertility of the land it was about which piece of land located where allows me to prove the land in which way to make the most money on it interestingly enough in the book although this is often forgotten Fontunen also discovers how society and contextual changes affect land rent how technological inventions affect land rent how all kinds of developments, transportation and things like that also are actually a way in which you can make more money on the existing land it was designed to benefit the landowners not the farmers and in a way Fontunen also theorized something that Karl Marx would later call absolute rent and of course it's quite interesting Marx writing as a socialist Fontunen writing as a member of you could say the higher classes as a representative of capital but they came to very similar conclusions about what Marx called absolute rent Fernand Braudel great French historian some people would say one of the greatest historians ever he considered both Marx and Fontunen the two great German political economists and why I'm going back to this history of Fontunen because what Fontunen did is in a way he discovered how agricultural land could be used in a way what Patrice describes about what could happen in London by these landowners owning the land but the difference here these landowners in London didn't write a book they had to wait for Patrice to write the book Fontunen did in a way did the practice and then wrote the book about it so Patrice Barrington and this is where I'm going to end this is going to be my last line Patrice provides us with an excellent sorry I'm going back to my first line so in closing my talk I would like to say one more thing for agricultural land use it took Fontunen a few decades to go from the practice that he developed himself to an evidence based theory of land use for real estate development but such a book was sorely lacking for real estate development especially urban real estate development so Patrice Barrington to provide us with the roots and the advancement of real estate development since its genesis four centuries ago thank you very much well I'm going to step in and thank you very very much Manuel taking us broadening our understanding through of urban real estate through to that historical beginning in agricultural value is absolutely key to what we have inherited in our minds about the importance of owning property and you know the interesting notion of a diversified agricultural portfolio of course is now played out with institutions who seek to hold diversified real estate portfolios so we've got an echo of this very very fine beginnings from von Thürer thank you for bringing that up Gordon Richard I'll pass over to you maybe some questions that was great one of the things that I've noticed as I said being an investor as much as an academic about this space is how you construct portfolios of property and for what purpose do you construct portfolios in a sense that they overlap thematically and in a sense I say in my own commentary that you bring together like types of properties around the world and what you're doing is managing risk if you like geographically across the world but basically taking advantage of the benefits of one type of property that has a quite a universal value but a sort of well understood value or what you do is you build a portfolio say within the country that is geographically diverse so I wonder if you might comment a little bit more on what you mean by these portfolios of property what types of risks that I try to deal with could you repeat the last line again you said something about risk but I couldn't hear it very well Gordon sorry I'm wondered if you might explain in some with some examples about the portfolios you have in mind what their building blocks are underpinning them I need to think about that you mean the portfolios as in the terms of indirect exchange value or well yes but also how do you translate that to property on the ground well I didn't talk much about portfolios so I find it hard to see exactly what you're trying to get at but I might be missing your point sorry well what I'm looking for is a translation of the principles into the practice of real estate investment and indeed the benefits that investors want to get out of property I think it's what you see in many cases developers working together in a way to develop or redevelop an area so I think that is a clear example of where you see they have a joint interest so Hudson Yards in New York is a great example where the location within Manhattan in a way on the one hand is very good it's very central it's close to Midtown on the other hand it's very bad location the infrastructure is not particularly pretty there some blocks feel very unpleasant and there's some mecca developments there's a tunnel coming in with like four or five exits so you can also say that last part means there's a lot of potential there but if I as a real state developer would put one building there and well I might still make a profit on that building and it might work well but if I really want to make money with the land I own whether by developing or whether by selling the land to someone else it needs all the development around it right so you need a lot of developers at the same time or in the same time frame to do something like this to live up to the potential of the land and this is about these indirect exchange values and to do this it's you need coordination between the developers and you need to lobby the local government to intervene in this area to make investments in the area but also to rezone which it doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money to rezone but it still costs a lot of efforts of the government to get this done so I think that's where you see in practice how this idea of coordination works and how through the coordination between them and between them in the local states they shape indirect exchange value. Yes of course coordination comes in many flavours some of it's above board but often it is actually the stuff of life with corruption and other than development go hand in hand. I have two questions from Manuel first of all thank you I've learned a lot in this hour and learned a tremendous amount from your talk and I like probably everyone else on this zoom read their Vontunen but I didn't read this Vontunen and your reading is so contextualized and so important so my two questions are the first one more mundane you can just punt on it real estate has always been a very local industry it seems to me especially with regard to Hudson Yards these players are now more global so do you think that's happening it is my more mundane question and feel free to say I don't know or I don't care the more I think interesting question for you is you have a very close reading of Vontunen you have a very close reading of Marx and I've been playing around with Henry George so theoretically how do you think Vontunen Marx and George compare in their view are landlords a separate class I'm asking that very vaguely are they a separate entity a faction of capital that is extracting a tremendous amount of surplus through their ownership of land and manipulation of land and coordination or are they in your view more of what Marx said just a member of the capitalist class and not particularly interesting at least in my reading or I may have that wrong so I thought you'd be the most appropriate person to ask that question too thanks a lot Richard I think the first question is relatively easy yes I would agree that we're moving partly to global players but I would say it's a partial globalization right in terms of investment prime markets are very much global markets big institutional capital that's behind this Gordon knows much more about this than I do I think in terms of development we see a combination between on the one hand local players but in places like New York some of those local players are becoming national players or international players but rarely are they active globally so this is another interesting thing a lot of them are active in select locations and they might be working in other global cities but not necessarily everywhere so yes a partial globalization I would say the second question I don't know Henry George as much as you do from tuna marks I mean have very different perspectives but I am definitely here more on the Harvey in reading of marks I mean I read my Harvey better also than I read my marks to be honest and I would agree with both from tuning and Harvey coming from completely different perspectives that you could say land use and land development and landlords are worth the attention there's also there was an interesting debate in the 1980s in British housing studies Gordon is asking me to stop soon I'll finish two sentences and it was basically about the question is housing just something where we find the typical capital versus labor or is there something else going out going on in housing market that actually goes beyond that and the Marxists were supposed to say no although not all of them did in the way Barian said there's something more going on here and I think this is true real estate markets, land markets have their own way of producing class in ways that are sometimes parallel to but not necessarily exactly the same as what happens in labor markets I agree entirely thank you Manuel and I must say very very interesting and what breadth what breadth we're going to turn now in a minute's time to Derek Forshek from Oxford University and I just want to bring him online so that we can see him and where is Derek I'm here there you are excellent sorry about the mix up in order but here we are and the same order up to 25 minutes it's best if you finish in 20 minutes five minutes for questions but I'm actually now just wasting your time so I'm going to give you half a minute Grace off you go thank you very much Gordon thank you Patrice, thank you Richard I'm a financial and economic geographer I'm speaking from my residential real estate in Oxford and when I first came to England in 1998 I came from Poland so a country emerging from over 40 years of communist regime a big part of the cultural shock I experienced here other than meeting Gordon as my supervisor which was a positive shock the negative shock was the low quality of most buildings here particularly residential poor insulation double taps thin walls exposed pipes general lack of solidity I don't need to go on so first as a geographer I described it I explained it with weather mild climate a roof above your head is enough to protect you from elements then I came across historical explanations the country has not been invaded for a long time the average building age is high old fashion technology is still everywhere but with time also as an economic and then financial geographer I learned about financial factors affecting this material fabric of England the significance of which seems to be confirmed by Patrice's book land ownership, particularly in England is highly concentrated land leases are relatively short and long term objectives in building are further curtailed by the financialization of real estate development driven by long term profits with community and societal interests sometimes also those the interests of people housed in the buildings themselves falling by the wayside Oxford where I live is no exception there are two more episodes in my experience of English real estate that this book Patrice's book sheds light on so in 2006 I lived in London and every second shop on my high street turned into a real estate agency literally a television was full of programs about IT managers becoming developers because why would they be so stupid to only earn 100,000 pounds a year if you can make so much more easily in property development so I went to my agent on the street asking about the possibility of buying a lot of land to build a house so this is something that people many people in Poland would do buy land and build a house but my agent was shocked only developers and the super rich he said can buy real estate can buy land here maybe just maybe you can buy some rural land north of Birmingham so this was again a lesson that contrasted with my Polish background where buying land and building your own house is still common even in big cities and most recently as a happy house owner occupier I realized that I actually don't know the value of the land on which my house stands in relation to the value of the house itself almost everyone in Poland would know such a thing but hardly anyone does here so again these oddities at least from a Polish perspective are the product of historical, political, financial and legal processes that have been going on in this country as the book shows they have been going on for centuries now speaking about shocks when I first received Patrice's book I was fairly surprised by the big format rich illustrations not just in other monograph as people before me said it's really a work of laugh not just research just look at the ambitious table of contents everything and I really agree with and want to emphasize this is an identification of the research gap here she says private development despite extensive criticism does not itself interrogate its processes or seeks to improve its practices in this it does not qualify as an institutionalized discipline or attracts scholarly and professional respect well just recently I was reminded the research real estate was while conducting input output analysis of the US economy with my associate so imagine in 2020 for those of you who are into network analysis in 2020 real estate was had the highest total strength centrality measure of all sectors in the US economy so put simply to those of you interested in network analysis this is real estate is the most important economic sector in terms of its inflows and outflows and the degree to which they penetrate the whole US economy and its centrality has actually grown over time not only prior to the global financial to the subprime crisis I should say but also ever since now patrice's book follows what she describes as a historical turn in business studies but I think it also offers elements of and potential for a spatial or geographical turn the deep dive into the private property development in 17th century London is fascinating shows the role of shocks in economic development with the great fire of 1666 a changing the use of building materials and the contrast between innovative but conscientious urls of Bedford and Southampton on one side and the speculative Nicholas Barbone is instructive the book is a story of property development as financial innovation as well as path dependence timing a feather innovation for example through the use of the discounted cash flow model again quoting patrice the understanding of the mutual benefit achieved through designating portions of a site to positive economic externalities for the community was not explicitly formulated in the financial calculations for urban development and as a result community community contribution remains a qualitative assessment not justified by economic rational and neglected when financial objectives became dominant and as she documents this process started happening already in the 17th century at least in the 17th century regarding the geography in the book I really love as a geographer I love the patrice's phrase distance of financial interests this reminds us of the quintessentially geographical problem involved growing distance between investors and often developers as well on one side and communities in which property is located on the other side and this distance is enabled if not created by financial innovation regulation technology and globalization far away investors and developers tend to tend to neglect and underestimate both positive and negative local externalities of real estate and as a result prefer reductive financially driven models of evaluating real estate at the expense of more inclusive metrics this problem is aggravated when equity particularly public equity is used as a side effect of the liquidity that equity offers and to compound the issues in addition to investors and developers users can be non-local too think of empty houses both for investment and money laundering or money laundering or both in Miami, Sydney London Toronto, Oxford, anywhere historical case studies in the book illustrate the problems of distance very well the developers of Covent Garden and Bloomsbury which arguably achieved very positive societal outcomes lived within their new built precincts the developers of less socially successful San James and red lion squares in London departed entirely upon completion. I don't think this is a coincidence the role of proximity is also made palpable in the book by the fact that the birth of modern property development is located right between Westminster with its court and the city with its merchants and financiers close connections in both places where crucial for the early developers discussed in the book and such connections are still crucial for developers today now, history and geography in the book, where they meet lies a potential challenge to the book so can we be sure how can we be sure to identify 17th century London as the cradle of modern property development business or does it smug of Euro and Western centrism it's the kind of bias I experienced in San Marco library this summer I was lucky to go to Florence San Marco library in Florence was funded by Cosimo di Medici in the 15th century Medici the founder of the banking dynasty and the library is wooing its visitors with the writing on the wall that it's one of the oldest public libraries in the world full stop but then when you actually read the research you find that Damascus had a public library 750 years earlier and later the dozens of cities in the Middle East and elsewhere now London's tripling of its population mainly through migration during the course of the 17th century from 200,000 to 600,000 nearly 600,000 by 1700 indeed created huge demand for shelter and public space but there were many cities that reached larger even much larger populations of one million or more before London I counted 10 such cities Alexandria Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad Cairo as well as five cities including Beijing in China all of them hosted major financial innovations so is it not possible indeed likely that private sector was involved in property development to house the booming populations and shape public spaces in these cities before London and if so is it possible that these innovations have influenced developments in 17th century London as they probably I think circulated in the Silk Road network trade network connecting London with the Middle East and China via cities of Renaissance Italy like Florence and Venice so there are other potentially missing links in the story by the 17th century Amsterdam the button of the leading financial center in Europe from Antwerp which in turn superseded Bruges and Venice that were dominant in which were dominant in the 16th century Florence, Venice, Antwerp are mentioned in the book Amsterdam I don't think it is so my question is wasn't the development of London real estate influenced by the role of Amsterdam as the beehive of financial innovation with its own stupendous property development during the 17th century and also by the Anglo-Dutch personal union that followed the glorious revolution in 1688 the book says that London with rising agglomeration of migrants, flourishing intellectual activities, variety of skills capabilities and focus on financial transactions was ideal for the emergence of the early real estate developers I agree but so was Amsterdam maybe before London another missing link that could be explored building on this wonderful work is the role of offshore finance, corruption and illicit finance the dark side of things the book touches on it when it mentions the plague of unoccupied luxury condos but when I think about the globalization of real estate that Richard mentioned and Manuel in the Q&A 10 minutes ago it takes me all the way to the boardwalk in Miami beach overshadowed by high rise residential blocks which get totally dark in the evening because nobody lives there when you read about the majority of multi-million dollar condos in Miami beach are purchased with cash often I bet produced out of a suitcase with few or no questions asked by Miami realtors and lawyers so there's much more work to be done on the abuse of tax laws the use and abuse of trusts secrecy in private property development this note is interesting to read in the book about the 17th century Bedford's and Southamptons invested in the Bermuda company back then it was obviously about exploration trade and slavery thrown in for good measure now it's about another form of colonialism using Bermuda trusts other legal vehicles to establish and prolong modern English and other dynasties so questions can be asked both about the origins and the impacts of private property development in 17th century London that the book focuses on the book states that the model of private urban developments that started in London spread across the Anglo-American world and with only the slightest legal and economic modifications has been embraced by formerly known capitalist economies and other governmental systems but perhaps what I said about my Polish perspective on these things this statement is exaggerated what for example about the lack of trust as a legal construct in civil law countries what about traditions cultures, institutions of property development which had suddenly been established in many countries for centuries and do not change so easily and there are vested interests involved in the reproduction now one of the paradoxes of real estate globalization highlighted by this book so well is that this globalization has happened without much standardization of property development as a sector or a profession so the book describes that the relative lack of professional association or regulation of practitioners for the development activity continues today and this may be related I think to the often observed loads standards and also corruption while we read about professionalization of architects so think of Inigo Jones in 17th century London property developers escape simple categorizations they are entrepreneurs they are professionals financiers at the same time you may want to think or not to think about Donald Trump I leave that to you interestingly in the context of real estate as part of the financial and professional services complex property development is probably one of the areas where the role of big companies has been minimal big four advisors on absolutely anything and everything even underwriters of financial deals but I think that real estate seems to be the market they have difficulty getting into and this maybe says something interesting about the sector so the book stimulated me hugely to reflect on topics which are obviously beyond the scope of the book itself what about sustainable real estate development there are mentions of ESG but what about green bones impact investing in relation to real estate in addition to community impacts of real estate we have to consider global externalities to add to what Manuel was talking about for example for climate a ton of CO2 emitted from a building contributes to the global emissions with global impacts what about diversity I guess real estate development is male dominated with major consequences on its models operandi many of the characters in the book itself are Oxbridge educated white English males and what about technology including prop tech smart cities and internet of things in particular makes buildings and real estate tools of surveillance so that multiplies the dilemmas and tradeoffs involved in property development as if it wasn't convoluted and complex enough already and what about COVID-19 impact given the likely lower demand for office space higher demand for residential building and change in the nature of what is sought after so to move towards finishing here I'm absolutely fascinated by Patrice's motivation as she explained and interest for this book and her interest in real estate teaching and the potential impact this book can have on teaching programs I believe as a financial geographer that we also need to teach geographers more on real estate proper I'm sure Manuel does personally I'll never walk in Covent Garden or Bloomsbury again without thinking about property development and I will thank Patrice for that I hope to take my students on a field trip there interestingly the leading property development companies in the UK are still headquartered exactly between the city and Westminster so you know three and fifty hundred years later to the events described in the book Brookfield prologies Welltower, Seggro, Land Securities the list goes on all there and the book is a reminder that financial geography is not only about specializing finance but about financializing space about financial production of space so I really also love Patrice's use of quote from David Harvey that money maybe as the moralists have it the root of all evil yet it appears also as the unique means of doing good I haven't seen many people quoting that from David Harvey so on this parting note I just want to say maybe the book is also or should also be a call for the moral philosophy of real estate real estate is long-term in nature changing communities and societies in the process as such it requires long-term commitments in other words used often in economics in the world where people use finance to turn these long-term commitments into short-term liquid money-like claims to make it like money basically when people use law to rob a stamp they charge financial transformations in the form of contracts and when people use accounting to obsess with short-term mark-to-market valuation and the government quietly approves or even promotes all of these processes the long-term commitment may go missing or goes missing and the result may be a short-term quest for quantity and superficial appearance so my question is working towards more long-term objectives of real estate I put it to everyone here thank you great thank you I wonder if Patrice you might have some comments in response I would just I'm so thankful to Darius for expanding just my sort of meager exploration of this of those key things that we are challenged with today and I hope that there's thank you I am already making ideas for projects to continue that myself so thank you very very much and that's the whole point of opening up this doing the open commander of what real estate development is about to say where can we go from here thank you could I ask a question Derek why do you think you make a point about real estate development in western cities to be in a sense underdeveloped in terms of the institutions or organizations that would have otherwise cornered the market say for example in power generation or even retail for that matter why do you think the property market or indeed the building market is so fractured and fragmented why so in general or in relation to other geographies other than western Europe why don't you start with respect to western Europe and indeed you know you sort of making the contrast between whole industries in the UK being incredibly sort of there are dominant firms why are there dominant firms in property in real estate markets in the UK so first what I wanted to say is that where some of my comments come from so I've been starting financial centers for a long time not particularly focusing on real estate development and something I confess and after reading this book I want to correct and and I'm myself an example how you can easily just kind of make assumptions about the origins of a lot of these financial innovations and developments in western Europe sometimes going back to Italy sometimes going back to classical civilizations but then for all kinds of reasons I've been in recent years I've been pushed to read more on China from a similar perspective on India on Mesopotamia and so on and so forth and the role of the middle is actually in the birth of capitalism itself and how a lot of ideas that influenced Renaissance Italy for example actually came from the fact that also Venice was the terminus of the Silk Road network so I would just say that I cannot imagine these big cities in other civilizations developing so successfully for centuries and sometimes millennia without some good solutions to the questions that we're asking now in the context of 17th century London or even 21st century western Europe or America I sense there's a huge potential there to learn and geographers should lead the charge on it okay so Richard you're currently occupying an apartment in a building that is otherwise probably fairly empty according to Dharik what is it about Miami you're a recent joiner of Miami is it actually this coexistence of the occupied and the unoccupied in these buildings that sort of makes the economy work well um you know partly I live in Toronto where it gets extraordinarily cold in the winter yeah we wanted a little bit of a getaway where things were a little bit warmer and you could have a reprieve um you know I want to ask Therese I think he's very spot on on this I want to make just one general comment and ask one question first of all I think this globalization of real estate is happening in real time and I think you pointed out innovation property tech but the the aggregation happening with even the big four the Goldman Sachs is that there is a move now for the black stones the black rocks the Brookfields to acquire lots of smaller players and it it's incredible black was it black stone bought AIG's affordable housing portfolio for nine billion dollars a couple of months ago this is happening in real time and I think you're going to see an industry that is more rationalized and where these players want to get more involved but and you can comment on that but I have a more specific question along the lines of Gordon's question I think real estate is really a two hats a white hat blackout problem more so than most other industries I think there are organizations you mentioned Brookfield I think they're large organizations and major many of the major pension funds that Gordon speak about that really want positive impact ESG sustainability affordable housing but I think there's a horrific dark side and this is what Gordon was getting at in real estate where is a massive vehicle for money laundering and for all of those you have the Donald Trump's and and I would just like you to reflect on this issue of not just the bark buildings but but the real estate's role in laundering money and I think we need that's an area of capitalism that has been very not studied empirically or theoretically just like you to reflect in a minute on that thank you Richard and you have one minute one minute is great it's all you need I think it does seem to me like I've been studying the financial business professional services complex for a long time and after reading this book I am I'm kind of the book confirms my suspicion that real estate is the most opaque of all of industries I absolutely agree and the globalization also hugely happens now through the real estate investment trust owned by institutional investors and owning the shopping malls and much else globally I think it's yeah it's happening at the staggering pace that has to be that has to be studied okay thank you very much thank you Derek I'm looking for Sam and I wondered if Sam no no Janelle sorry yes right Janelle okay right I'm looking at a different schedule all together but anyway sorry Janelle wonderful I'll go ahead and jump right in so Patrice thank you so much it was such a privilege to read the book and to contribute to the symposium I think as the other commentators have said it really is a remarkable body of work and for me I read although the focus is largely on 16th and 17th century London I was really fascinated by the earlier origins or Patrice begins with the kind of classical orientation of land privatization and property and then the moral imperative that's directed through those classical learnings I was very deeply impressed by the scope of covering 2000 years of history in some sense and then the meticulous detail of the developers of which Patrice wrote so my commentary is going to focus on these origins and then also thinking about pathways of development for the future so let me see how do I move my screen to go so Patrice really organized the book around three questions I think Manuel already noted this in the conclusion and for me this was a way to really read and organize and understand the text and so I also want my commentary to reflect this structure so how and why did such a model of production emerge when it did and become the dominant mode of urban growth why does it take the form it does and what exactly is that form and why is this form of economic production so poorly regarded and charged with responsibilities for so many urban ills where might improvements be made so for the first question of how this is where Patrice delves into the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and I think this is kind of fascinating because it's actually if you go deeper than the neoclassical political economists this is really where it begins at least for the western world which is this wonderful quote the better system is that under which property is privately owned but is put to common use a kind of public imperative in the writings of Aristotle that privatization is the way to maximize the value of land but it should always have this leaner this direction of facilitating common use and to that I also I think Manuel already comment on this and I went back to the original thinking on use and exchange value in Aristotle's writing on the politics that he identified two uses and didn't exactly identify these as use and exchange but said one is the proper and the other is the improper or secondary use of anything and then went on to say that exchange is in fact unnatural a mode by which men gain in the most hated sort of way and with the greatest reason usury which is gain for money for money's sake for money was not intended to be used in exchange but instead to be put to sort of what he called the management of households and so I think in this idea of the use value in exchange there's two really important principles to pick up for understanding the privatization of land one is that there was originally this moral imperative of public good and throughout the book Patrice explores that tension how do you generate a range of different utilities for the use of real estate but with that always the public amenity and I think in that moral imperative Aristotle recognizes that privatization tends towards excess and exclusively private benefit so I'll come back to this idea in a moment the second is that in privatization the land is only realized in its productive use and to this I think is where Aristotle brings the idea of there's the proper and the improperly or secondary use of it this idea that to really fully make benefit of the land you have to understand and capitalize on its productive use and so again I'll come back to that principle but I think it's really important to Patrice's question of why maximizing the use of land here she drew from the Enlightenment philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and again leaned on what is the moral imperative land is high demand civic responsibilities there's a natural law embodied in a constitution of a civil power which provides for the governance of property rather than it's being administered through religious politics so there is a public responsibility and then with Locke this really interesting principle that first property not be wasted but rather through human labor it be used to create value and secondly that the quantum of property in an individual's possession should be limited so there would be enough as good equality remaining for others so in effect if an individual own land enclosed or fenced but did not cultivate it or make it productive Locke argued such land was still to be looked on as waste and might be the possession of any other I think this is absolutely a fascinating principle because you can see the positive moral intent in it that you allow private possession of land but always with the eye towards making it productive to public benefit and problematic because it is also the logic if we look across the colonial world through which indigenous and other native inhabitants were dispossessed of their land if they weren't making so-called productive use of it or putting the land to its productive use there was this inherent argument that it could be better used by the white civilization moving in to occupy the land the other piece of it that I think is also really fascinating to consider is that the conceptualization of land value is in its nature extractive it sees only the value or the benefit of exchange value the private benefit of the land realized through its productive use and fails to recognize the social cost or the indirect cost that Manuel Albers addressed so in my own work I sort of say well wait a second if we look at use and exchange value we're really only identifying a spatial distinction to this we also have to add the temporal distinction and to the questions of why or what is so unique or special about the developer I think it's absolutely this it's the capacity to extract tremendous future potential value of land and represent it in the present so if we add not just use and exchange a spatial distinction but a temporal distinction and think about value already realized versus value that is potential we have not just two types of value but at least four so use exchanged derived and external and a lot of my work on carbon markets has been about theorizing externalities and external external value but I think that for the relationships with land this distinction is also really important so if value is considered across not only its spatial but also temporal there are these four types of value but also there's a recognition that we consider most forms of value as commensurate exchange but not all forms of value are equally capable of producing social benefit the ghost apartments in Miami are terrific example of this there is a sort of speculative advantage of storing wealth in these places but then there's also a distinct difference in the capacity to provide housing for residents in the city that need it and then to this I would add a third point which is the long-term or sustainable value generation must be systematic and consider not just socioeconomic but also socio environmental systems in the assumption that land is a commodity there is this idea that the land is not a living thing development proceeds over or on top of or through what is considered to be a static environment and for a range of reasons that is incredibly problematic I thought Manuel Albers diagram from Fontunin showing the value of different utility of land was really instructive because you saw at the end of it the thing of least value was the old growth forest and there's an incredible kind of arrogance or human perspective that something that takes 500 or more years an ecosystem of 500 or more years of growth is worth less than the agricultural product of a season and so in that I think you see that there's a sort of missed opportunity to understand and fully realize the capacity of a range of values for a civilization so so moving on from this I think the third question that Patrice raised about the problem why is development so problematic she identifies from Covent Garden and the development of a range of the 16th and 17th English developers a very concrete practical model that is established a four step model of land development first obtain control of the land to calculate value based on possible uses three determine its highest and best economic use and for achieve any necessary legal changes of use to maximize its potential and then goes on to say that this model with little alteration adapts into the present day and then perpetuates not only across the Anglo-Saxon world but also with slight modification to other worlds and I agree with Derek's critique there is obviously there is other influence from other older models and practices of land development but I think where this is really powerful and potent is in its capacity to generate the logic of settler colonialism is something we absolutely see in the North American context it is the logic that underwrites the history of settler colonialism and land dispossession of millions of indigenous indigenous people not only in the West but in other colonial states around the world with it there is also the challenge of what Patrice identifies as the Faustian bargain the developer can never stop developing and so absent ecosystem considerations relentless development leads to a situation whereby virtually every measure the Earth's biosphere is in decline I see climate change is symptomatic of that condition not as an underlying cause and finally this third issue the idea that land is a commodity this sort of unquestion assumption it is a thing to be possessed here I think it's interesting to consider the alternate logics and for most indigenous cultures land is not a thing it is relational it's not an object of control but rather an integral entity in relation to the community that inhabits it and with this there's a principle of connectivity the idea everything in the universe is connected the spirit world is represented in this diagram is connected to the moral world the sea is connected to the land the sky is connected to the ground connectivity expresses the ontological foundations of indigenous society the connections that people have to their communities their traditional territories and the ecosystems and so in this idea that's not an argument that we can we can undo 300 years of history and go back to where we began but it is this idea that we need to return to the principle that land exists in reciprocity it is a living system it provides the resources a community needs but only if they carefully steward and renew the land alright and so I think you know it's difficult again to conceptualize this in the context of modern capitalism of cities that are already established where it becomes more promising is when confronting climate change in the reality that 80% of human population lives on the coast and that in the next century these cities these civil settlements will have to be radically transformed these are a few images from the recent storm Hurricane Ida that hit New York and showcased the absolute vulnerability of the infrastructure because again it was built with this assumption it exists over a static environment the land on which it resides the natural environment is a thing that sits in opposition rather than in relation I wanted to briefly in the commentary I talked through the Boston Seaport District case because I think this is emblematic of so many of the principles that Patrice describes in her book you see here a sign it's just for the last 20 years and a place of incredible productivity and development but it's envisioning what the developer always envisions for the city you have these beautiful green spaces you see kind of the ideal of the public domain that's never actually fully realized in the city so the Boston Seaport this is an aerial view of the city it's a 1000 acre low-lying actually built on backfield land post-industrial area just east of downtown Boston it's a site that's been built on landfill historically it was used for fishing piers and then for range of industrial activities and by the 1990s was quite dilapidated so as the city cleaned up the harbor built infrastructure to connect this the transit and roadways to connect this region developers began to realize there could be potential use so a tremendous amount billions of dollars from the 1990s of both private and public investment has been poured into the seaport district originally this was planned as a mixed use neighborhood for families with parks and other public amenities in 2010 it was re-christianed is the innovation district because again here is the highest extractive value of the property so the intrinsic benefits it was meant to create construction jobs new tax revenue it was also meant to have a housing linkage job training linkage on-site affordable housing and to connect to the regions on surrounding it and then there were a range of negotiated public benefits in the plan including a tremendous amount of public open space of civic and cultural buildings public access and recreation of a diverse neighborhood and water activation and transportation and over time you see how this beautiful vision of what the seaport could be evolves into something that's quickly adapted and acquired by elite tech and life sciences businesses, luxury offices, apartments and restaurants it now has the highest household income on all of Boston it's predominantly white 89% white and it's a good example of investigating longstanding issues in the city of segregation so here you see one of the two-bedroom luxury flats that's recently sold for nearly $2 million and then I think the other really important consideration is what does this mean for the future the seaport is being built on land that under climate projections will be underwater by end of century and developers have been aware of this and assume two things one they will acquire the return on their investment long before this problem becomes a reality so it's not really their problem and in any case it is a challenge that will be addressed in some way by government intervention so there's a range of different ideas or plans about what all of what sea level rise means for the harbor here's a vision of this massive harbor wall system including an outer wall a harbor island wall and then an inner city wall that could be built and a recent study by the Kirshen lab and UMass Boston has demonstrated that across all parameters environmental, economic, cultural this piece of infrastructure is unviable so in fact there isn't really a plan to confront sea level rise and to deal with this challenge so in some way looking at what Darrington wrote and thinking about the takeaways for me I think there's a remarkable history and a remarkable set of principles to study and understand but in thinking about the origins of development there's also this realization that the development of past centuries will not adequately confront the challenges of the next century so we need more considered plans not just for the city of Boston but for other cities that will face the same challenges for thinking about the relationship between the built environment and its natural ecosystems for ways of addressing systemic inequities and vulnerabilities and then limiting development high risk areas so that we accept plan sea level rise rather than trying to build infrastructure that is unlikely to be viable in the long term alright so I'll leave it at that and open it up to questions thank you so much it was really a pleasure to read this work Janelle thank you very much for your comments insightful as usual and I might encourage those who get a chance to read Janelle's commentary about the case study about Boston was very I thought very revealing we've got dare I say it's we have a break as I understand it am I right team yes I wondered if other speakers might have comments or thoughts in reaction to Janelle before I pass it over to Patrice silence is gone Patrice over to you right well I'll kick off I'm sure hopefully even some folks if you have questions just please post them on the Q&A we would love to you know not have you take advantage of this opportunity to us something directly of Janelle's wonderful work but very I very much appreciate your your ability to utilize the what I've revealed in terms of motivations of land use and exchange and so on what we have done as you say is arrogantly take that as being a right to any land that we land on or that we arrive on this is going back to the indigenous aspect and in fact you know I was raised by another who was a historian of Aboriginal art and she always said to us you know they do not own their land they do not believe that anyone should own their land they themselves the Aboriginal people who are Indigenous to Australia and in fact often nomadic they just see themselves as responsible for the stewardship in return for the livelihood that it provides no one ever would dare to have a right to own it so very interesting and of course we've all ignored that at great tragedy but thank you for bringing that up I know she will be very touched to hear your affirmation of that Richard Florida Thank you Janelle and again for me just incredibly instructive and I learned a ton I have a really basic almost dumb question for you which I think you would be able to answer better than just about anyone else I've heard speak a couple of times we've touched upon the growth of real estate interest both from the development community but also from the investor community in things we would lump is ESG in fact invest in or sustainable development goals and I myself have been asked by real estate developers to comment on that help them formulate plans I see that Mark Carney the former governor of the bank of England is now a vice president at Brookfield by the way a Toronto based company that operates in all these major markets he's joined them as a vice president I think either a vice chairman in charge of impact or sustainability I think of all of this is this for real is this partly for real and partly you know people trying to bolster their image so called greenwashing if it's not for real can it be a trend for the good in other words is it something that governments or other regulatory bodies whether national or local or global can enforce or investors is there something is there a there there or not much at all I think it's a fantastic question Richard and I think maybe it's all of those things is it what is the motivation I do think for work that I did several years ago documenting systems of mitigation around the world and how markets emissions markets are established I interviewed or financiers and developers and regulators and you know often middle-aged white male professional service operators in different capacities and it was fascinating because it was almost as though they had had this sort of you know religious or spiritual journey that had brought them into the ESG sector into this idea of green finance where they had a very productive career and traditional finance and then realized they had children or grandchildren and wanted realize they wanted to leave something else and so I think that that motivation or this realization that there is a tremendous problem and a need to generate both social and environmental wealth or benefit is real in terms of the mechanisms again like this is where and I apologize I probably didn't felt rushed for time so fully explain this but I think one of the challenges is this assumption that everything is commensurate in exchange and particularly the idea of what I call derivative value derived value this idea that you can extract potential value options swaps derivatives so much of finance and make it present make it realized in present terms and so what I'm finding with carbon markets and with other forms of externalities or external finance it's this idea that again the path towards achieving green objectives is to creating a price system creating exchange value for those environmental parameters and I think that thoroughly misunderstands the nature of use and exchange value and external value is something sustained through use not through exchange so it's less about I think a sort of malicious intent or malicious motivation and just a failure of modern economists or even historical orthodox classical economists to properly theorize the nature of value and to really consider the dynamics of spatial and temporal connotation beautifully said agree 100% can I just catch up on that a little bit I've been very interested in this question about why ESG has got out ahead of public regulators in the US through the previous administration for example they wanted to outlaw ESG they wanted to stop pension funds using ESG and there was a somewhat of a constituency in the finance industry in Wall Street to do that but it wasn't very loud and in fact actually when you look at who's peddling ESG it's often finance companies looking for an edge in a market which they think is evolving and growing and we know everyone wants to be in a growth market a declining market is not great likewise carbon and likewise power stations systems of energy generation that rely on fossil fuel you know I would have thought COP26 was the death now for fossil fuel energy generation and it's not that anything was decided but it was the direction of travel and the direction of travel now is of course we'd better get out before we get caught if you like with our hands in the till if you like on carbon so there's a sort of momentum that is I think it's taken the politicians by surprise I'm shocked actually in the UK that Boris Johnson is interested in the environment you know there's no evidence that he is but it's that sort of sense that the politicians are on the back foot finance industry is on the front foot but they are doing it because they don't want to be caught short that is holding at the same time they want a market edge looking forward are they genuinely ESG you know heart on heart only when they put their head on the pillow and think I made a lot of money today that's a bit cynical yeah cynical though it absolutely is business interest and this is where the short termism is so critical because if 20 years ago you could have known Google is the great company Tesla is the you could have this foresight to know what's the next innovation you would absolutely invest there if you could see that in the future we know renewable and we know there's going to be an energy transformation you know we absolutely if we think into the 21st century we're not going to be producing on coal and petroleum and yet there is this latent inability to capture that advantage because there's the incapacity to think long term and to realize those gains across the long term that the short term present always overrides those considerations and so I think the business community is starting to move on mitigation they are realizing the advantages of energy transformation for mitigation but they also don't want to be caught holding an asset that's going to bleed on them so there's that sort of sense of gee you know if I don't move now when I'm am I going to move and do I want to be late or do I want to be early where's the payoff if you like right and and to extract as much value out of the conventional energy economy is they can't move forward over yeah what I think what everybody is missing is the rate of adaptation even at the cop this this sort of you know there's an undertone or an undercurrent among developing countries among the youth non-conventional non-state actors but I like I doing work with tribes in Louisiana even over the last three years I and I've studied as you know Gordon for 20 years from an academic standpoint climate change absolutely astounded visiting Louisiana and seeing what is happening to these communities on the ground we are in the present losing that coastline it's absolutely devastated by each subsequent year of storms I had destroyed thousands of communities and we're not seeing that because it wasn't you know one big flashy city it is a reality that we're going to be confronting around the world everyone is confronting and I think you know Manuel alluded to this in his talk private that the value of real estate doesn't exist in a bubble it is subject not only on its neighbors and its external conditions but it's on it's based on its socio-political cultural stability climate change is going to undermine that for everyone and so while we have this opportunity to be thinking about adaptation and development we absolutely need to be doing that now before we have mass migration of millions of people cities around the world destroyed I know that sounds alarmist but I think it's just being realistic about what is coming okay now thank you very much it's been fantastic hold on sorry we do have one question do we think we could just have Harpreet Gill asks Janelle tax revenues were labeled as you labeled them as intrinsic you know how did the question is the curious Harpreet is curious about how that choice was made obviously between you know intrinsic or extrinsic yeah and I'm apologies I don't I'm not sure if internal or external maybe was the question is not seeing tax revenues as external so apologies I'm not sure I fully I'm catching the reference so for maybe for the sake of time I'll give that question some consideration and can add something to the chat so thank you very much okay Patrice it is 3.30 in the afternoon my time it is 10.30 in the morning your time yes we have a break now until 11 a.m. your time mm-hmm for a clock my time I keep saying these things just to remind me so shall we get together again five minutes before start that would be excellent if folks don't mind we would then have our fabulous Sam Chandran who is the Dean of the School of sorry the New York University Shack Institute of real estate and also a very renowned speaker globally about the pandemic and its aspects or its impact on real estate and so on so we shall look forward to seeing Sam then and seeing you all back at 11 eastern standard time or whatever that means wherever you are thank you there you are there you are good good thank you thank you all right well you know in a minute Sam's there I'll just give him an up a heads up good do you want to introduce him or do you want to introduce Sam, Richard and Rachel is that valuable or not well I think look I'll just introduce Sam hi Sam there he is hi I've known him we share real estate yes we do do you? real estate exactly are you in the same building not quite not for Patrice are you in your office today yes yes but we are sympathetic of our graduate students who are not who are on strike so that's why we're not doing it in person so anyway we're not striking against sorry the university's harsh treatment all right yes yes Patrice and I are actually the only two that are probably on Columbia's campus right now so I don't know if you saw on my note that actually I'm in a faculty apartment on campus so I'm just behind the library very good wonderful well you know it's very pretty here so yeah so let's get to it I would like very much welcome back folks and thank you and I would like to introduce my very well known colleague the Larry and Clara Silverstein professor of real estate and the academic dean at the New York University Shack Institute of Real Estate Sam welcome. Thank you so much I'm delighted to be here very flattered by the invitation to join you and it was such a thrill for me to read the book the thing I'd start by saying is that I because I imagine this is something on the minds of a lot of people here who are both presenting and tuning in you know for me Patrice it's been a very long time since I've encountered a book particularly one is substantial as this that I would even consider you know assigning to my students to read but this is one of those lucky times where you know every page I turned I couldn't help but think to myself how well that particular chapter or that particular passage or graphic would fit into something I'm doing next semester and I very self-servingly and hopeful that either you or a group of us perhaps will develop some teaching materials that can go along with the book to facilitate our being able to leverage it with our students I think Larry said at the outset this morning that it sort of has that rare combination of being so evidently readable but also so scholarly and really filling an incredible gap that has persisted for so long in our historical understanding and it really is one of those things where absent you know this book certainly I learned so much and by the way I've been taking notes all morning the but a lot of this I think absent the book would be sort of lost to you know the next generation of real estate and urban students are very grateful for again I think what folks have described as a labor of love and creating this and it wasn't lost on me that you've got sort of Mark Holiday's New Tower one Vandy right there on the cover of the other thing that I'd like to comment on briefly because the conversations that we've already had this morning have been so interesting to tune into that just before the break Gordon and Janelle and Richard where we're chatting a little bit about ESG and for folks who maybe are in other parts of the world and not as familiar with real estate landscape and sort of collection of players here in New York between Patrice's program and mine we are board members and benefactors probably own almost all of the class A properties in town so we have this handle on the thought process and the thinking of a lot of people that have fallen sort of the institutional segment of the market certainly there are there's an incredible need for and a lot of attention to segments of the market that are not as institutional outside of the REIT space outside of securitization of debt the areas related to personal housing which only more recently has taken on more institutional flavor by virtue of many of these conversations I think one of the things that really comes to mind for me is that sort of reflection of what folks were describing just before the break real estate being a little bit ahead certainly in the United States of where we see policy but looking at the examples of other countries I would speculate that I'm not a political scientist by any stretch but I would speculate part of that has to do with the current state of the political dialogue in the United States and are being in a place now where whether you agree with the policy priorities or not issues related to climate change the environment equity in cities are clearly higher priorities and they might have been two or three years ago and again not casting aspersions on folks who might think that the current environment is worse or better than where we were but certainly we've been in a place where building a national consensus around issues related to ESG is very very difficult and there's been a geographic element to it where in some parts of the country there has been a different sensibility around this now Richard describing Toronto was very very cold I would remind him that he is quite close to the US border and that there's an entire country north of him that's even colder but being a Canadian myself I will pitch in for him because Toronto is quite livable but I think when we're looking at the issues that Jenelle and Gordon were describing I do agree that while on an individual basis it may be the case that there are folks within the real estate industry that Patrice and I and others know that may have very strong feelings about the importance of prioritizing issues related to ESG when we look at the way business decisions and investment decisions are being made and I think Jenelle described it as a business imperative and a business decision for how people are pursuing things it reminds me of LEED certification perhaps 10 years ago where it wasn't necessarily the case that the investors whether they be domestic or non-US bringing capital to the United States were prioritizing the importance of green building at that point in time but certainly we're thinking given their longer investment time horizons around the liquidity of those assets and whether or not there would be a richer deeper more liquid market for assets that were LEED certified simply because of the signaling mechanism completely independent of the energy efficiencies that it might represent so I think there is an element of this that is market responsive what do folks who are developing think that or feel that tenants want what do their investors want certainly folks for whom some of their capital is coming from pension funds or from outside the United States are having to be mindful of those issues as well government contracts and see when to play a role over here but I think a lot of it is market responsiveness factoring in the longer time horizon and there are people having to think ahead if I own this asset for 10, 15, 20 years what is my exit what is the attractiveness of the asset on an operating basis to tenants maybe not today but down the road that being said I think we also see that there are a range of interpretations around what constitutes ESG and just how far folks are willing to go and so that continues to present an issue for us one of the things that places like Hudson Yards one Vanderbilt, Scott Reckler's new building at Grand Central come to mind World Trade Center properties downtown certainly we do see some unevenness in the burden of meeting those goals where relatively newer properties are going to be in a privileged position in meetings or ESG goals just by design and whether it be sort of energy efficiency spaces that are conducive to the health and well-being of people that are working in those spaces the ability to provide green spaces and terraces in a lot of these buildings who haven't visited one Vanderbilt you don't want to miss the opportunity it's an extraordinary asset but it does raise the question of the most visible participants in the market are going to be in a very different situation face a very different set of constraints in meeting those goals as compared to the investor that owns or is left holding the B or C asset the office building that was built in the pre-war environment and I think we're far enough along there that I have to clarify for my students when I say pre-war I mean the Second World War the the so all of this becomes really important for us I'm really interested in hearing you say about it I'm going to share a brief deck I didn't want to overlap with some of the commentary from earlier this morning and so I'm focusing my comments on a slightly different aspect of the discussion in the book and it dovetails with an area of great interest for me in the realm of public health and this was really instructive to the text and I've included a couple of pulled out a couple of examples here from Patrice's writing it was well known that the use of coal for domestic purposes brought small conditions for many months of the year and encouraged London's wealthier inhabitants to move westwards there are a range of a number of different sort of references to that interaction between health and well-being and perhaps in the early 17th century not cast in the frame of or through the lens of overall public health as much as individual households optimization of their behaviors but the interaction between the built environment and outcomes for both individuals and for communities has been a feature of the real estate markets going right back in some cases through I pulled some quotes from the preface of the text that go back to Roman times and I think that we are at a point in the market today and in part it has been motivated by the more robust conversation around ESG part of it relates to our response to the pandemic and our thinking about how we might need to do things differently the clear observation of disparities and outcomes for households in some cases that are at a minimum correlated with where they live and their living conditions how they work but also differences emerging across sort of systemically important cities around the world depending upon how they are built how people access the transportation network and it is underappreciated that there is a deep connection between public health and the built environment and again it was very instructive for me to read the text and to see references to this interaction going back more than 2,000 years and then interviewing the later parts of the text to the 16th and 17th century another two quick examples health governance of the area was outside the jurisdiction of the city and relied totally on overburdened parish officers again sort of a key thing for us here when we are thinking in a post-pandemic environment around how it is that private real estate investment and development decision making is shaped by or interacts with issues around the externalities associated with private development or the need for collaboration and partnership with public entities with Hudson Yards is an example of this someone mentions the infrastructure around Hudson Yards without the seven line extension for those who are not as familiar with New York a lack of subway access historically on the far west side in the neighborhood of Hudson Yards so a critical element of this being through the public expansion of the subway system if you come into Grand Central you could immediately hop on the seven train and now the seven train will take you right to the heart of Hudson Yards arguably Hudson Yards would not be viable in the absence of that investment having been made and certainly sort of speaks to the locational advantage of building like one Vanderbilt where you don't need to hop on the seven train you can just exit from Grand Central and you're right there but this issue around sort of where does the jurisdiction and responsibility lie for thinking about how the interaction of the built environment in public health are ultimately driving outcomes for households in an environment that is more attuned to ESG and the importance of equity in outcomes in an urban setting where we see a disproportionate number of income constrained families becomes I think critically important for us because this question 400 years later has not been entirely resolved and you know we're at a place now where I think the absence of coordination between public health authorities and private real estate development firms is still sort of a stark reality for us. Finally then they wish to avoid the unhealthy crowded and dirty conditions of the city and to locate in the salubrious emerging suburbs to the west I think what this captures for me also is that while we often will think of that interaction between public health and development as being sort of you know conditions in the environment in the natural environment or in the urban environment impacting people's location preferences and decisions about where to live that there's significant endogeneity here and what we know is that it's not only that okay you know there's that example of coal you know in air quality you know three is so prescient because you can go to the BBC's website today and read about exactly that same set of conditions in New Delhi India the but I think what we see here is that while individuals may and households may make decisions about where to locate based on the quality of the environment around them what we also see is that the nature of the investments we make in the environment is driving out outcomes as well now why does this become important for us and I wanted to give this one example it's a little bit further along in 1854 but the origins of our thinking about sort of that formal discipline within public health of epidemiology you know we're also you know just around the corner from you know from a lot of what you know sort of a lot of the projects and history that Patrice is describing so the gentleman who was considered sort of the father or the originator field epidemiology John Snow you know in 1854 was conducting field research during sort of a cholera epidemic in London and in the Golden Square neighborhood was actually looking quite specifically you know at this one neighborhood he mapped out to review each one of these dots if you're able to see them clearly enough represents sort of a household with incidents of cholera and was able to see that there was a clear density pattern here and the density of cholera increased in proximity to water pump a on Broad Street in London and I think again what this highlights for us is that you know there are going to be associations I think you're one of the big things that I know Richard and others have written about and discussed over the course of the pandemic is that we should not make the mistake of associating density with severity of epidemics or infectious disease there are other intermediate causal drivers so density for all of the things that we know are wonderful about you know scale and agglomeration density ultimately also leads to you know some other feature of the built environment that is a facilitator of you know disease or negative outcomes but what that means for us and this is for me sort of a conceptually absolutely critical point density at this point in our history is you're perceived very very negatively I think sort of that's one of the outcomes of the pandemic but in helping people to think about how the connection between density and health outcomes is intermediated by other factors or features of the built environment like are we keeping that pump filter or clean are we ensuring that there isn't sort of garbage being collected nearby these things become very very important for us in thinking about how we can mitigate you know some of the risks associated with density and ultimately arrive in a place where some of that negative stereotyping around dense urban areas is better understood now this does become I think important for us and it's a real takeaway for me from Patrice's work because we're at a period in time where after 100 years of seeing improvements in outcomes for how it is that people fare from a health perspective in the urban environment we now find ourselves in a situation where probably over the last I'd say 20 years we've seen something of a reversal there part of that reversal is related to what we refer to as zoonoses and so about 60% of all emergent infectious diseases that we will be able to catalog our animal in origin and what we're going to see here and again sort of it's that endogeneity in public health outcomes impacting the built environment with the built environment impacting public health outcomes what we're going to see here is that much of the reason why we have seen an increase in the rate or frequency of emergent respiratory diseases SARS, MERS COVID is going to be related to issues of urban development and development overall I think Gordon I just have a couple of minutes left here if that's right you could see me creeping up on you yeah yeah yeah so in short I'll simply say there's a considerable body of research work that's been done to identify how it is that changes in the way that we are developing the intensity of development and activity when it is not tempered by an appreciation for that intermediation between density and disease outcomes is allowing for those disease outcomes to increase in frequency and so identifying what that intermediation is so that we can mitigate it becomes critically important and it was just so instructive for me to see in Patrice's book references to this going back for those of us briefly who may be thinking of the critical conditions or the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new zoonotic disease being something that happens very far away you can see here on this map certainly the critical the necessary conditions unsurprisingly South Asia Asia Pacific and also see here is that those necessary conditions exist in a very concentrated area in the northeast of the United States along through the northeast corridor and in parts of Europe as well so there's something that we need to be mindful of the last piece of this is that while coming out of the pandemic we are acutely focused on the need for pandemic response and to be better prepared for the next time something like this as far as the relationship with the built environment goes what we also know is that the United States and many other advanced economies over the last hundred years have experienced what we refer to as an epidemiological transition and by that I mean that we've moved from a scenario where most people when they die die of some kind of infectious disease if you look at this chart and I don't know how clearly you're able to see it the big killers are going to be diphtheria, gastrointestinal infections, tuberculosis, pneumonia we didn't live long enough or have a good enough control over many of these diseases prior to the introduction of antibiotics to actually die of the things that kill us now and so while mortality rates have declined overall what we also see is that infectious diseases while the idea of Ebola or COVID might frighten us and there's a clear sense that there's an increasing frequency ultimately the things that are killing us are cancer and heart disease and diabetes and this becomes again another critically important part of our thinking about the built environment what this chart shows in my closing one is that this is a map of percentage of the population in the United States that lives within half a mile of a local state or national park what we do know from the research is that proximity when we're thinking about the built environment proximity to well developed usable public spaces as was reinforced by the pandemic is actually quite critical to the public health outcomes that we observe and so we're thinking very holistically about this relationship as part of the built environment the need for public spaces access to transportation good quality public schools how it is that we might think about directing some of that the largest of the Build Back Better Act becomes a critically important piece of this conversation and one of my key and many takeaways from built up is that this has been an issue that has remained underappreciated in our thinking about the built environment going back to the Roman times so Patrice I think we all owe you a great debt of gratitude for your work and again I greatly appreciate the opportunity to join you today great thank you very much Sam I'm conscious that my fellow participants might want to have a question or Patrice you might want to have a brief response we've got thank you Sam the critical analysis is perfect and Covent Garden of course renowned for its public open space and by a private owner and continues to be but Richard Florida Sam nicely done and great to see you I guess my question to you is given your role one about public health and the contemporary scene why do you think that we have what I would call an ironic if not counterintuitive if not an insane thing happening in the United States principally I don't think it's happening in France I don't think it's happening in England I don't think it's happening in Canada where the places that have done the best at protecting themselves from this virus New York San Francisco that have had the most stringent public health measures are the places that either rightly or wrongly are speculated to be seeing the greatest out migration to be crazy sorry who was it what's his name Marty Lipsett always said the best thing you can do by moving to Canada as American it's come to understand the country you could say the Americans are uniquely insane or you can say that Americans put an incredible value on Liberty and I'm not just talking about Trump Trump or populous that Americans put an incredible value I'm not saying this is right put an incredible value on Liberty and don't want anyone telling them anything else the places that have done probably the most to protect their people with regard to public health, have seen arguably large outmigrations and those outmigrations have gone to the places that have done the worst, whether that be Florida, Miami, you know, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Texas, Houston, Dallas. I just wondered if you had a reaction to that or rightly or wrongly. Absolutely. It's not just the pandemic when we talk about Serbia people migrating to some of the places that have performed quite poorly. I think to Jenelle's point earlier, folks are also migrating to some of the places that are the greatest risk for climate change. And so while Serbia we profess to care deeply about ESG, you know, for both firms and individual households, we don't always see that concern and that commitment reflected in people's location preferences and decisions. I would suggest that there's two things. One, a broad misperception about the role and contribution of density, where we don't see the intermediate factors. The in the United States and part of that reflects, you know, people's reading of people's reading of of, you know, New York having been hit hardest first, and just simply assuming that that must be a function of density. The other to round it out is that I think what the pandemic has done and this is unrelated to the disease issues and the public health issues is shown for many people that they have the ability to exercise some kind of geographic autonomy at work. And so the issue that is vexing New York and Boston and some others is not really density in the pandemic in some of these cases, it's that we are fiscally inefficient. In terms of what the, you know, so the contributors to the cost of being located in these high and long duration locations, whether it be local fiscal policy, the taxes that are being levy, issues around the quality of life and quality of infrastructure. I'm done. It's a tough place to live. Thanks, Gordon. Hi, my word. Thanks very much. It really a two to four Sam, a two to four. So it's really impressive. Now Jerry's got his hand up, but I'm afraid Jerry. Oh, no, please, please let him Jerry, please jump in. Rich Rick, Rick Paz is here. Hi, Rick. Do you mind a minute or so? Well, just a minute. I can do it in one minute. Yeah, come on, Jerry. Go for it. The comments one on Richard's comment about people moving out of San Francisco and New York. For San Francisco, for example, they didn't move out of the Bay Area, they just moved to cheaper apartments further out because they could, they were working from home. I remember that it was they wanted freedom rather than lower rents for the year that they were out. And second comment on the map, which I thought was really significant about open spaces relative. I think one needs to dig down a little deeper. So for example in Los Angeles, you have high proximity to low to open spaces, lots of open spaces in the mountains have run through the city. There's no transportation from the lower income neighborhoods to those open spaces. So they could be 100 miles away as opposed to the 10 miles that they are. I did that. Right, Gordon. I look, you know, beautiful. You've, you know, we, we like. Yep. Totally agree. I think what we see is that in a lot of cases, the migration is just a little bit further out if you live in New York. You know, in maximizing your utility function, you need to be close to work because you know, sort of it's, it's costly in terms of time and patients and sanity to be able to have to commute, you know, a lot in New York City. But I think what we see is that with people expecting that, you know, I'm going to go into the office three days a week, two and a half. The geographic radius over which they can optimize their location preferences just wider and so they're maybe outside the core. Okay, to someone who follows Zillow and house prices outside of New York City through not through to the Connecticut border. So it's always house prices in big blocks. Beautiful houses go up through the pandemic. What we're seeing is them going down on the other side of the pandemic. Interesting moment. People are coming back to the city, Sam. Watch out for them. Okay. Thank you very much, Sam. Just super good. And let me pass over to Richard. Pisa. Pisa. Here. I'm being English, asking the obvious question. But anyway, so Richard, over to you. Oh, it's a pleasure to take part in this and I'm very grateful to Patrice for not only writing a very provocative and thoughtful book, but it's a very interesting conversation. And I know I've learned a lot and I hope others have as well. The current conversation actually tease up what I wanted to focus on, which has to do with is the pandemic causing a return to urban sprawl. Before I jump into this, let me just say that a few years ago, we did a small research design project on Covent Garden by for the owner, which is the big insurance company. And at the time, Covent Garden was actually starting to fall on hard times. The retail was really not in great shape. And they were bemoaning the fact that all the retail around Covent Garden was sort of low end tourist stuff. And so we were looking at design interventions to take advantage of the wonderful public space around Covent Garden with temporary facilities to really enhance programming, which I think just speaks to how as Patrice very so nicely notes how these critical center center city areas change over time and how they go up and down. But places like Covent Garden will always be very special and I think the perspective of the forces that cause them to go up or down. Patrice emphasizes in her book or I get to the heart of why all of us urbanologists love the study of cities. So with that brief preamble let me just jump into a brief presentation on some research that I'm doing right now. Let's see if sharing my screen will work here. So whoops. So, can people see my screen. All good. Thanks, Richard. All good. Okay, thank you. So it happens that urban sprawl has been a topic I've been writing about for a lot of my career and I was pleased to see with the change from in migration to out migration for major cities that I think this raises the question again. Are we seeing a fundamental shift in patterns of migration. And of course that has huge implications for the future of cities. So as you've noted there are many stories about people moving to the excerpts and to rural areas as brought about by people working from home. The need to commute into the office either not at all or looking forward one or two times a week. And the question is this really a fundamental shift in migration patterns, or is it a natural change as many millennials marry out of children move the suburbs for schools and raise their children. So, looking back on writings about urban sprawl. It's a very misused term in my view it's been a catch all time for everything that's bad about urban growth, including congestion blight monotonous urban development ecological destruction and so forth. There have been many strategies to try to control urban sprawl. One that I was personally involved in years ago was when Florida past concurrency legislation that required developers to only develop in those areas that had traffic intersections that were rated a B or C, whereas the D and F for the worst congestion, and Florida was very surprised to find that instead of pushing development back into the city, it tended to force development even further out, because the worst congestion was in the suburbs where and the city where development was occurring, and the way developers could get around this concurrency legislation fight intersections that were congestion was go out to the rural areas. And that actually had a very counter intuitive impact and often I think that's what happens with urban policies designed to control urban growth. So, when you read about sprawling cities today, Ewing and Hamidi point out that Charlotte is competing to be the next Atlanta, and being from Dallas Dallas is always vibe with Atlanta to see who can have the most urban sprawl. We've seen an urban Renaissance from 1990 to 2015. No one's written about this more than Richard Florida with this fantastic work on the creative class and who is it that has helped cities turn around. And I think there's a consensus that signs of inner city revitalization. We're appearing in the early 80s and began to grow in the 1990s. And by the early 2000s, especially with the growing growth of technology and life science firms wanting to move back to the cities, repurposing post industrial real estate, and the focus on ads and meds. We've really seen a rebirth of urban cores. Another explanation for the population influx is that these are the most desirable places for young college educated migrants who desire services like restaurants bars hair salons and similar places. In a recent study by Brombeck, looking at where growth was oc