Alistair Parvin, this is the fourth lecture of the Alive House of Studio Series. Alistair is a designer with long-based Studio 00. Although he trained in architecture, his work extends outside the traditional framework. Looking at the economic, social and technological system behind it, Alistair joined Studio 00 in 2010 as a designer and researcher. Previously, he has worked with Alistair Parvin's partners and as a freelance designer for Fulton Click, Bradley Merit. His work has been shortlisted for bronze and silver medals for river president medals. He was listed as one of the UK top six graduating students in the building design class 2009 awards. He is the lead author of the Right to Build, which is an ongoing research project exploring the UK housing crisis, the democracy deficit in planning and how citizens could become a mass house building movement. This work has been awarded to river president's work in 2012. Alistair is also a co-founder of Wiki House, an open source construction system in radically democratizing the ability to make houses. He is a co-editor of Mayshift, an open content design about architecture, economics, technology and society. He has also written for architects journal and lecture in the University of Greenwich. His team is one of the number of international architectural competitions, plus recently the Heathrow Third Runway Competition for Greenpeace. So what we offer to do, please give a warm welcome to the highest department. This is Alina Lidgetree, going out of my whole history. Well, thank you very much for the invitation to come out and speak with us. Extraordinary good, I'm sure you're hearing that today, it's good. You know, the conventional format for these sorts of talks is, in my experience, that you cannot present a load of polished answers in a very attractive way. I think A, I haven't been around long enough to do that and don't have any answers. But B, I wasn't sure that would be very useful. I think the most interesting, valuable thing about architecture is that no one really knows what it's for. But also the most problematic thing about architecture is that no one really knows what it's for. So, the other aspect of this is that the most difficult questions which architecture has to ask itself right now, are the questions so naive and obvious, things like who pays for it, that no one dares ask them, particularly in architecture schools, because in this kind of elevated environment of tutors and anything like that, it's very like, no, you're stupid if you ask questions like who pays for it or why do we need this.  Hopefully I will cause some arguments and that's good. So, yeah, please feel free to heckle at any time. So, if architecture is the answer, what was the question? Like, actually when you look out there, it turns out there's no shortage of really, really interesting and crucial design questions that need to be addressed. Some we're very, very familiar with and we're all familiar with things like addressing climate change in a world where the population is going to increase to 11 billion, some of them far more niche to do with our own minds, data freedom, all kinds of things like that. These are design problems and they're being widely recognised by corporations, governments, everybody has design problems. And yet architecture, I don't know about you, it's always struck me that architecture seems to be incredibly peripheral to all these questions. It seems to be very powerless and have very little engagement in shaping these things. And I'd like to know why. Sorry about this, it goes on quite a long time. So, the first thing we have to ask ourselves in asking this question of what is architecture a question, is we have to dispel some myths. The first myth is this one, which is this idea that architecture somehow dates back. It's this ancient practice that goes back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece. It's all bollocks. Actually, the truth is that architecture, the profession is we know it, the most sometime around the 17th and 18th century as a sort of gentleman's hobby.  And of course they had a really direct interest, a reason to be interested in what the architecture of empire looked like because they happened to be building one at a time. And what they did is they wrote themselves a sort of creation story like Adam and Eve.  Let's call ourselves architects. So that's the kind of first myth. The second myth, which is probably the most prevalent one, I've seen it prevalent in this building. Well, actually the other building already today. And throughout the whole of public architecture is this myth that architects make buildings. Now, this is rubbish for a number of reasons. The first most obvious one is that actually architects are responsible for only about 2% of all the buildings that ever get made. You know, most buildings we have architects have nothing to do with. The second thing is if you ask any practicing architect, even the most mainstream conservative architect, particularly a director or a leader of those practices, what they actually spend their time doing day to day, only a tiny percentage of their time is actually designing buildings. It's conversations, negotiating, you know, it's on the phone. Most of the buildings are actually designed through email inboxes. The third reason, of course, is that a building is a complete artificial construct.  And so that's a really big part of our kind of approach and thinking. An example of that is actually a project we self-initiated a few years ago, which was called Scale Free Schools, where the big political debate at that time was about this idea of schools, and on one side you had Labour saying, no, we're going to spend loads and loads of money making these big new schools for the future. And if we're really good, we'll get Zaha Hadid to make them a funny shape. And then on the other side, you had Tories saying, no, we don't want to build you any schools, or you can live in a border cabin. And both of these seem pretty unattractive offers to me for two reasons. One, if you build the building, it was a kind of this sort of, what's called the cells and bells model, this Victorian factory idea of education. But also this problem that you spend £30 million building this asset called the building, if you actually factor in the evening times, the weekends and the holidays, your actual usage of that asset is only 16% of the time. Your school building is sitting empty, 85% of the time. That's not a clever way to spend money on education. So we explored this once more to scale through schools where we said, actually, if you look at the latent capacity in neighbourhoods, particularly shrinking cities like Glasgow, the capacity to, if you like, turn a neighbourhood into a school using existing spaces, but also existing institutions and existing resources. And practically, how would you begin to do this? Looking at issues like security and due diligence, et cetera, et cetera. So the kind of net, kind of gist here is, to quote Cedric Price, as I almost always do, you know, his thing, which is, we should be much less interested in the design of bridges and more interested in how to get to the other side. That means we should be much less interested in designing schools and much more interested in designing education, much less interested in designing hospitals, more interested in designing health. And that's literally true. I mean, if you think about a society with a perfect healthcare system, one with many hospitals is one with no hospitals. So that's the kind of first thing that I think is sort of going, the kind of niffle thing that's going on with architecture and why we seem to be so peripheral. But I think there's another thing, which comes down to the straightforward economics of architecture. So I kind of did this exercise in my head. If you look up on the ROBA, what your expected salary is when you graduate from part two, you should be expecting to earn 24,000 pounds. Now, if you put that globally, in terms of if you line up the whole world's population in order of income, that would already put us in the top 1.95% richest people on Earth. Now, any of you, have you ever worked on an, or I'm sure you have occasionally, but pro bono work, but generally in your practices, have you consistently worked on projects where your client was poorer than you? No. Clients are always richer than us. So effectively, what we're saying is that in order to hire an architect for the several weeks and months required to do a project, the only people who can genuinely afford to hire an architect are this tiny 1% of the world's population. And that plays out across many different economies, by the way, but I won't bore you with all the graphs. The reason why we forget this, why we don't think of ourselves this way, and we all kind of know this, right? We all know that when you pick up glossy magazines, it's like a villa for somebody. It's like an architecture. It's like, you know, Phillip Meyer doing a villa for a millionaire in the middle of nowhere. The reason why we forget it is because actually the times in history of completely defined architecture's identity have been the times when through completely external political and economic reasons, the 1% of organizations and wealthy individuals have built on behalf of everybody else, and particularly housing. Obviously that began at scale with the philanthropists when there was this incredible urban deprivation. Later, of course, and most famously the welfare state, you know, up to even the 70s, over 50% of all the architects employed in the UK were employed directly by the state as part of this kind of utopian project to deliver housing. And of course Glasgow knows that well. Then went through this kind of weird period from the 1780s where architecture's question was, meh, whatever, no, I'm an artist. I don't have to answer a question. I'm completely pursuing my own whims. I don't have to be useful to society.  And if the client doesn't like the shape that they then have to end up living in because it's a funny shape or the green glass on the facade breaks, then stuff. But of course what was really happening, the question that architecture was actually working on during that period was real estate. Actually what was driving all that age of icons and funny shapes was this real estate bubble. That was actually who was paying us with these speculative developers who were building these things so they could sell these real estate things, which we would get mortgages and buy and they would make their money. And, you know, indeed, my boss puts a rather brilliantly the architecture's business for the last few decades has been creating assets and inflating assets. And the inflating bit is the Bill Byall effect, where, again, you get a famous architect to come in and make a funny turd thing. And then all the media flock around and say, isn't this incredible? And that's actually what's going on and I wish more star architects could be more honest about it, actually. It's not a bad thing, it's fine. Glasgow, by the way, is much cleverer than all these people. Instead of spending millions of pounds building the Bill Byall in Guggenheim, they just put a cone on a statue's head and have the same effect. And this is a painful reality for us to deal with. But Le Corbusier's idea, when we've been doing all these housing projects, Le Corbusier's idea of what the house was was a machine for living. He actually cast Gilbert, the architect of many skyscrapers in New York, had it better, which is that houses de facto that their purpose is to make the land pay. That is the design intent. And that is why, when you went out to practice and you worked in commercial practice, some of you would have been frustrated by the fact that the development of your client kept saying, make the ceilings lower, take the balconies off, et cetera, et cetera. That's what's going on there. Now, you know, that plays out for better or for worse. It comes around and it crashes. But fundamentally, what hasn't changed through all of those areas, whether it is the welfare state or the real estate bubble, is that we only work for the 1%.  This is the kind of basic history of housing in the UK over the last few years. This is the total amount of supply that we were providing it. This is the key graph here, which is this line, which was this massive inflation in house prices. This is where our money came from. If you're an architect and provided this is where your money came from. Because new labour hooked all our delivery of everything from schools to, you name it, off the back of uplift through housing price inflation. And it was inflation. It wasn't growth. Just because the middle classes get to say their house went up in value, actually all that means is if your house went up in value, your next house just halved in size. We think this is good for us, but it's not. It's a massive kind of myth of economics and everybody from the left and the right insisted from Shelton which pointed out that if chicken in the supermarket had inflated by the same amount as housing since 1971, chicken today would cost us 50 quid. And so how is architecture, architectural culture this community of designers, how does it react to that? It sort of split two ways. Well, there's another way, which is the kind of the Bartlett way, sort of trap farms on Mars we call it. But actually it's kind of split in two halves. I used to go into this kind of reactionary conservative position which, these are the sort of people you'll hear using words like this which don't mean anything by the way. Materialities are made up word. It doesn't mean anything. I'll argue it with me afterwards. And these are the sort of people as well who are assessing, oh, hand drawings. I love doing hand drawings. Which is a way of saying, I believe in a Victorian labour model. You know what I mean? If you want to do hand drawings, it's a way of saying I'm going to need a richer client who's prepared to pay me to spend the time doing it by hand. I don't get me wrong, I love hand drawings but be an artist. And don't get me wrong I'm all about craft but the remain modes of craft. The other side of it is this kind of critical side which I guess is slightly closer to my heart, but equally frustrating which is this sort of lefty alternative or social architecture movement. Social architecture is in a logical term because all architecture is social. In a way though both of these are equally conservative because none of them really engage with the real economics of what's going on. These guys will just say oh, we're going to transgress against the normative instead of just actually maybe we could be part of inventing what are the new normals. And neither of them really engage with the economics and I thought this is a beautiful kind of a cartoon of that, the problem with activism which is the fantastic V for Bendetta masks being made by a sweatshop in China. So we're back at this kind of square one position. I think the only structural way that we're going to begin to address both the struggles facing our own business model the struggles facing our own abilities for usefulness in society and if you like the ethical dilemma that we seem to be on the wrong side of democracy is somehow to try and make our client for the first time ever not just the 1% but the 20% 30% 50% 100% Architecture has never done it, so don't feel a burden of a burden on you. What that actually means on a day-to-day level is that you quite hard knows about the transaction costs of design. So my jokes are about hand drawings, they're only half jokes. Fundamentally it's saying you're going to earn only £24,000 over a year and you're going to have it for one client with a lot of money or many clients with a little bit of money. Now anyone who's worked in an architectural office for a period of time will tell you this is completely untenable. So we actually have to really think about the way that we're operating. This is a kind of, I'm re-appropriating the idea of architectural scale here as you can see. So what this leads us onto is having investigated our own sort of business economics is the economics that we're part of and this is one of those Damani questions that is the most important question. There is not a single question relating to the design of buildings or cities where there's sustainability, density, form and materials anything, labour. There's not a single question that isn't essentially underpinned by this question or transformed by this question which is who is it who actually makes cities? This is not a blank page. This is a graph of all the houses built in the UK in 2006 along the x-axis is all the people who made one and a pixel per house. Now on the y-axis is how many they made. It's such a sharp parallel that it looks like the page is blank and I have to do that to see the top of it. In that year, more than 50% of all the houses in the whole of the UK were made by just 10 companies. And the interesting thing is almost regardless of ideology, whether it's the state or the market, fundamentally since the industrial revolution the way the development model behind housing hasn't really changed that much. The fundamental idea is that the only people who can develop housing at scale are professional organisations or corporations building on our behalf. So instead of what you intuitively think which is 30 people come together they decide how they want to live they pay someone to build them a house or 30 houses we do it rather backwards. This is the dumb obvious stuff we know this where we get one person with a single chunk of finance to buy a whole site and they get a design made for a planning commission based on this imaginary one size fits all human being whoever that is which is becoming increasingly untenable as well and they do a planning application and of course form follows finance is the general rule. So if you do a big monolithic chunk of finance surprise surprise you get big monolithic chunks of buildings and it's amazing by the way how many designers architects you'll see calling most housing bad design. I mean I did a whole thing on this saying it's not actually bad design it's good design but to a completely different set of economic values than the ones we want to be working for. Then they divide them up into housing they commission professional contractors to build it and they might have to run and you might end up having to inhabit the building early. Now of course in that context you've created a situation where if you have an inflating land market it doesn't matter if you give a developer what the developer wants to make is real estate so if you give them a technology that enables them to build half the price they'll just go great double up profits they'll still sell for the same price. So there's absolutely no incentive for them to build houses bigger or to think through what more a house could be doing for us so it's completely logical for them to say actually I'll take insulation out of the walls etc etc the only person who ever has a real financial interest in real sustainable energy buildings is the person who's going to be paying the heating bills and yet they're the only people who don't ask to commission our builders. By the way this isn't controversial this is completely established in 2007 there was a government report called the Calcutt Review which is of how written by a house building industry professional and it made it absolutely clear it said in the current market there is absolutely no incentive for us to invest in quality. In other words all the things that governments, designers and citizens architects believe is good about housing, community, flexibility quality, sustainability, affordability we see them as costs and we will not provide them that they absolutely have to and that's why at the peak of a boom the UK found itself building the second smallest houses in the whole of Europe and we call it wealth and of course the result is we all end up being hefty with a huge amount of mortgage debt and living in slightly isolated little flats which then get foreclosed and this is literally what's playing out in our cities and what has been playing out in our cities I mean it looks like it could be kind of eastern block or something it's not it's the Olympic park that's literally what you know the irony by the way is that all the design professionals who worked on these sorts of buildings all live in west London in the lovely fine-grained streets of Fulham and things or North London and by the way this is also the development model that we're trying to export onto an urbanising world this is Kilamba in Angola where Chinese financial capital has parachuted in and it's built a completely new city from scratch that makes kind of something like that look quite sort of tame by comparison and the amazing thing is it's completely empty because no one can afford you need to pay $75,000 to buy a flat so it's completely empty and they pay these gardeners to go and tend all these weird non-spaces in between they pay all the gardeners to go around gardening and there's this brilliant BBC thing where they go up to say do you like it here? and and where do you live? oh I live in the slum down the road so actually what happens is the reality of urbanisation, the city of the future actually looks like this, they're self-made cities not these kind of real estate cities there's this massive disjunction because we fundamentally don't have a development model for making this kind of development a sustainable form of development, a sustainable form of development that has institutions, has infrastructure et cetera, governments can't recognise this at the moment so there's a fundamental problem in here which is the whole model of urban development everyone is telling us that the world is urbanising and yet fundamentally there's a democracy deficit in the way that we're producing and there's an increasing awareness that planning and development is something done to people not by them and that things like consultation are increasingly inadequate as means to mitigate this and certainly not market competition, so this is and this by the way is completely regardless of ideology, so this is in China where the owner of this building refused to sell the house for the construction of a motorway so the government just built the motorway anyway and of course this puts also urban space issues, these questions are the common right at the heart of political discourse this is of course Tahrir Square that's right isn't it in Turkey that was Egypt, so this is the Turkish one which actually began, what triggered that was a debate about trying to build them more on a public park and actually we experienced this in our own environments not just in the small planning disputes but in these big questions of almost anyone says actually wind turbines look alright until they want to build them by their house so there's this fundamental mismatch in the idea of democracy which is we're going to build this by your house but you're not going to get any benefit you're not going to be a shareholder you're not going to get money, you're not going to get cheaper energy as a result so of course people are going to be against it and underlying all that there are big things, big questions like land monopoly and all that but fundamentally underlying it was the industrial assumption that actually it's simply not possible for a planner to work with 100 amateurs simply not possible for 100 amateurs if you like to efficiently procure and commission their own neighborhood and I think that's now wrong the technology is changing we know this right because we've already seen it for the last few years of the this idea of the long tail and a few professional providers to the many small participants technology fundamentally changes our ability to do this and this has begun to spread into realm of cities and things like Airbnb which I mean now I think I'm right in saying Airbnb is now globally one of the biggest hotels in the world and the interesting thing is these systems not only are quantitatively comparable with these sort of systems but actually they have a fundamentally different quality to them which is the moment you stay when you go on an Airbnb and you stay in a 14th century castle you suddenly look back at hotels battery farms and there's some other interesting things here in the sense that what this graph actually looks like is highly monetized corporations a big bulk of professionals monetized professionals but fundamentally small companies and then this long tail of amateurs who are not necessarily doing it out altruism but they're simply doing it for themselves to address their own needs and of course one of the big shifts to where this is following on is this thing that's been turned into the third industrial revolution which is radically dropping prices and opening IP around digital manufacturing tools like 3D printers and CNC machines so the quote we always use on this is a John Maynard Keynes one we think which is easier to ship recipes than cakes and biscuits and what's interesting about that is it's simultaneously completely obvious and yet not how our industrial economy works the moment we get people in black polo necks and we send them over to a sweatshop in China where we can get the cheapest laders to make them and we ship them all the way back again and then we're consumers again at the other end and the promise if you like of digital technology is it fundamentally changes that chain now that in itself is not an industrial revolution it will simply mean that maybe you download your iPhone 20 but actually what it does is it creates a world in which the recipe is simultaneously super valuable and yet wants to be free now expect legal battles but this is potentially an industrial revolution which means for the first time we can create open source hardware completely shared so that anyone can get access to a design for a thing and access it and replicate it and make it for themselves that's really kind of interesting if you look at open source software there's now an open source software equivalent to commercial software out there imagine if the same were to happen for the stuff and it also changes the fundamental economics of production away from this assumption that one size fits all is the only economic way of doing things so a world where potentially products can begin to be more like Darwin's Finches in the sense that they can adapt and evolve to local contacts, local needs local economies etc and that of course is fundamentally the kind of premise behind this experiment we began called Wiki House if you're familiar with it come across it basically we're just beginning to try out that same idea the one particular word making has so we've made this kind of online free commons or repository from which you can download structures in this case we're using SketchUp but I'll show you where we're moving after SketchUp just because it's relatively free and easy to use and made this plugin where at a click of a switch you can generate essentially a set of cutting files it's still very ropy the software so you can't quite do it at the click of a switch which are your kind of raw information to print out the parts from a standard machine material like plywood on a CNC machine which are these machines, actually they've been around for ages they're just more and more widely available and you know every part can be numbered etc so what you end up with is this big kind of bespoke Lego or Ikea kit effectively and what we've been doing over the last couple of years is slowly trying to find a way to finance ourselves to go through this project but developing and honing this hardware system so that you can take those parts and a very small team of people with no construction skills necessarily whatsoever can just come together with their friends and very quickly they can build those frames and they're designed always thinking through considering health and safety it can take off issues like scaffolding all the way through so you don't need bolts or things like that the whole thing is done by wedge and peg connections and yeah you can build them very quickly and then equally making this an open modular system so that taking the same approach of services inside so that you can essentially allow users for the first time to hack their services this is the house we're developing for the UK obviously this is just a video of one of those structures which we did in New York really for an event that sort of popped up and the whole thing was built in a day and a half one of the interesting things about this is when we focus on technology we're always trying to go higher and faster and we're obsessed with actually lowering thresholds which are time, cost scale and carbon always trying to design down those equations and so one of those is actually a concept in Japanese for this called sort of poke-a-yoke which is sort of trying to idiot-proof parts so trying to make it impossible to get wrong so that essentially you can have a level of site organization equivalent to a piss-up in a brewery and it will still just go together and there are other aspects to that as well which are for example none of the pieces are so huge that average able-bodied female can't lift them which means for the first time construction might not just be an hands game and this so we put that up in about a day and a half and this we were particularly proud of because it came down in three hours which is pretty cool and so what we've developed is this chassis system when we're currently in the process of taking this all the way through to a complete very high energy performance low cost home and that home I showed you before we could serve simply targeting that to be a 50k build cost but it's very very high energy performance etc the actual structural build is as tiny as 20k and this is a one which we'll be building in spring in Scotland just in Argyle which is quite fun now the sketch-up thing I showed you earlier this again just lowering threshold also is our ability to lower thresholds not just by being lazy like foxes by going and getting something that already works that's shared under an open license and adapting it but actually I'm not just in the way that we build the things but actually in the design process itself and frankly it annoys the hell out of me that parametric design has been abused by architects for the last 10 years or so to make funny show to hotels in Dubai when actually the real potential of this technology is to again radically lower thresholds so we can do in a way and this is the challenging aspect of this we can do stages you know D to K in a few minutes potentially so this is an in browser parametric tool we're developing this is not the house this is another a desk product which we developed and this is the product called open desk where this is all in browser you can just say what the shape of your desk is you can position the legs and you can adjust the height and the thickness of everything like that and then you just click and it generates the profiles at the very end so what we can begin to imagine here is that for the first time it becomes possible so if you like legitimize the idea of citizens making for themselves as a legitimate form of development a very high performance high quality development so imagine we took that same site which cost 30 million and instead of selling it to one very rich person 30 ordinary people and they came together and they developed not a complete design because they tear each other's research shows that they tend to hate each other you know tear each other's heads off but actually what they could develop is again potentially through parametric a parametric tool like that they could develop a set of basic outline rules for the neighborhood and that can get passed we have the legislation to do this called an LDO local development order which is like a community permitted development rights community permitted development rights says as long as you stay within the rule you don't need to apply for planning permission so suddenly it becomes viable for a planning authority to see this as you know workable instead of having 100 amateurs on the phone and those rules can be about more or less anything you want they can't planning law says they can't necessarily interfere with ownership but that's fine together fund the investment of infrastructure maybe the first step is actually to build and install a kind of community factory which becomes a kind of yeah I mean it is what it's in a kind of this manufacturing but also a sort of local village institution for getting the support that you need or finding out an answer to a question or whatever it might be and use that community factory to design your own houses which means A you can invest sweat equity says radically more affordable your but fundamentally the most important thing is that the people doing the designing and the procuring and you can get professionals in to do it like architects it is they are investing social capital as well as financial capital and their fundamental purpose is not just to make a tradable financial asset it's to make the place where they're going to live where they're going to pay the heating bills where they're going to bring up their children so suddenly all these things that as architects are going to be viable and in fact the aim all that there you are some propaganda and of course what our aim is to develop not just kind of construction systems but open source development models so actually having developed these sorts of models our aim is then and this is a slide all about basically pointing out how you're going to get real terms economic prosperity as opposed to just debt instead of having to commute elsewhere you can start business in your own house or whatever again this idea of live work has been talked about for a long time but we've looked to an economy that has no interest in doing it our aim is to completely open source all these models and I'm always at pains to point out there is absolutely nothing really innovative about what we're proposing here this is how we built most houses throughout most of history open source architecture is just a very fancy way of saying vernacular architecture just with computers and actually that idea of the kind of traditional barn raising was how kind of settlers and things moved out west but it's where changing the economic equation in the housing actually changes the outcome so for example I can't say to Ambrose can you come and spend two months of your life building a house with me because he'd be like no actually I'm kind of busy but I could say to a whole bunch of my friends can you all come for a weekend and I'll bring pizza and beer and we'll build a house that's a lot better than what I had planned so actually you can take steps to feel like unlock this social economy and allow people to provide for themselves and so we've open sourced not just the Intellectual Property of Wiki House but also the deep ownership and governance of the organization and as a result of that we've made this open trademark license so we're now happily frankly because we're tiny not the only one that's developing these sorts of projects there's actually more than this I think there's 13 right now chapters around the world going it's completely open so this is one of the chapters that is developing in Christchurch New Zealand looking at post-earthquake recovery housing ignore this bit get back into the trade yep yep yep it's such a legend that guy to explain this one of the things that often people say to us in Wiki House is oh it must be really good for disaster response and we're like hmm probably not it's actually when a disaster hits what you probably really want to do is just get your head down and mourn and survive with Christchurch what happened there's amazing form about this with Christchurch what happened was this there was a lot of solidarity when the earthquake struck and they suddenly out of nowhere huge amounts of food and support arrived at village halls and schools and central locations and loads of volunteers became this self-organizing army to make sure people's needs were covered what happens again and again and again is that by the way globally we're pretty good at this the UN is pretty good at this disaster relief stuff what happens again and again is that six months to a year down the line the emergency housing because the cranes and the capital and the debt don't come and if they do come it's usually a problem it's usually gentrification or debt or exclusion and that's to some extent what's happened in Christchurch where the cranes and the capital have come but they've only built big scale projects in the centre it's been completely bogged down in bureaucracy so there's loads of people in the suburbs where there's still these black spots of land and the people are there they want to help themselves but the law and the industrial system doesn't allow them to do it and rather excitingly actually WikiHouse is now, thanks to the team over there WikiHouse has now been written into the official housing policy of Wellington the capital city of New Zealand as part of their strategy long term for how they were building resilience to these sorts of issues and this is just a cool little video illustrating this idea people can either rent a block and swap it for another block or just come along and help themselves to books from the bridge because you can see what's inside it and the books are going to be safe we can leave it here it's going to be open 24-7 anyone who says normal people can't design contributes to the city right now to get involved to feel connected to what's happening and there's a lot of making space that if you can just take away the barriers to if they utilise people can make things happen there, they can experiment they can encourage innovation and creativity and all these things which can really contribute to the regeneration of the city and that works hand in hand with the top-down demolition of the building I'm hearing a lot these days so basically it was what she said that really captured that for me, this is just some amazing footage I think these slides should have been in the other order of the earthquake when it hit there the truth is if that's what's needed there, the truth is actually that's kind of what we need everywhere because if you look at the global housing crisis sure in there they experience it as slow redevelopment in the global south they experience it as slums over here we actually have a not similar housing crisis it's just that we experience it as debt and actually in this environment where if we look at the straightforward mathematics of urbanisation straightforwardly if we see citizens only as consumers of housing and the professionals have to provide it somewhere we're going to have to create enough money to do it and Robert Neuwirth says rather brilliantly there is not a corporation there is not a government there is not an aid agency who will be physically capable of doing it and if there is a bank who can create enough debt to do it something has gone wrong again and we're going to crash so we fundamentally actually have to see find a way to make bottom up development work and actually that's in our interest areas of scarcity but in areas relatively wealthy countries where we're currently living in these frankly incredibly deprived houses so the fundamental aim if you like goes through just sort of housing and development I think it speaks to our idea of democracy when we talk about democracy what we tend to mean is generally universal suffrage independent judiciary and free speech and we tend to have this kind of black and white view of democracy which is you are you're not and I think that's just really unhelpful quite wrong actually which is that what we've done is we've seen democracy as an ends rather than a means and therefore we've justified saying democracy is what we're building but then we employ economic approaches and certainly industrial approaches which are fundamentally undemocratic in the sense of a very small number of people do it to many other people that doesn't need to be the case anymore and I think that is the great challenge as I sometimes put it I think if you look back at what design really did this strange industry called design in the 20th century in the 20th century it democratized the consumption so this idea everyone can have a washing machine everyone can have Coca Cola everyone can have IKEA and it did that really well but I think what it's doing now and I think the next challenge is democratizing production and the capability to produce and so if you like WikiHouse is just kind of one part and we hope to kind of go out into this whatever you're kind of working on the idea that collectively we could build a kind of Wikipedia for stuff a global commons of design solutions that anyone can get access to using multiple different materials maybe but always low cost, low skill, low threshold and very high quality and high performance it's actually the only way that we'll ever diffuse sustainability solutions to everybody because at the moment it's no use you're making a passive house solution if it costs an absolute bloody fortune and so the weird thing is about this is some of the technological questions that we could be usefully working on are strangely mundane and probably more disruptive than what we're doing on housing is what we're necessarily doing is windows we're trying to develop a CNC cutable very high performance window now of course we can't make the glazing bit but we've made a kind of frame the customizable frame assembly kit that we haven't tested it yet but we're developing it but we hope it will give you very a level of energy performance that currently comes from a very expensive proprietary product so if you don't want these things cut and make it for yourself for about a third of the cost and there's more people who need to replace their windows than need to replace their whole house other interesting mundane questions in India over the next by 2025 I think 50 million people are going to join the middle classes and they're going to want to use air conditioning and eat meat so actually if we're really serious about tackling problems like climate change we need to develop these mundane solutions and diffuse them quickly we heard this statistic before can't read it very well there's 7.2 billion people in the world 6 billion have access to mobile phone and let's be honest Cobra Cobra probably 7.2 actually have access to Cobra Cobra but only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets so this is weird it was a product of a whole load of distribution things about markets but for the first time we may as well start using this to try and solve that I wasn't sure quite how to finish this there are 3 possible kind of endings there's loads of possible endings one possible ending is to talk about the rise of new data capitalism which as you hear people say technology's going to save the world it's like well companies like Google are giving you some amazing free capabilities but behind the scenes they're incredibly centralized hierarchical organizations who are accruing huge amounts of data and that's got a price tag attached that's why Nest was the home sensing system was recently bought for billions of pounds by Google it was the data they were paying for and Facebook and things like that and that's something we had to really look to if you like the institutions behind technologies another kind of thing I'd love to go and I really won't is actually why this is not about buildings and cities it's actually about farming and rural production there was a UN report out last year that absolutely nailed this about from Monsanto Future so we need to radically democratize knowledge and tools for essentially organic farming at high yields but I'm not going to talk about that either what I'm going to talk about is just design this question that I was set if you like for what this actually means for us how do we as we're kind of going out how does our generation begin to say now actually I don't want to just design shadow gaps for rich people I actually want to go and sort of do something it's not a utopian ambition it's just I may as well be useful because if you're useful money will probably eventually follow so where does design actually sit in this framework do we actually sit in the arts and crafts and section of the Guardian in the how to spend it bit of the Economist no like design is fundamentally an extraordinary way of thinking and all architects are doing this all the time when you're thinking about design you're connecting economics, culture, aesthetics, ethics philosophy you're amalgamating and complexing all these various things in one place so it's very weird that we've only been applying that amazing way of thinking to an incredibly narrow set of questions which we make this real estate developer rich we can actually begin to participate in if you like by engaging with the economics behind what's going on we can begin to engage I think in hugely effective ways and honestly when I was in the third year someone came up to me and said it wasn't Ambrose someone came up to me and said Alistair what are you doing you're obviously a politician why are you becoming an architect I happen to be really impressed with Fuller at the time which was useful and this is a really a good example of this which is a few years ago the high-rise agency announced that they were going to turn off the lights on motorways at night to save money and carbon despite the fact that they knew statistically this was likely to lead to n number more deaths and injuries per year now this is actually a perfect microcosm of the impossible decision that we're giving to our politicians these deaths or those deaths you make the choice whereas it's also by the way a perfect illustration of what I call austerity environmentalism when you speak to most architect and designers now who you know I think most of us think of ourselves as being quite serious about climate change and sustainability a lot of us are actually saddled onto this kind of activist idea that oh no it's it's a kind of austerity thing stop eating meat, stop using your car stop going on holidays, stop having pets well not only will we never sell that but also austerity environmentalism is deeply problematic because who gets to decide what's a luxury and what has actually progressed our quality of life because actually the truth is that although these ill-gotten gains and fossil fuels to bring our food, the truth is we've had massive leaps in life expectancy massive leaps in women's rights only through development we get the average number of children down to about two per family which will stabilise out the global population etc so we don't get to just say oh no, stop the world I want to get off and that's the sustainability answer we need to find a way for designers to feel like fundamentally pull the rug out and really please political equations and actually this one I don't think is that hard I don't know if anyone wants to take a stab at it it's weird, I spent time thinking do you want to... that's pretty smart and that's been done in Germany because they can do that kind of thing another straightforward solution is to replace the bulbs with LEDs and that payback is pretty quick incidentally it also has the effect of making everyone look a bit prettier so I think if a government was really clever they'd do it and everyone would be like Britain seems so much better these days but actually my proposal for this is actually if you take a bit of capital and work with all the local farmers to install an anaerobic digester connected to a CHP unit if you do the back of envelope mats just from their manure and fertiliser they can generate enough electricity in a year that you only need a percentage of it they get to sell the rest of it use the electricity or sell back to the grid and the payback time is about 4 or 5 years as a designer you can bring an insight to these things that a politician or a business person cannot do it's why so many people are coming towards the idea that design is a central role whether you call yourselves architect or whatever as designers you are possessed of the most extraordinary way of thinking practically and creatively about these sorts of problems so for heaven's sake choose a question that you think is worthwhile now if I said to you I ban you when you graduate from sending out a CV to an architecture firm in fact screw it I ban you from sending out a CV what question would you work on that really gives you flow that you think is actually a really important question that somehow we need to ask even if a job description doesn't exist for it and even if you have to spend several years trying to find a way to make it pay you a wage what problem would you go and work on one that really gives you flow that you see as a great work for heaven's sake go and do it and if somebody says that's not architecture thank you very much or beratings as well come on I want for a fight questions hamburgers has a list I do please please think of questions and challenges materiality means just to go through a few things materiality means sense of material yeah but who gets to define what sense of material is I don't know drawing is useful and it's used by poor architects I know that I'd love to draw by the way I mean like technical drawing of buildings done by architects you don't have large printers so that's useful and it's not 18th century it's just better and the thing that really struck me is that I think yesterday that had a matter quite strongly is that architecture is building this new fabulous building as Bob Croft had described it it's cracking which I thought it was cracking you didn't know that you was talking about the glass architecture is on it's always been on capital A architecture which is what we're learning to do go and do it that's what we're training people to work for the one percent so what it's a lovely job I'm not telling you I'm well educated, clean clean I know exactly what you mean there's a really good quote about this which is actually about advertising which is you guys think very deeply about superficiality it's fine I'm not saying don't do it I'm saying you don't have the right to tell these guys that's the only option so I I think keep working for the one percent we work for the one percent as well that's always going to be part of the game and if you want to sign up to the Isleman belief that architecture's value is its very irrelevant the moment it becomes useful then it's not architecture anymore that's fine, you're an artist I love art let art be but don't fool yourself that that is a realistic view of what design can do and also what we definitely shouldn't be doing is running our architectural institutions and our educational institutions as if that's what design is this is not a question this is a comment I think it's really important for you guys you are trying to develop critical thinking skills but this person this person's the rhetorical provocation does not undermine the fundamental value so while we can address and critique certain rhetorical flaws you know, you've said you're so propaganda I would suggest or state that it's probably not the only instance of propaganda in the whole talk but I do think that the fundamental principle that both of you are sort of slightly arguing about is that what you are learning in architecture school whether you're being taught about a deeper or a different kind of problem is the ability to apply criteria and consensual matrices and structuring your thought and organizing your collection of information your analysis of information your synthesis of information and your deployment of information that guy over there is telling you you can do that in lots and lots of different ways and I would suggest state that the more people that are designing chairs, houses etc creating and more people addressing using design skills to address the wrath of the problems we have all I would say to you is on top of that the one thing that I think is important is that it not be ugly so now many of the proprietary window systems that I've seen have used in my life are pretty ghastly that one ain't no better looking but I love the fact that it is actually trying to provoke us wait till it's finished we're fully going for the full Johnny Ive I just think you're trying to make a point and the speciousness of some of the better views I'd love you to pick me out on the speciousness of the record because I would stand by any of it on your point I completely agree with you and actually even the most if you like dying in the war architect with a capital A what I argue is your thinking is so much more sophisticated than your treating it because the truth is what you're doing by ignoring all this stuff is locking yourself into a situation where you have to go out and do work and actually is embarrassing to yourself because you know and so many architects do that it's always so poor quality it's so commercial and say changing the client if you like to the user is the person who will say actually I want the quality so in a way I'm embracing that whole movement of architecture and I also completely agree with On Beauty there's a wonderful quote on this by the filmmaker John Luke Goddard who said it doesn't matter whether you choose or you'll find the other one waiting for you at the end of the corridor I fundamentally believe that but pick out the most specious rhetorical point that I made people accuse me of being like Tony Blair sometimes I just think that Frederick is a wonderful device as long as we accept his father no but the important thing about rhetoric I think this is an important point the important thing about rhetoric is that actually if someone scratches the surface and drills down there's a real solid informed discourse underneath it and that's something that is one of the weird things because in architecture it's really cool to be kind of off and Rem has made the total genius of this where he talks about radical issues but the one is slightly kind of off way the problem is to actually try and do something you have to risk being uncool because you have to try and go out and speak in plain English and actually try and talk about what you're doing and there is a component where it becomes like almost accidentally becoming like a salesman even though we're not selling it we're not making profit from this and students like you are studying in four parts one of the big parts is that not only one of the things we enjoy as humans is not only but our whole society is kind of out of here on that on that basis that's what we get from consumers we just love not only and I know that you know I love to see new things we just do it because it's all massive but because of the way it's just happening does it fight against that? I don't want to come back that does it come back that? what you're trying to do do you think it does? but the reason that you have shit fighting is because of that it's because it's led to find that that's not the same as the novelty thing right so so when a family in Africa go out and buy a new bike like that's still novelty, it's still a new bike they're still going wow that's what we did in the 50s when we had new cars this is one of the interesting double plays in the way we talk about very socially progressive things but it's also recognising that that development in the 1950s which that kind of culture of consumerism it came from a very real impulse my argument impulses always don't fight that's why we use these forces use them but give people access to yeah yeah yeah yeah is it? I don't wish to be rude but in my pocket I have the answer to pretty much every factual question this is basically magic why things are than No, but this is great. That's a great point. But this is also because...  Yeah, that's also a good point, by the way. We also look at, for example, corruption in our own politics and things like that, but actually it's so much less corrupt than, you know, a lot of African nations, for example. So you're right. Things are good, but equally, the question is why... Why is...  I think train services are good. You're the arch-contrarian, you're the best person to be. So why is it that our iPhones are so awesome? I mean France... But trains are so bad. It's a bane for God's sake. The post-national comparison... That's a line of enemies. They completely mean we're different. We do things different.   So you asked, for example, the classic one that I would say there is you asked the question, who makes cities? And your answer is housing in life. I think it's more complex than... This is your problem. How do you talk about everything without talking about something? If you want to have a conversation about hospitals and schools and procurement, there are one game. What is in this question about knowledge and I think the answer to it is that if you democratize production, then there's a better chance of people having an array of choices that might be more carefully calibrated to their own desires rather than those which are created by an avatar. We have undergone a 70-year psychological experiment where rational people see a car and they think, oh, God, I had a world that might get laid.  This is not an accident that we find ourselves in this place. And his point that we have the possibility as a designer to go in and work on the software that can change. And I don't think that's a... It is.   You came on several situations. Cedric Price's questions are still there. He was looking for a place in a world where the old architecture of the capital made didn't have any purchase in society. And you guys have that possibility between those people. Any more questions? It's only the last short time. I was just letting them know that it's going to change the subject. I was just wondering to ask about the nature of producing this project we're in this company. Yeah, they could have already did that bit. It's on the label. And by distribution, our main thing is that we don't get paid by what we do. So who's... Yeah. The two questions you just asked, bounded in that, are two super important questions. The first question you just asked, as I interpreted it, is about institutional clash. And another aspect of the institutional clash is this myth of originality, which I hopefully have just showed that even within architecture, most vernacular architecture was all based on copying. Even within architecture, it began to change its function. If you walk around your studio, you'll see these things being copied. And this is totally unfair that you've had this institutional thing put on you and says, you must be original. The more original you are, the more marks we'll give you. Which is really weird when actually design is really successful.  And just take what already works and hack it for your needs. That's actually smart design. And this will be something that will change. It's not just a tube and licensing on the internet, but it took people like Larry Lessig. People started doing that with videos and Wikipedia articles. It took people like Larry Lessig to write the CC license, which gives people different ways of sharing their content under different contracts to legitimize these new ways of doing, if you like, as the cracks appear in the old institutions. That was the first question. The second question was about labor economies, right? No, reframe what your real question was in terms of curating. The first point is don't confuse Democratic with ad hoc. It's not the same thing. Democratic fundamentally is not the absence of structure. It's the fundamental presence of appropriate structures for governance, control, ownership, et cetera. So ideally, your ideal systems have self-monitoring behaviors built into them. Now, actually, Wikipedia, people love to say, oh, there's a bad article on Wikipedia, but it's amazing how few there are on Wikipedia given the vast amount of knowledge that's on there. So actually, this is one of the great designs. That is a design challenge, which is the liability question. So this is where, exactly the same thing, we have to find a way to build in those protections and standards. At the moment, the whole of Wikihouse is done on a disclaimer basis, which says this carries no liability. You've got to check this and do this yourself. And it's a big problem, because open source software, if it fails, someone loses money. If open source hardware fails, people lose limbs. But on the long run, you know that parametric design tool. For example, it's completely possible you could codify a series of language where you can say the wind is this much in this location. And you can set in, for example, a max span limit, which is the most a structure can do. So that, in fact, not only is that possible, but it starts to completely reframe our whole attitude towards standardization and safety checking. At the moment, there's two scores of thought in open source hardware.  I'm going to 3D print a gun. And on the other side, you know, people saying, actually, those safety standards existed for a reason. But here's the problem, which is if I make one product and we get it certified, you know, by type or whatever, that's fine until someone makes one adaption, one fork, as it's called, right? And yeah, you can't trust the quality of it. So what you need to do somehow is to systematize the quality of it so that we're going to move to more, like I showed with the planning thing, more towards rules-based, which is as long as it's within these rules set written by an expert, by a professional, it's going to work. But if it steps outside the rules, it no longer works. So actually, it's a slow progress where we move from rigid to a flexible, or pliable regulatory and trust-based systems. But that is one of the central questions behind this whole movement in terms of online reputation. And there's people with some really misconceived ideas about trying to turn reputation into a kind of currency. You know. I would say most... I would say, no, I would say it's both, right? It's like, this is all... Unlocking craft. Find me an architect who says I want to spend less time really thinking about what I'm designing for human and how it's made, and more time worrying about safety regulations. So, and this is another one of the myths. If you like this idea, it's always going to be bad for architects. Might be bad for carpenters. Maybe. But it's going to be about... No, it's not, right? Because fundamentally, right now, architecture's dilemma is that we've got unpaid interns sitting late into the night doing 2D drawings of a detail that's been done many times before, probably better, and thank God they're protected by a big insurance mechanism. And then down the road, there's another unpaid intern doing the same detail, you know, at the same time, all because we're not sharing. So actually, commons are really good bases for economic share of prosperity. So I would say with Wikipedia. Sure, Wikipedia might have put in Carter and Britannica out of business, but it's put millions of more people into business. Yeah, but so what we're talking about, and that will still be there, because these people...  What we're finding is when you give people the power to do it, even if it's completely free, they can do it for themselves, they say, look, I couldn't afford to hire you for a month, but can I kind of afford you to hire you for two days to solve this problem? So they'll still hire that expertise in your head. So you'll still need to learn that expertise. That's the first thing. And secondly, almost this is like a shift, and Soderic Price talked about this, where instead of us producing objects, we produce the means by which others can make objects. So we're still doing that design exercise. It's just easier for people to replicate and copy. And, yeah, there's a kind of very interesting, you know, also culture shift in architecture, where it used to be that the greatest legacy an architect could leave to the world was, you know, a beautiful building with their name carved into it, like this one. I think in where we're going, I think it might be that the best legacy we can leave is not an object, but a way of doing it that other people can then carry on. No, it's the opposite, yeah. Yeah, but the weird thing is architects love to wax lyrical about vernacular and how beautiful it is and replicating Georgian houses. And yet those beautiful designs came from this emergent process of copying and then adapting. And they said, well, actually, we don't have that material here, or we have a different law here, so it tweaks and changes.  You know, there's a lot of these designs. They evolved over time by, you know, multiple iterations into slight tweaks and copies, and I think that's good. I think what he's saying is that the novelty will become part of the production, so you're, like, you're a reviner. I find it hard to believe that you can't see a novelty in production. I think he was the one. No, not necessarily. Some people will interpret that as the joy, and there is this thing called the Ikea effect, which is this thing where people become more emotionally attached to things because they made it. And that's nice. That's fine. That's fine. But no, it's far more mundane than that, which is straightforwardly, it becomes economic for buildings to respond to their context instead of being one-size-fits-all things, which, again, most architects seem to be trying to work towards anyway. I don't think it should be something that people are afraid of or do a huge opportunity. Well, in a way, right, a lot of this stuff will happen, and I don't wish to be the kind of scamunger in the room, but sooner or later, Google just bought Nest, which are these sensors where you can, you know, control the energy infrastructure in your house for a huge amount of money, and they'll give us all these products and they'll be harvesting all our data and all the money. And it's only a matter of time before they realize that this cordial property market is screwed and that they could unlock a huge data market by seeing houses primarily as places where people live. And they all come into this sex, but they all do this stuff. But the point that is fundamentally behind it will be this incredibly centralized kind of thing where Google will, you know, know everything. So, in a way, what we're kind of talking about is maybe we need to blend the design of democracy and, in fact, there was such a cool guy in this one. He invented loads of cool things. He never acted any of them. He sort of funded the purpose of them. He came up with the idea that everybody should have them. And the designs he produced weren't just objects. They're the famous ones. But he was responsible for implementing one of the world's, not one of the world's, one of America's first five games, which is a kind of, it's a civic design system, in a way. So it's just this idea that maybe because design has this ability to bring in not just market issues, but, you know, political issues and questions about civic good, we could do that. Yeah, and I think you're, you're not scared, well, really, if you're right, I think it's going to happen anyway. No. Well, we choose. I mean, I can't do Diddley, right? Now, the words are people working. But we can't do Diddley, but collectively we can. If you don't think this is a good idea, don't do it. But if you do think this is an interesting way of working, then, you know, apply it to what you're really interested in.  It's a mobile phone, though, by the way. And soon they'll have access to smartphones. And so that, that idea of, oh, that we've got technology and they don't, is dissipating quickly. However, your point is a really good one. The, in the sense of, I really hope that you guys, when we're having this conversation, as it seems, you have, in further, if you like the principles of the approach, rather than the specific thing, because a lot of people say, why are you so interested in plywood? Right? We're not. We look like we're fetishists, but it's just, we saw a disruption we could make now. So we did it. And we thought, we've got to start somewhere, so we'll start there. Now, actually, down the line, the fundamental open material, might be Earth, finding really sophisticated ways to build with Earth. The truth is, the system we've developed now, we know, we're pretty confident that it's disruptive in Western economies, where labor is expensive, but materials are relatively cheap and available, but it's not, it's as good as useless in Africa, where the opposite is true. But equally, the same set of principles could be applied in terms of open-sourcing solutions, et cetera. And actually, that would be a really productive way of going ahead. And I think a lot of organisations are realising this, and my traditional, I call the Berger and Salad approach, where it was a big, bad business over here, and then there's charity and pro bono and aid over here. And the problem with this, what Peter Buffett has called, who's one of Buffett's sons, is called the Charitable Industrial Complex, is that this has essentially no interest in putting itself out of business. So, it's kind of like throwing someone a life raft, but then filling up the pool with a hose with the other hand. And so, actually, this idea of democratising capability in order to kind of allow, you know, give people capability is a huge issue. And, you know, I love the economist, the Marty Sen, and his idea that freedom is not just the legal permission to do something, it's your actual real capability to do a thing. So by building capabilities, we are actually building freedoms, which is why, you know, we very nobly called the book Rights to Build, you know. Although there is a legal permission side of it as well, which is why we're always, you know, poking away at the government to change housing policy. You can say that people might eventually will be able to upload their own designs. No, they can do that now. They can do that anyway, but how do you establish, like, when people upload very similar designs to each other, and where does the money go? No, no, no, no. So the IP is free. No money goes to anyone. Now, there is an interesting point in your question, which is on the long run, the fundamental business model for this is that you create comments that we all benefit from using. And this thing, I said, is that even an Arduino and MakerBot have proven this, which is even if you give away all your IP for free, there will still be some people who find it easier to come to a professional and buy kits or buy your time as an architect over and above, which is free, so actually it's a pretty healthy business model in there without costing any other thing. On the long run, we would like to think about sort something like what you're suggesting, which is like a tipping thing, which is voluntary money, which is if you've taken this design and it's saved you money or made you money, please send a tip back to the designers. Now, the moment is you say, that's untenable because you can't trace the intellectual property. One of our timber bolt free joints is nicked from 14th century Japanese wood joinery techniques. We haven't heard from their lawyers, but we're not going to be sending them any money each. So, what we would be interested in developing now is a kind of, I don't know if you're familiar with the platform, Github. It's basically, it's the engine for open source code and it tracks every modification that gets made to a thing. So theoretically, it's completely, if we have the resources to build it now, it's one of our funding jobs to build a kind of Github-like architect for 3D things that can track all the changes, assign an author. So, if you took a product, said, I donate £500, it would then go and distribute that tip among the appropriate designers. But in truth, that's a long way off yet. I still don't understand though where the healthy architect then makes the money, like, how are the income? Well, yeah. So eventually, maybe, we could be a burden to all. Yeah, well, honestly, that's already happening to us, which is, we're giving away all of this and Wiki House Foundation is obviously, has all held in a non-profit pool, which is everybody's. But us, as 00, if you like, people are banging on the door, saying, I want to commission a house of you. How much fees can I get you? And the result is, as I said, over this year, we'll have about 10 clients as opposed to one. So we're not exactly getting to the 100 yet. But slow progress. No, baby steps. But no, no, that's happening. The door is, finally, after two years of kind of doing this on a shoestring, frankly, thanks to as 00 investing, you know, in kind and a bit, and others. Not just in a zoo, all the book contributors, momentum engineering, lots of people. And what I, lovingly, call the bullshit economy, which is like, museums and people who just are interested in the idea, who essentially found us to build a prototype for their exhibition, which is great. I love them for it. Finally, we're getting to a stage now where we can begin to imagine a way to keep beans in our plate. And the point is, you, right now, as an architect, could set up a thing and start using the system. And Baumann Lyons already have. So Baumann Lyons, really early on, took WikiHouse, they adapted it, and they built a sort of walker's shelter in Yorkshire. And they could easily, you know, become an architect to practice operating. Thank you very much. We'll be continuing in the master.


Men of Athens, I don't know how you felt as you listened to my accusers, but they spoke so persuasively that they almost made me forget who I am. But not much of what they said is true. Along their many lies one especially amazed me. I mean, when they told you to be on your guard so that you were not deceived by the power of my eloquence, that they were not ashamed of saying this seemed to me most shameless of them, since they were sure to be refuted as soon as I opened my mouth and displayed my lack of eloquence, unless by eloquence they mean the power of speaking the truth. If that is what they mean, then I admit I'm an eloquent speaker. My way differs from theirs because, as I just said, they hardly spoke a word that's true. You'll hear the whole truth from me, but not delivered in their way, not in an oration nicely decorated with prepared words and phrases. On the contrary, I'll use the words and arguments that occurred to me at the moment. At my age, Athenians, it's not right for me to appear before you in the guise of a youthful orator. Nobody should expect me to do that, and I ask that you grant me one favour. If you hear me using the same words in my defence that you've heard me use in the agorah, at the money-changers' tables or anywhere else, I ask you not to be surprised at this and that you not interrupt me. I'm more than seventy years old, and this is the first time I've ever appeared in a law court. I'm a stranger to the ways of this place. Therefore please treat me as you would a foreigner, someone you would excuse for speaking with an accent and in my own dialect. I don't think that's an unfair request. Please ignore my way of speaking, whatever its value, and think only of the justice of my cause. Pay attention to that. Let the just decide fairly, and the speaker speak truly. First, I have to reply to some older charges, to those who first accused me, and then I'll respond to the more recent ones. Many people have accused me, some of them a long time ago, and their false charges have continued over the years. I fear them more than Anita's and his associates, though they too are dangerous in their own way. But those who began when you were children, filling your minds with lies are far more dangerous. They tell stories about a man named Socrates, a wise man who speculates about the heavens above and inquires about the earth below. He makes the worst cause appear to be the better one. I dread these accusers because when they circulate this rumor, those who hear them are likely to suppose that people who inquire don't believe in the gods. The many charges against me go back to the time when you were young and impressionable. The case was lost by default because nobody was around to defend me. Worst of all, I can't even tell you their names, with the possible exception of a comic poet. The majority of these people have approached you out of envy and spite. Some of them have been persuaded, and then persuaded others. It's extremely difficult to deal with all of them because I can't bring them here and examine them. All I can do to defend myself is fight with shadows and ask questions with nobody to answer them. So let's assume that my opponents are of two kinds. One recent and the other ancient. I hope you understand why it's appropriate for me to answer the ancient ones first. You have heard these accusations earlier and much more often than the others. Now, I'll defend myself, and in the little time I have, try to dispel the bad opinion of me you have held for so long. And if it's best for both you and me, I hope I'll succeed, and that my words will persuade you. I know that won't be easy, and I have no illusions about the nature of the task. Let things happen according to divine will. I make my defense in obedience to the law. I'll begin at the beginning and consider the accusation that led to the lies that encouraged Miletus to bring charges against me. What are the slanderers? Sample complete. Ready to continue?


Passleaders have failed to unite Nigeria, says former president Goodluck Jonathan, and Serap has sued Inic over failure to register 7 million voters. This is plus politics, and I am Mary Anna Cohn. Former president Goodluck Jonathan has blamed passleaders for not doing enough to unite the country. He said Nigeria's founding fathers, including former premiers of the western northern and eastern region, or Bafemiawolaw, Amadw Bailu, a Namdea Zikwui, never had nationalistic views, but were focused on regional development. The ex-president noted that the present crop of leaders inherited a country that was already divided into three regions and later four. Joining us to discuss this is Ambrose Igboke. He's a public affairs analyst. It's good to have you join us with Igboke. Can you hear me? Thank you very much, Robin. I can hear you loud and clear. Okay, great. Let's start by examining what the former president is talking about, because you see, there is that thing that we always say about, you know, there's unity in our diversity, but in reality, is that diversity unifying us, or is it further dividing us? First of all, I would say the president is correct, is right, because the ex-president is right, because one, Nigeria was a country of independent kingdoms before the British colonialists came. We had the Oyog Kingdom. We had the Binig Kingdom. We had the Popol Kingdom. We had, you know, kingdoms like the Zazog Kingdom that was, remember the popular phenomenon, who was a very strongly died in the 15th century. Then in the east, where we didn't have large kingdoms, we had settlements where were ruled by chiefs, every small kingdom like Henry, and some other kingdoms at this stage. So Igala had the Obong of Calabar was the judge for Popol. No, we had strong kingdoms that were independent, and these kingdoms were actually trading with international partners. For example, the Binig Kingdom had trade partnership with the Portuguese as early as 600 years ago. Also, the oil empire had tradeings with the Middle East, with the Arabs for a very long time. So we had things that existed on its own. In the north and the south of the country that existed. Then just one day, a man called Frederick Lord Lugard, who was sent to go over the protectorates, they used to call them protectorates of southern and northern Nigeria, woke up on January 1, 1914, and said that for the convenience of his administration, that is merging the northern south of Nigeria together, and he brought them together, merging the northern southern protectorates and called it Nigeria. Of course, it was declared Istiwan, and other kingdoms were treated separately. Until in 1897, the Binig Kingdom was attacked by the British, where the last sovereign king, who was of Ovaram, was overthrown by the power of the British. So this is the time that the exiled a judge of the people who resisted their rules, and that is how they decimated the kingdoms. So this is my work of January 1, 1914, and I said they wanted to be matched with the two protectorates, and that is, I named them Nigeria, which was the name he was given by a foreigner. So first of all, we made Nigeria do not emanate from Nigerians. It has known, from any language that we speak, it was just an experiment by a British civil servant who was sent to go over the protectorates. And so it has been like that, and over the years, our forefathers who fought for our independence, our statesmen, from Habatimakoli to Enes Ticoli to Awoluwa, to Nambia Zikiwe, to Amadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, and Enahorua, so on Enahorua and the rest. They understood the fact that we are diverse. They understood the fact that we are different. They understood the fact that we have our separate identities, and those identities were respected. I remember that even as far back as 1948, the revered Awoluwa wrote in his tribune newspaper that Nigeria is a mere geographical expression that is not a nation. Nationhood is a people that have homogeneity in culture, homogeneity in tradition, homogeneity in values, and homogeneity in culture. So these are the things that make up nationhood. Most of them speak one language. That was for nationhood. But Nigeria's expression was because the nationhood was first on these various entities that were independent. They came together in 1960 to form a country. But in respect to the diversity that existed before the independence of 1960, each region, three regions were created to take care of those entities, those unique entities that existed. Although they were still lumped together, but they were able to have some unique identities among them. So we had the Northern region, we had the Western region, and we had the Eastern region. Then some three years later, Midwestern region was created, I think, six years later. So these are to take care of the identities of those people. And Nigeria was more healthy when it was operating regional system, than now that it's operating a unitary system. Remember between 1960 to 1966, when we have regional governments, regional governments were competing among themselves, healthy competition. Remember, by 1960, UNN created the first indigenous university. And then, by 1962, 1963, we already have universities in Lagos springing up, IFEI was springing up, Amadebello was springing up. And then, you know, everybody was trying to compete wholly. Grantnot was going on at Heiss and Skin in the North, Pampoy was going on here in the East, and then Coco was moving in the West. So the economy of each region was being competition so that they would not lag behind. And that was to witness, and that was what the country prospered. And that's where the country, where there was the glorious age of Nigeria. Where nationalhood was addressed, first and foremost, we are Nigerians, but they gave, in terms of economic growth, we took it from the regions. And the regions paid tax to the center. And we had strong regions. And then in, after the 16th, 15th January 1966 school, somebody like Aguri Euronsi, you know, from what I've done, you need to decree, and then collapsed everything, I said I created stakes. By 1967, they upgraded websites. And that is where Nigeria started having a very weak federating unit and a very strong center. And that is why, to today, we have really, really gone down the precipice because of that change. So I agree with President Good Lord Jonathan that our people, our first political actors, promoted the region more strongly. But they promoted the nation because through the regions, the Nigerian nation was able to be stronger in terms of economics. So that, where we disagree, is that he said they didn't promote nationalhood. They promoted nationalhood. The Zik of Africa was travelling everywhere, talking about nationalhood. Sardana Osokoto was sparkling Zik then, that look, let us understand our differences. When Zik was saying, let us forget our differences. So we cannot forget our differences because we are different. I'm curious to come in there. Now that you have said that you agree with President Good Lord Jonathan, it seems more like we've just seen that idea of nationalhood, even though we still say that we are a nation. What do we do now because it's about solutions? Good Lord Jonathan has clearly stated that the legacy of nationalhood and roots of unity were weak, even at the Nigerian independence. How do we strengthen it? Because I have sat in a room with several people, leaders of thought, who have also said that, who have said that one way or the other, politicians are the ones who are responsible for the divisions that we are facing as a people. Because I don't know which Nigerian would say they're Nigerian first before they start asking you about your indigent where you're from, are you an indigent or a non-indigent. So where do we start in solving the problems if we have said this is where we started nationalhood from and this is where we are right now. How do we retrace our steps? And do we have leaders who are able to rebuild that? Well, for now, Nigeria is a pretty more, Nigeria is a pretty more as a country, not a nation. Because first of all, there seems not to be a homogeneous focus on how we are going as a nation. So the first thing to start with is, let's take a cue from other African countries, for example. All other African countries that we have received British names, most of them have changed them, especially in West Africa. The British, just like La Lluca called here Nigeria, the British called it Gold Coast. After independence, they changed it to Ghana. We had an offer vote up. After independence, they changed it to Bukinaw Faso. We had a Rhodesia. After independence, they changed it to Zimbabwe. And so many other countries like that, they had changed their name. We had another country, they changed it to Zaire. I forgotten the name, they used to call it. They changed it to Zaire. So what are we talking about? First of all, that is where to start. We don't have a sense of nationhood because this name, first of all, was imposed on us. Having said that, the next thing to do is first of all, we don't have any indigenous national language that would give us that sense of nationhood. We don't have it yet. Therefore, we just speak the English. Isn't that one of the problems that we have? Isn't that one of the problems that we have? I appreciate the fact that you are making reference to other countries. The likes of Bukinaw Faso, the likes of Cameroon, they all speak the same language. They speak the same language. In Nigeria, we have so many languages. We have over 500 indigenous languages. When it comes down to picking which one would be a national language, the politics, of course, comes to play. We might just be going around in circles for a long time. Isn't that one of the problems where we all even can't as much as make a decision as to which language should be national? So we have three major languages, Ibo, Hausa and Yruba. If we decided today that we're going to pick a national language, which would it be? First of all, linguistics. Those who study linguistics will tell you that linguistics evolve. Linguistics can also be created. Linguistics can be merged. That is why you hear languages, items in some languages sound alike. So when you check etymologies of language, of etymologies of words, you find out that there are root points that came up from different places and then coming to mean almost the same thing. So if we had it as an assignment that we took as a nation series, which is what independent, we would have been able to cover a national language. We can create one through a mixture of the various major languages as we have said. And we can create a language out of it. Some countries have done it. You can actually create a language from what you have and teach it and over the years it will become a language. So it is not rocket science actually. Languages are developed. So that is one area also. First of all, let's even begin by changing the name to see whether we can get a name that is indigenous. We can couch it, we can form it. The other one also is that our fathers recognised the fact because of our diversity there is need to have some sense of commonality, some sense of belonging. And that is why they ensure that there is a balance always in terms of political balance, in terms of religious balance, in terms of cultural balance. The last seven or eight years have been thrown into the dustbin. That is also why a lot of people are becoming disenchanted now that is willingly belonging to the same nation. So those are the questions we also need to answer. The other one is that a situation where some part of the country does not feel more privileged than the other. For example, look at the unity school scores. A child in Zaffara State who is 10 years old and going seeking into admission into unity secondary school can score points over 300 or so. Then somebody from Anambra State and Enogustin will not get that admission until it scores 230 something. That shows that we are not a nation. That is a divided country because we are not giving everybody the same comparative advantage, the same playground to play, no equity. So when you start doing things like that, then when you talk of recruitment into the police and some other, the armed forces and some other places, you don't find also a place of some people from one part of the country seems to dominate all. And so when you do that, the other parts of the country that are being online or marginalized will not feel the sense of nationhood because a nation is that give every citizen the opportunity to excel without minding where you come from, where meritocracy is enthroned over nepotism. And that is where you start building a nation. Anything short of that is not my nation and that is why a lot of Nigerians are disenchanted about this nationhood. And it's really that where we are just existing as a country because there's no sense of cohesion yet. But also beyond that over the years we have been able to form bridges across different divides and through intermarriages, through the NYSC has done a lot, for example, to ensure that Nigerians from different parts of the country go to other parts of the country to learn one or two things. But basically that is where it ends because we need to have social and cultural integration but there's also something that is wrong with the way we do our social policies in terms of every one part of the country to another. It's making people feel disenchanted. So and then the biggest fundamental problem with this country called Nigeria while it's not a nation is that we are not practicing physical federalism. Thank you for bringing that up because that was going to be my next question. I was going to ask, that's because the issue of restructuring like you said when you talked about language. You know, we keep saying that oh we need a unifying language but then the action to make that happen has not been resolute in any way. It's not shown any form of resolution in that regard. So is the issue of restructuring. We've been talking about it. Every election cycle it comes up. We throw it up there and we use it as some rhetoric. Why is it so difficult for us including the politicians to embrace the issue of restructuring and getting through federalism? Is it too much a knot to crack? Well, you don't expect the politicians to throw away the things they are gaining. There's time to gain a lot from this present system because where you go to Abuja, everything is centralized, command and control, power is controlled from there, the economy is controlled from there, allocation of resources is controlled from there, allocation and exploitation of mineral resources. They even allocate who to get what and who not to go. How to exploit mineral and not how to exploit mineral. Who owns the oil well and who doesn't own the oil well. So there's so much power concentrated on the centre. Therefore they will not want to really push that power. So we don't expect the politicians to do that. It is the movement of the citizens, the demand of the citizens that will ensure that that happens. And if the citizens are docile about it, then the politicians will not really want to do it because there are humans and we are also humans to where you are getting from. We don't want to turn the apple card. Therefore what we need and what needs to be done is clear to everybody. Though we may not go back to the issue of region, but we can also do that because, for example, most of the states cannot be personal. Most of the states are not sustainable. They are not economically viable. They are just existing as they go to Abuja. Some of them don't contribute anything to the GDP. They don't contribute anything to the income of the country. But every month they go to Abuja because some of them have, what do they do? A nation that uses local government to give allocation and then they go to some places. What they bring to GDP is almost zero percent and because they have 40 local government, they get more than they said that is giving more to the GDP that has 17 or 20 local government. Imagine a leader having 20 local government without the population and then the state somewhere is having for something. So it is that kind of voodoo economics that is making us not be a nation. What we need to do is have a fiscal strategy. Even if it is political, so it is a comfortable reform system. And no, if we want to go back to what we had between 1916 and 1960, but if we don't want to go back, we can do what the way it is constituted, let the states exploit the mineral, let some items of the exclusive list of the constitution, remove to the concurrent list. For example, the issue of mining licenses, the issue of electricity. We are saying that the electricity, for the TCN, the federal government is still holding a grip on it.  Look at the issue of refining of petroleum products. The states are not allowed, modular refiners are not allowed to start because of policies that are muslin despite the PIB deal that has been signed into law. Nothing is still happening there. But we are here constructing pipelines to somewhere in the GER report, so these are the problems. That is why a lot of people don't see it as a nation. We are just a country existing and managing and patching up. Thanks to capitalism, where the state's pay tax to the centre has to be revived. That is the only way to actually say you are running a nation. I want to say thank you. Thank you so much for succinctly putting that particular one to an end. Thank you so much once again. Thank you all for watching. We'll take a quick break when we come back. We'll be talking with Serap and INEC because Serap is trying to sue INEC for the 7 million voters who are yet to be registered for 2023. Stay with us.