Good afternoon. You're all very welcome to this meeting of the Institute for International and European Affairs at the Irish Architectural Archive. We're very grateful to the archive for hosting this meeting. May I suggest that to reduce any of our embarrassments you might put your telephone to silent please. The exits, there is an exit signed here downstairs and across out the way you entered please. It's my great pleasure to introduce the Corporate Secretary of the Electricity Supply Board John Redmond to say a few words on behalf of the ESB. John. Thanks very much John. Thank you very much indeed John. Thank you. Today we have a particular focus in the series. The ESB has been generously sponsoring a whole series of talks over in recent years at the IIEA. Today Dan Regelstein is going to talk to us about smart cities for the 21st century. You might even see a new age of urban electrification. Dan comes to us from the London practice of SOM. He heads up their city design practice and directs projects focusing on the urban regeneration of cities. His educational backgrounds at Harvard and MIT, he has experience in an architectural urban design practice in France. He's been with Skidmore and Smerrow since 1994. He became an associate in 97. He became a studio head for urban design and planning in Chicago in 98 and associate in 1999 and he arrived in this part of the world I think in 2003 where he heads urban design and planning and is now a director of it. So Dan you're very welcome to Dublin and we look forward to your talk. Thank you. Great, thanks for that. Humble to be here. This is a great venue and a great topic and I've met many of you at lunch earlier and I've understood the passion that everyone's already has on the topic of cities. So I'm going to focus more at the city scale of the discussion but again this is more hopefully of a discussion topic. This is a topic point so we can have a dialogue afterwards please by all means. So it's great to be back here in Dublin. I know the city somewhat well although I know by no means the experts that you all are of your place but I'll hopefully make some interesting parallels. So the word electrification I'm not trying to be funny here I did have to look it up because it's not a word we use very much in our in our world. So in doing so you obviously find some anecdotes like this understanding that the first first city street that was electrified was the Avenue de Paris by the Opéra in Paris which really transformed the whole gas sector I guess there so maybe we're headed to a new kind of evolution. So of course this is really about us getting off of getting cities and buildings and everyone else off of fossil fuel and energy and on to hopefully electricity which can be much more sustainably sourced that's the goal. We tend to focus more and discuss much more about carbon carbon neutrality carbon neutrality of which of course renewable energy and electrification is really a strong component. So we're at an amazing moment in history and we have this incredible opportunity to reinvent how cities are reemerging in the world. We know more more people are moving into cities and obviously the population of the world is growing. But the reality is our planet is facing some pretty huge challenges population growth kind of acute acute things that are happening with the climate and climate change. So the loss of natural environment and also the tremendous amount of natural resources that that we're all using in some countries up to five times the their proportion of what the planet can give. So we really have to sort of correct these these trends. So I think we're seeing in the professions of architecture and city planning that we're in a new state of transition. We are trying to understand these these global forces and trying to find ways to collaborate much more to address these challenges. So we really do need to look I think at the scale of the region of the city to solve a lot of these problems. So I've challenged myself actually and I was asked to give this talk to answer a few questions. So I'll read these now go through them sort of one by one as we go through. But it's really also questions to you all as well to please enter into this dialogue by no means do I have any or all the answers to give you a bit of context. I thought I would describe who we are at SOM both particularly in the city design practice and from wide. So we are in the city design practice about a hundred and fifty people that work around the globe. We do share our stories and are in our sort of challenges quite regularly almost on a weekly basis. And we just got together yearly conference in September. So we sharing these interests where architects landscape architects urban planners policy policy planners that really are trying to come together to think at the larger scale. We are well known for for delivering not only just master plans and reports but also delivering those things in real life projects around the world in very complex scalable size. We're also very passionate about the environment. You'll see that hopefully not work. As you mentioned we have been looking at the largest scale. This was part of the the Burnham anniversary in Chicago. We started as a pro bono exercise. We started looking at the Great Lakes watershed without any boundaries. Understanding the the natural environment understanding the watershed from a geological and ecological point of view. And looking at how to create partnerships across these boundaries to look at the future of the Great Lakes region which actually provides this actually 25 percent of the world's freshwater resource and over 40 percent of the of the of the North America's freshwater. And it's glacial water that will never go that can never come back. So looking at large scale strategies for how to protect that environment and also get to work more together recognize it as as a system across boundaries. Of course we're also heavily involved in large scale district master planning. We were brought to really London to work on the Broadgate and Canary Wharf projects. We've been involved in Canary Wharf for the past 30 years with that long term client. We're also focused on transit centered urbanism. So this is a recent project in Philadelphia on the western side of the city around the rail entertains that exist there today. Re-envisaging a higher density development as high speed rail development. And this would also link to University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University to create a new innovation district around this transport interchange. So that plan has just been approved and we'll now start to move forward in a public-private partnership with developers in the city and the regional rail authorities. We're highly focused on urban regeneration, embracing historic patterns of development, existing communities, revitalizing, refreshing, and having a community dialogue for how the future of their neighborhoods can go forward to embrace modern development. We're very interested in liveability, liveability in an urban place and at higher densities. So what are the things we need for that? We talked at lunch earlier about this, it's schools, but it's also about great public places and comfortable, safe, secure places for families to live. If you really want people to live in more dense urban areas. We've also been involved in some sort of think pieces or this is a weekend workshop with the City of London to look at and hack the city cluster. And this was about understanding with some help of other experts who have this great modeling techniques to measure the dynamics that are taking place, for example, in the city cluster. To not only look at the effects of wind, but also measure thermal comfort. How can we add different layers to our modeling to understand if these places are going to be viable places to dwell, not just move through. I'll show you that later. And we're also working at the larger scale, the same sort of issues, using dynamic computer modeling to help us form new cities. So this is a new city in China, we're working with the government in Chengdu, around a new airport and this was really modeling different scenarios of city form to ensure that there was fresh air. We breathe through the development over the long term and through modeling we're able to improve, obviously air quality is a really key issue in China right now. So making sure that there's enough flushing of fresh air through the development. That really helped form the plan, not some idea from outer space of a formal geometry, it's really environmental modeling that's helping to form the city. As I said, we're also very passionate about the landscape and nature and the native environment. So in our strategies like the one in Chicago through the river bringing back this industrial waterway into more cleanly environment, it can become amenity for people not only who work there but who will live there. So revitalizing this riverfront is already taking place for the last about 20, 25 years and just extending that strategy further in. Obviously from the built form architectural side, which our practice really is an architectural led design practice, but we are multidisciplinary as well with structure engineering, environment engineering, sustainability, etc. Really pushing the envelope with high performance design, ensuring efficiencies and minimizing demand. This is one of our most sustainable recent buildings in Geneva. All glass building, but it's a quilted facade so it's actually tilting the glass away from the sun to help reduce the energy that will come into the building or the building demands. We're also talking much more in the profession now about well-being and people-centric design. This is really important for the younger generations that are looking for these kinds of great places to live and work in cities. This is a recycling of a building in Milan where alliance used to have their headquarters. So it's repurposing for example the interior parking courtyard and the below-grade parking structure to create this great amenity for employees, a mixed use sort of open environment that people can kind of mix and mingle and also bringing landscape and green space in. That's what I'm doing a lot of research with partner institutions as well. This is a green wall that we've now built and installed. This is with Rensler Polytech Institute who's actually shared space with us in our New York office. Develop this potential new system which would help recycle air internally within the building through native plants to help cleanse the air before it gets put back into the space. I think we're also seeing, I'm encouraged, even all of our architects are now thinking much more about the city than ever before. How does the building connect to the place? Whether it be for workplace, environment, housing, in this case a school in New York, really linking the circulation space of the school and its main collaborative spaces to its neighbor environment. So that's I think a positive shift that's going on. Recognition that cities really are this dynamic place. So just before I get to some of the key questions, maybe just a bit of background about cities today and tomorrow. I think cities are very complex, organic things. They're multi-layered. They're very diverse and things have happened over time for many reasons, not just for physical infrastructure reasons. As many different lenses we need to look through when we look at cities in terms of the structures not just of roads and of infrastructure and buildings, but also the social infrastructure, the cultural history, the natural environment, the economic reasons for things that are happening taking place. So it's a very difficult element unwind and we need lots of help. We can't see it as ourselves as a city planner or as a city architect or as a architect of a building having all the answers. We all need to work together. Obviously I think the industrial revolution had a major impact on cities. This is pretty clear. I mean London, you can see how the growth of London was impacted exponentially when the turn of the industrial revolution came on board, but it also had a huge impact on the not only physical infrastructure, but the social infrastructure of places. So I think we're all sensing now is the time for a new revolution. We're seeing it in terms of information for industrial revolution, but we see it as a need to think of it as a new revolution for cities that moves away from fossil fuels and into much more livable inviting and more meaningful environments. In doing this research some of the statistics my team found were quite shocking to me as well. Obviously we understand that built environments have an impact on health and well-being but to this state I had no idea really that it's affecting this much about our future health of a human race is really critical to understand. Obviously air pollution is one of the major issues and again this for me is quite shocking to this. It was the number one cause of premature mortality in the world, almost 7 million deaths. I guess that's more than cancer, that's quite surprising to me. So it does sort of put the urgency forward here very quickly in your mind. So thinking more positively I think our thesis, I think all of us would agree that a smarter and cleaner city really is the bright future and this has the opportunity to become the new revolution. We're seeing it already happening in many places. Singapore is a great model for one. Hopefully other good things will come out of Singapore this week, won't they? We shall see. So obviously the world is growing, it's growing very quickly, it's going to be incredibly dense and we know that most of these people are moving to cities so that is our challenge. And I think you're seeing it here in Dublin as well, I'm not sure if this statistic is accurate but you're growing proportionally very quickly and you have good reason to obviously with what's happening with Brexit, but it's a similar growth pattern that we're seeing in London and other major cities around the world. So there may be a small number for other people to think but I'm sure proportionally it's quite big for you to kind of get your heads around. So we also found this interesting piece of information that over the next two decades only 80 billion square meters of development and constructed in urban areas worldwide. So how big is that? Well it's more than half of the entire stock of built forming in the world. That's as much as rebuilding and rebuilding New York City every 35 days. So that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully it's a good thing, it's massive changes happening but it's got to be positive change. So we really do hold our own features in our own hands. Urban environments really do consume three quarters of the world's natural resources so it's really critical we get this right. And of course I think everyone knows that more than three quarters of carbon emissions come from cities. But I wanted to break that down a bit. I was asking Ed Mazaria and the state sees heads up the AIA's 2030 challenge and he was in the office in Chicago and when I happened to be there we had this little workshop as I was asking. So Ed can you pick this down for me? Because everyone's talking about sustainability and how we have to be green. Every building's going to be green and what impact would that really have. So we map this out together with him and then we sort of then research it further to develop it further.  When you look at that donut. Yes of course three quarters is sort of built environment focus but there's a big piece there related to transportation which I'll talk about. And then energy production. And obviously in the industry. So I think we have to have a global context here that it's not just about the architectural form it's about lots of things coming together that we have to address. So based on that piece of the pie on electricity so energy production let's say what countries and cities are really leading the way to trans get us off of fossil fuels. Well surprisingly I found this surprising Germany is ahead of the game and from a country that has a lot of coal powered plants they've already gotten to that one third of their energy productions source renewably out of last year. So that's fantastic. They always have been so I would say advanced in terms of pushing forwards recycling and green initiatives. And they are looking to get to 80% minimum by 2050. You all here are committed to sustainable energy sources and maybe these numbers are under providing what I've heard at lunch earlier. So that there's this great impetus for creating change here in Ireland as well. And again it's not about one thing it's a series of things that are going to help get you to that goal of which we found to be 60% in just two years time. Paris is moving forward and this is maybe not as about energy production but it's related. So they are looking to banish all petrol and diesel fuel vehicles by 2030 and Macron just announced a couple of months ago that the entire country is going to stop selling allow the sell of gas and diesel powered vehicles by 2040. That was astonishing to me that the French government was able to take that initiative. Particularly since all their major car companies are primarily state owned. So maybe they can inflict that upon their car companies better than maybe the United States can. So good news is over 40% of cities in the world that are actually operating under I guess 40 cities. 40 not 40% there are 40 cities not 40% of cities currently operating at 100% renewable energy. So there's Billington and Vermont. These are small cities, Basel and Reykjavik. Reykjavik I think benefits for having tremendous geothermal deposits below but that's good news that things are actually moving in the right direction. The UK 80 towns and cities are signed up to run clean energy by 2050 and these are including some of the major cities and some of the major boroughs in London. So how much can electrification affect the city's performance? And how do we get us off of this sort of moving from dependence from diesel which is everywhere you'll see in a minute to more freedom through electricity. I think we also be careful so moving to electricity is a great thing but only if the energy source is as clean as we like it to be. If we're moving everything off to electric but electricity is still being generated from these fossil fuels from natural gas or coal fire plants we really haven't done much as a other donut showed before. So we really need to work at the upstream provision of electricity not just the systems and the downstream side. Also the story has to be discussed about not only what kind of energy are we using but where is it being produced and where are the sources of it being used. So in the US there was in 2013 20 billion kilowatt hours were lost just in transmission across the lines. Which could have power over two million regular sized American homes for one year. So moving you know renewable energy sources closer to the place it's going to be used as key and therefore we're talking about compact cities. The need to have a compact development which also talks to livability. The most livable cities that constantly get on that livable cities index in the world are really compact cities not necessarily Uber dense like Hong Kong but compact urban environments Melbourne's been on the top list for the past seven years running. So it has multiple benefits not only moving things closer to and making things more compact it will also make things more livable. So an example of moving energy production and use to the source this is a pilot project we did we are in the middle of doing with the US Department of Energy and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee and this was a building a little pod of a building that was 3d printed and it was trading energy with a jeep that was also 3d printed and the idea is to see how that could work at a small scale and then scale it up over time. The project was really about reducing carbon and cities not just promoting renewable energy production so it was about eliminating waste 3d printing buildings we can also recycle that material and having the shared integrated energy between sources. So here's the it was the biggest it was maybe a couple years ago it was the largest 3d printer in the world being done at the lab. We created a series of C-sections which were then assembled into these rings and then the rings then became assembled together to create this pavilion and which is now built and sits on the campus of the School of Architecture at the University of Tennessee and it's meant to be a pod for living in actually so it has a kitchen the kitchen folds up and it becomes a bedroom and it's really meant to be sort of a showcase for how this building could produce its own electricity and trade it with the vehicle. Oak Ridge other group of scientists at Oak Ridge actually developed the Jeep in 3d printing I guess everything except for the tires and this energy is being transferred so the Jeep drives around the city generates energy gives it back to the building the building also captures solar energy from its PV's on the roof and it gives energy back to the Jeep. They've even are developing now the wireless transfer of the energy so it doesn't have to be plugged into one another. So that was just the first year of a five year program and now the next step is to scale it up so obviously this is very applicable for remote areas or for let's say conditions where you have to address a crisis this could be a really great solution for that but the next challenge is to bring it up to a city scale and how can that be done so the researchers are now beginning to work on ideas of prefabricating pods that can then be brought into be assembled into a building at a larger scale almost like a shipping container or like a flat pack like a piece of IKEA furniture that you have the individual components that are printed and then assembled into a building and it doesn't have to be repetitive monotonous and terrible looking it could be quite interesting it could actually be quite a challenge to architects to create an interesting built form out of that very simple system so that's where that study is headed so what cities are moving forward in terms of electrification of transport so many of you have probably seen this diagram which is the profile of energy production and use in the European Union on the left hand side you have all the different colors of energy use the poor renewable strand is the tiny little green spaghetti you see in the middle completely dominated by natural gas and fossil fuel oil production the reason I show this is that on the right hand side the biggest user of that fossil fuel energy is transportation in the EU so if we can tackle that we've tackled a huge proportion of that issue so the news isn't great in Europe 9 out of 10 of our buses are still operating on fossil fuel energy so only 1 in 10 are green and most of those are also hybrid not electric so there's a ways to go there cities are now signing up and bus companies are signing up to transform their stock into more renewable and electric sourced buses in London all the single layer buses are moving towards zero exhaust emissions by 2020 double decors a bit earlier but that'll take time and today it's less than I think 2% the entire fleet of buses in London so quite a ways to go there so the city that gets the gold star on this now is Shenzhen they've actually a year early than planned they've transformed the entire fleet which is 16,000 buses which is more than London's 9,000 more than New York's 6,000 or so and in this period of 2 years they've transformed their emissions and their air quality to meet their target their 2020 target 2 years early so this is phenomenal that they've been able to pull it off but one change has changed the entire complexity complexion of their their air quality of their city so the rest of the world has a ways to go so what are the benefits of embracing new technologies at the scale of the city it's interesting to embrace it in our telephones and our buildings but what about at the larger scale so I guess this brings us to the topic of what makes a smart city I think unfortunately the IT companies have jumped to that term and have won the race to take ownership of that which is a bit disappointing for us for us smart cities is much more than just about IT layer of the city so but it is about making sure that this data that we're getting more and more of everyday which is almost impossible to manage in some ways how do we make it more usable and more custom user friendly to the everyday person living and working in the city so we're really promoting ideas of within our developments starting first at a smaller level to create these development apps that allow people who live in those communities and work in those communities to understand the dynamics of their energy use at a community scale to sort of inform what they're doing to make decisions maybe they take that one extra car trip out of their weekly journeys and they change it to something else like lane or walking so it's about awareness but in a way that's very user friendly like we're all used to seeing on our computers and our phones but also using technology to grab and create community to let a community grow and change over time to connect to the people and to bring on events and other initiatives that can help them create a more sustainable future so I mean in summary the smart city topic it's not just about electricity it's not just about smart IT it's really holistic and we have to hit all these things so it's not it's not sexy it's not easy it's complex it's requiring lots of different experts but to really deliver a smart city and smart growth we have to address all these things and technology can help us in doing that so will electrification help reduce city's energy demand or bring on better efficiencies or will it just mean we'll just use more of the same electricity we have in different ways I think I would like to argue technology can be a beautiful thing obviously we don't have to search long and hard in these kinds of archaic filing systems to find information anymore we have it readily accessible at our fingertips but that does mean we're drawing more on the grid to do those things so as we come more advanced technology and energy becomes more efficient my question really is will we actually become more energy hungry than there already are I mean the good news is a lot of our equipment and facilities are much more energy efficient so we have lights that turn themselves off and we leave the room etc. and appliances at home that are being much more energy conscious so that's helping to reduce the demand even though we're using much more electronics let's say but to me that's kind of a question so how can we embrace the technology and sustainable future in a more enduring way I mean billions definitely have a role to play and they need to be able to create energy not just use it and sometimes even waste it so this is a project that's been completed in New York for a new primary school this is your energy primary school I think it's kind of cool because it's actually teaching the younger generation what their school is doing from an energy point of view they actually go into their kitchen and they understand that when they're making something that it's creating energy or they run a play cycle in their playground is actually showing them how many kilowatt hours they're helping to produce for their own school that's all tied to the energy of the school so it's a great sort of educational tool which is really also pretty key. At a larger scale we're working ironically with Indonesia's largest petrochemical and oil company Pertamina for the new headquarters building and they really saw this as a flagship for a zero energy tower they benefit being on the ring of fire obviously and the Pacific so we found the ability to go down about two and a half kilometers to get down to geothermal sources that can actually be used not only heat and cool the building but also to turn a turbine to generate electricity and that electricity generation can almost power this 500 meter tall tower not entirely 100% so we also have to still add in wind turbines at the top and photovoltaics down at the ground but there is a great opportunity to think about geothermal around the world in the right places there are examples in Europe we found some in Berlin in Germany where it's not too far to go and these aren't big pieces of kit and the cost turnaround isn't that bad so we should be looking much more geothermal and obviously for those cities around the edges of waterfronts using sort of water based technologies but no individual building should be seen as an island and an isolation it's a project we're doing in Paris for the Grand Paris management and the local town of Chalenton and a developer of course it has a very tall tower as iconic structure to be emblematic of this district but it's tied to a much wider new urban district as well of low scale sort of prescient scale buildings and we're looking at this as an opportunity to create a more dynamic system a district wide system of sustainable networks both recycling water and waste and energy demand and energy use where the buildings particularly between residential and office buildings can trade energy different times of the day different times of the week so there are things you can do at a larger scale you can't do at a building scale which is really important to embrace so moving towards the last couple questions so we were talking a lot about this at lunch about the future of travel and what is potentially the impact on city form over time as we become less dependent on fossil fuels so we were talking about this a lot at lunch about what is the future of the autonomous vehicle soon it could be everywhere I think from a design profession point of view we're probably a bit behind the automobile makers and some of the transportation and tech companies dealing with this issue I would hate for it to become but this image is kind of implying which is a private luxury limousine that allows you to move about the city on your own where you don't socialize with anybody and you're able to read a book or work on your laptop in a more efficient way than if you were stuck in traffic for an hour or two but I fear that it could be the danger particularly in more sprawling cities and cities where the personal vehicle is sort of rules the day cities like Houston and Los Angeles we have to be careful not to end up on the right hand side of this slide we really need to be pushing the left hand side where we're creating more shared opportunities for vehicles sharing that singular vehicle or getting vehicles a bit bigger to share them so they're traveling the same distance so I think the first route and the first opportunity is for the taxi system the taxi system is a shared vehicle it's the same vehicle that is shared by many people throughout the day just in the electric London taxi to the day it's fantastic so if we can get those types of vehicles first to be electrified it's very comfortable, very quiet that's a tremendous first step and the answer in our more urban areas and maybe even suburban areas which we were also discussing earlier is sort of the microtransit system that it's about four to five, maybe ten people in a vehicle that sort of fill the gap between the metro systems, the mass transit systems and maybe the last mile of travel and you can link that to biking and walking and create a much more dynamic system and so these kinds of things we're seeing popping up those maybe have the best opportunities for the series of minivans that are moving around not just taxis so how are cities getting ready for the autonomous vehicle, where do they see these things benefiting their environments, this was a survey I think of US cities and the good news here is the majority of them are thinking about them as sort of last mile transit vehicles as a thing that I was just saying to plug into the wider network and be coordinated so last mile transit, taxis, mass transit, those are the top of the list cities are also thinking about them in terms of moving goods around the city of London is thinking about this as well in terms of centrally locating all deliveries, let's say Amazon, they get a barge in the river there's a study to look at a barge in the river, from that point you have a series of robots that deliver goods throughout or they're going to force companies to move their deliveries to their employees homes because there's just too much white van traffic in the city happening today there's also about who's going to be scripting these future visions if it's left to the car companies as this image comes from I find it a bit scary and they really haven't created a better city environment, it's really just again big roads, people are segregated from the roads, all these flyovers I don't see that as being this better environment for us as people maybe it's better for them and their cars but not for us as people so I think we need to engage many people together to solve this this is an answer but I think this is heading the right direction, this is an idea we brought forth in New York City which is re-envisioning the the Brooklyn Queens Expressway into a autonomous vehicle superhighway so that would be the long distance travel transit which then frees up the ground plane which today is a street to create much more local neighborhood space it could provide other forms of transit, local transit mass transit above and better landscaping and people places in the middle of a dense urban environment, so I think we need to get architects involved, landscape architects involved, not just the car manufacturers that are delivering the vehicles, we've been working again with the City of London on this, an idea for the square mile and looking at and analyzing the major transit routes in the city, the center of the city center these red routes are used by buses, by service vehicles and by trains coming out of the rail stations to move to their place of work so we are envisaging an idea that you stop all this transit at the perimeter outside the square mile and that you use the system of microtransit to create the last mile journey and that could be combined with walking as well as these micropods and the city would be pretty conducive for these smaller vehicles because it is very circuitous it's not a North American grid obviously, sort of medieval and character these smaller vehicles could navigate the tight turns and things so that could be an opportunity to move more people around and spread them across many more routes than just the major ones where they've had conflict with most traffic and that could also be teamed with a green strategy for the city so you could have wayfinding through greening up certain parts of the city and I'm just having to dig up a lot of the streets just putting some trees and planters and making that part of the wayfinding and sort of improving the quality of air as well so getting back to the question, we're debating this too what is the future form and shape of the city? It's one thing about retrofitting existing cities but other new city environments how are they going to be formed? in the past obviously cities were formed by a man in his mule probably taking his things to market which created this kind of medieval city pattern so in the evolution we got a bit more efficient we began to align development along corridors that mirrored the transportation corridors and where the corridors cross we created intensity and development so that was really something that was determined by the wire or by the rail in which those vehicles ran so are we talking now about something that's much more diverse again? because these little robots with people in them can travel anywhere towards a model where it's even much more polycentric than before question, could be interesting it could be much more diverse, much more polycentric, it could be more alienating because you may not ever see anybody else on your journey I hate to see that what happens is the LA kind of model where things cities just get, because you can do that, cities just continue to sprawl further hopefully it's more like a model like the Dublin the center of Dublin, hopefully that's more of a human scale urbanity that allows this incredible mobility in multiple directions, but it's still at a urban scale that densifies and makes things compact and livable so that's our big question that we're all scratching our heads particularly when we're working in new city environments, we're working in new cities in Africa and the Middle East these are the kinds of questions we're asking ourselves how long does the city need to take as this new boat of transport happens, that's going to be the next debate I think over the next 20, 30 years just to summarize is electrification the big silver bullet to reduce our carbon footprint, I think by now the answer for me is kind of obvious, the answer is no, it's much more complex, cities are multi-layered things they have many different systems and needed different layers of expertise, you have energy is one of those key layers obviously in electrification, but you have rainwater and stormwater management you have resiliency issues, community infrastructure etc etc, so I think we've always been talking about a suite of things that you have to put together with electrical strategies to actually get to a carbon neutral future interesting anecdote, when you look at taking fossil fuel production away from coal plants you're also going to reduce the amount of water demand, because those coal fired plants require a lot of water, so that would help for that, so again thinking more holistically there's many things that we have to address, not just one of those things in that wheel, and again just underlining the issues of making sure these places are wonderful places to live and work, bringing people together, connected with nature dealing with resiliency, but also allowing things to evolve and change over time as our cities have been able to do in the past, and creating comfort on the ground, within buildings, to making sure these things are relevant, making the invisible visible, again educating people about what's happening, what their daily impact is on the grid or on the city, on their services, on their infrastructure, but let's also keep in mind the kind of places we're creating, we don't want a city full of roads with fast moving vehicles, it could actually be quite dangerous if we're not careful, some of these vehicles so quiet that we create new conflicts we hadn't imagined before obviously we'll clean up the air, but you have to think about these other conflicts, and again I think it's always about the people, and ourselves as human beings coming together in these urban environments, that's what creates cities in the first place, it's why cities will survive in the future, because there will always be this desire to bring people together and so we have to keep that in the back of our mind, not always just the system. Thank you.


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We like to say conservation is at the heart of everything that we do in BC parks. Most of it is about protecting the natural values of parks and often why they were designated as parks in the first place. When we try and work towards conservation, what we're really trying to do is coexist as best we can with the natural world. The kind of work that we focus on around conservation in parks is partly about knowing what's in the park, so we have projects that are surveying species or ecosystems that help us understand how nature is changing, especially into things like climate change. Part of it is about restoring habitats in response to impacts from human use. We're also doing projects that are about educating the public about conservation and we've been doing projects that focus on specific actions to recover species at risk. I would encourage people to buy BC parks license plates because the funds from those go towards conservation, indigenous relations, community engagement. Parks agencies, we're trying to deal with reactionary type issues, so something has already happened and we're trying to fix it as best we can. So this sort of larger conservation budget allows us to take preventative steps rather than reactionary steps. What I'd like to say to people who buy BC parks license plate first and foremost is thank you. The money that they're paying to have that license plate and to show their support is really translating directly to projects on the ground. It's going into real meaningful work that's happening already all over the province and it's really making a difference.


Good morning and welcome to the next lecture in our course on chemical engineering principles of CVD processes. In the next few lectures I want to spend some time again talking about the various types of CVD processes and trying to differentiate between them. In particular one of the key variables in controlling a CVD process is the pressure. As I have mentioned earlier in the course the most CVD reactors are run either at atmospheric pressure or at lower pressures and according to the pressure at which the CVD processes run you can classify the CVD processes as atmospheric pressure CVD, low pressure CVD as well as plasma enhanced CVD which typically is done at pressures that are even lower. So when we talk about low pressure CVD we are typically talking about a tenth of an atmosphere whereas in terms of plasma enhanced CVD we are talking about pressures that are a hundredth of an atmosphere or even lower if you want to go to a ultra high density plasma CVD. So when do we use what kind of process? I mean what is the factor that differentiates between these processes? The simplest way to think about atmospheric pressure CVD is that it is a process that is used when you are looking for high rates of production and low cost of production. So it is typically used for components that do not have a high sale value essentially. So for example if you are trying to make a dielectric film like SiO2 then atmospheric pressure CVD is a very suitable process but if you are trying to make crystalline silicon probably is not. And also we use atmospheric pressure CVD when the rates of deposition have to be quite high by which I mean that the rate of thickness growth is of the order of about 1000 angstroms per minute. So when you are looking for such large rates of deposition and film growth you tend to use atmospheric pressure CVD. The primary advantage of an atmospheric pressure CVD process is that it can be designed as a continuous flow process. All the other types of CVD processes that we will talk about are essentially batch processes where you have to have a chamber which is depressurized, you know vacuum is applied, process runs and then you open up the chamber and take out the substrates. In the case of the atmospheric pressure process you can design it so that substrates are constantly being cycled through. Obviously that helps in terms of throughput. You can do a lot more product when you run anything in a continuous mode compared to a batch mode and also it helps in the simplicity of the equipment. You know any time you have to provide a vacuum in a process it is very difficult. It is expensive and it is prone to leaks unless your vacuum chamber is perfectly designed hermetically sealed there are always going to be molecular level leaks happening. The CVD process is especially sensitive even to very, very minute quantities of leakage because all it takes is a few molecules of a particular impurity to for it to react with the components inside the CVD reactor and thereby deposit on the film. So in the case of an AP CVD atmospheric pressure CVD reactor you can conceivably have an entirely open chamber so that the reactants are coming in this way and the byproduct gases are going out that way and when you talk about a continuous throughput process essentially you can have a belt drive mechanism where you are constantly taking the cassettes through on a conveyor belt which is constantly rolling right. So this is the this then becomes the load station and this becomes the unload station. You will load your substrates to be coated on the upstream side and then it will go through the CVD process and then you will download the substrates with film on the downstream side and then the belt itself will typically go through a cleaning solution to remove any impurities that might have deposited on it. Of course you would still need the heater arrangement so the substrates will be provided an energy source as they go through the CVD process. Now in this particular case the gases are typically introduced through a tube that is sitting on top of the film deposition location. So this could consist of a diluent gas plus the reactants and essentially this gas flow will be happening constantly continuously even as the substrates are moving through continuously. So in principle this is a very simple flow through process and has all the advantages. What are some of the disadvantages of this type of reactor? The first is it is open to the atmosphere right so there is really no way to prevent impurities from getting into the chamber. So your product the film has to be robust enough to withstand impurity. So if you are looking for 99.999% purity it is probably not going to happen. So you have to have a product that is a little more forgiving of impurities and other imperfections. The second problem with this is that this type of a system is typically run as a cold wall reactor where only the substrate is heated. However the fact that the pressure is relatively high you know atmospheric pressure means that even locations that are farther away from the substrate are susceptible to nucleation. So a frequent problem in atmospheric pressure CVD reactors is that you have a tendency for particles to nucleate in the gas phase and then arrive on the substrate in particular form which gives rise to again powdery or flaky deposits rather than a smooth and continuous film. So the way you try to address this is really by controlling how the reactants are fed in. You try to keep them as much separated as possible until they actually get close to the substrate. So you try to play around a little bit with a gas delivery mechanism to ensure that the reactions do not take place far away from the substrate. But essentially you pretty much have to live with it. In an atmospheric pressure CVD reactor the price you pay for the increased throughput and the lower cost and simplicity and so on is that you really cannot expect a perfect film. You get what you pay for essentially. So again that is the reason why this is primarily used for dielectric materials where the absolute purity or even the uniformity of the film is not a major issue. Now if you want to take this process and improve it in order to provide better controls, higher quality, more uniformity and so on the first thing you need to do is make it into a batch process. You have to provide an isolated and controlled environment for CVD to happen and that is done in a LP CVD process which is a low pressure CVD process where the atmospheric conditions are kept at sub-atmospheric pressure. So in this case you would have a reactor which is essentially a sealed reactor and the primary difference that you will see you will still have a substrate on which the CVD process is happening. The primary difference is you will have an arrangement to pull vacuum on the system so that you can achieve a certain low pressure before you start depositing materials. Now when we are doing low pressure CVD again there are two configurations in terms of the temperature distribution. There is the cold wall LP CVD and the hot wall LP CVD where CW LP CVD implies that the substrate is kept much hotter than the reactor walls and the pressure is kept low. And of course hot wall LP CVD simply implies that the temperature distribution is fairly uniform within the reactor. A cold wall reactor obviously has the advantage that nucleation is unlikely to happen in the gas phase and most of the condensation will happen at the substrate whereas a hot wall reactor has a disadvantage that nucleation can happen anywhere in the gas phase. You can have substantial deposition on the walls of the reactor which can then flake off and so on. The advantage of the hot wall reactor as we have seen before is that it makes the flow much more uniform. You do not have to deal with recirculation flows, natural convection and other effects that are associated with the steep temperature gradient in your reactor. And in fact a majority, a vast majority of LP CVD processes are run under hot wall conditions but why would you do that when you know that the reactor is now susceptible to homogeneous nucleation? Well there is one thing that helps. Can you think of why a hot wall LP CVD reactor would be better than a hot wall AP CVD reactor in terms of controlling homogeneous nucleation? It is a fact that the pressure is low. Chemical reactions are typically driven much faster under elevated pressure and elevated temperature conditions. So the fact that you are keeping the pressure low automatically implies that to some extent chemical reactions are suppressed. So by driving to a sufficiently low pressure you can minimize the amount of homogeneous nucleation that takes place in this reactor. A low pressure by the way also helps in terms of reducing macroscopic induced flow such as buoyant flow or natural convection flow. So that is another reason why the low pressure CVD process typically gives you much better uniformity of a film compared to the atmospheric pressure CVD reactor. Another way in which you can classify these reactors is that the low pressure CVD reactor is typically run under lower temperature conditions. What that means if you recall the figure that we drew relating deposition rate to temperature is that at lower temperatures the kinetics become the controlling factor and not the transport. So what that really means is that that gives you the potential of doing multiple substrates at a time. The drawback with an LP CVD process is that compared to the atmospheric pressure process it is slower because it has to be done in a batch mode but what we do instead typically this process if you look at it the coating is happening essentially one substrate at a time whereas in the case of a LP CVD process you do not do one substrate at a time you essentially take a cassette on which you mount multiple substrates and you coat all of them at the same time right. So this is like a basket in which you can have a number of wafers or substrates to be coated and it can happen simultaneously because the conditions are set so that the deposition process is kinetically controlled which means that as long as you have a tight distribution over the or control over the temperature distribution the uniformity should be fine. Now in this case there are actually two different configurations as I mentioned one is called horizontal flow reactor and the other is vertical flow reactor. This actually refers to how the wafers are positioned. The wafers can be positioned so that they are parallel to the flow of gases and that is called HF CVD reactor whereas the wafers can be positioned also so that instead of lying flat like this they are actually standing up straight like this and that is called a vertical flow LP CVD reactor. The advantage of the vertical flow reactor over the horizontal flow is something we have discussed in one of the earlier lectures that when you have a horizontal plate and you are flowing a gas through it the uniformity is very very difficult to achieve because of concentration depletion as well as boundary layer growth. Whereas in a vertical configuration where the wafers are actually you know standing up you can potentially direct the gases and in fact what you would do in this case is the gas inflow system will be designed so that there is a fresh flow of gas for every substrate so that the flow is not going across them like this but rather there are multiple flow inlets so that the each substrate that is vertically standing up sees a fresh feed of reactants and gas so it makes the uniformity much better. In fact with this configuration vertical flow hot wall LP CVD it is possible to achieve better than 2% uniformity in the CVD film that is if you measure the CVD film across its length and you look at the variation in the thickness of the film it can be controlled to be no more than 2% which by the way is very good in a CVD reactor. And so the this is again the preferred configuration the cassettes or the wafers are mounted in a vertical configuration in the cassette and the walls are kept at about the same temperature as the substrate and the pressure is taken down to subatmospheric levels. So it is obviously a very good process and by the way this process is mostly used to make polycrystalline silicon in fact this process is used to make many semiconductor devices so silicon, germanium, gallium, arsenic, S-I-G-E, G-A-A-S there are many semiconductors and semiconductor compounds that are made using LP CVD process. The characteristics of the film will be different in the case of LP CVD compared to AP CVD the fact that these LP CVD reactors are run at a lower temperature as we have discussed before essentially means that they would not be as crystalline in structure as the atmospheric pressure CVD reactors which are run at a higher pressure and higher temperature. So they are likely to be less dense likely to be more porous and also there is a possibility that they can actually absorb some of the product by product gases and other impurities in the system. So typically the LP CVD process after it is run you do a high temperature annealing to bring its properties physical properties of the film to be more like the film properties that you get in an atmospheric pressure CVD reactor. There are two important characteristics of the film that you try to measure and control. The first is the refractive index which is typically measured using ellipsometry and the specification for a poly silicon film is that the refractive index must be in the range of 1.8 to 2.2 nominally should be 2.0 for a good film. A high value of mu indicates that it is silicon rich and a lower volume of mu indicates that you have some impurities typically oxygen in your system. And so as you measure the refractive index you constantly tweak the process so that you keep trying to bring it to the nominal value of 2.0. So this is you know quantitative measure that is a fairly sensitive indicator of the composition of the film. The second metric that is used frequently for quality control is the H rate in 49% HF solution. Here the specification for a good CVD film is that this must be less than 1 nanometer per minute. So H rates that are in excess of this basically imply that you have to do something to improve the solidity or integrity of the CVD film and again the most common process for doing that is to expose it to higher temperatures and that will improve the H rate as it is as measured in 49% HF. In an LPCVD reactor if you actually look at how the rate of deposition changes as a function of pressure and temperature so if you plot film growth rate versus let us say temperature of the substrate and you look at this dependence as a function of pressure typically what you see is that you get a family of curves that look like that where the pressure is it increasing or decreasing in this? Would the pressure be increasing in this direction or decreasing in this direction? How many think increasing? So that is the change to decrease, some of you are not sure. See again remember that I said it is kinetically controlled. As soon as I say that it means higher pressure is good. If it is diffusion controlled the other way around will be true. Something is diffusion controlled, low pressure is better than high pressure but when a process is kinetically controlled higher pressure always helps. The reason being higher pressure just very simplistically brings molecules closer together so they are more likely to react compared to if your pressures were lower. So we have looked at two categories of CVD. One is the atmospheric pressure, the other is the low pressure CVD. Third kind of CVD process is what we call plasma enhanced CVD. Plasma enhanced CVD is typically run at even lower temperatures than LPCVD and at lower pressures as well. The pressures in fact are kept so low that you either introduce a source of ionization into your system or the pressures themselves at sufficiently low values can cause ionization to occur spontaneously as well. The advantage of a plasma enhanced CVD is when you have a temperature sensitive substrate and you cannot afford to heat it up much beyond room temperature clearly you cannot rely on thermal source of energy to provide the energization to the substrate. So as an alternative means of energization of the substrate things like laser CVD, photo electric CVD and plasma enhanced CVD are resorted to. When we do plasma enhanced CVD the surface temperatures can be as low as 300 Kelvin not too far above room temperature. The advantage of plasma enhanced CVD is that it is again from an energy viewpoint, from a substrate reactivity viewpoint it is much better than APCVD or LPCVD. The downside of plasma enhanced CVD is that it is the most complex of all CVD reactors. The design of the reactor has to be paid a lot of attention to in order to achieve the plasma conditions you are looking for and maintain them. The other disadvantage is see the way a plasma enhanced CVD reactor works is you are energizing the substrate using a plasma but at the same time you are also energizing the gas phase itself. So the molecules that are present in the gas phase are also getting some of this energy transferred to them. So the same kind of problem as in hot wall CVD can happen, your molecules gas phase can become sufficiently energized that they start reacting in the gas phase and homogeneously nucleating particles or aerosols and so on. In fact there is a process called ECR which stands for electron cyclotron resonance where what you really do is you provide sufficient plasma energy to take a radical or a species in the gas phase and turn it into a radical. For example if you are trying to make let us say silicon nitride by reacting SiO2 plus N2 not easy to happen, make that happen right or actually if I use SiH4 sorry not SiO2 while SiLine is a very reactive molecule N2 is not. So it is very difficult to use this process to make Si3N4 however if you can bombard this N2 with high energy plasma and turn it into N, N is now very reactive with SiH4 and it easily forms an SiN3, Si3N4 type of compound on the surface. So electron cyclotron resonance is a technique by which you essentially convert neutral species in the gas phase to an ionized radical form which then reacts readily with the precursor vapors that you are introducing into the C V D reactor to get you the film that you want. A variation of this is called the HDP C V D reactor which just stands for high density plasma which is an extension of the ECR to provide energization not only to the gas phase species and the substrate but in addition there is sufficient energy provided to start etching the surface. You know normally plasma enhanced C V D works in its simplest form by energizing the surface by providing an additional energy component to the surface. ECR C V D works by energizing the surface as well as the gas phase species. High density plasma essentially goes one step further it energizes the surface, it energizes the species in the gas phase and it actually etches the surface which is sometimes necessary if you are trying to simultaneously grow film on the surface as well as etch certain locations. So it is kind of dual purpose kind of a system where you are able to do both simultaneously. The plasma enhanced C V D films are even more amorphous or less crystalline compared to the L P C V D films and certainly the A P C V D films which means that some of these thermal annealing or other processes are even more necessary in order to provide densification of the film and certain functional properties that you are looking for. Now one of the advantages of a plasma enhanced C V D reactor is that it is a very tunable process. You can grow many different kinds of films in the same reactor with the same reactant species. For example suppose I have a case where I want to build a multi-layer deposit so that I want the film to have varying compositions across its thickness. How do you do that? A C V D reactor in principle offers you the ability to do that because all you have to do is tweak the deposition conditions as a function of time to change the composition of the film. However that is easier said than done. It is very very difficult to provide that kind of precision to the film formation process that you can have a graded composition that is tightly controlled. However in the case of plasma enhanced C V D that does become possible. One of the common applications is multi-layers of S I O 2 and S I 3 and 4. As we were discussing in the last class while they are both dielectric materials silicon dioxide and silicon nitride have somewhat different properties in terms of hardness and moisture permeability and so on. So there may be cases where you want to put down these dielectric layers of varying composition. So in the case of if you want to take let us say silane in a plasma enhanced reactor and you want to make silica film S I O 2 you have really three options as far as how you do that. The first is let us say that all the processes are P E C V D you can introduce oxygen into the system. So S I H 4 plus O 2 in a plasma enhanced C V D reactor will give you an S I O 2 film. But it is kind of an overkill. It is a what I would call a brute force technique because oxygen is an extremely reactive species and to try and do this in a plasma enhanced C V D reactor is not necessary. I mean if you really want to make S I O 2 by mixing S I H 4 and O 2 you might as well do it in an atmospheric pressure C V D reactor. The other possibility is to do this using C O 2 which actually works quite well but what will be the concern? Suppose you make S I O 2 film using C O 2 as your reactant gas. Do you have any issues with that? Do you see any issues? The carbon can be an impurity, right? Carbon can become part of the film and carbon is you know very difficult to get rid of once it gets absorbed. So the presence of carbon as an impurity is something that would worry some people depending on the process that you are running. So in fact the preferred process for making S I O 2 is by using N 2 O as the reactant gas. The other advantage of using N 2 O as the reacting species with silane is that by controlling the ratio of S I H 4 to N 2 O you can make either S I 3 N 4 or S I O 2. So simply by altering the ratio of this to this you can have virtually a continuous transition from a film that is essentially S I O 2 rich to one that is S I 3 N 4 rich or any combinations thereof. So the plasma enhanced C V D process enables you to do that mainly because it is less reactive environment compared to atmospheric pressure C V D and low pressure C V D. So you potentially have the ability to control the process reasonably well. Another process that is similar to this is what we call a UHV process or ultra high vacuum plasma enhanced C V D. So typically while as I was mentioning earlier L P C V D may be run at one tenth of an atmosphere and plasma enhanced C V D may be run at a hundredth of an atmosphere. Ultra high vacuum plasma enhanced C V D typically runs at one thousandth of an atmosphere or lower pressures. The advantage here once again is that it can be done to keep the temperatures very low and when you talk about this type of ultra high vacuum you can almost start manipulating at atomic level. Now the problem with the ultra high vacuum kind of plasma enhanced processes there is actually two issues with it. The first is that when you pull the vacuum that low the mean free path of the molecules becomes very large right. So diffusion becomes very fast and you cannot dependably get uniform film thickness. Essentially it becomes a process where the transport phenomena start to play a role. A high mean free path essentially means that the probability of an encounter with another molecule is much lower. As the probability of encounters becomes lower what that means is that you cannot repeatedly and reproducibly make the same film every time because it all depends on whether two vapor molecules are going to find each other or not. So that is one issue particularly on the substrate what we typically find is that uniformity starts to suffer as you lower the pressure. Of course the other parameter that you can control is the plasma intensity. If you increase the intensity of the plasma you will get a higher deposition rate but it also means that the uniformity will become poorer and in fact the deposit that you make is also less dense as you increase the power of your system. So there is a penalty to pay. You get thicker deposits but they are less uniform and they are not as dense by increasing the power of your plasma. The other problem that becomes intensified when you go to very low pressures and plasma enhancement is that again particles start forming in the gas phase. Under ultra high vacuum conditions or even under the high density plasma conditions you know the heterogeneous nucleation process which happens sporadically in a low pressure CVD reactor in a plasma enhanced reactor it occurs to such an extent that particle formation is highly likely. So how do you deal with that? I mean you do not want those particles to fall on your CVD film and damage its properties. So what people use what are known as particle traps? They are like scavenging type of devices where you use usually a thermal gradient so that you know if you have a reactor and this is your substrate on which you are trying to make the film but instead your particles are forming over here you provide a essentially a temperature gradient in a certain direction. For example the temperature gradient should be such that the particles in the gas phase are pulled away from the substrate and towards the exhaust. You do that by making use of a property called thermophoresis. Thermophoresis refers to the diffusion of particles down a temperature gradient. As you know diffusion is typically associated with a concentration gradient right that is called Fick diffusion in the case of vapors it is called Brownian diffusion in the case of particles but the movement of vapor molecules due to a temperature gradient by the way is known as Soray diffusion and the movement of particles from high temperature to low temperature is called thermophoresis. So what you do is you apply a temperature gradient so that the exhaust system is kept at a lower temperature compared to the bulk of the CVD reactor. So automatically any fine particles that are formed in the gas phase due to nucleation in the gas phase will be automatically sucked towards the exhaust by using this temperature gradient. The application of thermophoresis as a particle trap is widely used in these plasma enhanced CVD reactors and by the way thermophoresis or thermal diffusion can actually have an adverse effect on CVD film formation. We will talk about this later when we talk about transport processes and their effect on CVD phenomena because as you can imagine by the same token if you are keeping a substrate hotter than the surrounding gases then vapor molecules that are trying to deposit on the substrate can be essentially transported away from the substrate because of a temperature gradient. So even though the concentration gradient may be helping you in terms of pulling molecules towards the surface the thermal gradient particularly in a cold wall reactor can be quite a significant effect in driving diffusion away from the surface. And that is another reason why hot wall reactors are typically favored over cold wall reactors because thermal diffusion when it does set in can be an order of magnitude greater than the molecular diffusion or thick diffusion that we are familiar with. So it can significantly counteract the effect of the diffusional deposition mechanism particularly in the boundary layer region where convection is absent thermal diffusion can play a huge role. So you try to design the reactor you know in such a way that you do not have to deal with thermal effects and that is again done by having a fairly uniform temperature distribution inside the CVD reactor. So we have talked about atmospheric pressure CVD, low pressure CVD and plasma enhanced CVD today. In the next lecture we will talk a little bit more about metal CVD as well as metal organic CVD reactors which are two other important classifications of CVD reactors. So with the discussion of those two we would have covered the five most widely used CVD reactors in the world and after we do that we will start looking into some of the process parameters in a little more detail. Any questions on what we have talked about today? Generally atmospheric and low pressure CVD we have homogeneous nucleation because the pressure is higher. So how are particles forming in the CVD? That is because in PECVD even though the temperature is low and the pressure is low the plasma itself is providing the energy right. I mean two neutral species are unlikely to react but if you bombard them both with plasma you energize them, you turn them into ionized radicals they are very very very keen to interact and react with each other. So it is a fact that you know same reason why the deposition happens on the surface.  Similarly the gas phase molecules are also energized because of the presence of the plasma and in fact I would say that the effect on the gas phase energization is more immediate and more direct than the effect on surface energization. Okay see you at the next lecture.


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Stephen King review. We're doing this one a little bit differently only because my internet's acting up the way it is, so I'm going to split up the four novellas in If It Bleeds. This is just a dust jacket because my copy is inside because I'm still reading it. I'm currently halfway through If It Bleeds. Not yet. The title story. I guess? The collection too. Whatever. So we're gonna start with my review of Mr. Harrigan's Phone. I loved this story. I couldn't find any fault in it whatsoever. If I were going to criticize it, because people are bound to mention it, this story felt a lot like Hearts in Atlantis with a nod to... Give me a second. I can never remember the name of this short story, although I like it. I think it's Harold something. Harvey's Dream. That's it. Harvey's Dream. So it's a mishmash. It's a mishmash of Harvey's Dream. I almost forgot the name of the story again just that quick. It's a mishmash of Harvey's Dream and Hearts in Atlantis. It's about a boy who goes to read for the rich dude in town and they end up forming maybe not a friendship, but a close relationship and then supernatural spooky stuff happens. I loved this story as much as I loved all the stuff in Hearts in Atlantis. There's a certain passion that Stephen King has, a talent for writing about kids and old people talking back and forth. At least I feel that that is true. With this one, one of the things that really struck me, and I spoke to my buddy Scott Kemper about this, he brought up how racist McTig and I can't remember the other books that the boy reads to Mr. Harrigan, but there was a lot of subtext there. You got a lot of character building based solely on what this boy was reading to this man. And all of the books from what I haven't read them, but I do know the history behind the authors that wrote the books. What I didn't know about the books, and thank you Scott for pointing this out, is that the books were about corruption and greed. And that tells you a lot about Mr. Harrigan without telling you anything on the page really. It's just saying these are the books that he enjoys. This is probably how he is. And as the story goes on, you learn more and more about this guy. And King paints this character so that you maybe sympathize, well no, you definitely sympathize with the boy. You don't sympathize with Mr. Harrigan's attitude and the things that happen in the book are rather vile, but they have their purpose and they are somewhat even say deserved. But this one, I love it. This story is everything that I want from Stephen King. The character development, the supernatural aspect, it even has a bit of Wendy's button box in it, but this one, this story is much better than Wendy's button box and Leagues better than Wendy's magic feather. You guys know I just like that one anyways. Well if you're a fan of the channel, if you're new here, hi. But with Mr. Harrigan's phone, I was left with this feeling like this is the man that I respect. This is the hero that I have come to love. This is the guy that I missed for so long after his accident. This story, I'm trying not to talk about any of the other stories in there and I'm trying to keep this one short because I plan on super cutting all these together once my internet is better. Bear with me, bear with me. I know we're all struggling right now. I'm not looking for sympathies. I'm just saying just bear with me. But this story, here's my final thought on the book. I want to bring this up because I get a lot of flak for mentioning the cost of books. Like in my review of Yukio Mishima's Star, it's a $12, $13, $14 book but it's only a short story in length. I honestly feel like if Mr. Harrigan's phone was released by itself like Elevation was and they charged $20 for that story, I would be more than happy with the money spent. So it's not always about the length of the story. It's about the content and if I don't feel like content is worth my time and my money, I'm going to say something. Sometimes that's the only time that's the only thing I have to say. But have you read Mr. Harrigan's phone? If you've read the rest of the stories, wait for those reviews please to comment and please no spoilers down there in the doodly-doo while you guys are telling me whether or not you liked this story. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been the Stephen King review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!