Welcome everybody. It's Gordon Clark from Oxford University beginning this webinar, this what is in effect today long event, honouring Patrice Darrington and her most wonderful book. With me as well is Richard Florida, who is the co-convener and co-conspirator about this project and as we go on we will have of course many others join us as speakers but also I expect the audience to build and build as we basically go through the process. There are quite a number of speakers and you might notice that I'm speaking to you from Oxford in the UK. We have one of our desk speakers that is a course from Belgium and we can go Belgium, Oxford, we go then to New York, to Illinois, to Chicago, to Los Angeles and Stanford. So we've got quite a spread of speakers here today and more particularly people who really understand Patrice's project which actually is quite remarkable on many dimensions, very crudely, size and scope really astounded me when I first saw her but equally she has said something fundamentally original about actually real estate and she's been a diligent historian bringing to the fore many aspects of the of the project that the book's based on and I don't think there's anything quite like it in the social sciences and that's saying a lot when you think of all the academics out there specialized in this kind of research. So welcome everybody and welcome to speakers, welcome to the audience, we've dived in for the occasion, welcome so I've caught Richard in dispose. So I'll turn it over to Patrice who will also say hello and also might make some remarks about where she started from at least very briefly historically speaking. Over to you Patrice. Thank you very much Gordon. I'm humbled by your very kind words of appreciation of this. Yes it was a long project but one I just thoroughly enjoyed. I'm sure like many people on this at this event and many many people worldwide we love real estate, we love talking about real estate, we love being in our buildings, we love arguing about it, you know real property the things we live in every day are very very exciting and and you know definitely material for lots of juicy comments. So having been fortunate to put together an education combining architecture and then an MBA business degree I have practiced in real estate for many many years. Then having the opportunity to go to an academic institution wonderful ones like New York University and then now Columbia University and be responsible for teaching young people young future professionals about real estate development. I realized how is it actually done. We go and do it, we try to do it well but have we ever really thought about what are the essential principles, what are the essential motivating dynamics of this activity. And so I started looking back to see where we were doing this, where it had happened and this took me way back to the 17th century and Covent Garden. Thank you for having me welcome. I'll turn it over to Richard who will now make something today. Oh I'm just sorry about that for some reason my connection dropped off for a minute so I ran the hearty speed test and found that I have enough bandwidth to carry on so thank you for bearing with me. I want to echo Gordon's comments. I well I've known for his treats for a long time we were colleagues at Carnegie Mellon at the beginnings of our career and I think somehow brought there together. We've never talked about that by one Gordon Clark an incredible person and an incredible scholar but an incredible majestral connector of people and human beings and scholars. So you know I have been an urbanist most of my career trained in Columbia University. Rutgers is an undergraduate Columbia University where Teresa is as an urban planner in the mid 80s. And late in life late in life late in an academic career I came to the belief that real estate was important to urban development. That sounds so simple-minded when I when I say it it sounds almost ludicrous but I took up an appointment and I believe Patrice also overlapped with me there as a distinguished visiting professor at the Shack Institute of Real Estate at NYU and I did that particularly to try to educate myself about real estate and I learned nothing and I'm not kidding you that I found in our field that there was there was commentary like David Harvey's important work on the spatial fix but there was very little commentary about the central role of real estate. And particularly in a knowledge economy there was the belief that real estate in space was no longer important and you know then Patrice's book arrived first into electronic format and then in analog format and I was literally blown away because Patrice brings real estate bring it she not only provides this incredible history she brings real estate back into our discourse and situates it where it should be at the center of urban theory and gives us she has I mean in many ways she's answered so many questions but I think Gordon would agree with this and many of you would agree that she sets the table for so many of us to ask other questions to think deeply about how real estate shaped cities and I would say even more than urban development shapes capitalist growth so I just want to echo Gordon's comments I'm honored and I feel honored and privileged to be involved I wish I could I love the city I love New York City even Gordon compared to Oxford to London it's still my favorite city in the world I wish I could be with you here there today but hope to be visiting with you in New York soon enough Patrice most of all thank you for making this important contribution and thanks to all of our our guests our distinguished participants our presenters for their incredible contributions great thanks Richard it's worth also saying that in bringing together the commentators today we were very we were mindful of the disciplines we were mindful of if you like the critical perspectives analytical perspectives that people bring to the table and and that I think is also some measure of Patrice's accomplishment here she's been able to talk to a lot of disciplines and a lot of scholars who you know on in their own fields may have made significant contributions themselves and as we went around recruiting people everyone jumped to say yes so it's quite quite a compliment personally and professionally one thing Patrice didn't mention was yes she was in industry yes she was in banks and investment groups on real estate and I think it's fair to say she met all kinds of people in that sojourn and I was I was particularly struck hearing one time a while ago a story about going to see somebody who actually owned a casino or seemed to own a casino I think it's actually more in the latter seemed to own a casino and seemed to owe a lot of money to banks and that man unfortunately didn't seem to become president but he became president it's just a shocker but there you go it's Patrice has seen rogues she's seen remarkably talented people on the investment side of things and she has also been able to conceptualize something whole that most of us otherwise look at in part so with that I'm sort of conscious of coming up to 45 minutes that is to say 15 minutes into the presentation we're going to of course start with the first presenter at 2 p.m eastern standard time I think I'm right no sorry at 9 I'm very confused at 9 a.m eastern standard time but before we do that we are also going to run a tape from Larry Summers professor Summers was very gracious in agreeing to make some preliminary comments he has also read the book unfortunately he can't be here today I believe he's in Singapore but nonetheless he is also a person enormously impressed by the book and enormously impressed by patrice's accomplishments so patrice how do we go about getting Larry in the frame so to speak to get him his comments displayed I'm delighted to open this symposium in celebration of patrice derrington's book built up you know there are important books there are deeply scholarly books and there are books that are fun to read there are not very many books that need all three of those criteria but at least for me this was one of them it's famously been said that we shape our built environment and then our built environment shapes us if that's even close to true developers are some of the most important people determining the destiny of our shared spaces therefore the destiny of our cities and therefore the destiny of all of us what they do and how they do it is profoundly important it's not just the stuff of abstract models or present value calculations it's the stuff of dreams persuasion sales motivation vision these are as important as financial calculation or carpentry or physical construction it's the great strength of this book that it tells real stories about real things and therefore makes the mechanics the abstractions come to life that's why I enjoyed reading it that's why it gave me a greater appreciation of the work of the developers I know that's why it caused me to think differently about the malls the buildings the office parks the projects into which I step and so I'm only sorry that I can't be present physically for this symposium I'm sure it will be as great a treat as reading this book was okay here we are again now I'm conscious that we are 10 minutes away now just or 15 minutes away from the schedule start so I thought in this period of time I might make some other comments and then get Richard and Patrice to also make some comments before we introduce our first speaker the first thing to say about this and sort of reinforce some aspects of the the debate about real estate and property in modern cities is the if you like the flux and flow of what happens in cities and in my own commentary I talk about how to conceptualize what happens in one neighborhood one part of a city as opposed to other parts of the same city and how they join together if not directly in terms of a joining land but indirectly in terms of the financial market pricing of one parcel of land versus another parcel of land and indeed actually what the future value is of that land looked in not just a local perspective but also in a global perspective and for someone like me who has been involved in urban research for many years but also as an investor through what a major institution in the UK in real estate it's brought home to me actually many of the issues that I hear investors come into our discussions and explain how they value one parcel of land over another parcel of land and it's really basic sometimes it's you know is the land situated in the right place and in the UK that means being in the midlands at the intersection between major freeways going north south east west but equally it's sort of very basic you know what what is the shell that is the the building on top of that land how does that have an intrinsic value does it have a use value is it actually not valuable at all except in the sense that it occupies a space land that can be converted to something else altogether and that's actually many respects what I learned from reading patrice's book that's sort of sense of contingency about land about property contingency on markets contingency on ambitions and aspirations of those people who hold property or will hold property in the long term the last comment I make about this is it's too often to think you know when you when you sort of speculate about speculators what they have in mind is is the return tomorrow or the return in a year's time the return in five years time but in London there are there is a landholder whose time horizon is almost infinite it could be a thousand years out so the crown estate thinks in terms of centuries has a rate of return target over centuries has a claim on space well beyond actually the building on the space which is either owned or leased by somebody else and to listen to how the crown estate thinks about urban space is completely different to a speculator thinking on the price of land today and tomorrow and the building that might reap a rent the crown estate in London around Covent Garden is also thinking about what's its intrinsic value over 100 years or 200 years how can we get people to pay not just for their current use value but actually their use value in 50 years or 70 years and indeed I'm in an organization that had to decide recently in response to the crown estate whether or not to hold the lease for 50 years or for another 100 years and we decided to hold the lease for another 100 years that says a lot about actually the footprint of human activity and how thinking about real estate is not only in the short term but it can be that enormous very long term and that's why I think Patrice's historical perspective is so revealing so revealing Covent Garden then and Covent Garden now these this is an expensive real estate was then was is now so I'll just pass it over with nine minutes to go to Richard to see if he has any last comments and then we'll take a brief comment from Patrice before we move on to Professor Derek Borzec. Of course thank you Gordon just a couple of comments on on my reading of why Patrice's work is so important as I mentioned earlier there are great predictions and punditry about real estate being no longer important an economy of innovation and knowledge and and in fact what's so interesting about this is that land or clustering or real estate have become probably more important to capitalist growth and urban development now than at any point in history and a couple of facts that I just included in my con commentary in the United States just four metropolitan areas the Bay Area New York Boston and Seattle accounted for something like 90% of all innovation job growth over the past couple of decades and across the world just six metropolitan areas the Bay Area New York London Boston Beijing and Shanghai accounted for more than all of the half of all the venture capital startups that have been created over the past decade Moreover there's a recent McKinsey report which I find really fascinating the study which just came out last week and was reported by a run-of-the-core in the financial times finds that real estate today comprises more than two-thirds of the world's entire net worth looking across 10 advanced countries the U.S. UK China Germany France Canada Sweden Australia and Mexico and in earlier study this one done about a decade ago the U.S. found that the total land value in the United States was 23 trillion now that's increased that's 160% of U.S. total economic output at the time a new study from Zillow suggests that the total cumulative value of U.S. homes is nearly 30 trillion also exceeding the total value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. so real estate and land is really important and also I think real estate is going through another that the the ownership their capitalist control of real estate is going through another transformation I think part of this we see as investors gobble up not just commercial real estate and multi-family homes but single family homes I forget the statistic but I believe it's a fifth of all home purchases over the pandemics were purchased not by individuals but by institutional investors and looking at a little further I think one of the changes we'll see if if if the 1980s and 90s gave rise to the securitization of real estate I think we're looking now at the digitalization of real estate coming pretty quickly and and so real estate as a basic asset class but one that's not only historical asset class so and it could be traded in new ways is really fascinating and just one remark on theory I cut my teeth as a kid at Rutgers and Columbia University on Marx and neo Marxism and theories of the state and theories of capitalist development and have been very influenced by Marx all through all of my career although taking a page from the great Christopher Freeman who I asked this when I was an assistant professor he said you may be influenced by Marx but if you talk about people like Schumpeter you get your papers published more easily so I've tended not to echo that so much in my formal writing but my insights have been shaped with Marx Marx and Patrice and I were talking about this and I think we want to do more to jointly understand this Marx more or less famously gave real estate short shrift and he lumped the world of capitalism I'm staying very crudely into a model where there were two great cap classes that drove the mode of production forward and in struggle capitalist and workers which was the end proletariat he didn't have much time for real estate and in the commentaries I've seen really derided it but the person who like Patrice put real estate at the center of the equation is Henry George and I've been paying a lot of attention to Henry George you know land was Adam Smith's first factor of production the classical economists like Cantillon developed the land theory of value recorder was Ricardo was very influenced by rent but it was George who put land at the center and real estate at the center and where Marx and I'll say this very briefly where Marx saw the capitalists as making off with the surplus generated by workers George and I'm not saying he's right in this but I think it's a fascinating view if you read his work very quickly and not just the book progress and poverty but the report he did before that which is trying to estimate US land values if you read that very closely what Henry George is saying is that it's real estate owners who make off with the surplus generated by both capital and labor and why I think that's interesting today is if you look at land values and real estate values in in superstars cities like New York or London or San Francisco or you look at land views values across the board it seems increasingly that much of the productive advance or innovative advance or surplus that we generate in these places simply gets plowed back into rising real estate values and and that I find to be quite fascinating how this classical factor of land or real estate which Marx derided is not that important as kind of a fetter how over time and well into the 21st century it continues to be a critical factor and indeed a much larger fetter that sort of forms a contradiction in that as more and more surplus is generated increasingly it appears that that surplus is plowed back into real estate and the home holders of land and I think that is Patrice's really remarkable contribution that she forces those of us who work in urban economics land economics spatial theory urban geography city and regional planning that consider ourselves urbanists to to really think about real estate in a in a different in a more important way so again thank you Patrice and I look forward to your comments and the comments of others throughout the day okay thank you um look um I've been confused uh the first speaker will in fact be Manuel Albers from Belgium and just in case uh Derek Wojcik and uh Manuel are confused I was confused sorry so um uh so I would like to see Manuel come on video please you should be able to see me now Gordon ah yes welcome Manuel sorry about that sorry about the problem nothing uh okay so Manuel uh in for and for all of those who are listening in you've got all of 20 minutes you could take five minutes for questions thereafter but we always are looking for five minutes of grace period at the end of your time to the next speaker which will be Derek so um just looking at the clock as it goes down we've sort of got one minute to go I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing the speakers because uh in so many ways uh well known for everybody so I will basically give you half a minute Manuel if you would like to sort of pick up the gauntlet and begin speaking uh when when you like okay yeah thank you very much Gordon I am ready I don't need to have a minute I think and can you all see my screen yes thank you okay good that's that's always good to know because sometimes you think you're sharing something and you're not only just yesterday I recorded a lecture for my students of more than an hour only to receive an email this morning that they could all see me but that they couldn't hear me um so I still make these basic mistakes so I wouldn't want to be talking to you for 20 minutes without you being able to see my screen or be able to hear me okay so Gordon thanks a lot for the introduction thanks a lot also for inviting me I'm happy to comment on Patrice's her book and I'm not going to do a long praise of the book I I'm going to give it a rather short the praise part because I want to see where we can move on next so Patrice Darrington provides us with an excellent historiography of real estate development since the 16th and 17th century in London so he takes us through the 20th century in New York City and then takes us into the 21st century discussing not just New York but also a number of cases abroad what I find quite remarking is that the book didn't exist yet do you would think someone would have written this book a long time ago I think Richard said something along the same lines you would have found someone would have written the history of real estate development so only when the book was announced I was like yes I've never read that book that is weird that that book doesn't exist so I'm very happy that the book is being written I'm very happy I was very happy to read it and I'm even happier to comment on it I also wish we could have been in New York City I used to live in New York for three and a half years and about half of that time I spent in the planning department at Columbia University so it would have been very nice to see some of those familiar places which I still hope to visit next year when I hope to be back in New York but for now let me focus on some of the contributions that we find let me see yeah so as I mentioned Patrice starts from 16th and 17th century London and what struck me is that already in that early affairs in that early history of real estate development that real estate development was already not just an economic but also political affair it was very clear that if you wanted to do real estate development you didn't just need the capital you needed the connections you needed the network you needed to be able to get the state the local state very often in a way to be okay with what you do and this also may be one reason why a lot of theories of real estate development fall short they are either emphasized in this economic part or they're emphasized in the political part but they're not so good in bringing this together so what I would like to do today is to go a little bit into bringing them together more starting to think from Patrice's work and then trying to bring in some other work to see if we can bring them in dialogue with what Patrice has been telling us and seeing how that could work productively so Patrice herself builds on both the real estate literature and the urban studies literature which I think is quite nice it sounds quite obvious to do that if you talk about real estate but it doesn't happen that often that those literatures are being confronted in the way that Patrice does there are separate chapters even discussing sort of the critique coming from urban studies to real estate developments as a discipline so the approach he follows is quite interdisciplinary and I would like to go along in that way and then presenting some sort of political economy of real estate development although some people might say maybe it's more of a sociality of real estate development because they will also be relying on the work of some sort of big names in sociality to make my argument so if we look at the book and at the end of the book in a conclusion Patrice is formulating three objections of real estate development this in a way that could say is a conclusion rather than something coming up front it's a conclusion of the history of the description of this history of four or five centuries of real estate development what we find is the first objective is the professional shelter for occupants and the community as a whole the second being the creation of financial assets for capital markets and the third being the contribution to urban topography in the profession of urban amenities I was thinking a little bit about these objectives and then I tried to reformulate them a little bit in a slightly different way and I came up with these two and both of them actually have two elements in them so you could say I have formulated them into two objectives or into four objectives the first one being the real estate development has both use and exchange values this seems really obvious but it basically translates to some of the things Patrice says in her objectives the second being maybe a little less obvious and the the real estate development may create both direct and indirect use and exchange value so let me explain the difference a little bit there if we think of the direct use and exchange value the direct value of the house the apartment where I'm sitting right now is that I can sit here that I can sleep here work here and do other things the exchange value here is that I'm actually renting this flat and so that there's an economic value is being generated through my rent payment to my landlord and that my landlord if you want she could resale the house at some point but there are also indirect use and exchange values so the indirect use value is what Patrice calls the community as a whole the contribution to the community as a whole and what she calls in one of the other objectives the provision of public amenities which is in a way the question how do non occupants benefit or are afflicted by a building how do people benefit from my building being here well my building is a pretty nice one from the outside so maybe people would benefit from this indirectly there is a bar on the ground floor of my building there's also a dentist on the ground floor of my building these are facilities that people in the neighborhood may benefit from these are also facilities in the neighborhood the people might be afflicted by my building is is larger than most of the buildings in the neighborhood it may take away sunshine from some of my neighbors the bar may cause some noise it's not a particularly noisy bar and there are much noisier bars in the neighborhood but it's also important here that this use value can also be a negative indirect use value and Patrice Falkos is mostly on the idea that real estate development could have a positive value for the community and that is great and that is sometimes the case but I think it's important also to realize that real estate development and the existing buildings can also have negative indirect use values so if we look at the economic value that we get from a juice it's already the example I mentioned my landlord benefits from me paying the rent and I usually pay it in time so that's that's nice for her she can resell the building in the future also good for her she might be able to make some money there or she might just get her investment back so in this sense real estate is rather unique real estate provides both a stable income and it provides a stable question mark it's not always that stable we can talk about it a long time but I won't do that now I'll just leave the question mark up there it provides investment potential this means also that real estate has both commodity and asset features if we look at the side from development and construction into the lifespan of the building real estate is also of course basically fixed and this is the key here to the indirect use and exchange values these values are of course derived from the land this is no surprise I assume everyone knows this in this room I'm not pretending I say anything new here so location is key we all know that location location location are the three important things for real estate is we're often reminded but this means that value and price of real estate and the land underlying it or the lands potentially being used to develop real estate is derived from the values and the prices of nearby real estate and lands so the value of real estate the value of land changes as a result of the changes in nearby plots this again seems quite obvious but this is quite important for how real estate development is being done this means also that this is how the indirect exchange value is being created the indirect exchange value here is about how it influences real estate values of nearby plots what's the effect of new housing coming up my neighborhood what's the effect of the building across the street from me being fixed up and being rented out for higher prices is this just one building with higher rents or is this going to have an effect on the rents in the neighborhood is this going to lead to possibly a gentrification process is a part of it so the real estate values are always influencing the other real estate values in the neighborhood which means that real estate development always has an indirect exchange value it's not just about the building that's being developed that has these exchange values and the economic income coming also from rent it also means that it influences not just to use but also the exchange value of the buildings around it so and this means the developers as well as investors have an interest in increasing investments in a larger area you would think that if you have two real estate developments next to each other that they're competing with each other and this may be true to some extent i'm not saying they're not competing with each other at all but actually these two real estate developments next to each other or 10 or 20 or more than that are also working towards the same goal of increasing the indirect exchange value of these buildings of course they're trying to maximize their own exchange value by making sure the building can be rented out for more money can be resold for more money but also trying to make sure that if the whole neighborhood is lifted up all these buildings benefit from it even in theory the ones that are not necessarily being developed or really developed so here i'd like to take a step back and look at the work of the sociologist max Weber one of the great sort of classical sociologists and he argued that economic exchange is not simply about competition but also not about competition between suppliers and competition between the demand side but it's also about coordination and especially coordination between suppliers so coordination max Weber argues and many markets might be more important than competition hence the title of the slides to the left so there's a power struggle between different types of actors water than just between developers and developers here have a joint interest in enlarging the markets and patrice refers here to urban policies i can also think of lobbying so he refers quite explicitly to the idea of the growth machine coming from harvey molloch at new york university and you could also think of the pro-growth coalition that john molankov at cuny city university of new york discusses and these are sort of more the critical urban studies literature people from sociology political science geography discussing these kind of issues but this is in a way if you take a step back you can think like this is why this is important that actually developers may be working to coordinate with each other because they have this joint interest in the land values going up so and then we have another possible sociological perspective here one of the more reasoned big names in sociology the french sociologist pierre bourgeois he speaks of different forms of capital economic capital social capital cultural capital and symbolic capital and bourgeois argues and we're going to simplify his theory a little bit here that these forms of capital exist side by side and that to some extent these forms of capital are exchangeable but also foundational to each other it doesn't mean that you can by definition exchange one form of capital for the other but it means that to some extent it is possible to use one form of capital to further another form of capital so economic capital in case of real estate development that would be obvious to everyone so i'm not going to discuss that the social capital was actually also quite easy but threes discusses networks between developers and so this is also clear if we extend this social capital a little bit we start thinking about something that becomes cultural capital and this has to do with the club like nature of real estate and bourgeois argues that clubs have a spatial basis and they construct relatively homogenous groups they also keep intact these relatively homogenous groups and these groups are both instruments of inclusion and exclusion so it means that within the club it can be in a evolutionary measure to have a joint language joint ideas but also joint lobbying and things like that but it's also a measure of exclusion of excluding other groups from real estate development other actors that may have an interest in real estate development but are not developers themselves to exclude them here and bourgeois argues that if this happens quite effectively if actually some of the sort of the how you say it the use of cultural capital is some of the use of cultural capital in combination with economic and social capital is almost taken for granted and if the effects are not necessarily seen as a fact of having uh having these different forms of capital then he actually speaks of symbolic capital these are the effects of any form of capital when it's not perceived as such other social theorists may speak of hegemony here but actually an idea of symbolic capital in a way is a little bit sort of a less big concept than hegemony because hegemony seems to be almost like a black and white situation where symbolic capital was always in in relationships to these other forms of capital and bourgeois argues that this form of symbolic capital the use of it where it's actually not being recognized necessarily may also result in symbolic violence this could be for instance when there's development at the expense of the community referring back to what I earlier called negative use values so then let's see if we can confront bourgeois and uh Derrington a little bit more in built up um patrice shows that land owners um realized that the use that not only the use but also the direct and indirect exchange values of the land in a way she shows how this happened in 16th and 17th century London how before it was all about use value and these land owners started to see we can do more with the land we can use it in different ways make more money on the land use it more productively um and this this is how she basically tells how the first land owners became the first developers you could say in bourgeois terms that these first developers used economic social and cultural capital to seek favorable public investments which then became the hallmark of their symbolic capital and this is how real estate development was born and in a way how it gave shape to modern and contemporary real estate development this is where I could end but then I thought there's another interesting thing to say and if time is still on my side and I think it is I can go in one other perspective here in which one of the great names of political economy also could be put in dialogue with patrice Derrington and patrice in a way and this discusses the discovery of direct and indirect exchange value again my terms but my reading through a sociological or political economy lands of her work and this reminded me of the work of Fontunen Fontunen is famous in uh a lands economics real estate economics but also in economic geography for his model of agricultural land use I will show it in a minute but what is interesting here is that Fontunen himself was a junker a junker uh sometimes it's related to English but this is basically a form in uh Prussia of the landed nobility it doesn't translate necessarily directly into a proper English term but it is one form of the landed nobility it's not the highest form these were typically large landowners and it's a little bit similar to what patrice describes in London where these first real estate developers were also large landowners and these large landowners in London as Fontunen did in Prussia discovered in a way what they could do with their land and what Fontunen did is he developed ideas about land use and how to reap rent from them how to make money on the land he had he already owned some lands and then in 1810 he bought a large estate in Mecklenburg-Sverein a part of what is now Germany and he developed what he called a model farm there in 1826 so that is 16 years later he wrote a book basically about this and theorized how you could use these large land holdings and make the best of them so the book was called the Isolier de Stade in the Museum of Landwirtschaft with National Economy the isolated states with an eye on you could say land economics and national economics so you see here the connection between the land economics and the political economy already developing and basically he asked the question how to develop agricultural land according to its highest and best use if you take out the work agricultural it just seems to be the question in a way that many developers ask themselves so here you see the model what is most famous from the model is this lower part of the model these rings they're known as Fontunen rings four concentric rings about where you would find different land use I'm not going to discuss in detail I hope many of you will know it what is actually the more interesting parts is the top part of the model which is worth on tuna spends a lot more time about and this is indicating how by having different land uses you can get more profit out of the land and in a way how it works within sort of the horizontal line you look at which of the different diagonal line is the highest ones and that is how much farmers would be paying to leave the land from from tuna so this is assuming that there's a large land owner and he and in most cases it would be he is renting out this land to farmers leasing it to farms so what we saw here that's from tuna organized the land according to the economic potential of of the land use it was not so much about how to reap crops it was about how to reap land rents it wasn't about the fertility of the land it was about which piece of land located where allows me to use the land in which way to make the most money on it interestingly enough in the book although this is often forgotten from tuna also discovers how society and contextual changes affect land rents how technological inventions affect land rents how all kinds of developments transportation and things like that also are actually a way in which you can make more money on the existing land it was designed to benefit the landowners not the farmers and in a way from tuna also theorized something that Karl Marx would later call absolute rent and of course it's quite interesting Marx writing as a socialist from tuna writing as a member of you could say the higher classes as a representative of capital but they came to very similar conclusions about what Marx called absolute rent and Fernand Braudel great French historian some people would say one of the greatest historians ever he considered both Marx and from tuna the two great German political economists and why I'm going back to this history of from tuna because what from tuna did is in a way he discovered how agricultural land could be used in a way what patrice describes about what could happen in London by these landowners on in the land but the difference here these landowners in London didn't write a book they had to wait for patrice to write the book from tuna did in a way did the practice and then wrote the book about so patrice derrington and this is where i'm going to end this is going to be my last line patrice provides us with an excellent oh sorry i'm going back to my first line excuse so in closing my talk i would like to say one more thing for agricultural land use it took from tuna a few decades to go from the practice that he developed himself to an evidence-based theory of land use for real estate development um but such a book was sorely lacking for real estate development especially urban real estate development it took patrice derrington to provide us with the roots and the advancement of real estate developments since its genesis four centuries ago thank you very much well i'm going to step in and and thank you very very much Manuel taking us broadening our understanding through of urban real estate through to that historical beginning in agricultural value is absolutely key to what we have inherited in our minds about the importance of owning property and you know the interesting notion of a diversified agricultural portfolio of course is now played out with institutions who who seek to hold diversified real estate portfolios so we've got an echo of this very very fine beginnings from von thurer thank you for bringing that up gordon richard i'll pass over to you any questions that was um great one of the things that i've noticed as i said being an investor as much as an academic about this space is how you construct portfolios of property and for what purpose do you construct portfolios in a sense that they overlap thematically and in a sense i think i'm saying my own commentary that you bring together like types of properties around the world and what you're doing is managing risk if you like geographically across the world but basically taking advantage of the benefits of one type of property that has a not quite a universal value but a sort of well understood value or what you do is you build a portfolio say within the country that is geographically diverse so i wondered if meanwhile you might sort of comment a little bit more on what you mean by these portfolios of property what types of risks that i try to deal with could you repeat the last line again you said something about risk but i couldn't hear it very well gordon sorry i'm i wondered if if you might explain in some with some examples about the portfolios you have in mind and what their building blocks are underpinning them um oh i need to think about that you mean the portfolios as in the terms of indirect exchange value or well yes but also how do you translate that to property on the ground um well i didn't talk much about portfolios so i find it hard to to see exactly what you're trying to get at but i might be missing your points sorry well what i'm looking for is a translation of the principles into the practice of real estate investment and indeed the benefits that investors want to get out of property yeah well i think it's what you see in many cases developers working together in a way to develop or redevelop an area so i think that is a clear example of where you see they have a joint interest so Hudson Yards in New York is a great example where the location within Manhattan in a way on the one hand is very good it's very central it's close to midtown on the other hand it's a very bad location um the infrastructure is is not particularly pretty there and some blocks feel very unpleasant and there's some mecca developments there's a tunnel coming in with like four or five exits so you can also say that last part means there's a lot of potential there but if i as a real estate developer would put one building there um well i might still make a profit on that building and it might work well but if i really want to make money with the land i own what about developing or whether by by selling the land to someone else it needs all the development around it right so you need a lot of developers at the same time or in the same time frame to do something like this to live up to the potential of the land and this is about these indirect exchange values and to do this it's you need coordination between the developers and you need to lobby the local government to intervene in this area to make investments in the area but also to rezone which it doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money to rezone but it still costs a lot of efforts of developers and of the governments to get this done um so i think that's that's where you you see in practice how this idea of coordination works and how through the coordination between them and between them in the local states they shape indirect exchange value yes of course coordination comes in many flavors and some of it's above board but often it is actually uh that's sort of the stuff of life of corruption and and urban development go hand in hand so that's two questions from Manuel um first of all thank you i i've learned a lot in this hour and learned a tremendous amount from your talk and i like probably everyone else on this zoom read their von tunin but i didn't read this von tunin and it your reading is so contextualized and so important so my two questions are um the first one more mundane and you can just punt on it real estate has always been a very local industry it seems to me especially with regard to Hudson Yards these players are now more global so do you think that's happening it is my more mundane question and feel free to say i i don't know or i don't care the more i think interesting question for you is you've have a very close reading of von tunin you have a very close reading of marx and i've been playing around with henry george so theoretically how do you think von tunin marx and george compare in their view are landlords a separate class i'm asking that very vaguely are they a separate entity a faction of capital that is extracting a tremendous amount of surplus through their ownership of land and manipulation of land and coordination or are they in your view more of what marx said uh just a member of the capitalist class and not particularly interesting at least in my reading or i may have that wrong so i i thought you'd be the most appropriate person to ask that question too thanks a lot richard i think the first question is relatively easy yes i would agree that we're moving partly to global players but i would say it's a partial globalization right in terms of investment prime markets are very much global markets yeah big institutional capital that's behind this Gordon knows much more about this than i do um i think in terms of development we see a combination between on the one hand local players but in places like new york some of those local players are becoming national players or international players but rarely are they active globally and so this is another interesting thing a lot of them are active in select locations and they might be working in other global cities but not necessarily everywhere um so yes a partial globalization i would say the second question i don't know henry george as much uh as well as you do um fontuna marx um i mean have very different perspectives but i am definitely here more on the harvey in reading reading of marx i mean i read my harvey better also than i read my marx to be honest and i would agree with both fontuna and harvey coming from completely different perspectives that you could say land use and land development and landlords are worth the attention um there's also there was an interesting debate in the 1980s in british housing studies uh cordin is asking me to to stop soon i'll finish two sentences and it was basically about the question um is housing just something where we find the typical capital versus labor or is there something else going out in going on in housing market that actually goes beyond that and the marxists were supposed to say no although not all of them did in the way barion said actually there's something more going on here and i think this is true um real estate markets land markets have their own way of uh producing class in ways that are sometimes parallel to but not necessarily exactly the same as what happens in labor markets agree entirely wonderful thank you thank you man well and i must say very very interesting um and what breath what breath so we're going to turn now in a minute's time to direct project from uh oxford university um and i just want to um bring him online so that we can see him and uh where is darik i'm here there you are excellent um sorry about the mix up in order that um here we are and um you've got um uh the same order uh up to 25 minutes it's best if you finish in 20 minutes five minutes for questions uh but i'm actually now just wasting your time so i'm going to give you half a minute grace off you go thank you very much gordon and thank you patrice thank you uh richard uh i'm a financial and economic geographer i'm speaking from my residential uh real estate in oxford and when i first came to england in 1998 uh i came from poland so a country emerging from over 40 years of communist regime a big part of the cultural shock i experienced here other than meeting gordon as my supervisor which was a positive shock a the negative shock was the low quality of most buildings here particularly residential poor insulation double taps thin walls exposed pipes general lack of uh solidity i don't need to to go on and so first as a geographer i described i inscribed it i explained it with weather okay mild climate a roof above your head is enough to protect you from elements uh then i came across a historical explanations the country has not been invaded for a long time the average building age is high uh bold fashion technology is still everywhere but with time also as an economic and then financial geographer i learned about financial and legal factors affecting this material fabric of uh england uh the significance of which seems to be confirmed by patrice's book land ownership particularly in england is highly concentrated land leases are relatively short and long-term objectives in building are feather curtailed by the financialization of real estate development driven by short-term profits with community and societal interests sometimes also those the interests of the people housed in the buildings themselves falling by the wayside so oxford where i live is is is no exception there are two more episodes in my experience of english real estate that this book patrice's book sheds light on so in 2006 i lived in london and every second shop on my high street turned into a real estate agency literally a television was full of programs about it managers becoming developers because why would they be so stupid to only earn 100 000 a year if you can make so much more easily in property development so i went to my agent on the street asking about the possibility of buying a lot of land to to build a house so this is something that people many people in poland would would do by land and and build a house but my agent was shocked only developers and the super rich he said can buy real estate can buy land here okay maybe maybe just maybe you can buy some rural land north of birmingham so this was again a lesson that contrasted with my polish background where buying land and building your own house is still common even in big cities and most recently as a happy house owner occupier i realized that i actually don't know the value of the land on which my house stands in relation to the value of the house itself almost everyone in poland would know such a thing but hardly anyone does here so again these oddities at least from a polish perspective are the product of historical political financial and legal processes that have been going on in this country as the book shows they have been going on for centuries now speaking about shocks when i first received patrice's book i was fairly surprised by the big format rich illustrations not just another monograph as people before me said it's it's really a work of laugh not just research just look at the ambitious table of contents everything and i really agree with and want to emphasize patrice's identification of the research gap here she says private development despite extensive criticism does not itself interrogate its processes or seeks to improve its practices in this it does not qualify as an institutionalized discipline or attracts scholarly and professional respect well just recently i was reminded of how under-researched real estate was while conducting input output analysis of the u.s economy with my associate tacky zealopoulos so imagine in 2020 for those of you who are into network analysis in 2020 real estate was had the highest total strength centrality measure of all sectors in the u.s economy so put simply to those of you not interested in network analysis this is real estate is the most important economic sector in terms of its inflows and outflows and the degree to which they penetrate the whole u.s economy and its centrality has actually grown over time not only prior to the global financial to the sub-run crisis i should say but also ever since now patrice's book follows what she describes as a or the historical term in business studies but i think it also offers elements of and potential for a spatial or geographical term the deep dive into the private property development in 17th century london is fascinating shows the role of shocks in economic development with the great fire of 1666 a changing the use of building materials and the contrast between innovative but conscientious urls of betford and southampton on one side and the speculative nicolas barbon is instructive the book is a story of property development as financial innovation as well as path dependence timing a feather innovation for example through the use of the discounted cash flow model again quoting patrice the understanding of the mutual benefit achieved through designating portions of a site to positive economic externalities for the community was not explicitly formulated in the financial calculations for urban development and as a result uh community community contribution remains a qualitative assessment not justified by economic rational and neglected when financial objectives became dominant and as she documents this process started happening already in the 17th century at least in the 17th century regarding the geography in the book i really love as a as a geographer i love the patrice's phrase distance of financial interests uh this reminds us of the quintessentially geographical problem involved growing distance between investors and often developers as well on one side and communities in which property is located on the other side and this distance is enabled if not created by financial innovation regulation technology and globalization far away investors and developers tend to tend to neglect and underestimate both positive and negative local externalities of real estate and as a result prefer reductive financially driven models of evaluating real estate at the expense of more inclusive metrics this problem is aggravated when equity particularly public equity is used as a side effect of the liquidity that equity offers and to compound the issues in addition to investors and developers users can be non-local too think of empty houses both for investment and money laundering uh all money laundering or both in miami sydney london toronto oxford anywhere historical case studies in the book illustrate the problems of distance very well uh the developers of cavern garden and bloomsbury which arguably achieved very positive societal outcomes lived within their new built precincts the developers of less socially successful san james's and red lion squares in london departed entirely upon a completion i don't think this is a coincidence and the role of proximity is also made palpable in the book by the fact that the birth of modern property development is located right between westminster with its court and the city with its merchants and financiers close connections in both places were crucial for the early developers discussed in the book and such connections are still crucial for developers today now history and geography in the book where they meet lies a potential challenge to the book so can we be sure how can we be sure to identify 17th century london as the cradle of modern property development business or does it smug of euro and western centrism uh it's the kind of bias i experienced in san marco library this summer i was lucky to go to florans a san marco library in florans was funded by cosimo di medici in the 15th century medici the founder of the banking dynasty and the library is wooing its visitors uh with the writing on the wall that it's one of the oldest public libraries in the world full stop but then when you actually read the research you find that damascus had a public library 750 years earlier and and and and and later the dozens of cities in the middle east and elsewhere now london's tripling of its population mainly through migration during the course of the 17th century from 200 000 to 600 000 nearly 600 000 by 1700 indeed created huge demand for shelter and public space but there were many cities that reached larger even much larger populations of one million or more before london i counted 10 such cities alexandra rohm konstantino paul bagdad cairo as well as five cities including beijing in china all of them hosted major financial innovations so is it not possible indeed likely that private sector was involved in property development to house the booming populations and shape public spaces in these cities before london and if so is it possible that these innovations have influenced developments in 17th century london as they probably i think circulated in the silt road network trade network connecting london with the middle east and china via cities of renaissance italy like like florans and and and venice so there are other potentially missing links in the in the story by the 17th century amsterdam took over the button of the leading financial center in europe from antwerp which in turn superseded bruce and venice that were dominant in which were dominant in the 16th century florans venice antwerp are mentioned in the book amsterdam i don't think it is so my question is wasn't the development of london real estate influenced by the role of amsterdam as the beehive of financial innovation with its own stupendous property development during the 17th century and also by the anglots personal union that followed the glorious revolution in 1688 the book says that london with rising agglomeration of migrants flourishing intellectual activities variety of skills capabilities and focus on financial transactions was ideal for the emergence of the early real estate developers i agree but but so was amsterdam maybe before london another missing link that could be explored a building on this wonderful work is the role of offshore finance corruption and illicit finance the dark side of of things the book touches on it when it when it mentions the the plague of unoccupied luxury condos but when i think about the globalization of real estate that richard mentioned and and and manuel in the q&a 10 minutes ago it takes me all the way to a boardwalk to the boardwalk in miami beach overshadowed by a high rise residential blocks which get totally dark in the evening because nobody lives there when you read about the majority of multimillion dollar condos in miami beach are purchased with cash often i bet produced out of a suitcase a with a few or no questions asked by miami realtors and lawyers so there's much more work to be done on the abuse of tax laws the use and abuse of trusts secrecy in private property development or this note is interesting to read in the book about the 17th century bet forts and southamptons invested in the bermuda company back then it was obviously about exploration trade and slavery thrown in for good measure now it's about another form of colonialism using bermuda trusts other legal vehicles to establish and prolong modern english and other dynasties so questions can be asked both about the origins and the impacts of private property development in 17th century london that the book focuses on the book states that the model of private urban development that started in london spread across the anglo-american world and with only the slightest legal and economic modifications has been embraced by formerly known capitalist economies and other governmental systems but perhaps what i said about my my polish perspective on on these things the statement is exaggerated what for example about the lack of trust as a legal construct in in civil law countries what about traditions cultures institutions of property development which had suddenly been established in many countries for centuries and do not change so easily and there are vested interests involved in the reproduction now one of the paradoxes of real estate globalization highlighted by this book so well is that this globalization has happened without much standardization of property development as a sector or a profession so the book describes that the relative lack of professional association or regulation of practitioners for the development activity continues today and this may be related i think to the often observed loads often observed low standards and and and and also corruption uh while we read about professionalization of architects so think of the inigo jones in 17th century london property developers escape simple categorizations they are entrepreneurs they are professionals financiers and more at the same time you may want to think or not to think about donald trump i i i i lead that to you interestingly in the context of real estate as part of the financial and professional services complex a property property development is probably one of the areas where the role of big four companies has been minimal big four advisors on absolutely anything and everything even underwriters of financial deals but i think that real estate seems to be the market they have difficulty getting into and this maybe says something interesting about the sector so the book it stimulated me hugely to reflect on topics which are obviously beyond the scope of the book itself uh what about sustainable real estate development there are mentions of esg but what about green bones impact investing in relation to to real estate in addition to community impacts of real estate we have to consider global externalities to add to what manuel was talking about for example for climate you know a ton of co2 emitted from a building contributes to the global emissions with global impacts what about diversity uh i guess real estate development is male dominated with major consequences on its on its modus operandi uh many of the characters in the book itself are oxbridge educated white english males and what about technology including prop tech smart cities and internal things internal things in particular makes buildings and real estate tools of surveillance so that multiplies the dilemmas and trade-offs involved in property development as if as if it it wasn't convoluted and complex enough already and and what about covet 19 impacts so given the likely lower demand for office space higher demand for residential building and change in the nature of what is solved after so to move towards finishing here i'm absolutely fascinated by patrice's motivation as she explained and interest for this book and her interest in real estate teaching and the potential impact this book can have on teaching programs i believe as a financial geographer uh that we also need to teach geographers more on real estate proper uh i'm sure manuel does personally i'll never walk in coven garden or bloomsbury again without thinking about property development and i will thank patrice for that i hope to take my students on a field trip there interestingly the leading property development companies in the uk are still headquartered exactly between the city and west minster so you know three and fifty hundred years later uh to the events uh described in the book uh brookfield prologies well tower sagro land securities the list goes on uh all there and the book is a reminder that financial geography is not only about spatializing finance but about financializing space about financial production of space so i really also love a patrice's use of a quote from david harvey that money may be as the moralists have it the root of all evil yet it appears also as the unique means of doing good i haven't seen many people quoting that from david harvey uh so in this parting note i just want to say maybe the book is also or should also be a call for uh or their moral philosophy of real estate real estate is long-term in nature changing communities and societies in in the process as such it requires long-term commitments in other words used often in economics in the world where people use finance to turn these long-term commitments into short-term liquid money like claims to make it like money basically uh when people use law to rob a stump such financial transformations in the form of contracts and when people use accounting uh to obsess with short-term mark to market valuation and the government quietly approves or even promotes all of these processes the long-term commitment may go missing or goes missing and the result may be a short-term quest for quantity and superficial appearance so my question is can we have finance law accounting and government working towards more long-term objectives of real estate i put it to everyone here thank you great thank you um i wondered if patrice um you might have some comments in response oh i would just i'm so thankful to darious uh for expanding just my my sort of meager exploration of this to all of those key things that we are challenged with today uh and um i hope that there's you know thank you i am already making ideas for projects to continue that myself so thank you very very much and that's the whole point of opening up this uh you know doing the open commander of what real estate development is about to say where can we go from here thank you could i ask a question darick why do you think uh you make a point about real estate development in uh western cities to be in a sense under developed in terms of the institutions or organizations that would have otherwise cornered the market say for example in power generation or some or even retail for that matter why do why do you think the property market or indeed the building market is so fractured and fragmented why so uh in in general or in relation to uh other geographies the other western europe well why don't you start with with respect to western europe and indeed you know you're sort of making the contrast between whole industries in the uk being incredibly sort of there are dominant firms why aren't there dominant firms in property in real estate markets in the uk so so first what i wanted to say is that where some of my comments come from so i've been starting financial centers for a long time not a particularly focusing on real estate development and something i confess and after reading this book i want to correct and and i'm i'm myself an example how you can it's kind of easily just kind of make assumptions about about the origins of a lot of these financial innovations and developments in in western europe sometimes going back to italy sometimes going back to classical civilizations but but then for all kinds of reasons i've been in recent years i've been pushed to to read more on on china from a similar perspective on india on uh on mesopotamia and so on and so forth uh and the role of the middle east actually in the birth of capitalism itself yeah and how a lot of ideas uh that influenced renaissance italy for example actually came from the fact that also venice was the terminus of the of the silgrove network so uh so i would just say that uh i i cannot imagine these big cities in other civilizations developing so successfully for for centuries and sometimes millennia without some good solutions to the questions that we're asking now in the context of 17th century london or even 21st century western europe or or america i i sense there's a there's a huge potential there to learn and geographers should leave the charge on it okay so richard you're you're currently occupying an apartment in a building that is otherwise probably fairly empty according to darik um what is it about miami you know you're a recent joiner of miami is is it actually this coexistence of the occupied and the unoccupied in in these buildings that sort of makes the economy work well um you know partly i live in toronto where it gets extraordinarily cold in the winter yes yeah we we wanted a little bit of a getaway where things were a little bit warmer and you could have a reprieve um you know i want to ask there is i think he's very spot on on this um i want to make just one general comment and ask him a question first of all i think this globalization of real estate is happening in real time and i think you pointed out innovation property tech but the the the aggregation happening with even the big four the goldman's axis that there is a a move now for for the black stones the black rocks the brookfields to acquire lots of smaller players and it it's it's incredible right black was it black stone bought aig's affordable housing portfolio for nine billion dollars a couple of months ago this is happening in real time and i think you're going to see an industry that is more rationalized and where these players want to get more involved but and you can comment on that but i have a more specific question along the lines of gordon's question i think real estate is really a two hats a white hat black hat problem more so than most other industries i think there are organizations you mentioned brookfield i think there are large organizations and major many of the major pension funds sovereign wealth funds that gordon speak about that really want positive impact the sg sustainability affordable housing but i think there's a horrific dark side and this is what gordon was getting at in real estate where it is a massive vehicle for money laundering uh and for all of those you have the donald trump's uh and and i would just like you to reflect on this issue of not just the bark buildings but but the real estate's role in laundering money um and i think we need that's an area of capitalism that has been very not studied empirically or theoretically just like you to reflect in a minute on that thank you richard and you have one minute one minute is great it's all you need i think it does seem to me like i've been studying the financial business professional services complex for a long time and after reading this book i am i'm kind of the book confirms my suspicion that real estate is the most opaque of all of these industries i absolutely agree and the globalization also uh it hugely happens now through the real estate investment trust owned by institutional investors uh and owning shopping malls and and much else globally uh i i think it's yeah it's happening at the at the staggering pace that that has to be that has to be studied okay thank you very much um thank you darik i'm now looking for sam and i wondered if sam no no janelle janelle wonderful i'll go ahead and jump right in patrice thank you so much it was such a privilege to read the book and to contribute to the symposium i mean i think as the other commentators have said it really is a remarkable uh body of work and for me i read although the focus is largely on six sixteenth and seventeenth century london i was really fascinated by the the earlier origins or patrice begins with the kind of classical orientation of of land privatization and property and then the moral imperative that's directed through those those classical learnings so that's i i was very deeply impressed by the scope of covering two thousand years of history in some sense and then the meticulous detail of the developers of which patrice wrote so i my commentary is going to focus on these origins and then also thinking about pathways of development for the future um so let me let me see how do i move my screen uh here we go uh so patrice really organized the book around three questions i think manuel already noted this in in in the conclusion and for me this was a way to really read and organize and understand the text and so i also want my commentary to reflect this structure so how and why did such a model of production emerge when it did and become the dominant mode of urban growth why does it take the form it does and what exactly is that form and why is this form of economic production so poorly regarded and charged with responsibilities for so many urban ills where might improvements be made so for the first question of how this is where patrice delves into the philosophy of a play-doh and Aristotle and i think this is kind of fascinating because it's actually if you go deeper than the neoclassical political economist this is really where it begins at least for the western world which is this wonderful quote the better system is that under which property is privately owned but is put to common use a kind of public imperative in the writings of Aristotle that privatization is the way to maximize the value of land but it should always have this lean or this direction of facilitating common use and to that i also i think manuel already commented on this and i went back to the original thinking on use and exchange value in Aristotle's writing on the politics that he identified two uses and didn't exactly identify these as use in exchange but said one is the proper and the other is the improper or secondary use of anything and then went on to say that exchange is an in fact unnatural a mode by which men gain in the most hated sort of way and with the greatest reason usury which is gain for money for money's sake you know for money was not intended to be used in exchange but instead to be put to to sort of what he called the management of health households and so i think in this idea of the use value in exchange there's two really important principles to pick up for understanding land and the privatization of land one is that there was originally this moral imperative of public good and throughout the book patrice explores that tension how do you generate a range of different utilities for the use of real estate but with that always the public amenity and i think in that moral imperative Aristotle recognizes that privatization tends towards excess and exclusively private benefit so i'll come back to this idea in a moment the second is that in privatization the land is only realized in its productive use and to this i think is where Aristotle brings the idea of there's the proper and the improperly or secondary use of it this idea that to really fully make benefit of the land you have to understand and capitalize on its productive use and so again i'll come back to that principle but i think it's really important to patrice's question of why maximizing the use of land here she she drew from the enlightenment philosophers thomas hobs and john lock and again leaned on what is the the moral imperative land is high demand civic responsibilities there's a natural law embodied in the constitution of a civil power which provides for the governance of property rather than it's being administered through religious edict so there is a public responsibility and then with the lock this really interesting principle that first property not be wasted but rather through human labor it be used to create value and secondly that the quantum of property in an individual's possession should be limited so there would be enough as good equality remaining for others so in effect if an individual owned land enclosed or fenced it but did not cultivate it or make it productive lock argued such land was still to be looked on as waste and might be the possession of any other i think this is absolutely a fascinating principle because you can see the the positive moral intent in it that you you allow private possession of land but always with the eye towards making it productive to public benefit and problematic because it is also the logic if we look across the colonial world through which indigenous and other native inhabitants were dispossessed of their land if they weren't making so-called productive use of it or putting the land to its productive use there was this inherent argument that it could be better used by the white civilization moving into occupy the land the other piece of it that i think is also really fascinating to consider is that the conceptual age conceptualization of land value is in its nature extractive it sees only the value or the benefit of exchange value of the private benefit of the land realized through its productive use and fails to recognize the social costs or the indirect costs that Manuel Albers addressed so in my own work i sort of say well wait a second if we look at use and exchange value we're really only identifying a spatial distinction to this we also have to add the temporal distinction and to the questions of why or what is so unique or special about the developer i think it's absolutely this it's the capacity to extract tremendous future potential value of land and represent it in the present so if we add not just a use in exchange of spatial distinction but a temporal distinction and think about value already realized versus value that is potential we have not just two types of value but at least four so use exchanged derived in external and a lot of my work on carbon markets has been about theorizing externalities in external value but i think that for the relationships with land this distinction is also really important so if value is considered across not only its spatial but also temporal domains are there are these four types of value but also there's a recognition that we consider most forms of value as commensurate exchange but not all forms of value are equally capable of producing social benefit the ghost departments in miami are terrific example of this there is a sort of speculative advantage of storing wealth in these places but then there's also a distinct difference from the capacity to provide housing for residents in the city that need it and then to this i would add a third point which is the long-term or sustainable value generation must be systematic and consider not just socioeconomic but also socio-environmental systems in the assumption that land is a commodity there is this idea that the land is not a living thing development proceeds over or on top of or through what is considered to be a static environment and for a range of reasons that is incredibly problematic i thought manual albers diagram from fontuna and showing the value of different utility of land was really instructive because you saw at the end of it the thing of least value was the old growth forest and there's an incredible kind of arrogance or human human perspective that something that takes 500 or more years an ecosystem of 500 or more years of growth is worth the less than the agricultural product of a season and so in that i think you see the there's a sort of a missed opportunity to understand and fully realize the capacity of a range of values for civilization so so moving on from this i think the the third question that patrice raised about you know the what the problem why is is development so problematic she identifies from um coven garden and the development of a range of of the 16th and 17th english developers a very concrete practical model that is established a four step model of land development first obtain control of the land to calculate value based on possible uses three determine its highest and best economic use and for achieve any necessary legal um changes of use to maximize its potential and then goes on to say that this model with little alteration adapts into the present day and then perpetuates not not only across the anglo-sexan world but also with slight modification to other geographies around the world and i agree with with derrick's critique that you know there is some there there obviously there is other influence from other older models and practices of land development but i think where this is really powerful and potent is in its capacity to generate the logic of settler colonialism it is something we absolutely see in the north american context it is the logic that underwrites the history of settler colonialism and land dispossession of millions of indigenous indigenous people not only in the west but in other colonial states around the world with it there's also the challenge of of what patrice identifies as the faustian bargain the developer can never stop developing and so absent ecosystem considerations relentless development leads to a situation whereby virtually every measure the earth's biosphere is in decline i see climate change is symptomatic of that condition not as an underlying cause and finally this third issue the idea that land is a commodity this sort of unquestion assumption it is a thing to be possessed here i think it's interesting to consider the alternate logics and for most indigenous cultures land is not a thing it is relational it's not an object of control but rather an integral entity that sits in relation to the community that inhabits it and with this there's a principle of connectivity the idea everything in the universe is connected the spirit world is represented in this diagram is connected to the moral world the sea is connected to the land the sky is connected to the ground connectivity expresses the ontological foundations of indigenous society the connections that people have to their communities their traditional territories and the ecosystems on the land and so in this idea that's not an argument that we can we can undo 300 years of history and go back to where we began but it is this idea that we need to return to the principle that land exists in reciprocity it is a living system it provides the resources a community needs but only if they carefully steward and renew the land all right and so i think you know it's difficult again to conceptualize this in the context of modern capitalism of cities that are already established where it becomes more promising is when confronting climate change in the reality that 80 percent of human population lives on the coast and that in the next century these cities these civilized these settlements will have to be radically transformed these are a few images from the recent storm hurricane ida that hit new york and showcased the absolute vulnerability of the infrastructure because again it was built with this assumption it exists over a static environment the land on which it resides the natural environment is a thing that sits in opposition rather than in relation i wanted to briefly in the commentary i talked through the boston seaport district case because i think this is emblematic of so many of the principles that patrice describes in her book you see here a sign it's just for the last 20 years and a place of incredible productivity and development but in envisioning what the developer always envisions for the city you have these beautiful green spaces you see kind of the ideal of the public domain that's never actually fully realized in the city so the boston seaport this is an aerial view of the city it's a 1000 acre low lying actually built on backfield land post industrial area just east of downtown boston it's a site that's been built on landfill historically it was used for fishing piers and then for a range of industrial activities and by the 1990s was quite dilapidated so as the city cleaned up the harbor built infrastructure to connect this the transit and roadways to connect this region developers began to realize there could be potential use so a tremendous amount billions of dollars from the 1990s of both private and public investment has been poured into the seaport district originally this was planned as a mixed-use neighborhood for families with parks and other public amenities in 2010 it was re-christianed is the innovation district because again here is the highest extractive value of the property so the intrinsic benefits it was meant to create construction jobs new tax revenue it was also meant to have a housing linkage job training linkage on-site affordable housing and to connect to the regions on surrounding it and then there were a range of negotiated public benefits in in the plan including a tremendous amount of public open space of civic and cultural buildings public access and recreation of a diverse neighborhood and then water activation and transportation and over time you see how this beautiful vision of what the seaport could be evolves into something that's quickly adapted and acquired by elite tech and life sciences businesses luxury offices apartments and restaurants it now has the highest medium household income on all of boston it's predominantly white like 89 percent white exacerbating long-standing issues in the city of segregation so here you see one of the two-bedroom luxury flats that's that's recently sold for nearly two million dollars um and then i think the other really important consideration is what does this mean for the future the seaport is being built on land that under climate projections will be underwater by end of century and developers have been aware of this they're building despite the fact because they assume two things one they will acquire the return on their investment long before this problem becomes a reality so it's not really their problem and in any case it is a challenge that will be addressed in some way by government intervention so there's a range of different ideas or plans about what all of what sea level rise means for the harbor here's here's a vision of this massive harbor wall system including an outer wall and a high island harbor island wall and then an inner city wall that could be built and a recent study by the kirschen lab and umass boston is demonstrating that across all parameters environmental economic cultural this this piece of infrastructure is unviable so in effect there isn't really a plan to confront sea level rise and to deal with this challenge so in some i you know looking at what derrington wrote patrice derrington what wrote and and thinking about the takeaways for me i think there's a remarkable history and a remarkable set of principles to study and understand but in thinking about the origins of development there's also this realization that the development of past centuries will not adequately confront the challenges of the next century so we need more considered plans not just for the city of boston but for other cities that will face the same challenges for thinking about the relationship between the built environment and its natural ecosystems for ways of dress addressing systemic inequities and vulnerabilities and then limiting development high-risk areas so that we accept plan sea level rise rather than trying to build infrastructure that is unlikely to be viable in the long term all right so i'll leave it at that and and open it up to questions thank you so much it was really a pleasure pleasure to read this work i'm janelle thank you very much for your comments insightful as usual and i i might encourage those who get a chance to read janelle's commentary about the case study about boston was very i thought very revealing we've got um dare i say uh 10 minutes uh till um we have a break as i as i understand it am i right team yes patrice is not excellent i wondered if um other speakers might have comments or thoughts in reaction to janelle before i pass it over to patrice silence is gone patrice over to you right well i'll kick off then i'm sure hopefully even some folks if you have questions just please post them on the q&a we would love to you know not have you take advantage of this opportunity to us something directly of um of janelle's wonderful work um but uh very i very much appreciate your uh your ability to utilize uh the what i've revealed in terms of motivations of of land use and exchange and and so on uh what we have done as you say is is arrogantly take that as being a right to any land that we land on or that we arrive on um this is going back to the indigenous uh aspect and in fact you know i was raised by a mother who was a historian of Aboriginal art and she always said to us you know they do not own their land they do not believe that anyone should own their land they themselves the Aboriginal people who are indigenous you know indigenous to Australia and in fact um uh you often nomadic uh they just see themselves as responsible for the stewardship in return for the livelihood that it provides no one no one ever would dare to have a right to own it so very interesting um and you know of course we've only you know ignored that uh at you know a great tragedy uh but thank you for for bringing that up i know she will be very touched to hear your affirmation of that richard florida yeah thank you janelle that was just unbelievable and again for me just incredibly instructive and i learned a ton i have a really basic almost dumb question for you which which i think you would be able to answer better than just about anyone else i've heard speak um a couple of times we've touched upon the growth of real estate interest both from the development community but also from the investor community in things we would lump is esg impact investment or sustainable development goals and i myself have been asked by real estate developers to comment on that help them formulate plans i see that mark carney uh the former governor the bank of england is now a vice president at brookfield by the way a toronto-based company that operates in all these major markets um he's joined him as a vice president i think either or vice chairman in charge of impact or sustainability i wonder what you make of all of this it is this for real is is this partly for real and partly you know people trying to bolster their image so-called greenwashing if it's not for real can it be a trend for the good in other words is it something that governments or other regulatory bodies whether national or or local or global can enforce or investors is is is there something is there a there there or not much at all yeah i mean i i think it's a fantastic question richard and i think maybe it's all of those things is it you know what what is the motivation i i do think i for for work that i did several years ago documenting um systems of mitigation around the world and how markets uh emissions markets are established i interviewed or financiers and developers and regulators and you know often middle-aged white male professional um service operators in different capacities and it was fascinating because it was almost as though they had had this sort of you know the religious or spiritual journey that had brought them into the esg sector into this idea of of green finance where they'd had a very productive career and traditional finance and then realized they'd had children or grandchildren and wanted you know realize they wanted to leave something else for the future and so i think that that motivation or this realization that there is a tremendous problem and a need to generate both social and environmental um wealth or benefit is real in terms of the mechanisms again like this is where and i apologize i probably didn't let's felt rushed for time so fully explain this but i think one of the challenges is this assumption that everything is commensurate in exchange and particularly the idea of what i call derivative value derived value this idea that you can extract um potential value options swaps derivatives so much of finance and make it present make it realized in present terms and so what i'm finding with carbon markets and with other forms of externalities um or external finance it's this idea that again the path towards achieving green objectives is to creating a price system creating exchange value for those environmental parameters and i think that that that thoroughly misunderstands the nature of use and exchange value and as of external value is something sustained through use not through exchange so it's less about i think a sort of malicious intent or malicious malicious motivation and just a failure of of of modern economists or or even historical you know orthodox um or classical economists to properly theorize the nature of value and to really consider the dynamics of spatial and temporal connotation can i just catch up on that a little bit um i've been very interested in this question about why esg has got out ahead of public regulators in the us through the previous administration for example they wanted to outlaw esg they wanted to stop pension funds using esg and there was a somewhat of a constituency in the finance industry mall street to do that but it wasn't very loud and in fact actually when you look at who's peddling the esg it's often finance companies looking for an edge in a market which they think is evolving and growing and we know everyone wants to be in a growth market a declining market it's not great likewise carbon and likewise power stations systems of energy generation that rely on fossil fuel you know i would have thought cop26 was the death now for fossil fuel energy generation and it's not that anything was decided but it was the direction of travel and the direction of travel now is of course we'd better get out before we get caught if you like with our hands in the till if you like on carbon so there's a sort of a momentum that is i think it's taken the politicians by surprise i i'm shocked actually in the uk that boros johnson is interested in the environment you know there's no evidence that he is but but it's that sort of sense that the politicians are on the back foot finance industry is on the front foot but they are doing it because they don't want to be caught short that is holding at the same time they want a market edge looking forward are they genuinely esg you know heart on heart only when they put their head on the pillow and think i made a lot of money today that's a bit cynical yeah it absolutely is business interest and i this is where the short termism is so critical because if if 20 years ago you could have known google is the great you know company or tesla is the you know you could have this foresight to know what's the next innovation you would you would absolutely invest there if you could see that in the future we know renewable and we know there's going to be an energy transformation you know we absolutely if we think into the 21st century we're not going to be producing on coal and petroleum and yet there is this this latent inability to capture that advantage because there's the incapacity to think long term and to realize those gains across the long term that the short term present always overrides those considerations and so i think you know the business community is starting to move on mitigation they are realizing the advantages of of energy transformation for mitigation but they also don't want to be caught holding an asset that's going to bleed on them so there's that sort of sense of cheer you know if i don't move now when i'm am i going to move and do i want to be late or do i want to be early where's the payoff if you like right and and to extract as much value out of the conventional energy economy is they can't move forward so yeah what i think what everybody is missing is the rate of adaptation even at the COP this this sort of you know there's an undertone or an undercurrent among developing countries among the youth or non-conventional non-state actors but i like i'm doing work with tribes in Louisiana even over the last three years i and i've studied as you know gordon for 20 years from an academic standpoint climate change absolutely astounded visiting Louisiana and seeing what is happening to these communities on the ground we are in the present losing that coastline it's absolutely devastated by each subsequent year of storms ida destroyed thousands of communities and we're not seeing that because it wasn't you know one big flashy city it is a reality that we're going to be confronting around the world everyone is confronting and i think you know man well alluded to this in his talk private that the value of real estate doesn't exist in a bubble it is subject not only on its neighbors and its external conditions but it's on it's based on its socio political cultural stability climate change is going to undermine that for everyone and so while we have this opportunity to be thinking about adaptation and development we absolutely need to be doing that now before we have mass migration of millions of people cities around the world destroyed and i know that sounds alarmist but i think it's just being realistic about what is coming okay now thank you very much it's been fantastic but let me hold on sorry good we do have um we do have one question do we think we could just have uh harpere gill asks janelle tax revenues were labeled as a are you labeled them as a intrinsic um it did you know how did the question is uh they're curious harpere just curious about how that choice was made obviously between um uh you know intrinsic or extrinsic yeah and i'm i'm apologies i don't i'm not sure if internal or external maybe was the question is not seeing tax revenues as external so apologies i'm not sure i fully i'm catching the reference so for maybe for the sake of time i'll give that question some consideration and and can add something to the chat so thank you very much okay patrice um uh it is 3 30 in the afternoon my time it is and it's in 30 in the morning your time yes we have a break now until 11 a.m your time mm-hmm for a clock my time i keep saying these things just to remind me um so shall we get together again five minutes before start that that would be excellent if folks don't mind uh we would uh we will then uh have a fabulous sound chandron uh who is uh the uh dean of the school of sorry the new york university shack institute of real estate um and also a very renowned speaker globally about the pandemic and and its aspects or its impact on real estate and so on so we shall look forward to seeing sam then and seeing you all back thank you and i would like to introduce um my very well known colleague uh the uh larry and clara silvestine professor of real estate and the academic dean the new york university uh shack realist institute of real estate um sam welcome thank you so much i'm delighted to be here very flattered uh by the invitation to join you and it was such a thrill for me uh to read the book uh the thing i'd start by saying um is that i because i imagine this is something on the minds of a lot of people here um who who are both presenting and tuning you know for me patrice it's been a very long time um since i've encountered a book particularly one as substantial as this uh that i would even consider um you know assigning to my students to read uh but this is one of those uh lucky times where you know every page i turned i couldn't help but think to myself how well that particular chapter or that particular passage or graphic would fit into something i'm doing next semester um and i very self-servingly uh i am hopeful that either you or a group of us perhaps uh will develop some teaching materials that can go along with the book uh to facilitate our being able to leverage it uh with our students i think larry uh said at the outset uh this morning that it sort of has that rare combination of being so uh evidently readable uh but also so scholarly and really filling an incredible gap that has persisted for so long um in our historical uh understanding um and it really is one of those things where absent you know this book certainly i learned so much um and by the way i've been taking notes all morning the um but um you know a lot of this i think absent the book would would be sort of you know lost to you know the next generation of real estate and urban students so very grateful for uh again i think what folks have described as a labor of love and in creating this um and it wasn't lost on me that you've got sort of mark holidays new tower uh one vandy uh right there on the cover the other thing that i'd like to comment on briefly because uh you know the the conversations that we've already had this morning have been um so interesting to tune into that just before the break uh you know gordon and janelle and richard uh where we're chatting a little bit about esg um and for folks who maybe are in other parts of the world and not as familiar with you know the real estate landscape and sort of uh you know collection of players here in new york between patrice's program and mine uh we are board members and benefactors probably own almost all of the class a properties in town so uh we have a we have sort of this handle on the um we're sort of on the thought process and the thinking of a lot of people uh that trivia fall in sort of the institutional segment of the market um certainly there are uh there's an incredible need for and a lot of attention to um you know segments of the market that are not as institutional outside of the reed space outside of securitization of debt um the uh sort of in areas related to workforce and affordable housing which sort of only more recently i think has sort of taken on more institutional flavor um but by virtue of many of these conversations you know i think one of the things that really comes to mind for me um is that when sort of reflection on sort of what folks were describing just before the break you know your real estate being a little bit ahead certainly in the united states of sort of where we see policy um and i would you know looking at the examples of other countries um i would speculate that uh and i'm not a political scientist by any stretch but i would speculate part of that has to do with uh the uh through the current state of the sort of the political dialogue uh in the united states um and are being in a place now where whether you agree with the policy priorities or not um issues related to climate change the environment uh sort of you know equity in cities you know are clearly higher priorities and they might have been you know two or three years ago and again not um to review uh not casting aspersions on folks who might sort of think that you know the current environment is worse or better than than where we were but certainly we've been in a place where building a national consensus around issues related to esg um has been very very difficult and there's been a sort of a geographic element to it uh where in some parts of the country um you know there has been a sort of a different sensibility around this now richard describing toronto was very very cold i would remind him that he is quite close to the us border and that there's an entire country north of him that's even colder uh but being a canadian myself um i will i will pitch in for a warmer jacket for him uh because toronto is quite livable but the um i think when we're looking at the issues that janelle and gordon were describing i i do agree that you know while on an individual basis um it may be the case that uh there are folks within the real estate industry that patrice and i and others know that may have you know very strong feelings about the importance of prioritizing issues related to esg um when we look at sort of the way that business decisions and investment decisions are being made um and i think janelle described it as sort of you know a business imperative and a business decision for how people are pursuing things um it it reminds me of you know lead certification you know perhaps 10 years ago where it wasn't necessarily the case that the investors whether they be domestic or non-us bringing capital to the united states uh were uh you know prioritizing um to review the the importance of green building at that point in time but certainly we're thinking given their longer investment time horizons around the liquidity of those assets um and the you know whether or not um there would be a richer uh deeper more liquid market for assets that were lead certified simply because of the signaling mechanism you're completely independent of the um uh you know the you know the the energy efficiencies that that might represent um so i think there is an element of this that is sort of your market responsive you know what do folks uh you know who are developing think that or feel that sort of tenants want what do their investors want um certainly folks you know for whom uh you know some of their capital is coming from pension funds uh or from outside the united states are having to be mindful of those issues as well you know government contracts uh or government tenancies going to play a role over here but i think a lot of it is uh market responsiveness um factoring in the longer time horizon and there are people having to think ahead if i own this asset for 10 15 20 years uh you know what is my exit uh you know what is the attractiveness of the asset on an operating basis to to tenants maybe not today but but down the road um you know that being said um you know i think we also see that um you know there are a range of interpretations around sort of you know what constitutes the sg and just how far you know folks are willing to go and so um you know that continues to present an issue for us one of the things that you know you know places like Hudson Yards one Vanderbilt Scott Reckler's new building at Grand Central you know come to mind world trade center properties downtown certainly we do see um you know sort of some unevenness in the burden of um you know of meeting those goals where relatively newer properties are going to be in a privileged position in meetings or view esg goals just you know by design um you know and whether it be sort of you know uh energy efficiency efficiency you know uh spaces that are conducive to the health and well-being of uh people that are you know working uh you know in those spaces uh the ability to provide green spaces and terraces you know in a lot of these buildings who haven't visited one Vanderbilt please you know folks when you're in new york you don't want to miss the opportunity it's an extraordinary asset but you know it does raise the question of the most visible participants in the market you know are going to be in a very different situation face a very different set of constraints and meeting those goals as compared to you know the investor that um you know is owns or is you know left holding you know the b or c asset the office building that was built sort of in the pre-war uh environment and I think you know we're far enough along now that I have to clarify for my students when I say pre-war I mean the second uh world war the um the um uh so all of this becomes you know really important for us I'm really interested in hearing uh what what uh sort of what other folks today have to say about it I'm gonna share a brief deck I didn't want to overlap with you know some of the commentary from uh earlier uh this morning and so I'm focusing my comments on a slightly different aspect of uh the discussion in the book and it dovetails with you know an area of great interest for me um in the realm of public health um and you know this was really instructive for me as I was reading through uh the the text and I've included a couple of I've sort of pulled out a couple of examples here uh from uh you know Patrice's writing it was well known that the use of coal for domestic purposes brought small conditions for many months of the year and encouraged the London's wealthier inhabitants to move westwards um there are a range of a number of different sort of references to that interaction between health and well-being um and perhaps you know sort of you know in the early 17th century not cast in the frame of or through the lens of overall public health as much as you know individual households optimize optimization of their behaviors um but the interaction between the built environment and outcomes for both individuals and for um you know and for communities sort of has been a feature of the real estate markets going right back in some cases through I pulled some quotes uh from from the preface of the text uh you know that go back to to Roman times um and I think that we are at a point in the market today and in part it has been motivated by uh the more robust conversation around ESG part of it relates to sort of you know our uh response to the pandemic and our thinking about how we might need to do things differently the clear observation of disparities and outcomes you know for households in some cases that are at a minimum correlated with where they live and their living conditions how they work um the but also differences emerging you know across sort of systemically important cities around the world depending upon you know how they're built um to reveal how people access the transportation network um it's sort of and it is underappreciated that there is a deep connection between public health um and the built environment um and again it was very instructive for me to read the text and to see references to this interaction you know going back more than 2000 years and then for you in the later parts of the text you know to the 16th and 17th century the another two quick examples um health governance of the area was outside the jurisdiction of the city and relied totally on uh overburden parish officers again sort of a key thing for us here when we are thinking in a post pandemic environment around how it is that um private real estate investment and development decision making is shaped by uh or interacts with issues around the externalities associated with private development or the need for you know collaboration and partnership with public entities and I think sort of here with Hudson Yards as an example of this someone mentions sort of the infrastructure around Hudson Yards I think we can all agree without the seven line extension um and again for those who are not as familiar with New York um a real lack of subway access historically you know on the far west side in the uh in the neighborhood of um of Hudson Yards and so a critical element of this being through the public expansion of the subway system so that you know if you come into Grand Central you could immediately hop on the seven train and now the seven train will take you right to the heart of Hudson Yards um arguably Hudson Yards uh would not be viable in the absence of that investment having been made um and certainly sort of speaks to the locational advantage of building like one Vanderbilt uh where you don't need to hop on the seven train you can just exit from Grand Central and and you're right there um but this issue uh you know around sort of you where does the jurisdiction and responsibility lie for thinking about how uh the interaction of the built environments in public health are ultimately driving outcomes for households in an environment that is more attuned to uh ESG and the and the importance of equity and outcomes you know in the urban in an urban setting where we see a disproportionate number of income constrained families becomes I think critically important for us because this question you 400 years later you know has not been entirely resolved um you know and you're sort of we're at a place now where I think the absence of coordination you know between public health authorities and private real estate development uh firms um is still sort of you know a stark reality for us. Finally then they wish to avoid the unhealthy crowded and dirty conditions of the city and to locate in the salubrious emerging suburbs of to the west. I think what finally what this captures for me also is that while we often will think of that interaction between public health and development as being um sort of you know conditions in the environment in the natural environment or in the urban environment impacting people's location preferences and decisions about where to live uh that there's significant endogeneity here and what we know is that it's not only that okay you know there's and you know that example of coal you know in air quality in 1603 is so prescient because you can go to the BBC's website today and read about exactly that same set of conditions in New Delhi India. Um the um but but I think what we see here is that well Pete while individuals may and households may make decisions about where to locate based on the quality of the environment around them what we also see is that the nature of the investments we make in the environment um is driving uh to the the public health uh outcomes as well. Now why does this become important for us and I wanted to give this one example it's a little bit further along in 1854 but the origins of our thinking about sort of that formal discipline within public health of epidemiology you know we're also uh you're just around the corner uh from uh you know from sort of a lot of what uh you know sort of a lot of the uh you know the the projects and history that Patrice is describing so the the the gentleman who was considered sort of the you know the father or the originator field epidemiology John Snow you know in 1854 was conducting field research during sort of a cholera epidemic in London and in the Golden Square neighborhood was actually looking quite specifically you know at this one neighborhood he mapped out to review each one of these dots if you're able to see them clearly enough represents sort of a household with incidents of cholera and was able to see that there was a clear density pattern here and the density of cholera increased in proximity to water pump A on Broad Street in London. And I think again what this highlights for us is that you know there are going to be associations I think you're one of the big things that I know Richard and others have written about and discussed over the course of the pandemic is that we should not make the mistake of associating density with severity of epidemics or infectious disease. There are other intermediate causal drivers so density for all of the things that we know are wonderful about you know scale and agglomeration density ultimately also leads to you know some other feature of the built environment that is a facilitator of you know disease or negative outcomes but what that means for us and this is for me sort of a conceptually absolutely critical point density at this point in our history is you're perceived very very negatively I think sort of that's one of the outcomes of the pandemic but in helping people to think about how the connection between density and health outcomes is intermediated by other factors or features of the built environment like are we keeping that pump filter or a cleaning are we ensuring that there isn't sort of garbage being collected nearby you know these things become very very important for us and think about how we can mitigate you know some of the risks associated with density and ultimately arrive in a place where you know some of that you know negative stereotyping around dense urban areas is better understood now this does become I think important for us and it's a real takeaway for me from Patrice's work because we're in we're at a period in time where you know after you know 100 years of seeing improvements in outcomes for how it is that people fare from a health perspective in the urban environment we now find ourselves in a situation where probably over the last I'd say 20 years you know we've seen something of a reversal there part of that reversal is related to what we refer to as zoonoses and so about 60 percent of all emergent infectious diseases that we will be able to catalog our animal in origin and what we're going to see here and again sort of it's that endogeneity in public health outcomes impacting the built environment with the built environment impacting public health outcomes what we're going to see here is that much of the reason why we have seen an increase in the rate or frequency of emergent respiratory diseases SARS, MERS, COVID is going to be related to issues of urban development and development overall I think Gordon I just have a couple of minutes left here if that's right yeah you could see me creeping up on you yeah yeah yeah so in short I'll simply say that there's a there's a considerable body of research work that's been done to identify you know how it is that changes in the way that we are developing the intensity of development activity when it is not tempered by sort of an appreciation for you know that intermediation between density and disease outcomes is allowing for those disease outcomes to increase in frequency and so identifying sort of what that intermediation is so that we can mitigate it becomes critically important and it was it was just so instructive for me to see in Patrice's book that there were references to this you know going back you know you know very very far for those of us briefly who may be thinking of to you know that the critical conditions or to you know that the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new zoonotic disease you know being something that sort of it happens very far away you can see here on this map certainly through you know the critical sort of the necessary conditions unsurprisingly South Asia Asia Pacific but what you can also see here is that those necessary conditions you know exist in a very concentrated area in the northeast of the United States you along through the northeast corridor and in parts of Europe as well so there's something that we need to be mindful of the last piece of this is that while coming out of the pandemic we are acutely focused on the need for pandemic response and to be better prepared for you know the next time something like this happens will we the as far as the relationship to the built environment goes what we also know is that the United States and many other advanced economies over the last hundred years have experienced what we refer to as an epidemiological transition and by that I mean that we've moved from a scenario where you know most people when they die you know die of some kind of infectious disease if you look at this chart and I don't know how clearly you're able to see it you know the big killers are going to be diphtheria gastrointestinal infections tuberculosis pneumonia we didn't live long enough or have a good enough control over many of these diseases prior to the introduction of antibiotics to actually die of the things that kill us now and so while mortality rates have declined overall what we also see is that you know infectious diseases while the idea of Ebola or COVID you know sort of might frighten us and there was a clear sense that Serbia there's an increasing frequency ultimately the things that are killing us are our cancer and heart disease and diabetes and this becomes again another critically important part of our thinking about you know the built environment what this chart shows in Gordon promises my closing one is that the this is a map of you know percentage of the population in the United States that lives within half a mile of a local state or national park what we do know from the research is that proximity when we're thinking about the built environment proximity to well developed usable public spaces as was reinforced by the pandemic is actually quite critical to the public health outcomes that we observe and so our thinking very holistically about this relationship as part of the built environment the need for public spaces access to transportation good quality public schools how it is that we might think about directing some of you know that you know the largesse of of the Build Back Better Act you know becomes sort of a critically important piece of this conversation and you might you're one of my key and many takeaways from for built up is that this has been an issue that has remained underappreciated in our thinking about the built environment going back to the Roman times so Patrice I think we all owe you a great debt of gratitude for your work and again I greatly appreciate the opportunity to join you today great thank you very much Sam I'm conscious that my fellow participants might one have a question or Patrice you might want to have a brief response we've got well no I thank you Sam I you know the critical analysis is perfect and Covent Garden of course renowned for its public open space provided by a private owner and continues to be so but Richard Florida Sam nicely done and great to see you I guess my question to you is given given your role it one about public health and the contemporary scene why do you think that we have what I would call an ironic if not counterintuitive if not insane thing happening in the United States principally I don't think it's happening in France I don't think it's happening in England I don't think it's happening in Canada where the places that have done the best at protecting themselves from this virus New York San Francisco that have had the most stringent public health measures are the places that either rightly or wrongly are speculated to be seeing the greatest out migration and and one hypothesis I have is that Americans are uniquely crazy sorry you know who was it what's his name Marty Lipsett always said the best thing you can do by moving to Canada as an American has come to understand the country you could say the Americans are uniquely insane or you can say that Americans put an incredible value on liberty and I'm not just talking about Trump Trumpers or populist that Americans put an incredible value I'm not saying this is right but an incredible value on liberty and don't want anyone telling them anything else but I just think it very interesting that the places that have done probably the most to protect their people with regard to public health have seen arguably large out migrations and those out migrations have gone to the places that have done the worst whether that be Florida Miami you know Port Lauderdale Palm Beach Texas Houston Dallas I just wondered if you had a reaction to that or rightly or wrongly absolutely it's not just the pandemic when we talk about Serbia people migrating to some of the places that have performed quite poorly I think to Janelle's point earlier folks are also migrating to some of the places that are at the greatest risk for climate change and so while Serbia we profess to care deeply about ESG you know for both firms and individual households we don't always see that concern and that commitment reflected in people's location preferences and decisions I would suggest that there's two things one a broad misperception about the role and contribution of density you know where we don't see the intermediate factors the in the United States and part of that reflects you know people's reading of people's reading of of you know New York having been hit hardest first and just simply assuming that that must be a function of density the other to round it out is that I think what the pandemic has done and this is unrelated to the disease issues and the public health issues is shown for many people that they have the ability to exercise some kind of geographic autonomy at work and so the issue that is vexing New York and Boston and some others is not really density in the pandemic in some of these cases it's that we are fiscally inefficient and in terms of what the contributors to the cost of being located in these high agglomeration locations whether it be local fiscal policy the taxes that are being levied issues around the quality of life and quality of infrastructure I'm done it's a tough place to live thanks Gordon hi my word um thanks very much it really a two to four Sam a two of the four so it was really impressive now Jerry's got his hand up but I'm afraid Jerry no no no please please let him Jerry please jump in rich Rick Rick Paz is here hi Rick do you mind a minute or so well just a minute thanks I can do it in one minute yeah come on Jerry go for a few quick comments one on on Richard's comment about people moving out of San Francisco and New York for San Francisco for example they didn't move out of the bay area they just moved to cheaper apartments further out because they could they were working from home so I'm not sure that it was they wanted freedom rather than lower rents for the year that they were out and second comment on the map which I thought was really significant about open spaces relative I think one needs to dig down a little deeper so for example in Los Angeles you have high proximity to low to open spaces lots of open spaces in the mountains have run through the city but you don't have transportation from the lower income neighborhoods to those open spaces so they could be a hundred miles away as opposed to the 10 miles that they are I did that right Gordon I look you know beautiful um you've um yeah we we like both don't we Sam yeah great totally agree I think what we see is that in a lot of cases the migration is just a little bit further out if you live in New York uh you know in maximizing your utility function you need to be close to work because you know sort of it's it's costly in terms of time and patience and sanity to people to have to commute you know a lot in New York City the but I think what we see is that with people expecting that you know I'm going to go into the office three days a week two and a half um the geographic radius over which they can optimize their location preference is just wider and so they're maybe outside the core okay to someone who follows Zillow and house prices outside of New York City through not through to the Connecticut border what we saw was house prices in big blocks beautiful houses go up through the pandemic what we're seeing is them going down on the other side of the pandemic interesting moment people are coming back to the city Sam watch out for them okay um thank you very much uh Sam just super good and let me pass over to Richard Pisa Pisa here Pisa sorry I'm being English uh asking the obvious question but anyway so um Richard over to you oh it's a pleasure to take part in this and I'm very grateful to Patrice for not only writing a very provocative and thoughtful book but uh teeing up a very interesting conversation and I know I've learned a lot and I hope others have as well the uh current conversation actually tees up what I wanted to focus on which has to do with is the pandemic uh causing a return to urban sprawl uh before I jump into this let me just say that a few years ago we did a small research design project on Covent Garden by for the owner which is a big insurance company and at the time Covent Garden was actually starting to fall on hard times the the retail was really not in great shape and and they were bemoaning the fact that all the retail around Covent Garden was sort of low-end tourist