Okay, so this is kind of a weird video for me to make. I've been very, very, very outspoken about my opposition to trendy mega church pastors and folks that really don't preach the gospel and the hyper entertainmentization of worship and how it's just all about lights and show and smoke machines and all that kind of thing. And so people could easily look at me and my channel and say, okay, Isaac is just vehemently against this stuff. He sees no good in it whatsoever and he hates it. And yeah, that's pretty much the end of the story. But what if I were to tell you that there was a period of my life that not only did I not have a distaste for it, I was attracted to it. It appealed to me and this wasn't too long ago, maybe four years ago or so, that I really began to say, hey, like, I like this. I know I shouldn't like it, but I do like it. And I wanna tell you a little bit why trendy churches, trendy, you know, all that kind of that ambiance and that lifestyle, that culture appealed to me. And maybe by doing that, we can begin to understand a little bit more of what the problem is with it and where maybe we need to learn from it. Okay, so this is my story. I grew up in like a Christian homeschooled household. We were known as like the liberal homeschool family because just because we weren't like ultra-hyper-formers family conservative out in the middle of nowhere. So it was kind of funny because we were very conservative and yet we were seen as like the liberal ones because we wore pants and we listened to secular music sometimes. So anyway, that was kind of funny. But all that being said is that we grew up in this kind of conservative place, conservative bubble for the most part. And then also our church was fairly conservative. We sang some modern music as well, but we had pews. It was just very staunch, not hype and not cool and not trendy, that's for sure. So I'm growing up in this, you know, I liked it because I liked it because I was listening to a lot of like podcasts and things that were kind of very similar to the content that I make today, honestly, a lot of inspiration I took from that growing up. And I was like, okay, I don't want this. I want the meat. I don't want the milk that they're serving up. I don't want the trendy Ted talks that these pastors are trying to serve up. I want the true expositional preaching from the Bible and I don't want worship with running around and flag waving. I just want real, true worship that is focused on God and not on me. So I loved it. I was in it.  I was like, you're kind of evaluating and I'm for most people, I think they do this, evaluating, okay, what did I grow up believing? What did I, what do I take from that? What do I disagree with? Like you got to be really honest with yourself. A lot of people aren't honest with themselves until way later down the line, but this was a moment of clarity where I'm like, okay, what do I really believe? I know I play this part that this is what I believe about this, but what do I actually feel in my heart about all this? And if I was honest at that point, a lot of the hype around hype worship and that kind of thing and people that were really into it. I'm not saying that it was just like necessarily the crazy, crazy stuff, but just like the worship where people were into it and they were really singing and they were really excited and they were really joyful about it. That appealed to me. It did, it appealed to me. I'm sorry, like it really did because I grew up where maybe you have a couple people raising their hand and that was pretty much it. And I also felt embarrassed to like kind of really show any kind of emotion during worship.  But we can't, we can't, we got to reel it in, we got to reel it in. And so you're like, okay, this is appealing to me. What about the pastors that are preaching? If I'm honest, yeah, I knew they weren't super good. A lot of them weren't super good about focusing on the gospel or doing expositional preaching. Like that's true. They didn't go verse by verse. They could have focused a lot more on understanding the nuts and bolts of what the gospel means, absolutely. But they were really good about application. They're really good about practical things of life. They were, they had, a lot of them had a lot more of a softer heart it seemed like towards mental health, towards the daily life of what we're going through. It wasn't just all highfalutin theology. It was real like on the ground stuff. But okay, so that's what I was beginning to notice. In the midst of this, there is a battle. There's an internal battle because it's like having two people in your brain that constantly have answers for each other. So I would say, okay, if I'm honest at that point, I really like the worship. And then I would go back and my other side of me would say, okay Isaac, you like the worship and you're supposed to like the worship because it's entertaining and it's high emotion.  And I'd be like, well, our emotions are part of us. Like you can, you should engage with your emotions and be your whole being while you're in worship. Like to be emotionless, it just makes no sense. And the other side would say, oh, well, you're getting too stirred up into the emotion and you're getting swept away and it's not good to just be guided by your emotions in that way. And so there would be this internal battle when it comes to preaching, it would be like, well, hey, those guys, I know they're not super deep theologically and maybe they get some things wrong but they have a really soft heart and they understand the compassion and presence of Jesus and his healing power and his transforming power in our life and how he meets us in just the practical things. And the other side would say, well, that's true, but we preach high theology over here because you as a disciple should be able to take that theology yourself and apply that.  And I would say, well, it's nice to hear some practical application every once in a while. Like, it's cool to just hear all this stuff about the Bible and that kind of thing, but I could use some help about applying it to my life. Like, I want it to feel real. And so there wouldn't be this paradox, it would be this battle where I'm like, I know, I know I shouldn't like this, maybe, but I kind of do. And why do I do? Is it all out of just self-indulgence? Is it all just because I want to be entertained or is there something to this here? Like, it'd be this weird thing where I'm like, I like the emotion that everyone is showing. And yet I see the emotional manipulation that is taking place. And so it's like, I want this, but I don't want this. I want people to be in it and I want to be in a place where faith is alive. Like, that's what I wanted. I wanted to be in a place where faith was alive, but yet when I was in places like that, I couldn't help but feeling fake because of the emotional manipulation that was taking place from the stage. And so there's this desire in my heart. I think what was going on, it was pulling out things in my heart that I wanted to connect with. Like, it's like I wanted there to be a real emotion in my heart about the worship. And I wanted there to be real application about the preaching, but yet it was kind of mingled and twisted with all this manipulation and just focus on the trendiness. And obviously, you guys, if you've seen my content about trendy pastors, you know my perspective on pastors that really flaunt themselves as celebrities and how damaging and negative that is. But that's where I was. I just want to pop in here real quick and tell you a little bit about Patreon. Patreon is a way that people support me on a monthly basis so I can continue to make content that equips people to follow Jesus daily. Thank you to everyone that's already signed up. And if you haven't and you're interested, we do video calls, we have exclusive videos. There's an exclusive Discord. I'd be so grateful if you signed up and supported what I'm doing. Click the link in my description now onto the video. I basically got to the point where I would say, okay, so conservative churches are really good about theology and they're really good about, you know, holding strong to the gospel and preaching the word and all that kind of thing. And like more trendy churches would be better at creating interesting art and creating good meaningful emotional worship that really hit you in the soul. And so they really do this well. They have really good method to how they go about things and it seems very seamless. And yet we really have the theology over here, but it's a false dichotomy. You, there aren't churches. The truth is what I've realized because I was looking for a church for a long time and I found a church and it really baffled me because for a long time I thought, trendy churches have community and they have practical application of their teaching and they have good worship that really gets ya. And then the conservative churches, they are the staunch ones that really don't have that much of a community but they really preach the gospel really well and they preach the Bible and that's really good. And that, you know, for me at that point, like that's the most important. You can do away with all the other stuff, but it's a false dichotomy. That's the truth of it. I don't want you to feel, some people do feel jaded. They feel jaded.  It's not true. I guess I just wanna give some compassion to folks and maybe extend some compassion your way as well.  Why are they going to this church? It might not be just because they're, you know, they want their ears to be tickled. It might not be just because they want to be entertained. They genuinely, I'm gonna say a bunch of them, genuinely want to know God. They want to hear his word. They want to be in community. And they're seeing these big churches come out of nowhere and they're really growing fast and it seems to be an exciting community and they're clinging on to them. Don't dismiss them. Don't dismiss their faith. But it's really just what their appetite is being formed into because that's what they're being fed.  If all you're given is a diet of milk, then that's what your body is gonna be used to. Of course, they're gonna have a hard time understanding the meat or consuming the meat because they've been raised up on a diet of milk. That's not really their fault.  Like, okay, they could have put themselves in a better position. They could have went to a better church. Da, da, da, da, da. Young Christians, they don't know this. And so what can we do? Well, I mean, for me, the gateway was exposing them things on, exposing them to preachers online that really gave them the meat. And then they began to understand, wait a minute, my pastor at my church is really not giving me meat. Where can I find solid teaching? Where can I find things that are actually gonna fill me up? But I don't want you to go around, because I went around like this, thinking that, okay, you know, I've got it signed, sealed, and delivered. I know what the best kind of church is like. And I can just like, you know, I know what it's like and you're not going to one. Cause they're trying to find a place. They're trying to find a place to belong. They're trying to find a place to be fed. I have a lot more sympathy towards the people that go to these kind of trendy churches than I used to and compassion for them. I don't have as much compassion for the people that are leading them because there's a lot of manipulation going on. Truly, there is. But I guess that's the message of this video is that I was there. I was there. I was into this. I was, it appealed to me. I could genuinely say that I wanted to watch these sermons. I wanted to take this stuff in because it hits somewhere that that other preaching wasn't hitting. And I don't think that's because it was just hitting in a sinful, prideful place or just really building me up in a positive way. But it was hitting some of the wounds and talking about things and how to navigate anxiety and understanding God as an emotional healer and his presence and power in our life and how we can operate when we don't feel like getting out of bed. These are the things that really hit me that attracted me to it. So I get it. I've been there. And look, as cliche as it might sound, we are all on a spiritual journey. That's the truth. I've changed my theological perspectives. I've grown. I've matured. And now as I get older, and I'm not that old, but as I get older, I just have that much more compassion for people that are on a particular place on their journey. Saying you don't speak up when they're saying something false or they're going down a bad path, especially as a friend, I'm gonna say, maybe that's not the best church to go to or what are they teaching here? Do you think they're really teaching the Bible? That's cool, but I just have grace for people because look, they're learning. God is changing and he's transforming them. And I don't know, man. I'm a lot less into, I'm just gonna tell you what church to go to and you obviously are not a Christian because you go to that church. Like, I just don't think that's true. I just don't think that's true because I've been there. I've been there. Anyway, thanks for watching this video. I hope you got something from it. Until next time, God bless.


And we really need to stay because I feel the sense of lunch coming and stomachs growling. So we're really going to ask the respondents, because there's so much material here, we're going to have three minutes per respondent. I don't even have time to put up the card. I'm just going to say time's up and we'll have to move on. To really just get to what is your most important point you would like to respond to that all of us can reflect on. So with that, I'm going to start first with Casey. Casey, my co-chair is helping me with that. We met in Delhi, it's an extensive experience in terms of government and planning and many different roles to begin our discussion. Casey. Thank you. I'll try and focus my brief comments on what has been presented and also the questions that were listed in the program. Number one, are cities planned in India? It would be very easy to bring this discussion to a close and say cities are not planned. One minute silence in honor of planning, end of the session. That's one way of looking at it. Neighborhoods are planned, buildings are planned, shopping malls are planned, facilities or sports are planned, cities as cities are not planned and they have not been planned for some time. And if you are not prepared to accept that reality, then I'm afraid much of your time is wasted. Second, policies and, you know, institutions, concepts. We hear about a world-class city. Whose concept is this world-class city? Who gave it to us? Whose world? Whose city? I can hear of a world-class soccer stadium. I can hear of a world-class airport. I can probably hear of a world-class hotel as the Elton Towers. But what is a world-class city? We have not had a concept or an attitude about city for quite some time. As long as the Ming's and the emperors and the Indian great kings and the moguls, whether there was an imperial purpose, there was a dominant purpose, there was a defense purpose, there was a religious purpose. And those major purposes are gone. What is the concept that we just, you know, float around ourselves? Third, what is this deference and genoflection to the so-called private sector? Why? What is the private sector so different from the rest of the society? It's wonderful to hear our friend from Singapore to say that design is a matter of public realm. It's not a matter of private negotiation and private deal-making. Here we are in Asian cities trying to dismantle the public realm, trying to forget what we ourselves contributed to the concept of settlements and cities. If you want to hack that public realm all the time, you do not have the right to talk about a city which is for the people. Fourth, the instruments. That's again a question. What are the instruments? Same old toolbox, same old planner's box, same old regulations and so on. We are trying to fiddle around with some adjustments. You hear all these various things, one of the things that appears to be, and I'm very impressed by what Umar Samuli presented in regard to Bombay. And you find in all these city presentations, except in Singapore, this so-called conflict between the city and the region, the city and the state. Over a long period of time, we have been used to a limited municipal construct. The Desivitas Dei, the Desivitas populi, small little controlled areas. But today's urban world is multi-municipal, multi-jurisdictional, and there are many, many, many, many actors, and these are going to be inevitable. In such a situation, we are busy negotiating space for various people, but we are not necessarily negotiating the space for the people themselves represented by local government. I hope some of you noticed in the case of Bombay, she made a reference to the Metropolitan Planning Committee. A Metropolitan Planning Committee, which consists of elected representatives, brings different municipal jurisdictions on a platform. Seven years the legislation has been there. Only Calcutta has set up the Metropolitan Planning Committee. Why? Because there is a certain amount of political reluctance to create and support a platform where contestation and argument will take place. In many of these cities, the state and the national government, whether they have a role or not, try to invigorate themselves into what is essentially a space that is to be determined by local choice.  So from that point of view, as Uma mentioned, and this is applicable to others, you have a Metropolitan Development Authority which was born in good faith. But today it continues in bad faith. Because you are not prepared to accept the alternatives. So I think the problem to all this basic question, how cities are planned, whose city, for whom, if you are not prepared to ask that question, that you are not ready for this debate. Thank you. Rahul Narochov, who is now at Professor at MIT, it's an extensive work here. Thanks, Andy. I think I want to sort of pick up on two points which were to do with integration. And I want to add to the discussion by raising something which I think has been absent in the discussions, which is the issue of making a transition. How do you move from one to the other, especially in the context of these visions? And I couldn't help, there's a kind of neatness in the presentations we saw. So I couldn't help but think about the sessions from yesterday, especially the one about inequality. And I think what we are trying to do is reconcile or blur these many binaries that seem to face us in these cities, a formal, informal city, paraffry, you know, all the rest of it. And how do we do that? I think that's a critical question for design. Darren yesterday used the word kinetic, which I thought was wonderful, because I think Bombay is the ultimate kinetic city. It's a city where clearly architecture is not the spectacle of the city. Architecture doesn't represent it. There's a whole lot of other stuff that happens here. For me, the Ganesh Festival is a wonderful intersection of community and identity, and it leaves no trace. It has no codification. The images of Singapore, the images we saw of Pudong are clearly representative of societies where architecture is the spectacle of the city. So I think when we talk about integration, we have to recognize other sensibilities of where urban space is used. And I think the kinetic city has a number of lessons for us there. Lessons of temporal use, of how landscapes can shift and adjust. You know, I'm really amused in America when people in their cities celebrate and make this great effort to introduce farmers markets to humanize their cities. And, you know, more than 50% of our cities are farmers market, and we are trying to dehumanize our cities in the kinds of visions that we project. And so I think this notion of the kinetic city, the notion of different sensibilities have to be part of the effort of integration. So it's beyond land use. It's about also spatial sensibilities. And this is not to do just with the city of the poor. The rich use the city like that in Bombay. I mean, if you drive on Marine Drive, you have these wonderful Maidans there, these open spaces, and in the evening after the sportsmen have left, they get transformed into these spectacular venues for weddings. Of course, weddings are an outlet for ostentation in our society, and that's a whole different issue. But it's just wonderful how the city can actually expand its margins temporarily, leave no trace, and in the morning the cricketers are back there on turf that has been untouched. And in the process, there's craftsmanship, there's employment, and there's a spectacle which is about, I think, about identity. And so I refer to Richard Sennett, who yesterday, I think, shared with us some wonderful insights about urban design, scale issues of complexity, over-determined form, public space, the notion that contact is more critical than identity, etc. And I think these questions lie more in the kinetic city than where we are actually locating them. And the last issue of transition, the reason I bring this up, is I think like in the question of energy, when we are trying to move, you know, get out of fossil fuels, we have to make transitions through other modes of energies, and that's a recognized model. I think we've got to ask that question for cities. We can't jump from our present situation to some ideal condition. The city here is not about grand design, it's about grand adjustment. Thank you. And we'll turn now to Enrique Norton, architect in Mexico City, and now in New York, to pick up on this. Well, thank you very much, Professor Altman. Well, I want to share a reflection, probably a preoccupation and maybe a little bit of a provocation. As I have, as I see through these conferences and at the same time visit new cities to me, like Mumbai and other Asian cities, I get a bit concerned that we are seeing that the proposals that we hear here are mostly what I would consider, or I fear they would be most of them obsolete solutions, very outdated mechanisms and many stereotypes that are basically on a very failed profession, which is planning of the 20th century. We have seen that planners, and please, I don't mean to offend anyone and excuse me, have only showed us a totally lack of imagination. I don't think that the two-dimensional city that we have been using for the last 100 years has anything to do with the city of the future. Here we are sitting in Mumbai, a city that obviously is eager to reinvent itself and become one of those cities of the 21st century. And again, we are looking at solutions of 19th century and maybe first half of the 20th century. I think that, or I wish, we could have here more visionaries. We cannot keep on looking at plans, plans by meaning two-dimensional representations of cities or statistics in a series of numbers. We are seeing no visionary work. Why aren't cities investing in vision? In vision, and I mean physical vision, multi-dimensional vision. I very strongly believe the city of the future is a multi-dimensional city that does not relate to the pre-modern city or to the many failures of the first half or middle of the last century. We are here facing more densification, more congestion, and at the same time we need to invent more new public space. And the only way to be able to do that is to start thinking literally in a multi-dimensional city. By that, I don't mean building high only because that is still, if public space keeps on being just a two-dimensional condition, we're doing nothing. We can see certain moments in Singapore, which I visited recently, that are really thinking into the future. Hong Kong, maybe other Tokyo in certain aspects. But I think cities like Mumbai, cities like Shanghai, cities like Dubai, and Shanghai and Dubai are already gone. But Mumbai has a great possibility for that future. So that's really what I wanted to share. Why aren't we looking into the multi-dimensional city of the 21st century and please stop looking at the failed planning profession of the last century? Thank you very much. We now turn to Barun Kumaray from the Secretary of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority.  We can still have a drink tonight. Yeah, exactly. No, we're friends. We'll talk about architecture later. Well, I'll start by relating a small anecdote. If you were to make God laugh, what would you do? You should go up. If you were to make God laugh, what would you do? Tell him your plans. I think while we discuss about whether cities can be planned or not, I'm sure God will be conversed with laughter. Anyway, the point that I'd like to stress upon here today is the conflict that we have between central planning and local planning. We have been discussing about this in our, over the past two days. And I feel that this is the biggest issue that confronts a city government today. The problem of multiplicity of plans and agencies and the ad hocism in planning that we have, especially in India, that is the, I think, the biggest challenge that is confronting large cities like Mumbai or Kolkata or, for that matter, Delhi. It would be very important for us to resolve these issues. And to resolve these issues, as we have tried to do in Kolkata, we have a metropolitan planning committee which has representations from various chairpersons and representatives of the Panchayat areas. For example, Kolkata, just like Mumbai, the metropolitan area encompasses a large portion more than the city core as such, which in Mumbai as well as in Calcutta, I would say is about 10% of the entire metropolitan area. So unless we have representatives and the aspirations of people living in the fringe areas is met, it is very difficult for us to prepare the development plans or the plans for the city and plan as a whole. Secondly, we have been passed down by the 74th Amendment Act of the Constitution. The 12th Schedule of the Constitution says that there are 18 functions which have been devolved to the city governments. But where is the city government? As we have been seeing, especially in India, the city government is non-existent. So the point that I'm trying to make is that we may plan and we may plan, but when we finance those plans, what would be the role of the state in partly implementing these plans? And the issues of convergence and governance, which is very important, I think we should dwell upon in our deliberations. Thank you. Thank you. And now to Larisa, a different part of who works with Larisa Special Advisor in International Relations to the Mayor of Mexico City. Thank you very much, Andy. I really like very much this dubious honor of being the last one to speak before the lunch break because it surely makes everybody think, I hope this Mexican guy finishes up quite quickly so I can go taste the chicken curry. I'll be very brief. First, I can't agree more with KC, but I have some things that also have to be put into consideration. One is that given competitive and the uncertain economic environment, the cities need what's been said here, what we can certain from all these two days is that cities need to evolve into competitive strategic planning to get the most effective planning out of their limited financial and human resources to achieve the targets. It's certain that the capital available to any given city is highly elastic and only flows to cities that show potential and show well-thought-out planning in the future. In that sense, one key challenge in spite of cities' particular governance issues or due to them in many cases is that in order to be more efficient to service providers and wealth generators, the planning of the cities development strategies has to comprise well-positioned well-timed public, private and civil society strategic interventions in order to significantly be able to alter for the better the development path of the cities. These three sectors act harmoniously and decisively. Changes are likely to go faster and deeper and this is particularly important for planners and policy makers as lots of empirical evidence show that changes of cities can be done in enormous ways and time spans as short as 10 to 20 years. That's one of the things, reflections I have to make and the other one is very quickly about what Sheila Dick said today about giving word of the constituency. We can agree more. Major Brad in Mexico City has to be able to give the best for the public interest and how what's a better way to do it to be able to give the people a little bit of voice and in that sense I'd like to share this last 30 seconds I have one experience we had very recently in July giving that climate change as Nick turns very bitterly put today in his keynote presentation is one of the key issues for societies in one of the foremost challenges. Major Brad posted in July a green referendum that started with the people up with the younger generations of up to 14 age-olds because we sincerely think that in ethical terms and practical terms this is the generation that we're going to give the city as an inheritance of the show they should be able to have a word. So he put up a green referendum with 10 fundamental points asking if we should invest more in infrastructure to build new pathways and second roadways to send to use more vehicles or if we should go the other way around and to build more time ways and alternative systems massive transportation. Well the results were outstanding we had one million and a half people voting to be able to produce a city more oriented towards the green environment and that was for us one very effective way to involve people in active public policy and to give policymakers good sound policies. Thank you very much. We have time for five minutes and I think what I'd like to do there are many many questions have been asked many are very specific to Mumbai many are proposals many are specific questions to people and we're fortunate to try to connect some of these in a question of what we've heard. We've heard in the opening presentation yesterday about what's happening with urbanization the scale of urbanization the velocity, how quickly it's happening the complexity of it of different peoples migrations populations so there's an enormous rate of change happening on the one hand. We have as we heard from Tony Travers systems we're going to hear more from Joe Frug of governance that may or may not align what is the very notion of the city the regional city, the local city the right governance structure to deal with urbanization. We heard from Philip Rota about how planning systems may or may not be even capable have the capacity or be integrated to deal with this complexity let alone the mismatch between planning systems governance systems and the scale of urbanization. And then we have the whole issue that's come up is the Dharavi discussion about community processes, democratic processes from Shanghai where the government is able to implement unimpeded to more robust conversations like we had about Dharavi of different levels of protest and participation that are able to happen here in Mumbai and a whole continuum. So we have whole different systems operating. The question that I think would be I think we're interested in the urban age is how to connect the physical, the social, the economic, the governance together. And the one thing I think would be interesting since we have a panel here with architects, with planners, with different senior level government people the role of place. Where is the role of the physical place of the city? What you talked about, Rike, to go from two-dimensional to three-dimensional these abstract planning systems, the abstract notions of governance, all of these things that can operate at a very grand level. And when we looked yesterday at Rahul and we talked about the mills and said planning can set the FSI, the open space, but what about the physical place? So I'm curious maybe to get some reaction about how do we bring place and design from the ground up, if you will, the DNA, the uniqueness of these cities into this larger conversation of the big planning systems that are out there that may or may not be working and then we don't lose what it is that ultimately is so special and defines the identity of place and cities. So I'd be curious to open that up for a few minutes of discussion before lunch. Well, I mean, I think it seems to me that I think governance becomes the key issue here because I mean, we seem we seem to I think we're all seeming to recognize that that's the key sort of missing block and how that can actually percolate down these these different sort of levels at which the city operates. It just seems to me that's sort of the key missing sort of piece. In regard to space you also have to look at it from a scale. I think at the neighborhood level the city level, what Mr. Mayrothra has already mentioned Asian cities, Indian cities, world cities the people have shown that space is not static, it is dynamic it can be used and reused in different ways to connect itself to the different functions of the city. One of the very, very bad tools we have inherited from 19th century as Enrique points out is a set of color pens which says conforming land use non-conforming land use and as long as there is ink in the magic marker we have busy plotting non-conforming uses. They do not conform in the planner's mind, they eminently conform in the people's mind. One, two the concept of gated communities is not restricted to communities it is being elevated to the city scale to the metropolitan scale in a way it was elevated in that manner in regard to Joe Berg as you know Joe Biel pointed out it's the same thing that is now taking place parts of the city with access parts of the city without access parts of the city with infrastructure what we are doing here in India in the name of special economic zones we are creating brand new privately owned company towns and they have already made a demand we want freedom from tax we want freedom from everything we also want freedom from the constitution so that we would like all the people living in this special economic zone to be loyal citizens to the company so therefore I think this business of space we have to recognize space as a multiple entity space as a scale entity and the space should be decided by the people not preempted by the market in advance and that is what is happening across different asian cities thank you Tony Travers in the context of all those maps and charts that we were looking at earlier on there's no doubt that however configured planning for transport or for city and land use development is inevitably a top down institutional thing where clearly people constitute a place and they have views upon it and I think the issue that the urban age throws up again and again these conferences throw up again and again is how these institutional mechanisms which are inevitable and to some extent well some people don't think they are but I think they are almost inevitable how they can be sensitive to people and place and I think we have to recognize that there is a conflict here an inevitable conflict and the the micro political issue is how to reconcile those conflicts by these big institutions to people in communities and in cities that are developing all the urban age cities are growing and developing the conflicts between the city-wide institutions or the statewide institutions and individuals in their neighborhoods will always be significant they really will Small point before part of it you can talk about structures as much as you want but if there is an aspirational side to which you're talking about unless you plug into those structure those skills high up such as a city architect not just a city planner someone advising the key politicians that's how it works in the UK the mayor is advised by Richard Rogers as it happens in London which probably has had an impact in terms of the vision which is being said unless you do that you don't solve the problem just by playing around with structures of decision making just to answer to your question which I think it's a very well formulated question I think it's a very important question I don't think there are universal solutions obviously I don't think there are even universal solutions within a city you know I think our cities and especially cities of the complexity of Mumbai and many others that we have been discussing require very specific proposals and very specific solutions for each one of their many many pieces and elements of each one of the city at the end the city will be some of many good solutions and all I wish and I agree completely obviously with what Ricky just described you know unfortunately for the rest of the world London is a highly sophisticated city and it's very difficult to apply those conditions to many of the other cities that we are discussing you know precisely London one of those pre-modern cities with a very strong pre-modern structure it's other the issues that London deals with I only wish that people that are making decisions in our city would believe more in creation and imagination you know and less in formulaic solutions thank you on that note let's thank everyone here it's been a very rich session


Ladies and gentlemen, this is Todd Weinemann who is going to give you a brief synopsis of the pineapple weed. Todd, it's all yours. Pineapple weed is a weed that's commonly found along bullbars in gravelly areas and sidewalks growing in our area here. It is an annual that tends to pop up on some poorly managed soil. Mowing does not really take care of it. You can kill it with browned up or cultivation as opposed to type of a treatment. If you take a closer look at it, you'll see that the flower on the top has an egg shape and the leaves are somewhat ferny and rather deeply lobed. Good. Anything we can get this confused with? A chickweed would be one that you could get a confused with, similar shape. It almost looks in a way like very small yarrow that never really grows too much taller. There's some other plants too that might be confused with it such as chamomile. Chamomile has a very similar look but this is not chamomile. One way to tell that you have pineapple weed is to crush it and smell it. There's a distinctive pineapple odor to it or some of the other plants won't. Okay, very good. Thank you Todd. Weinemann, Cass County Extension Horticultures, NDSU.


smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, H1N1, blue, and polio. Have you heard of these? These are just a few examples of epidemics. I'm Melanie Chivroch and I'm the instructor to dynamics of epidemics. This course is going to cover various topics including biology, microbiology, public health, and vaccine development. After covering the basics of immunology and pathogens, we will use case studies to study different epidemics. We will discover the dynamics of childhood diseases, the evolution of drug resistance, digital epidemiology, disease surveillance, and vaccinations. We will learn the organisms that infect humans and make us sick called pathogens. We will learn about the factors that determine the outcome of infection, like host immunity, innate, and adaptive immune responses. We will explore the ecological factors that influence the dynamic patterns of infectious disease as well as mechanisms involved in controlling epidemics. By looking at the history of epidemiological response and modern-day public health initiatives, we can analyze individual epidemics for how effective they were, and in particular, we can look at the many equity issues surrounding those responses. This course will use case studies to promote seminar-style dialogue and it's going to be filled with discussion, research, and systems-designed thinking. If this sounds like a course that you might be interested in, I hope that you will consider enrolling.


Welcome to the show. It is time for JP's product pick of the week. It is me. I'm JP, and here we are on a Tuesday when we normally do this show. So that's all normal. This isn't normal. I apologize for people who are disturbed by that. I was making myself laugh, but it's definitely weird. I have no excuses, sorry. So let's see. Let's get on with this. Shall we? First of all, what I want to do is let you know. What's this all about? Well, on JP's product pick of the week. I pick a product that I want to show you that I think is new and interesting, or sometimes old and interesting, but always interesting. And we show it off for a little bit, take a look at it, do a little bit of a demo, show you how it's hooked up, whatever it may be. And we usually do a substantial discount, no coupon code needed. This week, if you head to that QR code or this URL, you'll see this product pick is half off. So throw it in your cart, you can get up to 10 of them. Like I said, no coupon code needed. Simply check out before the show ends or within a couple of minute grace period. And you will get this terrific discount. So before I go any further, let's have Lady Aida tell us what this product even is. So please take it away, Lady Aida. A new breakout, the PCF 8574. So this is a systemic UT breakout for an iSquad C GPIO expander.  I love them, but they're not available. So I thought I'd expand my outlook and find some alternatives. So the PCF 8574 is a low-cost expander from TI and it's available, which is the most important thing. It's got eight pins. You can control it over iSquad C. One nice thing about it is it has three address pins on the back, so you can have up to eight of these connected. The default address is 0x20 hex, but you can have eight, so that's like 64 total GPIO. It's got systemic UT, so it's plug and play. So it's interesting about this chip. I do want to mention because it took me like a few minutes to grok what's going on. It's extremely simple. We wrote drivers for Arduino and CircuitPython, but honestly, it's such a common expander. You're going to find drivers for almost any platform. You basically read and write just eight bits directly to the iSquad C address, and there's no specific direction pin. So what you're used to with most IO expanders is you have a direction and then you can also set pull-ups. So you have the input, and then the input can be higher-low, or the output, higher-low, and then you can add pull-ups as well. So this chip doesn't do that. Instead, it actually has two modes. So each IO can either be an input with a very weak pull-up, about 100K, or an output that's sinking current. And what that means is that it basically can act as a bidirectional IO. If you want it to be an input, you turn it on with that weak pull-up, and then you can, you know, by default it reads high, and if the whatever signal is sent low, you read low, and if it's floating, it reads high. So if you have a button, for example, I'll show this on the overhead. So I have two IOs here, because this is actually the most confusing is buttons and LEDs. Note that I didn't have a resistor with the LED because I'm just, I'm being cheap and fast here. So the button goes between ground and the IO number one. You cannot connect a button from an IO pin to high. There's no such thing as a pull-down. It's only this light built-in pull-up. But when I press this button, it can detect that I'm shorting the input to ground. And then what it'll do is the code running in Arduino on this QT Pi, reads that through I2C, and then writes P7 to be that output low. So if you want to read an input, you basically have a built-in pull-up, light pull-up. If you want to drive an LED, like something that's really sinking current, the LED has to be connected from positive, the anode to positive, and then common cathode. So you ground the LED to turn it on. If you tried to connect this LED from the output pin to ground, there's no such thing as sourcing current. You can only sync current. It only matters, again, with an LED. You can only connect it from high to the GPIO, not the other way around. And a button. You can only use that built-in light pull-up. If you're using signal, like you're using this to trigger a reset pin or communicate with another digital circuit, that light pull-up will always signal a high voltage. Sorry about that. I'm not sure what happened to our video there. It got cut off. That may be my fault. Sorry about that. I'll correct that in the notes later. I'll point you at that video. But hopefully that at least gives you a good idea of how this works. And I'll do a real live demo. So jumping back in for a moment, let's grab one of these from my, hey, brand new. OK. I cut this one open. But there it is. Let's get that out of the bag there. And take a look at this little beauty. So this is my product pick of the week this week. It is the PCF 8574. Say it again, it's the PCF 8574. It is a GPIO expander that runs over I squared C with two convenient STEMAQT connectors on it. And this allows you to add up to eight digital inputs or outputs. So you can use these as current syncing LEDs or you can use them as inputs for buttons and switches. So what I'd like to do is actually show you a demo I built here on a little perma proto. So let me jump to my down cam here. So here you can see I've taken one of these little PCF 8574s. I have hooked it up to a perma proto board. And then I have eight little buttons. These are some cute little buttons from our button sampler pack that we have now. And if you follow the traces on here, the wires on here, you can see I'm essentially running each button to a ground rail. And that ground rail goes to this negative input or ground on the PCF 8574. And then each of these, they're labeled pin zero through seven, run to the other side of each of these switches or buttons. If I am using something like a cutie pie, I have barely enough GPIO to do something like this as it is. And if you want to have more and more and more, well, it's one of the best ways that you can go is to add a GPIO expander like this. In particular, since this runs over I squared C, just plug this into the stem of QT port here and you're ready to go. You can change the address jumpers on here to use up to eight of them.  So if I go ahead and plug this in now over USB, you'll see it starts up. We have a little indicator light on here. Just shows us there's power to the board, to the GPIO expander. And what I'll do is actually open up Atom here and you can see as I press buttons on my button board here, I am turning on and off a little print statement here. Earlier I had a demo of this using some MIDI output. It could be anything. Anything you need up to eight GPIO for, it's going to work really well. And they are very easy to code. So we'll take a look at the code here in a second. But you can see I can do, I can press them all if I want and then release them one by one. And it remembers which ones are held, which ones are released really easily. It's easy to communicate with because we have the expander library specific for this expander chip. And we have one that works in Arduino as well as one that works in Circuit Python. Let me grab my code window here. And you can see all I really need to do in code is import, most important things, the PCF 8574 library using this as digital IO. I'm getting a little fancy in using the debouncer. You don't have to necessarily do that. And then I'm setting this up as an object on I squared C, on my I squared C bus. I set up the pins and this is the key right here. Whatever you've named the object, in this case PCF, get pin. And then we name the pins 0 through 7 on this board. So I'm looping through and just setting them all up in one fell swoop. And then switch to input in this case allows me to use them essentially in direction input and I'm setting the pull down or pull up as a pull up. In this case, it's pull up on this board. So switch to input pull equals pull up is just one line that conveniently sets the button up for you. Here's a, if you look here at this commented out section. This is how you do it if you're not doing a whole bunch of them. If you're not setting them as a debouncer, basically we're just set up a button equals PCF get pin pick 0 through 7. And then the same object switch to input pull pull up. And that's right from the sample code, which I'll show you in a second in the learn guide. And then I'm simply saying, okay, here's this demo PCF 8574 demo. And then in my main loop, I am running through 0 through 7 checking a debouncer update if it falls because it's starting out high and it goes low, that means I've pressed it. And then I'm printing out with a little fancy print statement here, something that gives me some spaces so I can move the objects around. I actually wired these up in a kind of funny order. So it goes 0 through 7 bottom right to upper left, which is bizarre. And then when I release one, you can see here I've got button two pressed. When I release it, it rises, the pin goes high again. And then we're printing out the off statement. So easy to use, very similar to other, Expander, i-squared C, StemAQT code that we've created and you may have used before. If you take a look at the learn guide for this, you will see we've got a data sheet for the chip here. So this is a Texas Instruments PCF 8574 chip. Let me get my extra me off of the screen there, there we go. And it says what it is, a remote 8-bit IO expander for the i-squared C bus gives you some stats and operating principles about it. Some curves for response and types of messages that stands over the i-squared C. So all the good data sheet stuff is right there. If we back out again and go to the pin out on the learn guide here, you'll see it tells you what to do if you need to change your address buses to use multiples of these on one i-squared C bus and avoid conflicts. We have all of the i-squared C power ground pins are on both the StemAQT ports and these pins. So if you want to solder to those and not use StemAQT, that's totally fine. And then we have all the expander pins up on the top, including the sort of extra set of the power and ground so that you can use those for the current sink and the ground for checking pins. And then there's some sample code both for Python, CircuitPython and Arduino. If you take a look at the Python docs, it'll show you some setups that you can do, some wiring setups both for a microcontroller as well as a Raspberry Pi that'll work on other platforms. Here it tells you to install that one library is all we need really. And then here's the sample code that shows you the most basic setup for setting up the board on i-squared C, creating a pin for an LED on seven and a pin for a button on zero. And then the key thing here is switch to output for the LED and switch to input for the button.  Let's see, I think that covers everything. Let me know if you've got any questions over in the chat. Pop over to my Discord and the YouTube. Let's see, Devon's Workshop said you were talking about the i-squared C multiplexers. They tried picking up some of those last week and they were out of stock. They sold out shortly after the product picked the week like two weeks ago. This very one, I think it was new. I don't think there were that many out. We should have quite a bunch, I think we stashed a bunch for this show. So if I reload my page here, we'll see. Yes, still in stock, you can get up to 10 of them. So if you wanted to get some of these, this is a great time to do it. And yeah, half price, so $2.48, a great time to get these. Let's see, another question we have over in the YouTube chat is from Dave McColl. How does this device compare to the Seasaw series? AT, Tiny is also $5. Yeah, so the Seasaw boards, depending on the chip on them, they have more capabilities. So there are, I think, I want to say they're PWM pins, but I can't remember on Seasaw if there are, I think so. Yeah, it's PWM, this one doesn't PWM. There are, I believe, more than eight ports available. And there's analog, there's at least a couple analog inputs, I think, on the Seasaw chips that we use. But yeah, this is definitely a similar type of thing, and it might be a good alternative if you're just looking to do GPIO and lots and lots and lots of it by adding these together. I don't know how many Seasaw iSquad C addresses we allow. It might be four, I'm not sure if it's eight. It might be more, but yes, very similar. And let's see, other questions, let me check over in our Discord. Yeah, check out that, the guide, actually, I believe Catney and Lady A to put up the guide already, so if you had to learn system, just look up PCF 8574, there's already a guide there. And then if you're interested in doing some multi button setup or multi LED setup, you can use this code that I'm showing here. This is very similar to any kind of set up a bunch of pins for debounce code that I use. I kind of go to the same well, which is a really good one. It's Todd Bot's Circuit Python Tips and Tricks Guide. I'll go there and grab the basic debouncer setup for debouncing multiple pins, a good little routine to use. Let me scroll up there so you can see the rest of the code here. And one other little tip, by the way. I only recently noticed this, but if you take a screenshot of this, just pause the frame and take a screenshot, at least on the Mac, the screenshot when you open up in Preview, does really good optical code or character recognition, OCR. So you can copy and paste text right out of a screenshot, which is pretty wild, but especially when it's nicely neatly, high contrast, a terminal font like this that's good for coding a mono spaced font. And these copy and paste really nicely out of OCR. So if you ever wanted to grab the code, you don't even have to retype it. Just go to a couple frames where I put this up here. Let's see. Trent Gajos over in YouTube says no more pies. Question mark? I think you're referring to Raspberry Pi, single board computers, and we get them in small batches and release them as we get them. One per customer, two-factor authentication to make sure people aren't cheating. We want to make sure as many people who can get one as we can, can. But PiePicos, I know we've got plenty of, but the Raspberry Pi, single board computers, they're making them as fast as they can, and we put them out when we can. Let's see. I think that is going to do it. So let's wrap this up. And let me put a little hanger on this. Put that on my wall there. I've got to stop using Stem-AQ-T cables for these, because then I have to go back and steal them off the board later. So I'm using just a piece of hookup wire as my hanger. There we go. That's my product pick of the week. This week it is the PCF8574 GPIO Expander with Stem-AQ-T. And don't forget, head to the store, go get one or more right now. That's the URL. And if you buy them during this show, they're going to be half off after the show. The price will go back up. No coupon necessary. All right. Thanks everyone so much for stopping by. Free to different industries. I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week. Goodbye.