one of welcome twelve a part of much of the twentieth century of rising levels of organizational came hand in hand with rising incomes moving to a big city more often than not a key key to a better life that still holds true but northern africa where the majority of people leaving for big cities in the global south particularly in africa may actually see their fortunes rather than improve is there a brown eyes ation turning from a blessing entire curse to discuss them now we're joined by robert buckley senior fellow in international affairs at the new school in new york mr barclay it's a pleasure talking to you thank you very much for your time thank you now almost every country in the world has a version of the breakfast at tiffany's movie about a young man or young women moving into a big city attracted by its opportunities but i understand it from your writing that it is a rather missed all or just perception of what are been

a station is like more and more people are moving to bigger cities not because they want to not because they're attracted by big lights but because they have no choice is that right that's right you know let me qualify that. the general sentiment or how it start of is that indeed cities grow more rapidly and urbanization happens as incomes increase and so in some countries and particularly in sub-saharan africa we've witnessed a settlement in which people move to cities because the conditions in the countryside are to their conflict or drought and so they're moving to cities in a situation where their income is an increasing but that doesn't mean their situation is an improving relative to where they were they were in dire straits in the countryside and came to the city so urbanization is not correlate it with increases in income but it doesn't mean. it's causing their situation to cure i

heard you say that many cities are now. prepared for the kind of and the flocks of new residents and their planning. making planning changes only after the occupants have arrived rather than before as was the case with say new york or barcelona in the nineteenth century. and that in your view leads to the proliferation of slums i wonder if you consider slums a kind of c.d.'s in the in the broad sense of the world i think the sense of. kind of the mis ologies of how urbanization fits into an economy was generally the notion that as urbanization increases societies become richer and that people coming to cities would often come particularly poor people and say in a slow as a way station on their way to becoming integrated into the city but no we're finding that in many african countries this is the third generation of families living in the same slow and they're not integrating into the society and slums or

increasingly according to u.n. data in most african cities it's a majority of the population indeed lives in slums without sanitation facilities and often without clean water you said before that moving into a bigger city it does not necessarily mean that doesn't mean at all that your life fortunes are going to worsen but i think. at least here in russia we associate living in a city with higher living standards down in the countryside high levels of hygiene high levels of health care but from what i understand of living in a very high dance community it's like slums for the proper access to health care are sometimes met nox as to health care at all what actually increases your likelihood of contracting disease it sure. is that do we understand at this point how those communities even function how do they address those kind of challenges

you know not extremely well for example. one of the issues that. a continual mother of tension two was the vision of said taishan and one reason i did is that in sub-saharan africa for the past twenty five years which is probably been their most rapid period of economic growth there's been almost no improvement in access to urban center taishan that's forty percent of the population has access so when you have figures that low the evidence suggests that no one benefits from the provision if you increase from forty to forty two no one benefits because you still have people desiccated in ellie's and you still have feces everywhere and so the sense of the health effects of something like that could be extraordinary and then if you compound that with many african cities are in dire straits already and there urbanization rates are at some of the highest levels ever so you're compounding a problem that's already severe with an influx that. could create really

nothing short of the catastrophe i think well i think in the one of five years or do you describe it as a looming catastrophe here on our hands do you think. their world community at large is well aware you know what i don't think why not i don't know i think there is attention to it but i think things like sanitation it's a topic that a government official wants to discuss it. something that you don't get a lot of ribbon cuttings for opening up a new sewer system you know that you would with redesigning the bolshoi or something like that. that's one conjecture about why that's the case but frankly i don't know but there is don't let me overstate it there is attention to it but i don't think the resources correspond to the need the argument that is often used to persuade donor countries to. provide resources for that kind of effort is the

theory for migration if you don't want people coming into your cities you need to spend some money on making bad lives more livable do you think that is a persuasive argument. and it's one that as you say it's i think. a myth that's been held by many officials in. public officials and indeed international agencies that the sense that you can prevent people from coming to the cities i know in some countries they in fact subsidize people to take a bus back to the countryside and they get on the bus and they go back and visit their relatives and then come back to the city and so it goes to my earlier point the one the way you are take you laid it is cities throughout history have offered bright lights and learning and occupations cities are a great thing and it's just how do you deal with this demographic movement is has always been a difficult process but i think right now in some countries it's a particularly difficult process i heard you say that almost all of the world's

next two billion people will leave and they celebrate islam saturated. communities given the scope of the problems already do you think the problem of slums will ever be resolved is that even possible given where we are at this point of time. you know and so i think you know there's a joke in economics where people said this is unsustainable and if the. sustainable it indeed will stop. so i think. given the potential problems here you could get people not moving to cities at nearly the rate that has been interested you could get a reaction from government. and so economists tend to be cynical and they tend to believe that in the long run things work out and so that's one view but i think there is a need to prompt people to react to this so that you react before the problems occur but i mean the problem of migration especially from the south. africa

is i think has been in the making for over a decade i mean it perceives the war in syria and if you think about billions of people moving to a very poor conditions regardless of whether they provide sanitation there or not it seems that the only way out of that situation is another op not. to build more housing there but actually it's you going to. it's and you see you know the thousands dying crossing the mediterranean into europe and the world probably hasn't had this many migrants. in fifty years since world war two i mean it's it is an incredible situation in that we see a lot of the news about international migration but the same thing is going on within countries and there's a rapid movement to cities in the same kind of phenomena now if you're alluding to

the fact that not many. politicians are policy makers. very key in. that problem or perhaps do not take it as the first priority and. there is a i think a very romantic. urban circles that c.t.'s will find solutions to all the world's problems since these no nation state is that they'll do that do you subscribe to that point of view so i don't think they care and i think cities have been far more innovative the national governments and i do think there's a sense in which cities are becoming politically more important and the ideas that are generated in the world are you know i think so much of our culture and ideas come from cities and it comes from just one writer jane jacobs talked about the only place where you can see a stranger of the or other traveler by going to a city and so there's just so much going on ideas are generated and so cities are i

think are a fulcrum of change like that but nevertheless central governments are still important very important in terms of addressing larger issues like income distribution and climate change you know what makes me concerned about this kind of discourse is the fact that they have long seen a gap that's when politics and policies and you know ideally politics is supposed to be a facilitator of policies but i think they're increasingly diverging especially in the western countries and my concern is that if we think this way of cities you know leading the way we will essentially leave all the major issues of life you know war and peace of life and that the politicians. do you have that sense and i wonder if you believe that politicians. care enough about the things that you supposedly care i think there's an awful lot of politicians talking

. about ideas that are clearly not only not evidence based but based against evidence and that community i don't fully understand but i do observe it a lot and. it's quite distressing and. i don't know how to explain it but it is a it's a real danger and i think measures to. policies that are shown to not be effective is but create political value in some way. is quite peculiar i don't want to make this into a political it's strictly about the city's bread where obviously recording it at a time when there is that major fear over confrontation between our countries between the united states russia over syria and you know it just strikes me and. so much attention is paid to delivering a strike on

a country whereas as you say we have millions possibly even billions of people living in squalor conditions and nobody ever would even discuss that on on television how do you gather a chance to talk about things that warry you so i think there's. an active discussion it's just there's not much action that's kind of depressing and there's a lot of action. as i said things that are clearly not only the right choice what we see today is something quite different and that information is provided and actions are taken that have very little to do or in fact are the opposite of well mr buckley we have to take a very short break but very well be back in just a few moments stay tuned.

join me every thursday on the all excitement chill and i'll be speaking to get us to the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy going foundation let it be an arms race is also a spearing dramatic development only and going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. welcome back to worlds apart the throbber and buckley senior fellow in

international affairs at the new school in new york. mr brooklyn just to finish. the issue all. where politicians. attention to. syria is a lot. on my mind a lot and i think there is also something. you know that country also requires and arjen how specialist like yourself because it has lots of formally urban communities where the infrastructure was damaged a great deal some of those communities and now trying to go back to normal but obviously the resources lacking or a very short i wonder if we understand as a global community at this point how do you try to rebuild those cities not only syria but perhaps also in iraq in a way that would encourage free conciliation between the various ethnic groups rather than strengthen the divisions that provoked those conflicts in the first

place. a famous english economist lord keynes who said. should be to be like dentists and to say we can repair this tooth and so terms of working in cities you have to have a context that the environment the broader political environment is reasonable and that people can read that politicians will be responding to the people when you have a state of war. there's nothing i can do with my motor skills. the works. and suggesting to go to syria and try to rebuild it from from from their own so i'm just asking whether it is no commitment rosabelle to carry out something on that scale that has already i mean to rebuild something on the scale that they have in syria. i think we've had if you go through history it's been cruel and destructive over and over again and so our cities have come back and many

are quite beautiful and wonderful places. if you look in the middle east and places like syria i agree with you it's totally depressing. and i wish the political issues involved with it could be resolved i don't begin to understand it or how to do that but i think until that is done there's very little hope that those cities will be able to turn the tide i think it has to come from the broader political context rather than from the city context kirkley from wrong i understand that the a specialized sort of matching. or correlating the city's layout its morphology to the economic activity and. we have an interesting example here in russia of the capital grozny which was destroyed two decades ago which has now been the belt of having a federal subsidies but i think there is a mismatch between how the city looks and how it operates in terms of the organic

self-sustaining growth i mean if you have the money you can get out of the city will exist but the question is how you make it self-sustaining. how do you figure out how to do the latter part of what doesn't require so we just did some work what we referred to as trying to avoid what they called them india's syndrome and it's this man who thought he was the king of kings and had a statue built of themselves that said well you look at me despair because i have such a beautiful place that i've designed and it's in fact in the middle of a desert building a city is a very organic spatial structure that responds to economic incentives and it's impossible for one player to know how to allocate and make the investments for the entire city i think as you mentioned earlier in new york in barcelona the plans there and what they did was quite quite basic in terms of set up

a structure so that people can respond to the incentives and build and paris and places like that they're just there as paris is a city of the. light still it's still quite beautiful and building a city that organically responds to the incentives and structures long live structures that can take advantage of where people want to live how they want to live and so forth is unquestionably the most important thing to do so a public policy maker to assume that he or she could do that is the highest degree and almost certain to fail now i know that you've also started the morphology off largest thirteen largest cities in russia and you suggest that. my fellow g. is less than optimal in terms of encouraging economic growth what do you see as the major impediments so let me qualify that in a couple of ways first of all i haven't been to russia in eighteen years i worked here during the transition and now i've come back and it's delightful to be back

and meet many old friends and just russian people are so friendly to me and. so my investigation was with the co-author who in fact is my son and he's a geographer who worked through satellite images of russian cities and what we did was compare those images to would cities look like around the world and what we find is that the types of structures of the cities the density of the population is such that it's unusual it's very unusual and so. papers written during the transition suggests that was quite costly to the russian economy and it was one of the reasons that the government was seeking to reform the way cities function. what we've found is that those patterns seem to not only persist but in some places to intensify so twenty five years after the reform you still have cities where instead of having most of the people living in the center of the city you often have most of them living on the outskirts of the city and so the idea of the city is that

people get together and they congregate and they. exchange ideas with a western city but i guess for us the russians. that kind of martha. you know something deeper about our culture we are very centralized people with some authoritarian tendencies so i wonder if that layout is ultimately going to reflection of not only our city planning but also of broader things in our culture you know we could as we say in the paper you know number one we're not sure it matters that it's different and if it does matter we're not sure that it's as costly as it could be but if you look at the studies in america these kinds of distortions they matter they matter a lot and they have. limits are the reduced economic growth in the united states by fifty percent and so did see ability to move to cities that have the highest

productivity if you can't move and you can't move to the places within those cities that afford you the opportunity to exploit your skills it stands to reason that you would be less productive whether that matters on a broader scale or whether it's something cultural we don't know we're just reporting that it is different here. russians to say do they agree to take what the causes are that we think what can be done about it and what can be done about it is quite difficult question. also attributed to a. problem which you described as too many people having too many rights to control the property which makes consensus very difficult and i think part of the reason is also that. the russian people after a long history of collective existence have also become very autum modest and they have void collective solutions collective action on their fifth objectively that to their benefit is that something permanent or do you say that

may change over time to have we seen in other cities how this collective muscle collective from the positive way how does it form so that was yesterday i gave the presentation and for russian experts responded and people from the audience responded that was almost a continual theme. it's not only the difficulty of negotiating it's the lack of desire to do so and that while the buildings the units were privatized many people don't feel that the building has anything to do they have anything to do with and that they should that should be provided to them and so one commenter said they're not real owners their view themselves as residents and there is this very collected feeling and so that's something that i think is profoundly difficult to change and it will take. i also think that in terms of the transition that some people take for example a person living on the outskirts of for example. in

a quite a distance or a job who has. transport heavily subsidized utilities heavily subsidized and not many job opportunities there are not as many as there were in the old days. what does a person do if you think of this the house with been given if you put the real cost to the utilities there are opportunities and there transport in fact they weren't given an asset they were given something that detracts from their their wealth and so that person is in a tough spot and so a lot of russians i think are in that spot and it makes it a very profoundly difficult political question it's an interesting observation especially given that there are authorities like to complain of. the lack of social mobility on the part of the population but you can also i guess think about the policy is that and courage that social mobility by for example restructuring some of those subsidies or how paying people to make. rational decisions about their

property but i think they are making rational decisions and it's difficult for the government to move away from subsidising the transport of utilities simply because those people are in such a costly spot and the killer afford it particularly pensioners what do you do about that and then it's just a transition from one type of system to another it's a very costly system change this effect is one that i don't think is from the discussion yesterday people were saying this is something we need to look at more closely now you mentioned that there haven't been in quite some time and i'm sure you've noticed that there must have put a lot of thought a lot of resources and various beautification. projects they have really trying now to make the environment a little bit more hospitable but i think an interesting phenomenon here is that. many of the residents are not actually excited about the kind of innovation and what it also reveals as they call for skill of community cation on the part of the

authorities or perhaps on the part of the population is that. a particular russian phenomenon known as is this something that you see in other cities as well. i'm not sure i guess i should say the city. center here but it's quite lovely and it's really it's not what it was when i was here when the transition was going to go it's no it it's a european city it feels a little if you see incredibly russian but it just it's delightful. so to me it's an external observer in the person who goes to lots of cities. it's great to come back and the people are very warm and it's very it's. it's been a delightful experience from the air speaking on their personnel and i guess my question is more professional and. more off your profit professional expertise i think they have they the idea that the mosque authorities have is that

if you crave the right kind of environment that you know how to bring. more people into the city not only tourist but also on business as it will also how keep the most agitated within the city do you think that kind of rationale is going to work especially given the. kind of times that male even so what i think. this is. a fascinating historical moment and it reminds me of. new york when there was a man named robert moses who they say that he's the only man in the twentieth century who you can see from the moon see his creations on earth and he really carved up new york city and he built a lot of it he built lincoln center he did a lot with the central park but he also destroyed a lot and he destroyed and he cut through neighborhoods particularly poor neighborhoods and avoided the rich neighborhoods and so his movement

a restructuring a city. you know for better or worse must goes in a point where it needs to restructure and so how do you do those things when you have all the millions and millions of people who have different ideas you have to listen to them and i think the. robert moses was a woman named jane jacobson very much getting community participation but that slows things down a lot and you can understand when there's a need for change what people don't want to engage the community but nevertheless if you don't it doesn't work and so i think it's a very difficult i don't begin to second guess the things that have been. but i wish them well. mr buckley thank you very much for this conversation it's been delightful i appreciate. and i also encourage our viewers to keep it going on our social media pages as for me hope to see you again same place same time here on worlds apart.

most definitely wasn't a victim. of any kind of. you know effect on the russian side because it was both really destroyed the russian could have debates here as far as exchanges sort of concerned and they depended on it because they certainly have to get their people back if they get into trouble. los angeles the city of luxury and fame but also an alarming number of people living in the streets. a simple fact in l.a. he's there's just not enough shelter even if people on the streets right now

decided to come in there's nowhere to come in it's been a struggle. to get this man from his own response of the problem and constructed dozens of tiny homes for people in need of shelter when you have nothing in order to go. you know having something like this may as well be a castle but do the authorities accept such solution tiny house on a city parking space is not a solution perth to someone monitoring the site otherwise it'll be a free for all and is there a better alternative to end the homelessness crisis. in the stories that shaped of the week doubts are raised over

a video of an alleged chemical attack in the syrian town of duma which led to western airstrikes are teammates locals who saw what happened. people from the white helmets told us about the use of chemical weapons. we saw no sign of that we run started pouring water over the people but the seemed to be ok and then walked away without any help. dozens of asylum seekers in germany asked to be arrested as a terrorist suspect in a bizarre tactic to avoid deportation also. tensions flare up in paris as transport workers continue their nationwide strike president against.