sign for the car. make sure you film how you get rid of the press cards do it in a creative way and with commentry so apparently according to these messages from their h.q. they thought faking u.n. credentials was a good idea by the way mikhail khodorkovsky who you mentioned he is the out let's pay tron he later claimed that the whole trip to the central african republic was coordinated with the un however the united nations said that they knew nothing of it so as we just heard the plan suggested using freshly printed press cards at one stage of the trip and then burning them at another so they knew that they were breaking the law in advance by entering the country with a tourist visa without any accreditation you might say fair enough the central african republic or most of the country is lawless land ok so your logical

assumption would be they must have a go to person on the ground then right well at least a proper translator in this case or again some sort of fixer definitely what i would say is that they should have had a carefully thought through plan the reality though was that they didn't have any confirmed fixers and not even and a tenner and no wonder that was the point when they arrived their problems started piling up one after another and i just want to show you parts of some other messages that were sent by one of the members of the crew guys were in a bit of a logistical disaster the locals are just in adequate gadgets are absolutely alien to them there's a feeling of total helplessness when it comes to language basically no one speaks english. the journalists mission in the central african republic obviously meant

that they would have to sneak through some heavy security and here's what the cameraman texted and the group chat after one of their first attempts to do that we couldn't get in they said it's only possible with a permit from the defense ministry plus two cops met us with all our equipment by the hotel we had to bribe them then we were stopped at the checkpoint and other bribe but a smaller one the local sea cameras as a negative unfriendly thing so again as i said this is an absolute mess and again if we are to believe the leaks i can tell you that the way the media were treating this story starting to add some sort of conspiracies to it is not really the way to go the investigation is still ongoing and many more details will surface will be looking into them and now thank you for bringing us that report. that's

your global news update for this hour and thanks for tuning in. on and welcome to the party for much of the twentieth century a rising levels of organizational came hand in hand with rising incomes moving to a big city more often than not a ticket to a better life that still holds true but not everywhere the majority of people leaving for big cities in the global south particularly in africa may actually see their fortunes worsen rather than improve is a ribbon a zation turning from a blessing intercourse well to discuss that and 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 miss all the driest perception of what are been a station is like more and more people are moving to bigger cities not because they want to know 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 phenomenon or how it's still out of it is that indeed cities grow more rapidly in urbanization happens as incomes in cruise and so in some countries in

particular in sub-saharan africa will. witnessed a phenomena in which people move to cities because the conditions in the countryside are tearing 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 isn't 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 that it's causing their situation to cure i heard you say that many cities i'm now. prepared for the kind of and the flagstaff new residence and they're planning on making planning changes only after the occupants have arrived rather than before as was the case with let's 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 mythology 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 you know 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 so and slums are increasingly according to u.n. data in most african cities it's a majority of the population indeed lives in slums without hesitation 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 living in very high downs communities like slums without proper access to health care are sometimes felt knocks us 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. considerable amount of attention to is the provision of 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 and it'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 compare it with many african cities are in dire straits already and there urbanization rates are some of the highest levels ever so you compounding a problem that's already severe with an influx that. could create really nothing short of the catastrophe i think well i thing they want to hear because they did describe it as a looming catastrophe on our hands do you think. the world community at large is well aware of what's going on i don't think why not i don't know i think there is attention to it but i think things like senate a should 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 were to queue later 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 their problems already do you think they have 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 it's. 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 saharan africa is i think has been in the making for over a decade i mean it precedes the war in syria and if you think about billions of people moving to a very poor conditions that regardless of whether they provide sanitation there or not it seems that the only way out of that situation is not the op not. to build more housing there but actually it's you going to leave 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 and the same kind of phenomena now if you're alluding to the fact that not many. politicians are policy makers. very key in. the 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 that is not 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 that comes from just as one writer jane jacobs talked about the only place where you can see the 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 that is the fact that they have long seen a gap that's been 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 to me is 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 strictly about the state is where obviously recording it at a time when there is that major fear of. confrontation that the in our countries between the united states russia over syria and you know it just strikes me that. so much attention is paid to delivering a strike on a country where 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 often do you get a chance to talk about things that worry 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 as i said things that are clearly not only not evidence based

but against the evidence. they're used there's a famous old conservative economist milton friedman who said that economists roller to provide the information and people like 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 over. short break but we have been back in just a few moments stay tuned. welcome

back to worlds apart that's brokered by the way senior fellow in international affairs at the new school in new york. mr buckley just to finish. the issue all for us. 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 an archon 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 various ethnic groups rather

than strengthen the divisions that provoked those conflicts in the first place. a famous english or columnist 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 the politicians will be responding to the people when you have a state of war. there's nothing i can do with my motor skills about how the city works. and suggesting to go to syria and try to reveal it from from from their own so i'm just asking whether it is no commission exhaustible 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 mankind has been cruel and destructive over and over and some cities have come back and many

are quite beautiful and wonderful places. if you look in the middle east in 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 they are specialized in 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. federal subsidies but i think there is a mismatch between how the city looks and how it operates in terms of the organic

south 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 that doesn't require so we just did some work what we referred to as trying to avoid what they called the. syndrome as i'm in the us 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 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 the city of la. it's 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 russia's largest thirteen barges that is in russia and you suggest that it's 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 who are so friendly to me and. so my investigation was with the co-author who in fact is my son and he 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 you 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. the myths are that they're produced 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. esther russians to say do they agree to take think 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 describe best to 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 automatized they avoid collective solutions collective action even their fifth objectively that

to their benefit is that something permanent today saying 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 an almost continual theme that 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 be provided to them and so. come after so they're not real owners there they 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 time 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 from 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 that the house that's 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 wealth and so that person's 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. about 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 they can't afford it particularly pensioners what do you do about that and that'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 this vironment 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. scale 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 in 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 as 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 the delightful experience that he was speaking on that in the first minute i guess my question is more professional and. more off your profit professional expertise i think 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 advocated 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 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 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. robert moses was a woman named jane jacobson very much getting community participation but that slows things down a lot and you can understand more and 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 well mr barclay thank you very much for this conversation it's been delightful i appreciate your time and i also encourage our viewers think you're probably going on our social media pages it's funny to see you again same place same time here i don't want a part of.