The question of peripheries, is finally almost the majority of the newcomers who are going to settle down in the cities periphery, so the pressure will be, not on city-centres, or on the today's existing city, but on territories which are not urbanised yet, so the natural territories that surround the cities. This is the main issue with peripheries. Then, last issue, widespread mobility, as we can see, statistics are helping us for that, people are more and more mobile, they move around more and more, have to cover more and more distance, often due to the effects of urbanization. The more the city sets out the world, the more the city extends itself, the more each inhabitant has to cover, against their will, most of the time, distances everytime bigger. So let's start from our urban mutations, let's start from our important issues. Now we are going to show our big challenges for the african city of tomorrow. Challenge number one: the right to the city, the right for everyone to have a spot in the city. Challenge number two: the question about climate and environment. Challenge number three: reduction of mobilities. Challenge number four: rethink the new forms of democracy. Here we are, those are the four main challenges for the african city of tomorrow. The right to the city, is the issue of land, of accession to the land, and the question is, just: what are we going to do with those thousands, millions of persons, who can't have access to the land on a free-market, and who are at the end of the day the products of the economic system we set up? This, is a fundamental question, what can we do with this majority of inhabitants of poor cities? The second aspect related to the right to the city is, advertising of public space. Advertising within the meaning of public, and its corollary that is privatization of a certain number of places. We see more and more gated communities, which means that entire streets don't belong anymore to the public field, the public space, with this noble concept of advertising, that would allow everyone, or that allows everyone to move freely, and we are in a situation in which more and more territories are privatized. And this is an extremely important question, that we should take into account in our planification, in the next classes, where we are going to slowly learn how to plan, but, make sure you keep in mind that, we have that issue of the right of birthplace. What can we do with that majority of people who don't have access to a free property market? We will have to put them somewhere. So what to do with this trend of privatization of public spaces? Second challenge: environmental challenge, this is actually an energy challenge. Countries, societies can go in three distinct directions. The first one, which is to link prosperity to increase of the quantity of used energy, or useable, per inhabitant. The more energy I consume, the more prosperous I am. Second possibility, is to transform, to have the highest return we can get per inhabitant. So we are making sure that we use in the best way as we can, with a high return, energy for each one of us. And third possibility, third option, is to reduce, finally, the quantity of energy per inhabitant. So those choices depend on the States, depend on certain cities, but depend on the choice of society we are going to make. We now today that if we keep on consuming more and more, we are going to extend our ecological footprint, and that we would tend to reduce more the consumption of energy. And we also have to take that into account, as we have on one hand a city that is more and more spreading out, and that requires in particular mobilities every time bigger, so an energy expenditure per inhabitant everytime bigger, while the sustainability would rather force us to do the contrary. So nowadays, poor people have to move more and more often, further and further. Why? Because they are going to look for cheap fields on the periphery, fields that are the only ones they may be able to occupy, or buy, if they get to reach this minimum price on the free market of land. So we are going to increase displacements of people, that makes the aspect of mobility, I would say the overall expenditure of the family increase and will play an extremely important part, and get to situations in which people are sometimes under house arrest, as they just can't pay their mobility. If I had to use 99% of my salary just to travel to get my salary, well it would be more advantageous for me to stay at home without doing anything. So this is an extreme case, of course, but more and more often we have to face those issues. And therefore, there is a huge lack of social justice, as at the end of the day, rich people can go everytime faster, those for which mobility and distances are not a problem, and poor people, the poorest ones are the ones who suffer from this situation. A small anecdote is that if we take again Ivan Illich in energy and equity, the wheel is not the main invention, but the ball bearings has allowed the invention of the bike, and has finally allowed that with muscular strength, we can move forward much more quickly. So it has allowed to do much bigger distances with the same muscular strength than we used to have before. We should have in mind, when we talk about regulating, reducing mobilities, that mobility today creates segregation. Speed potential allows rich people to go further and further, faster and faster. Mobility consumes a lot of energy, no matter what mode of transport we use. Except for walking and riding a bike which are human muscular strength, everything works rather with electricity or oil. And we have to know that, having that in mind, mobility creates urban sprawl. Its corollary is that urban sprawl also creates mobility. So we are in a self-supplying system, and if we want to regulate or reduce those mobilities, we have to act for those sprawl issues, on those issues about energy and on the spatial segregation. When we talk about redefining the forms of democracy, we obviously talk about participation, participatory process, increasingly fashionable in all the cities, even if we realise today how big the limits of those processes are. There is a big difference between asking for advice, and taking a decision all together. Those participatory processes pose a certain amount of questions and set limits. The first, is the question about participatory democracy against a representative democracy. Who are those people who are not elected, and who takes part in those processes? This is a question we have to have in mind, as in a democracy, we have to elect a certain amount of people, to whom we are giving the power to represent us. Of course, we are in the case of school, the case of theoretical figure, but the question of participation is about that. Who are those people who are invited in the participatory processes? The second question, is about scale. Can we use participatory processes in order to negotiate, manage, imagine, plan the very big infrastructures? Is it possible to sit all together around the table to think about big highways within a city? Does it make sense to ask for advice to absolutely everybody about those questions of big infrastructures? Third question is that we realise that people only react about their own situation. It is the not in my backyard, the nimby, that we agree with, but not in front of one's own house. And finally, those participatory processes are a sum of individual interests, but we never talk, or rarely, about everyone's interest, of public's interest. So those different challenges lead us to ask a certain amount of questions. Which are: which city do we want? For whom? For what kind of inhabitants? What role should the elites of those city play? Let's take a fictional example. In a city that would have twenty or thirty vehicules for 1000 inhabitant, am I going to create the same type of road or highway than in cities that would have 500 vehicules for 1 000 inhabitants? When I create a road, who am I going to favour? Which population? Is it for everyone, or is it only for a small proportion, an elite which has access to those infrastructures, that can ride way faster than others? I am not putting any value judgment, we only have to wonder for whom are we making the city. Is it for the highest number? Or is it for a small one? So which city do we want, which society do we want, what role do we attribute to all its inhabitants. And that backtracks on the question of the right to the city, to the first challenge I was mentioning earlier, which is what are we doing, how do we plan a city that could take into account those tens of millions people all over the planet that who don't have access to the land market, because simply, the smallest parcel is already too eminently expensive for their economical power? I leave this question open, we will come back to it later on in our class. We talked about the issues, the challenges, some questions. To conclude, I would like to introduce the question of the city's reading levels. When we want to understand phenomenon, there are three different reading levels. The first one is the formal and technical one. It is often the level of physical planification, networks' level. The second one, is the social practices level. At the end, the inhabitants of the city have practices that define a certain amount of behaviors, and we can, or we could read the city, and read the spaces of the city only regarding those social practices. A beach for example, somewhere on the atlantic coast. Finally, the third level is the symbolic one. No more technical questions here, no more social practices questions, we are reading questions of representation and picture. And this level is often less used, the reading level that we forget a little bit, but that is extremely important. This is the position that we take regarding the others, we have a symbolic position. So the idea is to ask ourselves when we try to plan, not only about the network question, it is not enough in itself, we still have to figure which are the practices that people will do on this network, and which are the imaginary ones and the representations that will develop around those uses. And this is only once we have taken into account those three reading levels that we can truly take into account all the size of the issue.
