Hey there, University of Toronto alums. It was great to see some of you in person at my lecture in Downtown Toronto. Thanks for so many people coming out. I've got a bunch of emails from a bunch of you saying, it's great to be in the course. I actually met a woman on the street last night in front of my office at the University of Toronto, who told me she was in the course. And at least to my face, she said she was enjoying, let's hope she's enjoying it. And heard from a bunch of you about issues with being enrolled and your emails and Coursera. And of course, we got you enrolled, so please if anything happens send me an email to my University of Toronto account. And either myself or our fantastic course team will take care of any issues you might have. And it's great, I think last I looked, enrollment was over 2,000. So thank you, and you made me and our team really, really happy. I mean we're really excited that this course has appealed to so many of you. Well we've just been through week one of the course, which is really about why cities are important and what cities do. And how they have become if in the old agricultural age, the farm was the organizing platform of the economy? And in the old industrial age, the factory and the office were the organizing platforms. One of the premises of this course is in the knowledge age and in the innovation age. In today's society, the city itself, the city and the suburbs metropolitan area is the basic platform. It's where talented people head, it's where ideas are created. It's where great universities and knowledge institutions are. And that metropolitan area, that city is the basic platform of the knowledge economy. And in week two of the course, we'll be talking more about a world of cities. And how this is not just happening in advanced countries like Canada or the United States. Or the advanced and developed countries of Europe and Asia. Really, we're seeing worldwide urbanization. And the way in which the world is developing today, globalizing and developing today is through the creation of these new cities all across the world, billions of people moving in the cities. Thank you guys for being so diligent, so interested in the course. Thank you for participating in the discussion forums and building on one another's ideas. And please continue to do that, and we have three questions. We have more than three questions, but what we did because we had so many, was distill the questions into three subsets of questions. So the first one says, cities provide the place and means to engage in all sorts of diverse activities, and this is a double edge sword. They generate a lot of positive things, productivity, ideas, wealth, social advances, cultural advances, political tolerance. But, but, but they also generate negative things on the other side of the equation. Waste, congestion, political stressors, and this person says, how do you think about the good and bad? And they believe the cities are doing more good than bad, and I think I agree. You'll see when we get through the course to week four, where we talk about my latest research on what I call the new urban crisis. I make essentially the same point, although I think the question frames it better than I do. It set frames beautifully, that cities are driving innovation. The clustering of people and ideas are making us more productive. They're generating wealth, they're generating revenue. But that same basic force, that clustering force, generates congestion. It generates increased housing prices, it carves divides such as inequality and it makes us more segregated. It actually creates a political backlash in the form of populism and anti-urbanism. But I tend to think on balance cities do, do more work with them. I don't want to give the whole course away, but I think that over the course of human history more and more of us have moved to cities, more and more of us have urbanized. Cities have become more advanced. So I think these negative effects while they're quite really in our time and especially as University of Toronto alums. Especially in the great city of Lake Toronto or a New York or a London or Seoul or Paris, and I could go on. I think that ultimately it will be the place these problems are resolved because cities, unlike gated suburbs are very diverse places. They have representation across socioeconomic classes, ethnic and racial groups. So that political process, I think will cause these problems to be addressed. And that's something we'll talk about more as the course goes on. Second question, cities represent communities of individuals, people, businesses, social structures, and the infrastructures that undergird them. They are clusters of activities that help people live their lives and better their lives. They can also be destructive of this balance of work and living and well-being get out of balance. And this person talks about what happened in US cities, cities like Chicago. That's so hallowing out, that's poverty, my own city were I was born, of Newark, New Jersey. Where the affluent moved out in the city was almost fully taken over by poverty and economic dysfunction. This person says, they become resource deserts. How do we make these cities better? What will be the future? Well that's the subject of the course. I think on the one hand, many of our cities have revived almost automatically. The past 20 years have been the years in which cities like Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, Boston, London, cities all over the world have revived. But not just those great cities, cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago. If you go to Chicago, now it's downtown is thriving. Cities like Detroit, even Newark where I was born, but that revival process is uneven. The affluent colonize certain areas of the city, that may be more the case in Chicago or New York, But bt's also the case in Toronto. And the poor are pushed out further and further, and our cities become separated. We become really a tale of two cities as the affluent concentrate in certain parts of the cities. And certain parts of the suburbs around the downtown core, around transit, around knowledge institutions, around amenities. And the less advantage are pushed out further away, and that's what the course is about. We'll discuss that phenomenon, why it occurs and also talk about how we can begin to have a conversation about and begin to solve it. The third question is, cities do something that few other forms of human organization do. They manage people, they facilitate our interaction on a massive scale in a non-hierarchical manner. They evolve organically, they're kind of emergent systems. Another way of saying is they have their own metabolism. One thing I like to say is, if we think at all other organisms as they get bigger you go from an ant, to a mouse, to a cat, to a dog, to a person, to a horse, their metabolism slows down. Cities are the one organism that as they get bigger they have to get faster, their metabolism has to speed up. And as Jane Jacobs, really the greatest urbanist of all time, told us cities are really arenas of disorganized complexity. There isn't a master plan, there isn't a boss, there isn't a hierarchy. It's groups of people organized in neighborhoods that kind of find one another and they emerge, they emerge organically. And actually, when we try to intervene with big top down plans, oftentimes we throw off that balance. So yes, this question or this learner is absolutely right. Cities are unlike business corporations, they're unlike business firms. They're unlike other forms of human organization is that they are quintessentially emergent and complex and dynamic. And they have their own unique metabolism, and that's why they're so interesting to study. And the fact of the matter is if the farm was the platform of the agricultural age. And the factory was the platform of the industrial age, these complex, self-organizing, dynamic, disruptive places called cities which depend on us, right? To combine and recombine and create ideas and new things are really platforms of the knowledge age. So not are they only a different kind of organization, they're the kind of organization that is in many ways the principa. Or primary organization that organizes our economy and society in the knowledge age. Thanks so much for being part of the course. Thanks so much for these unbelievably fantastic questions. Please continue to contribute. Please continue to be part of the discussion forums. And please continue to build on one another's ideas. And if you have a question for me, or you have a concern about the course, there's something we could help you with. Please email me, and I'll make sure either I or a member of the course team handles it. And thank you again for being part of The City and You.
