So I thought I'd talk about identity.
That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me.
And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, I'd just read, in one of the papers, I can't remember, something from someone at Facebook saying, well, "we need to make everybody use their real names."
and then that's basically all the problems solved.
And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble.
And so what I thought I'd do is I'll explain four sort of problems about it, and then I'll suggest a solution, which hopefully you might find interesting.
So just to frame the problem, what does authenticity mean?
That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting.
[What's the Problem?]
That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, and because I'm not very good at presentations, I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card.
And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists.
And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good.
And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean.
(Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it.
I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly.
So the first problem, I thought, Chip and PIN, right?
[Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right?
So why is that a good example?
That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system.
That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah.
Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper.
And for a joke, we take that super-secure chip and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe and for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card.
So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up.
And even more amusingly, and on my debit card too, we print the name and the SALT code and everything else on the front too.
Why?
There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip and PIN card.
And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it jfox@example.org.
Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card are criminals.
You know what your name is, right?
(Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is.
The only place where you ever have to write your name on the back is in America at the moment.
And whenever I go to America, and I have to pay with a mag stripe on the back of the card, I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway, just as a security mechanism, because if a transaction ever gets disputed, and it comes back and it says Dave Birch, I know it must have been a criminal, because I would never sign it Dave Birch.
(Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it.
They know the name, from the name they can find the address, and then they can go off and buy stuff online.
Why do we put the name on the card?
Because we think identity is something to do with names, and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, which obsesses us.
And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, but if you're someone in politics or the home office or whatever, and you think about identity, you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on them.
And that's very subversive in a modern world.
So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms.
[Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid.
(Laughter) And I love that picture.
I like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, (Laughter) I like that picture for the moment.
Why do I use that picture?
Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person.
So him and his friends, they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, and they got all their friends who had bands, and they got them together, and they do it all on Facebook, and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the - I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it?
The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on.
They were at the bottom of the menu, they were like fifth, I thought they had no chance.
He actually got 20 quid.
Fantastic, right?
But my point is, that all worked perfectly, except on the web.
So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right?
That's the big problem we're trying to solve.
If only they were using the real names, Then you wouldn't be worried about them on the Internet.
And so when he says to me, "Oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars" or something, I'm like, "oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars."
(Laughter) I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right?
So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are.
So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report.
But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no.
You can't give them your real name.
Because what happens if they turn out to be perverts, and teachers and whatever.
So you have this odd sort of paradox where I'm happy for him to go into this space if I know who everybody else is, but I don't want anybody else to know who he is.
And so you get this sort of logjam around identity where you want full disclosure from everybody else, but not from yourself.
And there's no progress, we get stuck.
And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity.
So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I?
I should stop saying it like that.
For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox.
And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story.
This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S.
There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this.
She was very upset.
And so she went to one of the girls, and said, "you have to give me your Facebook password."
I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords.
So you've got to give them your Facebook password.
She was a kid!
What she should have said is, "my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning.
It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got."
That's what she should have said.
But she's a kid, so she hands over the password.
The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook.
So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home.
So the girl tells her friends, guess what happened?
The teacher logged in, she knows.
So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles.
And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there.
My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way.
Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing.
You have lots of identities.
And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one.
The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong.
Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way?
And it just doesn't work properly.
And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest.
I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters.
I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, so you can see why it would drive them into an anti-capitalist frenzy.
(Laughter) So I thought, well, look.
If I don't want to inflame the protesters, the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester.
So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book.
(Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black.
I go into the bank at 10 o'clock, go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch, I've got a 3 o'clock with so and so there."
Sure.
They sign me in.
There's my visitor's badge.
(Laughter) So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security.
That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security.
And as long as everybody learns their lines, everyone's happy.
But it's not real security.
Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, because I work for them.
I know that things are actually worse than these guys think.
(Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something.
Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank.
So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing.
I send a message, this guy's a rogue trader.
That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank.
If that message just comes from anybody, it has zero information value.
There's no point in sending that message.
But if I have to prove who I am, I'll never send that message.
It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon.
That message will only happen if I'm anonymous.
So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity there, otherwise we don't get where we want to get to.
So four issues.
So what are we going to do about it?
Well, what we tend to do about it is we think about Orwell space.
And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card that we got rid of in 1953.
So we think if we had a card, call it a Facebook login, which proves who you are, and I make you carry it all the time, that solves the problem.
And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse.
The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted.
The goal is to stop people from using identity in transactions which don't need identity, which is actually almost all transactions.
Almost all of the transactions you do are not, who are you?
They're, are you allowed to drive the car, are you allowed in the building, are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera.
So my suggestion-I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R &amp; D.
I think this is a solvable problem.
It's something we can do about.
Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who.
Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer.
So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us.
And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper.
Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's psychic paper.
You're not nerds if you say yes.
Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper?
Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying I guess.
Is that what you're going to tell us?
Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see.
So I want to show you a British passport, I hold up the psychic paper, you see a British passport.
I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation.
You see what you want to see.
So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one.
It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one.
It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18.
But nothing else.
So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18, instead of showing you my driving license, which shows you I know how to drive, what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, I show you my psychic paper, and all it tells you is am I over 18 or not.
Right.
Is that just a pipe dream?
Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you.
So in order to build that and make it work, I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them, we need a plan, which is we're going to build this as an infrastructure for everybody to use, to solve all of these problems.
We're going to make a utility, the utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere, I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along.
That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone.
So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money.
It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere.
It has to be absolutely convenient, that's me going into the pub.
All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub?
And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross.
It doesn't disclose any other information.
It has to have no special gadgets.
That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely.
If it means no special gadgets, it has to run on a mobile phone.
That's the only choice we have, we have to make it work on mobile phones.
There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions.
My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world.
That means something, I don't know what.
(Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me.
It has to be a utility which is extensible.
So it has to be something that anybody could build on.
Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this.
You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it.
This is how we're going to do it.
We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity.
I'm going to suggest to you the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards with the contactless interface on it, you've already got that technology.
If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody?
The technology already exists.
The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops.
So the idea that the gas man can turn up at my mom's door and he can show my mom his phone, and she can tap it with her phone, and it will come up with green if he really is from British Gas and allowed in, and it'll come up with red if he isn't, end of story.
We have the technology to do that.
And what's more, although some of those things sounded a bit counter-intuitive, like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, the cryptography to do that not only exists, it's extremely well-known and well-understood.
Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up.
So the technology already exists.
We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places.
That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band.
I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, this stuff works in these environments.
They don't need to be special.
So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode.
This was a very special case.
So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper.
Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface.
Thank you very much.
Travel with me to some of the most beautiful spots in cities around the world: Rome's Spanish steps; the historic neighborhoods of Paris and Shanghai; the rolling landscape of Central Park; the tight-knit blocks of Tokyo or Fez; the wildly sloping streets of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; the dizzying step wells of Jaipur; the arched pedestrian bridges of Venice.
Now let's go to some newer cities.
Six downtowns built across six continents in the 20th century.
Why do none of these places have any of the charming characteristics of our older cities?
Or let's go to six suburbs built on six continents in the 20th century.
Why do none of them have any of the lyrical qualities that we associate with the places that we cherish the most?
Now, maybe you think I'm just being nostalgic -- why does it matter?
Who cares if there is this creeping sameness besetting our planet?
Well, it matters because most people around the world are gravitating to urban areas globally.
And how we design those urban areas could well determine whether we thrive or not as a species.
So, we already know that people who live in transit-rich areas, live in apartment buildings, have a far lower carbon footprint than their suburban counterparts.
So maybe one lesson from that is if you love nature, you shouldn't live in it.
(Laughter) But I think the dry statistics of what's known as transit-oriented development only tells part of the story.
Because cities, if they're going to attract people, have to be great.
They have to be powerful magnets with distinctive appeal to bring in all those new green urbanites.
And this is not just an aesthetic issue, mind you.
This is an issue of international consequence.
Because today, every day, literally hundreds of thousands of people are moving into a city somewhere, mainly in the Global South.
And when you think about that, ask yourself: Are they condemned to live in the same bland cities we built in the 20th century, or can we offer them something better?
And to answer that question, you have to unpack how we got here in the first place.
First: mass production.
Just like consumer goods and chain stores, we mass-produce glass and steel and concrete and asphalt and drywall, and we deploy them in mind-numbingly similar ways across the planet.
Second: regulation.
So, take cars, for instance.
Cars travel at very high speeds.
They're susceptible to human error.
So when we're asked, as architects, to design a new street, we have to look at drawings like this, that tell us how high a curb needs to be, that pedestrians need to be over here and vehicles over there, a loading zone here, a drop-off there.
What the car really did in the 20th century is it created this carved-up, segregated landscape.
Or take the ladder fire truck -- you know, those big ladder trucks that are used to rescue people from burning buildings?
Those have such a wide turning radius, that we have to deploy an enormous amount of pavement, of asphalt, to accommodate them.
Or take the critically important wheelchair.
A wheelchair necessitates a landscape of minimal slopes and redundant vertical circulation.
So wherever there's a stair, there has to be an elevator or a ramp.
Now, don't get me wrong, please -- I am all for pedestrian safety, firefighting and certainly, wheelchair access.
Both of my parents were in wheelchairs at the end of their lives, so I understand very much that struggle.
But we also have to acknowledge that all of these well-intentioned rules, they had the tremendous unintended consequence of making illegal the ways in which we used to build cities.
Similarly illegal: at the end of the 19th century, right after the elevator was invented, we built these charming urban buildings, these lovely buildings, all over the world, from Italy to India.
And they had maybe 10 or 12 apartments in them.
They had one small elevator and a staircase that wrapped them and a light well.
And not only were they charming buildings that were cost-effective, they were communal -- you ran into your neighbor on that stairwell.
Well, you can't build this, either.
By contrast, today, when we have to build a major new apartment building somewhere, we have to build lots and lots of elevators and lots of fire stairs, and we have to connect them with these long, anonymous, dreary corridors.
Now, developers -- when they're confronted with the cost of all of that common infrastructure, they have to spread that cost over more apartments, so they want to build bigger buildings.
What that results in is the thud, the dull thud of the same apartment building being built in every city across the world.
And this is not only creating physical sameness, it's creating social sameness, because these buildings are more expensive to build, and it helped to create an affordability crisis in cities all over the world, including places like Vancouver.
Now, I said there was a third reason for all this sameness, and that's really a psychological one.
It's a fear of difference, and architects hear this all the time from their clients: "If I try that new idea, will I be sued?
Will I be mocked?
Better safe than sorry."
And all of these things have conspired together to blanket our planet with a homogeneity that I think is deeply problematic.
So how can we do the opposite?
How can we go back to building cities that are physically and culturally varied again?
How can we build cities of difference?
I would argue that we should start by injecting into the global the local.
This is already happening with food, for instance.
You just look at the way in which craft beer has taken on corporate beer.
Or, how many of you still eat Wonder Bread?
I'd bet most of you don't.
And I bet you don't because you don't want processed food in your life.
So if you don't want processed food, why would you want processed cities?
Why would you want these mass-produced, bleached places where all of us have to live and work every day?
(Applause) So, technology was a big part of the problem in the 20th century.
When we invented the automobile, what happened is, the world all bent towards the invention.
And we recreated our landscape around it.
In the 21st century, technology can be part of the solution -- if it bends to the needs of the world.
So what do I mean by that?
Take the autonomous vehicle.
I don't think the autonomous vehicle is exciting because it's a driverless car.
That, to me, only implies that there's even more congestion on the roads, frankly.
I think what's exciting about the autonomous vehicle is the promise -- and I want to stress the word "promise," given the recent accident in Arizona -- the promise that we could have these small, urban vehicles that could safely comingle with pedestrians and bicycles.
That would enable us to design humane streets again, streets without curbs, maybe streets like the wooden walkways on Fire Island.
Or maybe we could design streets with the cobblestone of the 21st century, something that captures kinetic energy, melts snow, helps you with your fitness when you walk.
Or remember those big ladder fire trucks?
What if we could replace them and all the asphalt that comes with them with drones and robots that could rescue people from burning buildings?
And if you think that's outlandish, you'd be amazed to know how much of that technology is already being used today in rescue activity.
But now I'd like you to really imagine with me.
Imagine if we could design the hovercraft wheelchair.
Right?
An invention that would not only allow equal access, but would enable us to build the Italian hill town of the 21st century.
I think you'd be amazed to know that just a few of these inventions, responsive to human need, would completely transform the way we could build our cities.
Now, I bet you're also thinking: "We don't have kinetic cobblestones or flying wheelchairs yet, so what can we do about this problem with today's technology?"
And my inspiration for that question comes from a very different city, the city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
I have clients there who have asked us to design a 21st-century open-air village that's sustainably heated using today's technology, in the heart of their downtown.
And that's to cope with their frigid winters.
And the project is both poetry and prose.
The poetry is really about evoking the local: the mountainous terrain, using colors to pick up the spectacular light, understanding how to interpret the nomadic traditions that animate the nation of Mongolia.
The prose has been the development of a catalogue of buildings, of small buildings that are fairly affordable, using local construction materials and technology that can still provide new forms of housing, new workspace, new shops and cultural buildings, like a theater or a museum -- even a haunted house.
While working on this in our office, we've realized that we're building upon the work of our colleagues, including architect Tatiana Bilbao, working in Mexico City; Pritzker laureate Alejandro Aravena, working in Chile; and recent Pritzker winner Balkrishna Doshi, working in India.
And all of them are building spectacular new forms of affordable housing, but they're also building cities of difference, because they're building cities that respond to local communities, local climates and local construction methods.
We're doubling down on that idea, we're researching a new model for our growing cities with gentrification pressures, that could build upon that late-19th-century model with that center core, but a prototype that could shape-shift in response to local needs and local building materials.
All of these ideas, to me, are nostalgia-free.
They all tell me that we can build cities that can grow, but grow in a way that reflects the diverse residents that live in those cities; grow in a way that can accommodate all income groups, all colors, creeds, genders.
We could build such spectacular cities that we could disincentivize sprawl and actually protect nature.
We can grow cities that are high-tech, but also respond to the timeless cultural needs of the human spirit.
I'm convinced that we can build cities of difference that help to create the global mosaic to which so many of us aspire.
Thank you.
(Applause)