Where are we going wrong? Well, one of the ways that we've gone wrong, and this is my opinion, is that we have too often focused on the aesthetic at the expense of utility. And Arup has been involved in a number of these projects focusing on the aesthetic alone. For instance, the Athens Olympics did a tremendous job of integrating both the street scale and the transportation scale in Athens. The Parthenon did that as well. The planning for Mexico City in the Aztec days did it as well.

We've missed a lot on those opportunities and, in many cases, particularly in the United States where we've never had an urban policy, we’ve never had a national government that actually thought that cities were opportunities rather than problems. We have not been very effective at turning the corner in terms of marrying the aesthetic with the utility in terms of addressing these key kinds of questions. You know, the problem-solving in Moscow, in terms of the Soviet era, was how do we house people in the cheapest possible way?

We're doing a number of projects in China. One such project is called Dong Han, which is a new town for 500,000 people. The premier of China has directed it to be the world's most ecological city when it's done. And it has nothing to do with aesthetics or love of nature. It has to do with really hard core, strategic issues for the Chinese in terms of the availability of fuel, the availability of water, the increasing dissatisfaction of the public with regard to living conditions, and a variety of other things like that.

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