How is technology transforming cities today? What we're seeing in cities is something very interesting. We have basically new economic models coming into existence. We also see all practices, all political practices, like prioritization of infrastructure, continuing. And they're continuing because of technology in entirely new ways. It becomes possible to manage infrastructures remotely, becomes possible to charge differentiated prices, becomes possible to exploit assets and utilize assets in ways that are not possible before. That, of course, left uncontrolled and left without any kind of governance in the interests of citizens would only aggravate existing inequalities of existence. In addition, of course, we're seeing practices like the sharing economy, which is not a term I prefer, but it's a term nonetheless that I think captures some of the dimensions. Of this changing environment, because of technology, it's Uber and Airbnb entering cities and offering to provide alternatives to transportation services, offering to provide alternatives to hotels. That clearly is another dimension that left unchecked might result, in fact, to the weakening of public transportation options, in the case of Uber. And to even greater speculation, one real estate, in the case of Airbnb. You've spoken in your before about how cities could be crushed by their own citizens, if they don't tackle this, the provision of services by new technology companies. Can you expect this? Sure. Well, in a sense, in the 1970s, we see the rise of finance and consumer credit as political tools and mechanisms promoted and embraced by governments. So it was basically done in order to decouple citizens from the existing basis of loyalty and support and solidarity, which were trade unions, and to more or less hook them up to the financial markets. So your well-being now will no longer be judged by how well your trade union defends you and how well you relate to fellow workers. Rather, it will be judged by where the stock markets are, what the interest rates are, how cheaply you can borrow and how much you can invest into a real estate. And the idea was that because of low interest rate environment, the rates, the values of assets, especially houses, will continue growing up. So that has given us an environment now where they kind of old Keynesian welfare state, whereby we would be provided with some free services, or being titled to some kind of a job that actually pays us, has been replaced by this privatized Keynesianism, whereby the roles that have previously been played by the welfare state and public services have been delegated more or less to the financial markets. So our well-being has to be guaranteed by constantly growing value, which of course is a bubble, but nonetheless, our real estate, and not through some kind of actual performance and growth in the economy, in the so-called real economy, the productive sector. So that has created a situation where people now that they discover that they no longer can afford to pay for services. Their job no longer brings the money that they want, interest rates, I would virtually add zero, so your savings no longer gives you the money that you want. They discover that, you know, taking advantage of the real estate that some of them are lucky to have is basically the only welfare, recognize and guarantee by the current neoliberal capitalism. So that has resulted not just in them speculating on real estate markets, on putting their properties on the market and selling them after holding it for four or five years, has also created an environment where they increasingly renting out their apartments on a short-term basis, which is where services like Airbnb come in really handy. I mean, they do provide a way in a vehicle for people to compensate for the stagnating or disappearing incomes from the real jobs, with the speculative bubble that now you can also raise and ensure periods and put your property on the market to be rented on a short-term basis. That, of course, is a national, and I would even say in Europe, a European policy. This is why we have interest rates that are so low, that's why we have European Central Bank and Gation quantity that we're using. This is why, more or less, the macroeconomic factors make it possible for people to continue gaining money on real estate that is completely decoupled from the performance of the real economy. Now, if a city doesn't want to be entirely ran out or crushed by this real estate speculation, and clearly we see that the effects of it are everywhere in Barcelona. You can see that there are more and more tourists flooding the city. Real estate powerhouses are buying more and more property, putting it out on platforms like Airbnb, then a longer renting at short-term, then a longer renting at long-term. We also talk about short-term speculation, which also limits the pool of assets available to citizens. Of course, it generates some resistance from non-property owning classes, which push cities to basically do something about Airbnb. The problem is that if cities start doing something about Airbnb, that will alienate them against the working classes, which have managed to buy property. So that creates an environment where cities are basically presented with the enviable task of having to basically solve the problem created by the bubble-prone capitalism, which cities, of course, are not in a position to tackle. There is no way for cities to reverse privatize gains in itself. So this is where I think cities have to actually work within the limits imposed on them by the national and global system, and they have to find ways to limit the ways in which this platform served the interests of global real estate capital. And that actually do not amplify the already speculative practices that exist in cities, but rather seek to channel them to a somewhat less speculative financialized model. So people should be able to rent their apartments for short periods of time and make up some cash as a way to compensate for the weakened and stagnating economy, but that should not be turned into a highly speculative vessel. So regulating Airbnb or banning it, I don't think that's the right step under these conditions. So if this market city works only on sensors and connectivity, how can cities wire cities and important sites for outside capitalist resistance? Well, it's my serious to me as just a combination of infrastructure for managing assets, and managing access to assets, because many of the assets within cities have been privatized. So the property owners and the infrastructure owners need a way to measure the returns, they need to measure use, they need to introduce differentiated pricing, all of that requires smart infrastructure of sensors and connectivity. Now clearly a lot of people are very unhappy about it, not just because the privatization of infrastructure means that the current owners of it usually have a very short term perspective. They want to generate the maximum of returns that they can and then just drop the asset on somebody else and then move somewhere. So basically it creates an environment where there is systemic under-investment in long term, infrastructural planning and resources. There's equity, private equity funds that purchase this infrastructure, hold it for 10 years, what they do, what they call sweat the asset, they try to generate as much value as they can in the short period of time and then they drop it like a hot potato. Clearly a lot of it also generates huge losses. If you look at privatization of highways in the United States and the way in which a lot of highway tolls have been taken over by big financial capital, none of that delivers the expected returns. But the firms that are doing it gain quite a lot of money because they earn their money on fees paid to them by governments, they do not earn their money from fees for market to customers. So the private equity sector and the infrastructure asset sector always wins. But of course it clearly makes a lot of citizens unhappy because the infrastructure doesn't function and the increasingly I have to pay more and more to use it. So infrastructure as an important component of the city itself becomes a side of struggle. And smart city as a kind of infrastructure for managing that infrastructure itself becomes a political terrain. This is why I think we have to be able to find a way to democratize the smart city but that can only be done if they understand that the reason why there is so much interest in smart cities is precisely because there are all those other processes, privatization of infrastructure, some kind of rise of urban entrepreneur realism that David Harvie has been talking about for 20 years. All of those processes that basically have created the background conditions responsible for the rights of the smart city. And those conditions need to be tackled themselves. We could not just expect that by somehow generating an alternative vision for the smart city will reverse decades of privatization of infrastructure that is a very hard process to reverse. To reverse. To reverse. To reverse.