Start the Week

13/06/2011

Andrew Marr talks to Richard Sennett about increasing urbanisation. With half the world's population living in major cities, Sennett asks why the art of designing cities has declined so drastically in the last century. Iain Sinclair turns a critical eye on the grand plans for London's 2012 Olympics, and asks what will happen when the last race is run. Kate O'Regan was appointed as a judge in the Constitutional Court in South Africa by Nelson Mandela when he became President in 1994. She reflects on the role of the judiciary in building a modern democracy. And the advertising guru, John Hegarty reveals how you sell someone something they didn't even know they wanted. Over the last four decades he has transformed brands, famously linking Vorsprung durch Technik to Audi, and in a stroke, changing the perception of a staid car. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 13 Jun 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. (air whooshing) - Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on Chumbah Casino.com. I looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing. They were also playing Chumbah Casino. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumbah Casino's home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere. So sign up now at Chumbah Casino.com to claim you're a free welcome bonus. It's chumbah casino.com and live the Chumbah line. Sponsored by Chumbah Casino. - No purchase necessary, VGW Group Void for prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply. (air whooshing) - Thank you for downloading the start of the week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello well urban visions dominate today's programme. Later on on the day when Turkey's new leader is talking about the importance of a constitutional change there, we'll be hearing about how judges helped shape the modern South Africa with one of those judges, Cato Regan. But first the modern city, its shape, its follies, its imagery. Richard Sennett, a professor in New York and London spent a lifetime studying what one new book calls endless cities. Ian Sinclair spent his life writing through novels and non-fiction about the eastern edge of London and his new book is a great howl of anger about what he sees as the destructive folly of the Olympics. But we're going to start with one of the best known creative names in British advertising, John Hegarty. Think of the launderette man in his underpants, horse-blowing dur technique and the black sheep that zags when the rest of the world zigs. You've written a book, John which is half memoir and half hand book. One of the points that you make in it is the notion of handling brands through images, through how things look is very old, goes back, for instance to the Italian Renaissance. Well, I talk about what is the finest brand in the world. We often have this debate when you get a group of advertising people together and say, what is the greatest brand? And I was at this conference in New York and I was asked this question, various people on the panel were talking about Nike or maybe it was Volkswagen or Coca-Cola. And I said the Catholic Church, there was a sort of slight gasp because religion in America is a tricky old subject. And I thought I might be sort of drummed out of the building. But then I went through, it was a slightly sort of irreverent point to make, but one that was trying to make a very serious point, that it was the greatest brand because first of all, the finest logo. I mean, you know, the cross is absolutely genius logo. Could have been a fish, could have been a carpenter's plane, but no, they went for it. And anybody can draw it, you know, it's just so easy to draw. And then I sort of went through kind of, you know, through the line, they built churches on the shape of the cross. They were sort of location, location, location. They understood, you know, being the centre of the city. And of course, we've got all the greatest artists and paint artists and musicians and architects to work for it. And a relatively small number of images, the crucifixion, the Pieta, et cetera, have every few years to be refreshed for the audience. Absolutely, like any great brand, the story remains roughly the same. You have to keep refreshing it. And of course, the church was brilliant, it kept, you know, we all knew the story, but it had to go to various artists and interpreters to say, well, give us a new twist. We've got to keep people, you know, excited about it. And so, you know, Michelangelo comes along and says, I know what I thought, painting on the ceiling, you know, so the story's on, so you look up, you know, brilliant, genius piece of media placement. Absolutely fantastic. You came out of the '60s art college world. I mean, every second rock musician of that age also came out of the art colleges. They were clearly extraordinary places for a while. Should have taken up the guitar, obviously, that's one big failure. But you chose not to, you chose to go with advertising and business. And you say again again, I mean, although this is partly a how-to book, it's a rather frustrating one because actually how-to, it means standing in the shower or running a marathon, it's the moments of sort of break through thought that are impossible to teach. Absolutely, that's why I call the book "Turning Intelligence into Magic" because we have these brilliant people in our business who are strategic thinkers, planners, we call them, who come up with brilliant sort of thoughts about brands and then what we have to do in the creative department is tone those brilliant thoughts into something that captures your imagination. So it's a kind of a mad industry in the sense of there is a bit of logic in it, but then there's this huge sort of element of magic. Well, it's clearly related to lots of other things. It's related to the ability to write good headlines or captions or make short films or all sorts of things, except that you have to deal with the client and a lot of your book is a kind of protest against compromise, it seems to me. Absolutely. So what happens when you get the wrong client or the client simply doesn't understand? Lots of examples in the book. Well, you have this sort of impasse and I always remember one of them, we were pitching for, this is back in the early '80s for the Mail on Sunday, it was launching, the Daily Mail was launching the Mail on Sunday. And the idea was really that we got to, which was they were sort of, it was a tabloid shape and that there was gonna be condensed and it was against the Sunday times. The Sunday times of that were pulling out lots of sections, there were more and more sections. Huge, yes. You had to have a lorry to take it home and we thought the idea was focused journalism, focused reporting. And so we came up with this line and they agreed with the strategy, we came up with this line about depth without drowning, used in depth and you weren't drowning in newsprint. And I always remember the presentation, there were three people from the Mail on Sunday, I think Shrimmsley was one of them, the editor then, or soon to be editor. And I presented this line and said, "So the line is depth without drowning." And there's this silence, you think, "Oh God, this isn't going well." And I can't remember which one says, "Sar." No, no, no, I don't like this, I don't like this. No, no, no. Every time I look at the word depth, I just read depth. I go, "Oh, depth, news in depth," sort of journalistic term. And then one of the others goes, "No, no, that's silly because, you know, "I'm good news in depth," as they've said. Of course, that's very good, but he said, he said, "Vences, but I have a fear of drowning. "I can't bear the water. "I just see death," you know. Another one was death and I'm sitting there going, and there's only three of these people, and there's only three words. So I turned to the one in the middle, I think it was from distribution, and I said, "How do you feel about the word without?" And then you kind of can know that it's all over. It's all over. Packer bags, get out fast, you know. One of the perhaps unexpected things that you say in the book is that you think Britain is awash with too many brands, too much brand management, and there's a whole category of parts of life which shouldn't be branded. Yeah, so I think it's kind of ridiculous. You know, not everything should be a brand. You know, we can define a brand as sort of the most valuable piece of real estate in the world, a corner of somebody's mind. But, you know, everything to be a brand, just as an example, I was just the other day, I was walking up Islington High Street, there's a church there, and underneath it, they've got connecting people with God. And you think, are we talking about a vodafone here, or, you know, this is a church, it's supposed to be a spiritual kind of, and you're connecting people with God. And you just think it's just ridiculous, or the my favourite which I have in the book is, and you'll see it if you watch the news outside Scotland Yard, working for a safer London. Anything, well, what the hell are they supposed to be doing? That's like, you know, it's sort of, and so it diminishes that my point in the book is, if you don't do it well, if you don't capture the spirit of an organisation, you diminish the organisation by putting one of these stupid lines on. You don't need them. If they're great, they're good. If they're not, you shouldn't have them. And a lot of this is about slightly shocking people, making them laugh or gasp or double take with a brand or something, whatever it might be. That presumably just becomes harder and harder and harder. There's a sort of inflationary aspect. Well, there is, except that's the inventiveness of the creative mind. When everybody else is in one place, that's why we say when there was Zig, you should Zag go over there. And that's, I think in a sense, my whole life as a creative person has always been, take the opposite point of view. And the most important word, a creative person, can ever utter is why. You just keep saying, why? Why is that? Why is it like that? And challenging perceptions, challenging the way people do things, is very energising and it gets people thinking. And if your industry has a downside reputation as it were, it's because the perception that ad men will take on any client for anything and make it sexy, make it good, make it attractive, even if it's rubbish, even if it's soul-destroying or spirit-draining or whatever it might be. What's the response, I mean, are there a kind of whole category of clients and people that where you... However good the money is, you wouldn't take them on. Well, when we started BBH, we said there were two things we wouldn't work on. One was politics and the other was cigarettes. Well, this was back in 1982, 'cause cigarettes now you can't advertise anyway. And the reason we didn't want to work on politics is we felt, we have this, my partner Nigel always says, "None of us are as good as all of us." And we work together and politics becomes very personal and it's very hard therefore people to work in it. So we didn't ever want that. And obviously cigarettes, you know, I spent my life saying to my kids don't smoke. So how can I say that? Then go into the office and say, "Here's a great ad for a cigarette company." So we did that. And I think there was a friend of mine who came up with a wonderful definition when we were talking, we often talk about what would you work on, what wouldn't you work on. And he said, "I would never work on something "I would not want my children to partake of." - No, that's an interesting one. Because you're not like barristers. - No. - There's no taxi rank principle you can choose. - Yeah, you can choose. And I think you have to be emotionally involved to get into a brand and to sort of become a part of it. You have to really like what you're selling. - Ian Sinclair, we're going to come on to the Olympics brand in a moment. But what did you make of this book? - Well, firstly, you're a sort of samurai of consumerism and branding. And the idea, or you're so deeply in the present. And when I'm reading the book, I can see this enormous struggle between the creative and the necessity that you have to have approval. And an advert that's successful is one that either wins prizes or actually wins lots of money. You're kind of aspect as artists, or as independent in the structure that you describe, must always be in contradiction to the work that you're doing. - Well, I quite, I don't, I really quite like that. I enjoy that challenge. To me, it's what pumps you up. It's what gets you excited. And again, not wishing to go on about the church, but I think that when you looked at Michael Angelo and his arguments with the Pope, I mean, not that I'm saying I'm in that league of talk, of course, but you know, there's always that conflict between client and creative person. And it's how you get around it is part of the fun of what you do. How can I answer that query, which is sometimes completely stupid and make it work? - It is interesting that a lot of great art is produced, was produced historically with very aggressive and difficult clients, I mean, monarchs and popes and all the rest of it. And you could also say presumably that a lot of modern art, I mean, I think of people like Damien Hearst and Spot paintings is brand. I mean, you know, there's a Damien Hearst brand and he sticks with the brand and he refreshes the brand. But it's, there's not such a difference. - No, there isn't. And I've always said that, you know, you can think about brand as a brand as, you can either say reputation. If you want to use a slightly different word, a brand is really reputation. - Okay, to a Regan. - One of the things that interested me about the book is whether there's a big difference in cultures as to how people respond to advertising, because you make this point about irreverence, for example. And then you talk about how certain things will work in America, but won't work in Europe. And I wondered whether it is possible in a sense to follow a brand across cultures or whether that really is something one can't do. - Well, you can with certain brands, it depends on the brand. We always say, you know, movies go around the world, art goes around the world, music goes around the world. So why can't advertising by and large? It's because the local client doesn't want it to, is they want to preserve their little sort of domain, their kingdom. But certain things you do find that you hit a cultural difference, and there are cultural styles as well. - Well, let's turn to the brand that Ian Sinclair hates so much, which I think cost £400,000, the 2012 logo, that strange, strange object there. Your new book, Ghost Milk, is partly a memoir because you're telling the story of a swathe of East London and land beyond East London, really, where you first kicked around in the 1970s and grew up through and have seen change so much, and which is at the epicenter of what's happened with the Olympics. A lot of your problem with the Olympics is about boundaries and edges and fences. So let's just start with that. - Yes, I mean, there's a shocking moment when you have a particular landscape in the Lower Lee Valley, which was a freedom for the neighbouring boroughs in the sense that it was undefined, it lacked narrative, it was pastoral, it was decaying urban, it drew people into market gardens and all this. And suddenly, one morning, out of nowhere, appears this enclosure, this grand enclosure of the Blue Fence. And very soon, the Blue Fence is also being branded, it has these fabulous computer-generated visions of a perfect future, which are so convincing that people actually believe this already exists. - And it's guarded by former Gurkers. - Joanna Lumley's Regiment of Gurkers are now guarding the inner sanctum of the Olympics, very effectively and unaggressively, that people, they have such an aura that it works beautifully. Yes, that's very good. - And I'm just going to read out just a few sentences if you don't mind of the book, because it gives people a bit of a sense of what it's like, except I can't find it now, because I put it on my Kindle and it's gone again. Never mind. But the bit that I was going to read out was a sort of attack on all the puffery and all the financial people and the PR bag men and everyone who pours in to convince local residents first and foremost that this is a better better feel. - It's rather like the period after the American Civil War when the carpet bag has hit the south. There's a strange global regiment of weird moneymen and imagineers and promoters of every kind of scheme, including and talking of branding. I'm sure I myself get branded very rapidly as being the anti-Olympic person. And this is really not the case in the whole book. The old book is a kind of essay of love for the territory initially. I'm working in the same territory in a marvellously named place called Chobham Farm Angel Lane. In a while, we've got Thomas Hardy. This is now what is now Westfield. It was a container loading operation where you saw exactly the same motives were there from the very earliest days of how to exploit a piece of London that's a blank on the map. - And the ultimate exploitation that you see coming and dislike is vast shopping centre. - Well, there is this sense that in the end, everything will be this huge mall-like world in which interior and exterior can't be separated. You have silver metallic trees outside and real greenery struggling to survive inside. And you have all of the restaurants in the world without having to go anywhere. Essentially, everything aspires to the condition of an airport departure lounge. Everybody is doing duty-free shopping. And they're buying nervously as if they were going to undertake some terrible journey to put off the moment of going back into the gridlock of traffic, which surrounds these terrible islands that are being considered. We're creating islands and barriers. So the idea of the barrier and the edge land seems to be absolutely vital to all of this. - I wonder when I was reading your book whether you saw what's happening to East London and the Olympics as a general metaphor or simile for the rest of what's happening to Britain, really? - Absolutely, because as soon as I realized this was not a place I wanted to live close to, I started to examine the rest of Britain. And when you start to go across the North, you see those millennial follies spread out everywhere. Eco-centers that have actually become eco-centers because they're abandoned. The weeds are coming up and nobody can support them. There was this great thing of making structures such as the millennium dome that had no content, that were all a forcible celebration with nothing to celebrate. And you end up with these terrible images of the queen grimacing on New Year's Eve in the terrible embrace of a political philosophy or a bunch of dignitaries marooned on Stratford Station, confronting the real. It's an endless argument between the real and the virtual. - Richard said. - It did give me pleasure, but I mean, especially as anybody with an imagination can't help but be stimulated by these great events. These are global themes. And that the idea that money itself is disappearing is a substance. - Well, I wanted to ask about money because of course the response from the Olympics industry will be lots and lots of convincing and very specific appearing statistics about the huge amount of money that's going into the area for regeneration for new housing for this, for that. And you have a strong suspicion that a lot of it arrives in Stratford, as it were, alights briefly and then vanishes off into somebody else's pockets to buy a Tuscan farmhouse or whatever. - Very much so. I mean, it was a smokescreen. I didn't understand what was happening till one day I was wandering through the ruins of Stratford High Street, the civic granders that were gone and the old library was a maquette that demonstrated that the only final legacy was this huge Westfield shopping mall and that the stadium itself would now be called the Westfield Stadium. That was the story. And I realized that the pitches as I read them reminded me of something and the more I looked at them, I realized what they did remind me of was the publicity and the promotionism of 1936 games in Berlin. - Yes. - That the whole story of controlling the news media, capturing land and laying out grand projects, bringing the world in, sort of underwriting any kind of horrific regime or philosophy. - But at least there was no censorship. - The kind of censorship here and there. - I'm referring to the local library moment, as you know. - Oh, the local library moment, where I was banned from appearing in a local library was such a sort of absurdity that the level of attention that something as ludicrous as a small book event in a local library was worth a council spending time and money and their efforts to do that, which was so absurd that it actually pointed out the nature of the whole project. - Bad, but a branding journey. - Very bad branding, actually. I think the council should realize that they're doing that. - Libraries are allotments. - Yes, should be fine. But just to sort of go, I mean, I understand your concern about the Olympics, but unless you have these sort of grand plans, and I know they can go horribly wrong, and they often do go horribly wrong, unless we try, unless we keep having a go, we will never succeed and to sort of just say, well, it just should be organic is wonderful, but you end up in the Mumbai slums are organic, and I'm not sure I want to live there, even though they think they're rather good. - No, I think there's the mistake is to think that the ground project is a way out. - Well, all the ground project is about is creating a perpetual state of building, remaking, calling in, destroying, and bad branding, like dig a big hole in the ground and put up a huge notice saying, improving the image of construction. (laughing) - Well, that one does get me actually, yes, no you're not. - Richard said it. - Well, Ian, what would you have wanted instead? - I would have wanted instead what there is now to evolve quietly and slowly and to emerge out of the feelings of the locality and the nature of the locality. In that, everything that's now being promised with a big bang was actually there already. In the Victorian period, a publican created a running track at the back of his pub, invited people from all over the world, a Native American champion, had a very successful games. If people wanted it, there and then, and it all went away afterwards. Charitable patrons from the universities of the public schools came in and bought up land and created football pitches, boating clubs, laid out gardens and allotments. So it would all happen anyway and was allowed to decay because there was never the economics to support it in the same way that we lost all our small local swimming pools and bath houses, which used to be around Hackney where I live, to go into the ground project one, which is a sort of elitist, beautiful thing that doesn't ever have the money to support it. - But are you saying, then, that you wouldn't have wanted Britain to have an Olympics at all because wherever it would be, it would be the-- - I think Olympics has become hugely a monster, a swollen monster. I love the Olympics that came to London just after the war. - Make to amend Olympics. - Make to amend Olympics used what was here, you got on with it, it sort of brought Britain's spirit back, it was a mess in some ways, but it was perfect. It was a small local-- - It's just too much. - It's become so global and corporate, it's not about London anymore, it's not at all. I mean, the things that are there are all multinational franchises where-- - I think it depends on how they're done. I mean, the Barcelona Olympics was really good for the city. It was big. It was really tied into the fabric of the city rather than an implant, an abandoned land. They were quite clever about how they did that. So I'm not sure it's the scale of the project itself, that's the essence of disaster. - Morathans have these very beautiful stadium, but they're abandoned and the country can't afford them. And so you now have these wilderness theme parks with grass growing through, feral dogs, the rest of it. And I asked a young Athenian, 'cause the Athenians were still enthusiastic about having had the games. And you asked them, what did you like? - Oh, the opening ceremony was fantastic. And after that, I can remember some horses dancing. And one person said, and this was, I thought, the perfect one. He said, we liked it because we knew all along that these things would very soon be ruins. And we're a culture of ruins, do you know what to do? - Well, there you go back to East London again. (laughing) Let's move on to Richard's Senate. You're the great, big, beautifully illustrated new book, "Living in the Endless City." You've spent your life, Richard, looking at the shape and ways it is a construct, both economically and physically. And in this new book, one of the crucial distinctions that you draw when it comes to well-made or well-designed megacities or super cities or whatever is, and bad ones, is between boundaries and borders. So maybe we could just start with what you see as the difference between boundaries and borders. - Fine, although I want to make clear, this is not my book, this is a huge collective project. - You're one of the essayists in it, of course. - Well, there are two kinds of edges. One of them is sort of dead space where two territories come together and nothing's happening at the edge. - With a motorway or something? - A motorway defense. The other is a kind of living edge where you've got communities that are different, maybe they're economically or racially different. And on the edges between them, there's lots of interchange and the edges alive. And cities like Istanbul have plenty of edges like that. So does Cairo. The problem that I was getting at in this book is that in the 20th century, most of the planning we've done has had these dead space edges, these inert boundaries which keep people apart rather than borders which bring different groups together. - The reason this follows, I think, well, from what we've just been talking about in the Olympics, is it seems to be about what happens when somebody has a large piece of paper, as it were, and a pen and starts to draw what a city should look like on top of the spaces where people are actually living. - Right, well, you know, I can speak about the Olympics, but in poorer countries, what happens with these living edges is that they grow very slowly. They're not something you plan. In Cairo or Istanbul, they've taken hundreds and hundreds of years for those edges to grow. And they're not permanent. Oftentimes, you know, if a generation of people who have lived comfortably together at the edge of another kind of people suddenly will flare up and they'll become enemies overnight. So they're not set in stone and they're certainly not something you can guarantee by plan. - And what about the actual materials of the modern city, those glass frontages and those concrete frontages which, again, separate people walking up and down streets and pavements from whatever's behind them? - This is a terrible horror. I mean, in some way, the glass frame, big glass painting glass is a monstrosity of modern planning. If you look at a skyscraper, most of them will have it at their base, you know, there's huge plates of glass so you can see it, but you can't get it. There's one door, there's a security guard there. They look open, but in fact, they're closed. And we're seeing more and more of that in cities now, gated cities where you can't see into them. But a lot of our metropolitan high streets are becoming places which are essentially walls of glass. And I think planning has to find some way to take out the glass plates and have more exchange between the street and what's inside. - In New York, though, which is the big book, you have to have public space at the bottom, don't you? So that people have access to those buildings, which is, I thought, a fantastic idea. And it's a shame this doesn't happen maybe more here. Maybe we should be taking from New York. - Yes, well, the New York idea is that there are lots of small shops on a street wall. But it's also a notion of street walls where you've got this continuous plane. You can walk block after block in New York and there's always this liner of small enterprises. We don't do that so much here. - City of London doesn't look like that. - You described a planning failure. You thought you'd been involved with because you wanted to create a building that would have brought two very disparate groups actually together rather than separating them. Well, do you find that those points of overlap, I mean, I'm noticing where I live now, there's a huge upward demographic where there are people picnicking and drinking champagne on the grass right alongside an area where there's a postcode gang. So essentially, occasionally gunfire breaks out and the two groups are invisible to each other though they are living neck by jaw. How does that permeability work? - Well, I think the best way to make these living edges is to put facilities that groups, different groups use like health clinics, schools. - But they're going to the same health clinics I mean, they're very wealthy and the people. - Well, that's a real problem in Britain. I mean, and it's problems gonna get worse. - Where works, where are the cities that you admire? You mentioned Istanbul already. I wonder if you'll do about being a Hindu city. - I admire in general, I admire Barcelona, which I think is a city that works. I think the Scandinavians have been brilliant at this with one exception, which is their dealings with migrants. But if you walk through Oslo or Bergen, for instance, you have very little sense of fragmentation and isolation. - And how do they do that? - They had real local planning. Not what we call local planning. They had local planning where localities actually could make decisions about where things went and they had money to spend on where things went. - But also they didn't have the massive migration that we've seen in this country. They were very stable and it happened over a long period of time. You know, these countries have been able to sort of manage it. We've had huge migrations, suddenly when, I don't know, when the Kenyan nations, the Kenyan nations were, oh, you're gang nations. Asians were all booted out and they came here. We've had these massive migrations. - They saw yourself short. Britain dealt very well in the '70s and '80s with much of its migrant population. - You shouldn't, you know, you shouldn't sell yourself short. And you dealt well with the arrival of Poles here on the whole, you know? - What seems to have happened in the North in the last 15 years, however, is the kind of creation of self-made getters. I mean, and people moving across boundaries and nothing that politicians or planners or anybody else seems to have done has any effect on that. - That's a real problem and a real difference from Johannesburg, which had imposed fragmentation. We're seeing more of self-created getters, but it point out, you know, we always think Muslim in the back of our mind about this. We should be thinking about class as well. - And money. - Well, let's turn, I mean, Johannesburg is a city with very, very large numbers of exiles from Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa now. And plenty of urban problems there, but now framed under a sort of a new constitutional order, which tries to give people basic rights, not just to justice, but things like housing. And Kedaregan, you were appointed by Nelson Mandela to that first constitutional court of South Africa 17 years ago or so. And that was the move, the great move from the South Africa of the past laws and the apartheid state to the new South Africa. In this country, judges get a pretty bad press most of the time when they try to shift social mores on. What was the South African experience? What was the moment when you, what was it like when you arrived in that first constitutional moment for South Africa, the new South Africa? - Well, of course it was extraordinary. I mean, I think that none of us really predicted in the late 1980s that change was going to come so quickly and so comprehensively, at least at the legal and constitutional level, if not in the lives of ordinary people in social reality. So it was an extraordinary time. And I think that the extraordinary authority given to courts to overturn legislation, to overturn acts of the president, conduct of the president is a very awe-inspiring power. I think this was me speaking from the perspective of a judge. But of course it was part of a process determining the power given to courts and determining the way in which the constitution should be framed, was part of a political and historical process that started well, in fact, before 1990 and continued through 1990 into when the constitution itself was adopted finally in 1996, which really means, I think, that a constitution needs to be part of a political process in a very rooted way. - You were not neutral players in this. You were people with a huge political wind at your back, driving forward. - I think that's right. And I think one of the things that we often say about the constitution, it's a constitution of transformation. It's not a status quo constitution. Many constitutions are adopted to sort of preserve what is existing. - People think are endless and forever principles. - Exactly. Whereas in South Africa, it was what you might describe in a never again constitution. We know what we don't want, and we look backwards as the antithesis of where we're going. And that, both in terms of the constitution, gives a very clear direction. But also, I think, to judges, this was not something, I think, that, in fact, judges particularly sought. This was something that was a result of a political process. And interestingly, it was something that, across the board, from the liberation movements to the apartheid government, accepted the idea of creating a constitutional democracy rather than a parliamentary sovereignty. - What we don't know, of course, is whether it will stick, but you've taken big decisions as a constitutional court over things like the death penalty. - That's right. I mean, in fact, the very first hearing of the constitutional court was on the question of whether the death penalty was consistent with the Bill of Rights. And one of my messages as a South African judge is our text matters. The South African constitution specifically states that everyone has the right to life. And unlike many 18th and 19th century constitutions does not qualify that with phrases like save where a death penalty is imposed by a court of law. It says everyone has a right to life. But we also have a two-phase process, which is that once a right is infringed, government may come along and say, there is really good reason to infringe this right. And here are the reasons. And then the court, in a sense, becomes a place for exposing public reasoning and dialogue to scrutiny not only by the court. What about gay rights where there's an area with deep cultural hostility to homosexuality among many Africans? And again, you push things in a strongly liberal direction. - Well, again, here I would say text matters. The constitution says no person may be unfairly discriminated against on the grounds of sexual orientation. Very hard to say that criminalizing as we did and as Britain did for so many years, criminalizing consensual sodomy is not a breach of an unfair discrimination provision on grounds of sexual orientation, and similarly in relation to the right to marriage. So the text is very strong in South Africa, and to some extent we've really benefited from the political negotiators. We're able to look at text around the world. - You've pushed things, however. The South African court has pushed things in respect to economic rights, where people have the right, as I said earlier on, to housing and to sort of a proper level of survival living and so on. Which many people would say is outside the bound of any constitution, because it depends on economic progress and economic fairness and things, which are fundamentally about politics and economics. - Yes, and again, as you've mentioned, the text specifically says that everyone has the right of access to housing, for example. And the task for the court has been to give content to their rights and not to write it out of the constitution. Without acknowledging the real democratic role of the elected arms of government, the legislature and the executive. And also, because of the way judgments work, not to sit in constitutional stone or concrete, policy decisions, which really need to be able to be flexible and movable as circumstances change. And if we take the talk about the cities, for example, is an enormous need to change how South African cities are configured. But like many social problems, we're not sure how to do it. And the one thing you don't want to do with the court is to create rigidities which prevent an organic process or an experimental process happening. You want to leave that possibility open to the state. So it's a delicate balance and there's often critique of the way the courts have done it. But to me, the aim has been to acknowledge the importance of this right without denying the value of democratic decision-making and then flexibility of government. - Rich in Senate. Would you protect the rights of squatters? Would you see that as within your purview? - Yes, indeed it is. And many of the cases that come before the court, in relation to the context of housing, have been about attempts to evict people from buildings. Now, the approach of the court has been to recognize that in an ordinary common law system, ownership is, if you might describe it, the Trump card on the table. You put it down and everything else falls away. What we have said is that in the context of a right of access to housing, it is no longer quite the Trump card. And in particular, we have taken a view that it requires those seeking an eviction order to engage and to try to create local solutions to particular problems. And it's remarkable how often these emerge. That if a community is facing off, for example, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, between them, when it's no longer cast firmly in legal terms, that they're actually trying to find a social solution through a court-mandated engagement process, they often can find a solution. So it's the court recognizes that it's self-generally unable to understand the great sort of sway of possibilities and often they won't have legal character anyway. But when the parties sit around the table and know that the court is going to say, did you talk about this? They need to have really, really found some solutions. - The really hard thing, it seems to me, is to establish this trust between the people and the judiciary in the system that they've got to believe that what's being presented is something genuine and that they can respond. Otherwise, on the ground, I think we see so many fake consultation processes here, which don't mean anything and you feel that the law can be shifted and changed immediately. - Money just fixed everything in it. - Everything is fixed, so to establish that level of trust that for the dramatic changes that you've been involved in seems a huge challenge. - Even the word listening exercise is this sort of (speaks in foreign language) Yes, I'll listen to you. - Then I'll do what I was going to do. - Then I'll do what I was going to do. - Will I listen? - Just, I mean, I think what's happened in South Africa is truly amazing and we talk about, I sort of view Mandela as probably one of the greatest men of modern times because of what he's done and what he's represented. How do you feel that the legacy that he's created? Do you feel that that's being preserved? Do you feel that it will continue, that it has deep roots or deep enough roots for it to progress? - Well, you know, something that President Mandela would often say is that, you know, this was not a one person phenomenon. There is a range of people in South African society who represent what he stands for, he wasn't out there on his own. And those people are still there and we, but we have now what I think is, sometimes makes people nervous, but in which I think is the truth about democracy, we have a very vigorous debate. We don't have much censorship. I would hope, as a judge, I'll be able to say we don't have any, but we don't have much. And the spread of it is, the spread of the debate is enormous. And so, I-- - So you have the sort of mechanisms and the flexibility to try to keep the legacy as a word, we've got to be careful of this morning after the Olympics legacy, but keep the legacy. - Say well. - Mandela going. - Oh, we had to, well, I wonder about the legacy. - Well, I just actually wanted to finish by asking, because we've got, we hear today that Turkey is likely to rewrite its constitution after the military constitution of what, 30, 40 years ago. And of course, the Egyptians are now busily trying to create a new constitution. And we're going to see a lot more of that. You know, we hope, I suppose, around that part of the world. What is the crucial message from South Africa for those states? - Well, I think that there are two. One is that a constitution is not simply another piece of legislation. It is something in a sense where parties have to see it as being super the kind of political debates of the day and recognizing that they're setting something that is going forward for some time in which everybody needs to buy into. And that really brings to the second point, which is that you really do need to have participation. And now we all know, as you were saying, that participation can sometimes not be real. And in fact, there's no way to show everybody who participates fully, but nevertheless, you must attempt it. - Well, on that note, I don't know if anyone's listening out there in Istanbul and elsewhere, but thank you very much. And to all my guests, Ian Sinclair's ghost milk. And John Hegety's memoir, Hegety on Advertising, Turning Intelligence Into Magic, published this month. Richard Senet is one of the contributors in the collection of essays living in the endless city, which is out now. And Keira Regan's giving a talk, Political Questions, The Social Question, and other quandaries at the LSE in London tomorrow night. Next week, Tim Harford and Andrew Adonis walk the line between success and failure. And Ellie Parriser is discussing the perils of the customized search engine. A very important and interesting issue there. But for now, thank you and goodbye. - It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend, which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to Chumbakocino.com. It's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumbakocino has over 100 online casino style games, all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at Chumbakocino.com. Sponsored by Chumbakocino. - No purchase necessary. VGW Group void for prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply. [XBOX SOUND]