 Well, I won't add my welcome. You've been welcomed by many. My name is Ricky Burdette and with Philip Rode. I run LSE cities in the urban age project So my job is to do a couple of very practical things and then help set the context of the discussions in these two days The practical things are to do with turning off your mobile phones. Please very very important The second thing is that you've been given this badge Which has got a USB on it that has all the material Which is actually in the newspaper and the research reports. So if you're interested to hold on to it Don't give it to anybody else The third thing is that actually for the first time ever With Ute Vlan we have decided to actually make this conference live on a web podcast So that's actually happening now. So rather than just a hundred and fifty people in the room We may have thousands. We don't know. So bear that in mind and I'm now going to spend a little bit of time saying how we're organizing these two days But just looking at the statistics in many ways in front of you now You do get a sense that this is genuinely a global event We have people from four continents from a very large number of cities around the world some of which are Actually mentioned there the urban age discussions are about that their discussions We try to not just have presentations with an audience. That's the whole idea. That's why we're sitting this way Some will make presentations from here and then sit down And we encourage that discussion and the reason you all have a microphone is for you to actually contribute and We encourage that Throughout the two days in order to make that happen. We've asked all the speakers to stick to pretty strict time limits And we're going to be Radical in our asking the speakers or reminding them that they've got five minutes left two minutes left one minutes left or stop Unfortunately, that's going to be my role So I'm apologizing already The secretary is already smiling. Well, I I'm sure will be lenient But that is important in the dynamics of the event and I stress that we do want you when someone has said something at the end of their Talk put up your hand Look at whoever is chairing that session and myself and my colleagues at the top and try and Attract our attention or just intervene and just tell us what you you think the whole point here is not to make long Speeches but to say what has been said? How does that trigger? How does that reflect in terms of your own? Experiences very much focusing on the issues of health well-being and city form Now that takes me to really the next Set of information before I give an introduction in terms of the themes you will have all had I hope a Copy of this conference newspaper the urban age since the very beginning when we started in 2005-2006 believe that in some cases, you know showing an image Says more about the city than too many texts this time We've had to compromise because not only here are we presenting a lot of new research Which I will in fact talk about a bit later in the program We've also asked the number of colleagues from around the world To contribute to the health and well-being debate and in fact we felt it got a bit tight So we produced another document which you have which is nearly 20 other essays All of which by the way available online and so you have two documents here The researchers I stress which has been run by my Colleague me fan me Taylor and others who are here in the room is also illustrated in here So many of the graphs many of the documentation which I will be talking about you can find there So that's an important sort of resource for you now in terms of the program. You'll have this green Document here that this is effectively the program for our two days There will be one or two Slight changes with people who are either unable to come at the last moment Or one or two switches because of laryngitis or other issues of that sort. I'm looking at you Victor. Can you speak? He's fine, right? Okay. Otherwise, we were going to call a doctor of which there are many in the room But that's not going to be necessary But there'll be one or two switches and I'll make those Announcements as we go through the day But I think the thing to remember is that we have the program please keep on checking it We will try and keep very much to the time. We have a number of breaks as you know in terms of the Coffee and lunch and we aim to end today at around 5 30 or so and tomorrow at five So that is a program. We encourage everyone to be present all the time I know you're all busy and have other things to do But it actually does create that dialogue that we're talking about Very important in terms of the space this you know We're interested in form and cities and space if you come back after coffee and others have left Just bring your name tag and go and sit where there's an empty place at the front Just come in make it compact make it dense and make it integrated so Please use this room as a place for discussion So don't wait for someone who you think might be more important than you to come in a few hours time if they come late They can sit somewhere else. That's not a problem. So that's very very important in the way. We organize the space I've already talked about the extra essays. So let me come very quickly to the content of this conference and the content of the research that we've done over the last year with my colleagues here at the LSE but also colleagues at HKU and Interestingly and importantly in different departments both in the Department of Social Sciences, but the Department of Architecture And the Departments of Medicine Nursing etc. So it has been a sort of integrated approach between all of us So where does this start? Perhaps we can take the lights down a little bit so we can look at the slides Can the lights come down at the front? Is that possible? Not on me, but on the there. It's better We do that Is anyone able to do that? Jens, Tuan, can we have the lights down? Is that possible? Yeah, can you see the slides? Anyway, the point this is the starting point London in the mid 19th century like Paris like Berlin like Barcelona like Madrid Was experiencing exactly what is happening now in so many Asian or African or Latin American countries dramatic expansion in terms of population with Incredibly negative effects in terms of the quality of life and the health of people living there London in the mid 19th century the average age was something like 30 32 years old for a man Incredibly low for only a century and a half ago death was something which Was in front of the eyes of most urban dwellers who swelled the populations looking for jobs These are issues which of course resonate with the problems of the cities today, and we could say that that's where New modern planning actually started that health was the generator was the kickstart In terms of what actually happened to the shape of snow that was good Down with the lights. Yeah, down with it. Keep the lights down. That was very Significant in terms of what actually happens to the shape of the city because in order to resolve these problems The cities were actually transformed. Why were they transformed? This is an example of a famous map from the 1850s of one of the cholera outbreaks in London in 1854 and John snow who looked at this one of the first physicians Identified that one water pump in the middle of Soho in London in fact in Broad Street was responsible for the contamination Which actually killed hundreds if not thousands in that area. So just turning off that Pump made a difference to the lives of people there. So that was the beginning. Let's call it of a recognition In terms of what infrastructure means now This is connected of course to one of the key themes that we're going to address in this conference Which is one of inequality Charles Booth one of the first let's call it ethnographers effectively or chroniclers of Poverty in cities mapped the whole of London in different colors He went to every street in every house and said where are people living in Unacceptable conditions and you see the colors there on the life and basically the darker the color the bluer or the blacker The worst conditions they were now as it happens and I'll come back to this in my later talk But we will all have to think of this in our own cities. These inequalities still persist today socially and obviously in terms of health So what happened what happened in London and Tony travels as an expert on this is that the first? municipal government or the beginning of that actually ended up with the with the Infrastructure of sewers which tried to solve this problem So the Metropolitan Board of Works one of the major sort of political and governance actions in London began to Transform and as you can see here with the black lines Create the veins of sanitation under and across London making it perhaps the first sort of major Metropolis so you have things like this on the ground to carry fresh water and take out effluence And this is what happened above ground in other words the relationship between the infrastructure of sanitation of health The notion of public health led to a new form of planning, which is this great Victoria embankment Houseman in Paris, of course that the same thing similar things happened in Paris and I think the issue for us today is what is happening in the contemporary expanding City and how does it relate to inequality in society and in health? Very interesting. We found only recently this sign on a street in London in 1927 which in a way says it all The health of the people is the highest law if you don't live There's no need for anything Inequality Governance democracy are irrelevant if you don't actually have a chance to survive This as I say led to completely different forms of spatial planning Ebenezer Howard invented the Garden City movement How do we get away from the congested city of Yesterday and today and think of a garden city of tomorrow. This has led basically to suburbanization Another man a liquor buzier another rather important architect meant well when he said let's get rid of half of medieval Paris and Do that why not? The idea was a good one Instead of the congested medieval streets with no fresh air which provided the sort of contamination You put wonderful towers up in the sky You open windows on the left on the right You have a big garden on the ground and you create the modern city and that modern city is a force what is shaping Most of the cities that we're talking about now. This happens to be Istanbul. This happens to be Shanghai This happens to be some power. I Don't need to go on when it comes to Hong Kong that model in many ways is very clear in our minds So what are the issues today in cities and how are we addressing them? Mumbai is set to become the largest city in the world by 2050 Overtaking Tokyo today 50% of the people live without basic sanitations and in some conditions so For those living there the issue of sanitation as Jorgen Eskimoze who's working in Maputo will tell us is this Providing better water and some basic form of sanitation is really what it's about At another level it can be about this turning a beach which has been contaminated and a rubbish Depot for literally tens of years into this and in fact the Deutsche Bank gave this project an important prize a Few years ago just cleaning up a beach and making it accessible to people means that People living in slums can actually have an open space to walk So the effects on things like obesity air pollution and quality of life are fundamental So for us in looking at cities around the world, we've been observing social inequality This is an image which is well known to the urban ages here, but it's not a photoshop It's a favela in Sao Paulo on the left-hand side, which actually has no water or sanitation Basically and on the right-hand side is an new development Where the people are so wealthy that there's a swing pool on each terrace Now that level of inequality which I know Richard Senate spoke about last night at HKU in terms of the carpet of Capitalist model needs to be understood in terms of its health implications That's what this conference is really about and that is why the urban ages come to Hong Kong to talk about it So thank you very much for listening and I asked that the gun tend to introduce the first session. Thank you