 Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to the 2012 Urban Age Conference and welcome to the shortage electric station for our conference in the Electric City. How appropriate that we're gathering in a place which 116 years ago was set up with a specific aim of burning waste to produce electricity for the City of London, a theme which we'll come back to fairly often in the next two days. This year we welcome 400 delegates from 28 countries and 60 speakers for two days of presentations and discussions. That's a testimony to the successful cooperation between the LSE and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society since Urban Age was launched. Let me say some particular warm words of welcome to Mrs. Herrhausen and Anna Herrhausen who happened to be with us this morning. Urban Age is influencing development of cities all over the world. We advised the Mayor of Sao Paulo on public transport, our Global Metro Summit in Chicago in 2010 in collaboration with the Brookings Institute influenced economic policy development in that city. In Germany, we advocated federal government support for the Electric Mobility Pilot Scheme in Berlin. The Urban Age team has been consulted on next generation residential projects in China. Now we're living in an age of urbanization, now more than at any time in history, we are truly living in an urban age. Cities have become the defining centers of human activity. More than half the world's population now lives in cities. This will rise to 70% by 2050. In the next decade and a half in India and China alone, 600 million people will move from rural areas into cities. To give you a sense for the scale of that, that's twice the population of the United States and yet it only accounts for about 5% of the world's land mass. Now if we think about exactly what that means and the challenges which that represents, it is truly outstanding. Cities wind up generating 80% of the world's GDP. Over the next 15 years, one-third of the world's economic growth will be generated by the largest hundred cities and by 2030, 3 billion new middle class consumers, mostly in Asia, will have been created and back to in cities. The clear reasons why cities have become centers of prosperity, they enable face-to-face contact and ability for business communities to come together. Huge advances have been made in telecommunication but studies show that it doesn't replace the importance of personal contact. The ability to share knowledge quickly and easily creates centers of expertise, creativity and innovation. This tremendous economies of scale is up to a 50% reduction in cost per unit of basic services, education, housing, power, water, transportation due to urbanization. But as I said earlier, urbanization has brought benefits but it also brings tremendous challenges. If you run down the list of what these challenges are, a demand for natural resources, particularly energy, key commodities in recent years, steel, copper and other construction raw materials, there are environmental challenges, 75% of the world's CO2 emissions are from cities. Pollution undermines quality of life in a lot of the fast-developing cities. Urban mobility has become a challenge. Without planning and foresight, congestion undermines the practical and productivity advantages of urban clusters. Cities are aging, demographic shifts are already underway which will become more concentrated. Shanghai will soon have more than twice as many elderly residents as New York and that's got tremendous implications for healthcare and as I've said before, mobility solutions. Addressing these challenges is crucial if future generations are to enjoy the benefits of urbanization. I'm sure many of these will be discussed at the conference. Additionally, urbanization presents financial challenges. Financing the cities of the future presents some major challenges. The sheer scale of investment needed. Real physical capital investment in cities worldwide will rise from 10 trillion to around 20 trillion by the year 2025 and that requires very long-term planning horizons over 15 to 20 years. There are some particular challenges which I'll draw your attention to. There's a mismatch between very long-term infrastructure projects and shorter-term municipal planning and budgeting and that gap needs to be bridged. There's a need to involve both public and private capital together with the appropriate sharing of risk. There's a need to stimulate and finance technological innovation to build smart energy-efficient cities and for that we need upfront investment today while benefits will only materialize many years from now. And finally, city dwellers need to be given a direct stake in the smart cities of the future, making them true citizens. Deutsche Bank is committed to help meeting the financial challenges. We are committed to supporting successful urbanization with both financial and intellectual capital. And we are uniquely positioned to help. We can help municipalities and governments with long-term financing needs. We can use our network to bring together public and private capital to finance large-scale investments and manage associate risks. And finally, we can support investments in technological innovation which demand a long-term perspective and sophisticated risk management. In conclusion, urbanization will more than ever shape the world our children inherit from us. It's brought great benefits to mankind. Potentially it will bring many more. But there are challenges ahead and the way we respond to those challenges now will impact the well-being of future generations. At Deutsche Bank we feel our responsibilities as citizens very deeply and we're absolutely committed to playing our part. Thank you. Enjoy the conference.