 It's my pleasure to welcome you together with so many colleagues here from the school and from other organizations with which we work. I've just made all the slides go forward, which wasn't the intention. My name is Ricky Burdett and I'm Professor of Urban Studies here at the school. And together with Philip Rode, I run the Urban Age and the LSE Cities Program. This is a program which has created a series of investigations, a series of conferences, an enormous amount of research, which tonight we're actually celebrating together with our co-organizers of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, one of Deutsche Bank's organizations which funds research and cultural activities. And in fact the welcome, therefore, is not just from Philip and myself and others here, but also from Ute Wieland and Thomas Mausosec, the directors of that institution. As I've said before, we're actually celebrating 10 years of the Urban Age and the Urban Age is about this. It's about this slide. It's about where you can see in yellow from the back of the room, not just the t-shirts in fact of the of the stewards tonight, but also where the UN suggests population is going to grow over the next 15 to 20 years. We started in fact in 2005 in New York, we've been to 13 different cities around the world. Last year we were in Delhi and we decided to sort of celebrate this event here in London back home. I mean, there are many reasons for doing that here. One is what London is about. Another thing is that it's the 120th anniversary of the London School of Economics, which was set up then by Fabian socialists to really study urban society and its problems. Actually all the areas around here had all the problems that the Mumbai's, the Shanghai's, the Lagos's have today, but 120, 130 years ago. Issues of congestion, of intense change, rapid change, but also issues of how to reinvent the institutions which create democracy and inclusion in the city. We've come back here to celebrate and we're doing that with five major events of which this is the first over the next 10 days. So what has the urban age done and in a way what are our perspectives before we move on to sort of the real meat of the evening, so to speak? Well first of all it's visited, as I say, looked at and analyzed 13 cities around the world, but at the same time we've also probably all together looked at something like 40 or 50 different cities in different parts of the globe as you see. What it's also done, apart from trying to understand, and this is one of the key themes of what we're interested in, what are the relationships between the physicality, the space, the design of a city. This is, you know, Mexico City, 22 million, this is Hong Kong. There are different ways in which you can make cities. These are one of the things at the heart of our visual and intellectual investigations. But we've also done something different which is not unlike what we're doing tonight, which is to bring into a room people who actually, we can say after 10 years, normally don't speak to each other. We've brought mayors together with designers, we've brought other policy makers together with academics. It's really quite a range of people from transport planners to environmentalists who on the whole tend to speak in different silos. And then, of course, one of the other things we've done is carried out a lot of research. You'll see from the leaflet in front of you, particularly the back cover, which could be a little poster you might want to put up somewhere, for those of you who are really interested in this data, don't try and read it on the screen, but it's the back cover of what you have in front of us. What have we learned, as I say, from these initiatives which bring research, bring interaction between different peoples and visiting cities? Well, Philip and I were reflecting on this earlier today. What is it that we've actually learned? Well, one of the things that we've learned is the enormous convening power of a university, albeit with the support of the Alfred Hurrhausen Society, which has allowed us to do that. And that's not a simple statement. The fact that you can actually bring together in a sort of nearly neutral platform peoples in different cities who want to actually talk to each other about things which are sometimes very difficult. And in that sense, you could say that the urban age itself as a sort of mechanism is not unlike cities. It's about the flows of people. It's about the flows of ideas. And even this thing has a life of its own. But anyway, I'm trying to control it, but I can't. It's very much about these sort of different dynamics, which actually bring cities together. And probably because we're a university, because we realize that there's a sort of skills gap out there in terms of who decides what happens in cities, we're also very interested in effectively educating new generations of city makers across the board. I mean, if I think what have we actually found, what we found that design actually really does matter in cities. You can actually make cities humanize people and city dwellers or brutalize them. By the way, they're actually designed. Just think of what it means to commute for four or five hours in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, as opposed to, say, Hong Kong, where the average commuting time is 20 minutes. Think of the cities of walls of barbed wire that you find in enclaves in African cities or some Asian cities or Latin American cities in particular. And think of the luck we have in London of actually not actually being confronted by ghettos of necessary rich or poor, even though, of course, we have a massive housing crisis facing us today. We've also discovered that, of course, governance, without getting governance right, you really can't do many of the things that we've been talking about even up until now, we will in a moment. There are deep divisions between national governments, federal governments, state governments, and people who make decisions in cities. So those are some of the thoughts, some of the ideas which we'll cut across everything we're going to be talking about in the next 10 days or so. Now, in a moment, I'll hand over to Tessa, who really is running the talk tonight, chairing the event. Tessa, I think, is well known to many Londoners as the mayor we should have had, but won't have. And, of course, has been a Member of Parliament for a number of years, Minister in several Labour governments, and now much, much more importantly than any of that, Tessa, you're a visiting professor here at the, in practice here at the LSE. One last thing I want to talk about is not only have we decided with the Alfred Herrhausen Society to celebrate with these lectures, but also to take all that information that we've assembled, all the analysis, all the essays, all the narratives, all the discussions, all the videos of the conferences, and put them onto a new website. And right now, I'm launching it to the world. This is the first time that all of you will be aware of it. It's actually a test website. It's not the definitive one. There will be sort of things that won't work, and we'd love you to test it out and let us know what you think. But you will find for the first time that you can compare a density map of New Delhi and London, or you can find an essay by Richard Sennett or Saskia Sassen, if you want. So please note the website, and also in a moment, note the hashtag, which will be there, which we'd obviously like you to use, not for just those of you who are in the room, but those of you who are listening to this live stream around the world. Let me just end by doing the most important thing for anyone like me happening to stand here tonight and welcoming you and sort of presenting this celebration of 10 years of work. There literally are hundreds of people that one would want to thank, but I won't. I'm gonna start with just thanking those who've been responsible for making this event and the next events happen, led by Emily Cruz, so thank you very much. I want to thank Mike Hurd and Guardian Cities, who, as you've noticed, already has been publishing in Guardian Cities a number of the important articles and presentations which are being made this week. Obviously, the two founding sort of figures in many ways who made it happen both intellectually and logistically, Richard Sennett, my colleague here, and Wolfgang Novak, who was then the director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, it wouldn't have happened without them and got the ball rolling. But really, obviously, the two people I have to thank are Philip Rode and Ute Vilan for actually making it all happen. So, we now look forward to the next 10 years. Tessa, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for coming.