 Thank you, Anshu, and it's a pleasure to thank Anshu Jain. I'm Craig Calhoun, the director of the LSC. I'm new to the LSC, new to London. I'm old friends with leaders of the urban age, Richard Sennett, Ricky Burdett, and others of you. And glad to be present for this event today. And in this exceptional setting, the LSC outpost in Hoxton as we colonize more of London for the school. It's terrific to be here, to be here with some 350 delegates and speakers, as Anshu Jain said, coming from all over the world to join us in this discussion of crucial events. I start with a special announcement. We will be joined in a few moments by two senior political figures. They will make a statement on technologies and cities. I won't foreshadow more of what it is, but very appropriate to this event and to this setting, centrally connected to our themes, thus, and to our very place, which is appropriate for LSC cities, a program that exists and is dedicated to the linking of the physical and the social, bringing together the issues of infrastructure, culture, creativity, connecting spaces, structures, and life through the design and the understanding of cities. This core mission is one that has been developed in a partnership between LSE and the Deutsche Bank and Alfred Herrhausen Society of the Deutsche Bank. And it's been a very productive partnership that has enabled us to build a global network, to bring new perspectives and new understanding to issues of urbanization in a variety of different specific settings around the world, as well as on a global scale itself. We have a two-day event before us, an interdisciplinary inquiry into the electric city. This catchphrase is used to capture social, economic, cultural, and political dynamics of cities in the digital age. We will hear from some 60 experts from 30 cities in 15 countries across four continents. And this probably won't be the last time somebody cites statistics in that sort of litany to you. There will be local voices here. There will be people who travel, and there will be people who are heard globally through their writing, their work in film, and their work in design. This is the 11th Urban Age Conference. This international investigation of cities, as I said, organized jointly by the LSE and the Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, is an ongoing exploration that in every case connects the specifically-cited, the immediately-physically located to broader issues that affect cities around the world. Other cities have included Hong Kong, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Berlin, Shanghai, London once before, and only seven years ago, it was, to some extent, another city. And indeed, New York, where the series started. Some 4,500 people have attended this series, including presidents, mayors, ministers of government. There has been a collaboration making this possible with more than 30 research institutions, linked not just to the LSE and to the Deutsche Bank and Alfred Herrhausen Society, but to each other through this project. Some 25 cities have been analyzed in detail. Over a million people have read the materials on the website. As a project, the urban age has had unquestionable impact. I want to give some special thanks to the people who have made that impact possible. I've already mentioned the corporation, and Anshu Jain, its leader, the Alfred Herrhausen Society, but I would like to mention Wolfgang Novak and Uta Vailand, who have played a special role over seven years of friendship and support for the urban age, and also for creating LSE cities. This is now an important center of research and outreach at the school. It exemplifies something important to the LSE's very mission, that is bringing together high-quality inquiry, the creation of new knowledge through research, and public engagement. Public engagement that appears in many forms. It appears, first of all, in teaching, because it is an enormously important public we reach through our students at the university. It appears, secondly, in writing, in publication, in a variety of venues, from newspapers to large and thick books, and there's a large and thick book from LSE cities that you can look at. But it appears also in a variety of other media, as we reach out and communicate, and it appears in direct engagement as people from LSE cities and all of you in various settings share knowledge by working on design projects collaboratively, by working as consultants to policymakers, by working in the corporate sector and making investment decisions. The sharing of knowledge is not a process, we're convinced, in which there is simply a sort of pure science done at research institutions, which is then disseminated. LSE cities, and I think the LSE in general, suggests an alternative model, a model in which the development of knowledge is a shared process among a variety of people who bring different contributions to that, some of whom are professional researchers, some of whom work in a variety of other fields, putting knowledge to work, but changing the questions that researchers ask. Part of the contribution of the urban age is a contribution to the intellectual world from the world of a variety of different practical projects, each of which challenges, demands new information from, and creates new questions for the research projects of academics. The intellectual undertaking is among professional intellectual universitaire, as one says in French, that academics and intellectuals, highly educated, creative, and profound thinkers from other fields, the knowledge that is collaboratively created is vital for all of our work. I mentioned before the importance of linking infrastructure to culture, creativity, and social life. This is at the heart of the transformation that Ancher Jane already pointed to as the larger process of urbanization that is going on, a process that cannot be understood as a design process alone, as a demographic process alone, as an investment process alone, or a finance process alone. It's all of these together. It's all of these made possible in a way that depends on complex and dynamic systems. The electric grid that gives us the theme for the conference is an exemplification of this, but it's just part of a set of infrastructural decisions that shape vitally our lives, and which ironically have often been treated as boring, because the notion of infrastructure is brought up mainly when the glamour of new technologies ages into the taken for granted conditions of a life together in cities or beyond cities. That is, we think of aircraft as new and exciting when they're created and an invention 100 years ago changing the way we live. We think of infrastructure in London when we recognize the limits of our existing airports and create a commission to look into how they could expand and the complex choices involved in that. But infrastructure isn't just that old and existing capacity, that set of resources that make it possible for us to live in complex social productions like cities. It is also the set of decisions, the making of history that shapes our social life by putting in place infrastructures, transportation systems that determine where people will live, how they will interact, who we'll meet with, who that shape the way in which immigrants are assimilated into host societies, that shape the way in which class is bridged or reinforced as a divide. And it's not just transportation and electricity, it's water systems, it's waste, it's information. It's a host of different infrastructures that create the possibilities that we then act on as individuals or in groups that create the context and the very conditions for all those things that we understand as specific chosen actions. We need to be able to take full account of the way in which we reshape our lives in many of the most important and most basic ways by producing, transforming, and reshaping infrastructures. We could think also about this importance of the electric city and the many infrastructures that make urban life possible by considering the interaction with finance directly. This is at the heart of Schumpeter's famous account of the destructive side of capitalism, the disruptive side, the way in which massive technologies, massively important technology, massive investments in technologies transform whole economies and reshape not just particular cities, but the ways in which we are able to organize life and capitalism on a global scale. This continual creative destruction always has a side that is experienced as negative and problematic. It always has a side that is the cool, the new, and the exciting. And it always has a set of opportunities that are hard to understand. For this reason, it's not easily grasped as a conventional investment decision that has a prudent payoff over a short period of time. Anshur Jain alluded to this by suggesting the time gap between the very long-term investments that remake infrastructure and the more immediate fiscal and financial systems and investment decisions with which we live. It's not only a time gap, though, it is a tension between understanding the way in which finance works in terms of relatively calculable logics of prudent return on investment over a relatively manageable period and the extent to which some kinds of investments will prove transformative, reshaping the entire environment, the conditions on it, and are very hard to calculate. So many of these infrastructural investments that make possible the electric city and all the other basic conditions for life are made by governments. They're made by speculative booms in which reasoned short-term prudent calculations may not matter as much as a frenzy of buying bonds to build the railroads in the 19th century. And we need to be aware of the interaction between that which we can rationally and calculatively control and that which happens in ways that exceed our control. We need to be aware of the extent to which the technologies we love and depend on are produced not only by investors genius, inventors genius, not only by investors getting in early on companies that will make billions, but by speculative bubbles, by research and development funding from governments who may fund for 10 or 20 or 30 years looking at the long-term in a way that some other investors find hard, by investments that are driven by other purposes, by defense spending or the pursuit of cures to diseases that make people invest beyond immediate payoff in something that is deemed extremely important and produce spin-off technologies that transform cities, by pursuit of one sort of solution, security, and arriving at another sort of solution, a pedestrian city of a different kind with street lighting. These sorts of transformative investments are harder for us to understand simply as conscious actions and yet they are social choices and we need to find ways to look at them. This is at the heart of everything urban and of LSE cities. I think it's at the heart of much of the interest that the Alfred Herrhausen Society in Deutsche Bank has brought to the project because it's a project of understanding the intersection of different sectors in which it's crucial to work. At the urban age, we are engaged in simultaneously creating, trying to predict understanding what is happening all around us beyond our conscious control and trying to support political, communicative, and democratic processes in which the knowledge that we jointly produce becomes effectively a part of a shared enterprise. Now, I want to celebrate the past. I said that infrastructure is something built up out of other decisions. I want to thank people who are current supporters, Anshu Jane, Deutsche Bank, and the entire population of urban age and I want to look forward to a contribution and a collaboration that will continue for years to come. At this point, if it hasn't been obvious, I've been stalling and I'm now going to turn over to my colleague, not in stalling, but in making all of this possible, Ricky Burdette.