 Thanks, Joachim, and thanks to LSE Cities and Alfred Herrhausen for the invitation. Super happy to be here, very surprised. I usually, at previous urban age conferences, say outrageous things, and they keep on inviting me back, so I'm not exactly sure how to be even more outrageous. I'll try again. But I'm a little bit thrown off my game. Alcindor has kind of given me a moment of psychic breakthrough. I've always been struggling to understand this liminal condition that I feel, that I didn't have a name for, being determined not to grow up or not to feel like an adult. So thank you, Alcindor. I'm in this moment of weighthood. It's good to know. So we've got a fantastic overview in the last two presents, while the last presentation, and Rick is in particular, that gives us an understanding of the scale, the scope, the complexity, and to be frank, the overwhelming nature of what we have to get our minds around. And it's complex. It's enormous. There's maybe two things that I'd like to add to that picture. And the one is that a lot of this growth is actually happening in very small towns and cities, and intermediary cities is a big part of the story, even though our default position is to be drawn to the Johannesburgs, the Kampalas, the Addis of the world. But if we are going to really grapple with these questions over the next two days, we have to also foreground the specificities of the smaller places, the smaller towns. The second issue I want to flag is just this very peculiar geography of sort of, particularly in West Africa, that incredible concentration across the region, all the way from Dakar right into Brazzaville. That's a very specific kind of conurbation. And surely this represents important questions for regional governance, for trans-border urban or metropolitan governance. What does that mean? How do we build a language for that? Moving on, the second sort of point of differentiation to just again remind ourselves of is that the different regions of the continent are not in the same stage at all. In fact, if we look at North and Southern Africa, the urban transition is more or less, I guess, where Asia is at. It's sort of starting to plateau. But in Eastern and particularly Western Africa and Central Africa, we will see the doubling of urban populations in a relatively small space of time. And it is mostly those countries and economies that have the GDP per capita that we've just heard in the previous presentation. So again, there's something specific to those regions that we have to get our heads around. This is an attempt by the OECD and the African Development Bank and UNDP in 2016 to help us with this problem of differentiation. We're dealing with 54 countries in an enormously diverse continent. And what they try and do in this typology is to put urbanization, fertility transitions and the structural transformation, in other words, the state of these economies in the same frame. And then we're kind of going down very different paths. So again, just a reminder that when we are grappling with what the solutions, the responses, the policy menus might be, that they will, by definition, have to be very different things in these different places. So these are all caveats. And what strikes me is that when I look across these reports, the research, the data and so on, is how this translates into the public domain. So this is a recent article from this year by a very significant journalist from The Guardian newspaper. And this is what he writes, Kinshasa had just 20,000 people in 1920. By 1940, it was home to about 450,000 people. Today, it has possibly 12 million and it's predicted to be Africa's second largest city with 75 million people inside of 50 years. By Western standards, it is a dysfunctional, sprawling megalopolis ring by vast shanty towns of informal settlements, their infrastructure non-existent and all collapsing. More informed urban observer, Rob Muga, says the following. Africa's not prepared for this urban explosion. That's us. By 2025, there will be 100 African cities with more than 1 million inhabitants according to McKinsey, who's also in the room, I believe. That's twice as many as in Latin America. A runaway urbanization and a growing youth bulge with most young people lacking meaningful job prospects is a time bomb. Already some 70% of Africans are under 30, youngsters account for roughly 20% of the population, 40% of the workforce and 60% of the unemployed. Now, these dystopian references matter because what they do is they prepare the ground for very truncated policy responses. So to arrest this complexity, to arrest this overwhelming chaos that is going to engulf us, we have to residue A, B and C and we've got to do it in a particular way. So it is very interesting if we go back to the first urban age conference in Africa in Johannesburg in 2006 and we look at the arc to today, there's been a sea change in the policy landscape. In 2006, you could not get a pan-African politician for level money to talk about urbanization. It was just not on the agenda. It was not taken seriously and we were still grouped by the imagination that the African Renaissance that President Obesangio and Mbeki was championing at the time will be ushered in by the second green revolution in Africa. That was the discourse, that was the debate. Look at what's happened in the last decade and a bit. Report after report from the private sector, from the World Bank, from the UN Habitat, from just about every single policy actor that matters on the continent making the kinds of points that we heard this morning. This is significant. What this has meant now is a very different conversation to just a decade ago and I think it is important as Africans to take a moment to pause, to acknowledge that there's been a shift, that there's been a change and we're having a very different conversation today. And if I have to kind of summarize that conversation, if I have to make a bit of a caricature of it, that would be around these parameters. There's now a recognition that, of course, the big break on growth, the big break on fully realizing Africa's economic potential is the infrastructure deficit. You cannot have an energy supply system that is the same as that of Spain, servicing the whole continent and expect to be a significant global player. That's obvious, right? You cannot have the kind of logistical nightmares that we confront on the continent if you landlock country and expect to participate in the global economy. Obvious. But this growth imperative is also now triangulated very tightly, particularly through the work of UNECA, with imperative of job creation. In other words, this discourse around inclusive growth or job intensive growth. How bit of a mystery still, and we see lots of different reports, and particularly the recent report by the AU and the OECD on inequality and economic development that came out this year, with some interesting ideas. But we are still at ground zero in really cracking this question. And the reason is it's not because we closed for business. The reason is that the global trading system structurally marginalizes African economies. So if you don't address the global politically economy problem, how are you going to open for business? Right? How? So we can't disconnect these questions. But the discussion we're trying to have now is this tantalizing idea of structural transformation. It's tantalizing because the notion of structural transformation means deep rooted, systemic. That's important. It's critical for all the reasons that Alcindor outlined. But the transformation bit remains a little bit elusive because when this translates into the deals that Parks spoke about, the infrastructure deals that Ricky referenced, it is an imagination that I can broadly typify as three things. There's a sort of high-end idea that Ricky showed that is currently in currency in London and in others. These high-end real estate propositions of enclave-gated communities for the elites. Then there's this more progressive, grounded idea of middle-class social housing that will be mixed use and have all these wonderful elements of good urbanism. And then there's the activists, if you will, the social movement activists who are arguing that through carefully designed informal settlement upgrading, we can construct much more efficient, productive, makeshift settlements. And this is sort of a very interesting rendering that is a hybridization of these different imaginations. So this takes the floating school, the infamous noun, and the architects' proposition for Makoko. And it blends it with these other imaginations. And in some ways, this really crude, photoshopped idea of what the future could look like is where we're at. We actually don't have a substantive imagination of what could be a grounded alternative. So pastiche is what we are currently sort of, if you will, settle with. Now, there is a repost, right? And often in these conferences and debates, the repost isn't foregrounded. And so I want to just lift our two or three lines of critique that I think is important for us to at least keep in the back of our minds as we go through what will be lots of policy prescriptions over the next two days. So the first line of critique that is available in the literature and so forth is that when we look at all of these propositions that are so eloquently detailed in the latest World Bank report that we've just heard about, that essentially this sort of almost near obsession with sorting out these messy land markets is really just an alibi to, if you will, resolve the land market complexity so that you've got a smooth landing pad for capital. But this is not the issues, not capital. It's not FDI. The problem is it's the wrong kind of capital. As Raul would say who is in the room, it's impatient capital. Capital that wants spectacular returns with spectacular investments, right? Another line of critique is that if we are so obsessed with this question of a real estate driven model of urban development, what we are actually doing is we are consolidating a very powerful and narrow elite structure in our societies. And I think it's an important critique to pay attention to because we know for in the post-colonial period we've had this profound overlap of economic and political elites. And they've calcified into very narrow, very tightly organized elite systems in our societies. And finally, there was this amazing conference last year called Fearless Cities in Barcelona, where a group of, for lack of a better word, municipal socialists from around the world, experiments in radical alternatives, insisted that we have to pay a lot more attention to what municipal democratization might mean. What is deep citizenship? How do we think of urban incorporation that is not premised on technocratic obsessions with land markets, infrastructure finance, and smart cities, right? So I just leave that there without developing it, and I wanna conclude in the last two minutes with, I guess, a response to the provocations we've heard this morning. Can we think a different frame? Can we think an alternative? And taking my cue from what I guess for me has always been the most beautiful and sort of elegant core proposition of the urban age experiment, that good cities are cities that are marked by diversity and complexity. Taking that outcome as the starting point, for me, it seems that there are four critical questions we've got to always address simultaneously at all scales if we are gonna generate the innovations that resonate in our context. The question of meaningful work, and we've heard the reasons and the data. The fundamental structuring importance of prioritizing ecological regeneration. Part of the violence of the colonial and the post-colonial experiment has not just been dehumanization, but it has been the rape of our natural resources. And we've got to think those two things absolutely in tandem. The land question, the land market question, is not just a question of trade and exchange. It is about spatial justice. Can that be in the frame? And finally, drawing the most abundant resource from our society's cultural fulfillment or cultural expression. So four quick takeaways. Let's prioritize societal democracy in a deep way and let's pay attention to the large, mass-based institutions, churches, religious associations, saving clubs and so forth. Let's really take stock of all of this innovation that is widely distributed in our societies. That is, can do, as we've heard. But let's build a living archive of what those things are, because it's only by that recognition and that legibility that we can confront the question of productivity. Thirdly, we have to crack this question of money and with all due respect, Pox. For me, it is not about the deal-making that will get the players in the room that will fund more of the same. We've got to recognize that our cities and their needs are outside of the parameters of the mainstream infrastructure finance frameworks. And finally, let's build the research and development infrastructure and technology and innovation systems at the grassroots level in our cities. And of course, they have to be articulated so that we can really take this business of building an African frame, an African paradigm, an African vision about this different way of doing urbanism across the continent. Thank you.