 Thank you very much and we start now with our first panel, introducing the Urban Age and I ask a professor from the London School of Economics, Ricky Burnett, who is also I think it's much more important, the director of Urban Age and a very good friend to give his presentation. Ricky, it's yours. I have the first slide, I just go back. Thank you for these introductions and thank you all for coming to this important beginning of the two-day conference. It's good to see so many older faces and so many new faces that we've been collaborating with over the last few months, in fact. We've now been to Istanbul with the LSE and the Hermhausen team for nine times this year, so it's been a very rich and productive dialogue, which I hope will continue. I have two jobs to do this morning. One is to talk a little bit about how we're structuring the conference and sort of the main logistics and then talk a little bit more about the content of the four days and some of the research that actually has led up to the conference which we've developed at the LSE. So the first thing to say is that the conference program is in this yellow orangey sheet that you have here, but as with all things, just like with climate change, even the program itself is changing. As you've noticed already, two of our distinguished speakers came last night and are unable to attend this morning's conference, so we will just tell you as the day goes on and tomorrow goes on if there are minor changes to the program itself. On the whole, we will be sticking to the program that you have there, but the chairs will advise you. We have roughly 70 speakers over these two days. We always try and reduce it and we never succeed because there are just too many people with things to say. That means that we would very much like you to try and stick to time. I'll come back to that and the chairs have been asked to be extremely rigorous about this. We have represented this from at least 14 cities. I think it's growing by the moment. It's wonderful, for example, to have the head of city planning from Sao Paulo who sent an email just two days ago and said, I hear this is coming. My mayor would love me to come. Can I come? And of course, he's here and it's wonderful to see you, representatives, as I say, for more than 10 countries and from a large number of cities. We're here for two days in this extraordinary space. We have four sessions. I'll talk about them and we have a dinner where everyone in this room is invited. Please make sure that you register. The key things in terms of logistics is that actually we leave from here, right? So for those of you who need to change or whatever, please go to the hotel during the day but come back here because the boat leaves from here to go to the wonderful dinner venue and we will go by boat so that we get there beautifully and quickly. Not by car and not by bus. So make sure you're here. That's extremely important. All the presentations throughout the two days are around 15, 20 minutes. We have instructed the chairs. It's the only way to do this. I know it sounds a little bit rude to come up with a sign which says you have five minutes left, two minutes left and then stop. So that's going to apply to absolutely everybody and we encourage the chairs to use that with the exception of me, Wolfgang. So don't stop me yet because you don't have the... We want to very much thank the partners who've been involved in developing the research and the content for this program which includes the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and all the colleagues who've helped us in Istanbul. Particularly, I have to thank Salatim Yildon. Thank you very much for helping. Sabancı University and Bilgi University have been superb in supporting sort of the intellectual content of what we've been developing. The way the program is structured, again it's in the orange sheet that you see, is in basically four major sessions. Cities in the global context will start now, after lunch we'll be looking at cities and cultures. Then we go for dinner and go back for those of us who are staying at the Ceyran Palace, go straight back there. More morning again we start here, we have a session on environments and cities and then after lunch we will conclude with a discussion on city visions and projects and hope to end the conference on time at 6pm tomorrow evening. So what I want to do now is basically go through with you some of the things that we found, some of the things we've discovered together, some of the big issues which link the main themes of the urban age over the last four or five years, which is the relationship between the physical world and the social world, that's at the center of the inquiry that we have held together on cities. And let me do it by talking about the four major sessions and bring in some of the themes that I know some of the speakers will be addressing. Now in terms of the global context I think it's important to just frame one of the issues, we've heard the statistic Joseph Ackerman has referred to them about a large percentage of the world's population living in cities. But it may not be obvious to many of us that at least a third of the people living in these cities live in conditions of unacceptable squalor without basic resources, basically live in slums of one sort or another and that number is set to grow. What is it that we do about that? The other one is more debatable, there are many of my environmental colleagues who don't completely agree with this figure of 75 percent, but whether it's 60, whether it's 65, whether it's 75 percent, the fact that cities in one way or another contribute simply because they are wealthy and simply because they concentrate populations. They contribute to energy consumption and CO2 emissions is an issue that needs to be addressed. I see that as a problem, I see that as partly as the solution. If you make cities more efficient, you then make the world more sustainable. But I think one of the things that we've discovered over the years, undoubtedly as we've studied these cities is that most of the growth is like this. This could be a picture taken really in Mexico City, San Paolo, it could be the first phase of the Cheche Condos in this city here, but basically the informal development of urban forms of one sort or another in India, in Asia and elsewhere is something that I think our group didn't know we needed to understand and we are beginning to struggle to do with that. And then there's the other side of this urban growth. This happens to be the outside of Shanghai and I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that much of the new urban development, most of the new urban development being designed, being created in the emerging cities that we've talked about, the experience behind the statistics is more like this than anything else. And it's how these two worlds actually come together. This happens to be San Paolo, it could be elsewhere. It's how these two worlds of the formal and the informal, the aspirations towards global status and the need, as Sascha Sasan has often discussed, of the informal sector to actually support that global status is something that needs to be understood well. Now, I hope you can see from the back of the room some of these numbers on here, but we don't need to go into it in detail. What you see in the red color is where cities were in the 1950s. It's the size of cities, how many million people. And obviously you see that New York on the west of the map, London, nearly nine, 10 million, Tokyo already growing is how cities were only 60 years ago. The yellow is what has in a way happened in between Tokyo going way up to over 30 million, New York growing a bit, San Paolo exploding and other cities in South America. But it's the blue, the next years, which is where the growth is going to be concentrated. And as you can see, a lot of it clearly is in Africa, a lot of it is in Asia, and a lot of it is in areas of today, considerable poverty, but interestingly also low energy consumption. So those are issues which are very important to frame the whole debate. These are the cities, in fact it's more than nine that the urban age has been studying over the years because even though we've held conferences in nine cities themselves, we've been looking and analyzing the urban form, the demographics, the economics of all these cities that you see there. And this is work which is on our website for those of you who are interested in looking at this comparative dimension. Let's just focus on one or two key points that we found in this work. Shanghai still today, as you can see from this graph, is one of the cities which is still growing. It's beginning to flatten out quite dramatically. Since 1900, it's grown 1,746%. That's the scale of change that we're talking about. And Istanbul is not far behind. Yesterday we heard some extraordinary statistics about the numbers of how the city has changed, and we were also told that a large part of Istanbul is younger than Los Angeles. Now that begins to put things into perspective. Of course the Golden Horn and the city center is extraordinary. So these are issues that we need to see in context and understand in this way. And some of the work that we've done begins to compare cities. This is simply taking how cities have grown not by year but by hour. And Mumbai is growing with 47 people actually per hour. If we had put Lagos in there every minute that I'm speaking, someone would actually be arriving. Istanbul again is growing not at the same pace. And London and Berlin, in fact, are way down the scale in terms of growth. But just this gives you a sort of visual sense of how these cities are growing. Now what is intriguing that if you see the previous map, most of the growth, and you're all familiar with this, is happening on the eastern part of the world in Asia, in Africa, and parts of South America. Some of the recent research that has been done identifies exactly those areas of the areas greatest at risk in terms of environmental damage caused by climate change. Because of flood risk in particular. So cities are growing most in those areas which are at greatest risk. And our colleague from the London School of Economics, Nick Stern, who looks at the economics of climate change, is very clear that there's now a climate change refugee situation of people moving to cities which will exacerbate that growth. Saskia Sassen has talked a lot about how cities are very much part of an international financial network and their raison d'etre very much relies on that. And I think some of the research that we've done points to extremely interesting things which confirms what Joseph Ackermann was saying at the beginning, that cities are incredibly significant when it comes to contributing to the national economy. These graphs just compare in one column next to the other. The GDP of each city and the population. So you see that, for example, the population of Turkey, 17.8% is actually made up by the population in Istanbul. But they contribute far more, in fact, than their population to the GDP of the country. And that continues in all cases with the exception, I have to say, of Berlin. But I think there are reasons for that. And again, if you look at the same situation, you compare the average GDP per capita of the nation and the city. You see that in New York, the average is $53,000, the nation is $44,000. And when you come to Istanbul, you have $11,000 and $9,000 as a comparator. So again, cities clearly concentrate wealth and potential except for Berlin. We studied very carefully also where deprivation and wealth are distributed. And of course, that relates enormously to the economy of cities. Istanbul of the urban age cities has by far the highest manufacturing base still today. Nearly 40% of employment is in some form of manufacturing or other. That's slightly above Shanghai. Very, very different, of course, to say London where nearly over 50% is in services. And in Sao Paulo, where that section of services is growing. But a lot of it is taken up by commons. But why are cities growing? And what is actually happening behind them? Well, of course, it's a lot to do with people coming, as I will then conclude, in order to exploit the financial promise. The economic potential of the city. This young man who sells peanuts on the streets of Sao Paulo could be anywhere, makes more money than by per hour than by working in the fields. So there is very much this global imbalance which affects the nature of growth. And what we've found in our work is that most of the cities that we studied have a very, very high percentage of the informal sector. Just look at Mumbai, New Delhi, Mexico City, also Istanbul. We're talking about from nearly 70% to 30% of those economies being informal. And when you compare it to the national, what is interesting is that actually cities have the potential to formalize, to actually organize work. And therefore the potential of people to be better structured and to be therefore more included. One of the things that our team has studied very carefully in terms of understanding the global context is also the administrative organization of cities. Just look at these comparative maps and you see that Istanbul spreads across the page with a vast municipal area with it's nearly 13 million people in it. But it covers a vast region controlled by one mayor and by a number of city councils. This is similar only in terms of scale to the other cities that we studied to Shanghai. But these are nation states in terms of their literary global footprint. Compare it to London with 7 million and exactly the same scale as we saw before. So just look at those maps again, exactly the same scale. There is London, London looks tiny by comparison. It only has 7 million people concentrated in the built up area. And Sao Paulo, you see the inner shape is the city of Sao Paulo, but the state of Sao Paulo is the outer line. So how these cities are actually managed, who manages them and how they run are absolutely central to our work, which is something we'll be looking at in the first session. The second session is about cities and cultures. And I start with this image about social division brought about by physical forms. An image that is familiar to many of you in Sao Paulo. It's a favela on my left, which has hardly any water and is extremely poor on the right, a new tower block where each of the apartments is, the owners are so wealthy that they actually have a swimming pool on each terrace. There in that image you have social exclusion built in concrete. And I think that has been a fundamental issue of discovery for us as we study cities around the world and we will be looking at that in that session. We've done some work very much on understanding where social inequality is concentrated. In the darker colors you see that South America, Africa is much worse off in terms of the differences between those who are better off and those who are worse off. But we've also looked at that in terms of the cities themselves. And we find that Johannesburg, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and even New York, interestingly, has a much greater difference between the haves and the haves now than many of the European cities, Istanbul included, and some of the Asian cities. Now, violence and crime is something which I think has struck us enormously. We found that in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, the crime rates are absolutely extraordinary. And therefore the condition of existence there is totally affected by the sense of fear and crime. Istanbul, we're delighted to see together with Mumbai, is one of the low crime cities. And in fact, it's incredibly comfortable to have this luxury to be able to walk anywhere. This is something that a year ago we were unable to do as we traveled and walked around the city of Sao Paulo. Perhaps Johannesburg is the most difficult city that we've experienced from this point of view where people have had to abandon the city center, move in towards city forms which are always controlled by barbed wire, by high walls, and so much so that the city is no longer even investing in pavements because no one actually walks because they're too scared to walk. So that's the physical reality of change that we've discovered. People are moving therefore, sometimes for reasons that we understand and sometimes we don't understand, to gated communities, to clusters, to environments which are segregated. So we find that in India and we find that over here, even though the crime rate is not the case. This is not just a problem for the emerging world and the developing countries that we've described. In Europe, as Sophie Baudis-Jrondeau has taught us, the center of a city like Paris is of course perfect in many ways. But the reality of Paris is this. Most people live on the periphery in building types like this of a particular group. Hence the sort of violence which has emerged there for the year. So these will be some of the issues that we look at. The third area that we're discussing is the one of the relationship between cities and the environment. And again here, just focus on this image. The darker colors show you the offenders, those who consume more in terms of energy in the world. Clearly the United States, Australia, the former Soviet Union are at the top end of consumption. For clear reasons in terms of economic development. But the areas where there is greater urban growth is in fact the areas which today are low energy. So there are potentials, there are opportunities and it's not necessarily a negative issue. The question is very simple. What do city leaders decide in terms of directions? Which way do we go in terms of creating cities? Is it likely American cities like Chicago, which uses energy and extends, sort of, limit this to the horizon, stretching infrastructure, or are there other models of the more compact, more density, which make them more efficient? Transport and we'll come to this in that session. Public transport I think is key to this debate. Cities without good public transport are ineffective and inefficient. And if you think you have a problem in Istanbul, think of Mumbai. That's the sort of condition you have there. Nasser, I hope you don't mind me saying that. Sampala had the same sort of crisis in terms of floods and transport that you've experienced here recently. But we have found in these cities that there's a sort of DNA of public transport, which is, and different forms of use, which is actually quite fascinating. In Mumbai and in Istanbul, nearly half or very close to it of the population actually either cycles or walks less in Istanbul because of the hills for this reason. But look at those numbers, Mumbai and Shanghai, over 50% actually use that form of, you know, sustainable transport to actually get around. And I think there are questions to be asked as to whether that's the model that one should follow. But oddly, you then find that in terms of car ownership, London is, and Berlin you might expect very high levels of car ownership. Istanbul is less than half of that. But Sampalo, Mexico City, look at these enormous numbers in terms of car ownership. Nearly 900 cars are sold every day in Sampalo. And surely this must not be the right way to solve the sort of future problems of sustainability. And we've looked at other things to do with carbon emissions. But the relationship between density, how close people live, and public transport I think is extremely important in this debate. Istanbul is actually one of the denser cities in the world. It is denser than Shanghai and not as dense as Mumbai, in fact. But look at London as if nobody is living there when you actually compare these two. But then you need to relate this to public transport. And I think it's interesting that Istanbul's investment we heard yesterday, nearly 19 billion pounds have been invested in the infrastructure of the city. At the moment it has 32 kilometers of metro and 163 of rail, compared that to London, which is nearly 1,400 kilometers of rail. But after all, we've been investing for 160 years in that. So it's a question of time and development. So I think transport is absolutely central to this discussion. And let me just mention very briefly before I begin to wrap up a piece of work that Philip Rother and his colleagues in my team have been working on, which is trying to relate the shape of cities to not just the energy consumption, but also to the way that built form relates to energy. This is quite the new piece of work. Normally, and this is well known in the industry, it's very clear that if you have a very spread out city like Houston or Detroit or Denver, you use a lot of gasoline, it's an American research done a number of years ago. Well, if you have a city like Hong Kong, you see it way on the other side of the graph, it's much more efficient to use public transport to get around. So we've been doing some work on five or six cities in London and Istanbul, looking at different built forms and actually studying the energy impact of the built form itself. And we're concluding very, very simple things that actually denser built form, the actual buildings being closer together, is much more efficient in terms of energy consumption than the spread out. It may seem obvious, but to have those statistics is, I think, very important. So let me begin to wrap up by talking about the final session, which is the one about what is the role of vision making, what is the role of architecture, what is the role of public space in all this. And I think I want to use a negative and a positive here. We were struck when we were in Mumbai by a number of relocation projects which are happening to improve the infrastructure. But we were devastated when we saw that the sorts of projects which are being built with public money, including World Bank money, is this sort of housing. This is housing which is built for people who live near the railways and near the motorways and have been moved here. They look as if they've been there for maybe 30 years. They've been there for three years. They're built to sub-standard housing standards. In other words, the distance between one window and the other is less than is normally allowed in normal housing. Why? Because for poor people, the people who are now living there can't afford to actually use the elevators, the lift, because they don't have money for the electricity, so they put their garbage in it. Rats have moved in. You can imagine. It's now a vertical slum rather than a horizontal slum. So these are the decisions being made by city planners. Now, like I said, there are some positive things that we found which is absolutely the case. There are some examples of fantastic innovation in terms of housing types which we found in Chile, which respond to sort of the dynamics of informality. This is a Chilean architect, Alejandra Ravena, who's now building housing throughout Chile to deal with this problem. We, even in London with the Olympics and a number of the key players who are speaking about this, are looking at the opportunity of investing £9.3 billion in an area in East London which has been devastated for decades, I have to say, and is now under construction as an opportunity to reconnect the social fabric to reinvest in part of London. Therefore, design as a form of regeneration is absolutely fundamental. So we ask ourselves questions in this. We will, in the final session, with you as to whether a project like Zaha Adi is a very beautifully designed project in Pertal, just behind me, across the Bosphorus, is going to become a place which is reconnected with the fabric or becomes another gated community. These are therefore the big issues that we're addressing over these four days and we want to share with you. What we're interested and what we've been looking at over these last few years is trying to identify the DNA of cities. As Wolfgang has said, it's really trying to identify the grammar of success of what works and what doesn't. And I think we now can ask ourselves, well, what have we begun to find? What have we got there? I remember that Sasan mentioned in the New York session said we don't actually have a word to describe what we're talking about. Maybe we can use the word sittiness, not urbanism, sittiness. And I think we're beginning to identify some aspects of what sittiness is. And the first is something that when we were in Mumbai and it hit us, we were informed by what Sukhetu Mehta, who wrote this beautiful book called Maximum City, referred to in the common language of the city as the bird of gold. We were very touched by the notion that despite the poverty, the sense of promise of the city, the sense that you arrive in a city and you can fly, you can make money, you can move up the scale. It's something that we really understood behind sort of this negative impression of perhaps slums like Dharavi. There is extraordinary potential and incredible riches there in the city which aspires to being this great global city. In New York at the beginning, we asked the question, we nearly got kicked out. Is New York almost all right? Wasn't an easy moment. The New Yorkers didn't like that question to be asked. But we did find that it's a city which is really an essay in resilience, an essay in how to live in high density and even through the lifetime of the urban age. We've seen enormous changes. Janette Sadiq Khan, who will be speaking here a few days, has actually been able to pedestrianize Broadway. Can you believe that? I mean, in the city, in the United States, parts of the city have actually been pedestrianized and now Richard Sennett mentioned that yes, there's this extraordinary sheer energy of growth, 10,000 skyscrapers now rather than 121 over eight stories high 25 years ago. And the speed and acceleration of that change is something that we all understood and were shared by the people we were there with, was going to probably fail. There were parts of cities that actually were being built today that the city leaders knew in about five or 10 years time would have to fail because they were dysfunctional. But mistakes in many ways were being made because of the conditions and the need to house more people. St. Paulo, we were touched by what Governor Sarah said at the end of the conference that if we could pick up some of the ideas that the urban age had talked about or had picked up, particularly to do with the energy of what we found in the favelas and some of the environmental aspects that were being approached, the city would be a better place to live in over the next 20 years. And I have to say that probably the saddest place, many of us found, as an experience, was Johannesburg. Johannesburg was a city which, despite the great promise, after 15 years at the end of apartheid, was a city which was still even more fragmented. People living in Soweto and Alexandra had no public transport. The city center had become emptied out, left over to sort of bandits with drug wars. And we felt that this was a city where people were so scared to walk around in that it was no longer a city. And you've seen some images of what it's like. And I think I can only comment on London as being a city which has a strong generosity in terms of its openness, in terms of its greenness, but also enormous risk because it's becoming unaffordable and people are actually moving out because at the center of this great city there are no affordable schools and little affordable housing. Berlin, what can I say? The mayor himself said it was poor but sexy and we left it at that. It's a wonderful place. And I think all these are the themes which beneath the skin of the statistics that I'm talking about, behind the sort of the surface of the big debates about planning are exactly the issues that we want to discuss over these two days. And effectively, I can't answer the question about what Istanbul is about. That's what we're here to do. We're here to debate with you, the city of intersections and understand what its DNA is about. So that, I hope, explains the themes of the next two days and the context within which we set them. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ricky.