 Craig thank you so much, and that was quite an act and I'm delighted actually I'm speaking now But at a certain point I will be stopping and Craig will take over Again, but it's really an enormous pleasure to join Andrew and Craig and welcome everyone here I have a very very sort of simple task Which is to introduce in a way the themes and also to be the house manager to a degree in terms of the Logistics of the event and how things are going to work in these two Days that you're here So the first thing is just remind us that we're looking at the electric city Craig has given a lot of the themes behind it Philip Rode and I when we thought up this project with Wolf and over canute some Effectively year-and-a-half ago thought how can we talk about the smart city without saying smart city? How how can we talk about this bundle of very very complex ideas? Which doesn't reduce it in a way to a catchphrase but think of something which is an umbrella which deals with the social the technical And the physical things that we've been concerned with for many years here So we thought about this term electric city because it has a historical and a future sense And this is a view of what London might be over time and we've structured really the whole conference around many of the themes that You see here It's a two-day event as you know It takes place here with lunches and coffee breaks and everything else and there are a series of logistical issues I want to go through in a moment, but I think just looking at the program which of course you have here in Yellow in the insert in your conference newspaper. You will see that there's Very different forms of presentations many of them with power points as you can see here some of them are discussions at the table in the center and It's all broken up into more or less three or four major themes today in the morning We deal with really the scene-setting aspect of the economy of space and on Technologies and how they affect the bigger picture We will then move on After that but before lunch on issues of the economy and green jobs and how that's clearly related to that After lunch, we'll be looking at more detailed technologies What actually is happening in terms of innovation in cities around the world and importantly concluding with a discussion about? Low and high tech what can we afford and significantly in different parts of the world not just in the global north? We will then end at 545 and resume tomorrow Tomorrow we will take a slightly different tack very much along craig's lines Which is looking very at the culture the politics and the effect also of the on the individual on Society but also the individual at the heart of it so with Richard Senate We will be kicking off on the notion of culture and innovation on the city We will be moving to the critical aspect of design of public space and of buildings and importantly design of systems of Information and access which are at the heart of this technical Revolution as you might call it and then we're going to end after lunch by really Turning to the heart of some of the issues that have been said is who decides What do policymakers and politicians? Think about this and what can they actually do about it with a panel of mayors and experts following a discussion? with Tony giddens and others on what cities can do in terms of climate change and All the possibilities of the new infrastructures that have been discussed This is the boring bit, but I've got to do it. Someone's got to do it Because of the large number of speakers We're going to ask you all of those who are moderating all of those of you who are speaking I'm panel members to be short and stick to time. There's a little bulb here with flashes And a certain point it will flash while I speak I'm sure but please Be brief stick to time and those of you from the floor who have comments and things to say Make yourself energetically be seen But don't make long statements if you've got a point make it be very interesting That's why you're here, but don't go on into long sort of sentences keep the time We do have sheets of paper would say five minutes one minutes and then stop at which point then you're thrown out We are live streaming the event from now on so there will be more people than just the 300 plus room in the room We have these coffee and lunch breaks Please be punctual when you hear the gong come back in so that we can start on time the emergency exits I think you can see the toilets are off the main Room where we're having breakfast and coffee today, they're sitting signed over there There's free Wi-Fi. There's a Twitter with the address there And of course in this case given that it's the electric age conference We can't say turn off your mobile phones, but put them on silent I think that's absolutely Central so that you can Twitter and do what you like to do, but please do that I'm looking over there. No, okay someone else Now let me go back and stress one of two of the key themes and some of the research That we've been doing which of course is Reinforced and documented in what we call the conference newspaper, which you have here this Contains a lot of the research that fact Philip and his team have been Putting together over the last year or so looking at different cities But very much starting from these themes of as we saw in Dan's excellent sort of film Presentation at the beginning of looking at the history both backwards and forwards Electrification did this to cities it brought goods it brought people as you see here The great 19th century city was powered in many ways by electricity Then in the 20th century more or less this happened the car the petrol based vehicle actually took over and Turned cities into very very different sort of environments Spread thinly across the landscape with very negative consequences in terms of the environmental and social impacts And of course electricity is very much still there at the heart of cities and powering everything not just from buildings, but to the Little pieces of technology that we carry around with us When we thought about the electric city and we wanted to talk about it These are the obvious ways that we can think about it These are the mechanisms the technologies the systems that have already been alluded to But we want to focus here on three or four big aspects of the electric city One is how do you generate energy in a different way? This actually is a power plant a combined heat and power plant right in the middle of London guys hospital Generating in fact clean energy right at the heart of London This is what institutions like universities like hospitals and housing projects can actually do This is another theme we're obviously going to be talking about and it's to do with transport It happens to be the Boris bikes But it could be any systems of moving around the city in as efficient way as possible and I'll come back to that a Third very very important theme cutting across is what is the space? What is the place we're making in cities of the future? What does it actually feel like to walk down a street in a new town like Songdo in South Korea? Is it like? Hoxton or is it not? And a fundamental aspect is the personal one which I've already alluded to how do these technologies allow people to interact Not just with systems, but with each other there many mayors here who have been at the forefront of pioneering of using effectively the new technologies to Empower and make a difference in terms of people and how they engage in cities But as a great Architect no longer with us Cedric price said many years ago now Fine Technology is the answer But what is the question and these are the questions that we're addressing together We don't know exactly what those questions are, but they're certainly bigger than the solutions that are being offered through the smart city movement Let me go back a little bit and talk about what Anshu was in a way illustrating with his extraordinary Statistics about Asia and India and just point out some of the things that we've been looking at at the LSE for a number of years This is an extraordinary world map Which shows in yellow where people live where people are and You know you'd be excused for saying that the Sahara is a bit empty and the Amazon is a bit empty That's fine, but then you look at Ireland and you wonder where is everybody You look at most of Spain and say hey, what's happening there? Australia no comment But look at Asia Look at India look at the Pacific Rim and Look at the United States and parts of South America that is where not only is there extraordinary density of human Habitation, but as we've heard before there is growth and this is where together We have been working on these cities and conferences and studied a whole series of others Beyond that in the conference newspaper We've done a lot of work together with a number of colleagues too many to mention here And I'm not going to go through this in detail, but actually looking at where energy consumption is Located where there's more generation of Electricity from green sources or non and there's some very clear Public enemies and some clear winners and that's exactly the point at which I will now pause and Craig will come and greet our VIPs. So thank you very much, but