 Thank you, Joe, and now for some slides. I'm going to do two things in my slot. I'm going to talk a little bit about what the Urban Age Project has been trying to do intellectually over the last years, what we've found, and why we've come here. And then in the last minutes, I'm going to talk about the logistics of these two days and how they're organized. Let me also welcome the number of people from around the world who will be following this live through a live stream at the moment, so welcome from anywhere from the United States to Europe to Asia and other parts of Africa, and please use the Twitter handle that you see over there, but put your phones on silent, but do use the Twitter handle at Urban Age as you see there. I'm going to show you four very rapid images. They happen to be of Kampala, but they could be any city. They could be where we were yesterday with Fazl and Zagaya in Addis. They could be other cities from around the world. The issue here is that cities are changing rapidly for the same reason they've been doing that for thousands of years. People come to cities to meet, to do business, to transact, to exchange goods, to exchange ideas, to exchange information, to exchange money. And until that changes, urbanization is not going to stop. That's the heart of the question behind the Urban Age. That's why we started our work and we started in around 2005 when 50% of the world became urbanized. In order to have that discussion, we are interested in an interdisciplinary approach, but we're also interested in a regional take, which is genuinely international. That's why we have more than 60 speakers from over 26 cities represented here and in the program, which I'll come to. But urbanization is not an equal thing. If you look at this map, which is part of the newspaper document, which is you all have, you can see in this diagram in the purple circles where urban growth, according to the UN and other agencies, will happen most intensely, effectively between now and 2030. And you can see that it's an imbalance in the sense that most of it, the rapid part of it, is going to happen in Asia and Africa. The numbers that you see there, large numbers, 47, 56, are the number of people who are either born or are moving into these cities per hour. In 20 minutes that any of us are speaking to you, someone new is moving into his born, say, in Lagos, Dhaka, or elsewhere. So imagine what that means in terms of the provision of infrastructure, housing, sewers, hospitals, and everything else. That's the issue that we're looking at, and that is why, of course, we're focusing in the areas of the developing world that have been talked about before. This shows the same diagram effectively, but not in terms of population growth, but in terms of economic growth, and the same story as there. There is an advantage in many ways that the next generations of cities are at the moment in areas of low energy use, and relatively low levels of economic development, therefore the future is ours in a way to channel and steer in the right direction. But just think of these statistics. Just to put it in the context, 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050, that's sort of around the corner, which is when my son will be my age, it's not that far away, it's very close, and nearly 90% of that will be taking place in Asia and Africa. But the most important issue for us in these days of discussion, as Anna's already said, is that actually most of the investment has yet to happen, so we can either get it wrong or we can get it right. That's the point of the urban age. As we've been working here, we realize that there are certain models, certain typologies, certain existing cities which are seen as exemplars of how to manage this growth. Seoul and South Korea, of course, grew from a small village practically into one of the world's most dynamic cities. We have a number of people talking about that. Singapore, let us remind ourselves, 80% of the population of Singapore lives in affordable social housing, 80%. How do you do that? We're going to hear from a number of speakers. Mexico City, like other Latin American countries and other parts of Europe, of course, has experimented in large-scale housing and development. Not all of it is perfect, and we're going to be sharing with you. How do you plan for cities and not allow this to happen? Unfortunately, much of the urbanizing world is informal and unchanneled. That doesn't mean that it's not vibrant, it doesn't have its own ecology and its own economy, but we need to understand how these different parts of the city, let's call it the formal and the informal, cohabit in ways that don't promote exclusion. That is why, and we heard before from Anna, we have speakers from Medellin and Columbia that turned the city round literally in 25 years from the city with the highest homicide rate in the world to a place that people love to visit, enjoy and live in. These are the challenges for India, for Pakistan, and for other countries which are represented in these few days. And we come, of course, with fresh eyes, not to tell Africa what to do, but to share with you to offer a mirror of reflection with you as to what the issues are in cities like Lagos, in cities like Kampala, or elsewhere. Because the question really is what do you do with this? You know, when you have an environment which is growing, how do you actually design it, what sort of economy, what sort of governance, whose voices actually represented our issues which are fundamental and need to be understood? This becomes more and more important when, say, a city like King Shaza, this could be many other cities in the rest of the world, are growing literally uncontrollably, eating up the surrounding green land with devastating environmental, and I would say social, consequences. And again, we were fascinated yesterday in the tour to see that this country has invested in 200,000-plus housing projects around the city, and it's an important statement to be made. I cannot not talk about this project. It just so happens that on the 20th of November, I know all of you are going to raise it anyway, so might as well talk about it now, on the 20th of November, a short time ago, a project for the heart of your city is privately led, mainly from foreign investment, has been presented, and it's been talked about with enormous sort of intensity, shall I say. Cities need that sort of debate, and that's what this platform is about. And I want to say at the beginning of this two-day conference, we should not be railroaded by these discussions. These are important, but they're part of a much bigger picture and something we all understand. Let me share with you what's happened in London in exactly the same timeframe. This is a cluster of very tall buildings which are happening in the heart of our financial hub, the city of London. Last week, we got this thing, the tulip, a new proposal for a new building. Now, you know, we have our own problems and our own issues to debate, and that's why I want to, in a way, put this out right up front. In fact, our Lagar project, two stations in the middle of the city of London, four billion privately funded project, is probably one of the best examples of integrated socially connected, spatially connected planning that I am aware of. So bringing in, let us call private sector, within good public planning policy, needs not end up in exclusive environments. And this is why we have the Deputy Mayor of Paris also sharing with us what you can do to the roads and the infrastructure to turn them into places for people, the famous plage on the River Seine. Let me now talk about some of the key issues which are also talked about in the documentations that are with you. One of the colleagues at the London School of Economics and Extern, an economist who was focused on issues of climate change, makes this point that actually the future of the world's population, when we mostly built in our time, in the next 20, 30 years. Therefore, again, I stress to get it right is our responsibility as a generation and the people being trained by us. That's why knowledge exchange capacity building becomes so important. We have choices. We can do what the Chinese have done, which is amazing in terms of infrastructure investment and some of that is understood, of course, here. But behind this are two fundamental statistics which drive our research and our work. One is social and the other is environmental. If you take all the urbanization happening across the world, 33% at the moment are projected to be living in environments which are without basic infrastructure, without sanitation, water, et cetera. What you can call a slum, what you might call a favela, you can call it different names and I don't want to give it a negative connotation, but that's what it is. It's unplanned, broadly speaking. And you know as well as I that in Africa there are large concentrations, some cases 60, 70% could be described in that way, but we'll be talking about that. So it's a strong issue here. The other axis, if that is the social issue, is the environmental one. Cities today, because of what they are, let us remind ourselves, people come to cities to do stuff, to do jobs, to exchange goods, I mentioned it before. They consume vast amounts of energy, of course they do, but they also therefore produce large amounts of CO2 emissions. But there's a good news story here. If you actually manage cities, plan them in such a way that you get them right, you can actually have a maximum impact on the global sustainability of the planet. Cities are part of the solution, not just part of the problem. So you don't have to have cities as in Delhi where the equivalent of bad air is like smoking one pack of cigarettes a day. That's what we're talking about, right? What did we do 40 years ago? We banned smoking. We stopped it. We said it's bad for you. So I think we have to do something similar here. The urban age, we've mentioned it before, has been meeting many times across the world. And in fact, it's more than just meeting. It's a series of research projects in-depth work very much along the lines that I've talked about. And in fact, most of the cities that you see there in yellow with the conference this year, focusing very much on developing urban futures. We've put much of that work in a book which in fact came out only a few weeks ago that Philip, Rhoda and I edited, but with contributions from, in fact, many people in the room. We put a lot of that knowledge and new knowledge in this publication which I'm now going to talk about. And in a way, this statistic, this graph here, if you can read what it actually says is the reason why we're here. If you look at where large cities are growing across the world, the top five, six, seven cities are all in Africa. The next are all in Asia. You can see that here, for those of you like me who don't have my glasses, I can't read what's on the screen. But they're all Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam and others are represented there. So it sort of totally makes sense that this is where we have to have the debate. This is where it matters actually most because even Mexico City, certainly London or Paris, even though we're growing a bit, finally, it's nothing like the rate of growth that is actually happening here. So we produce this one of many publications for this conference. Let me say at this stage, there's only one copy per person. So don't steal your neighbor's one because they can't be replaced. But it can be downloaded on our website as of today. We only have literally as many copies that are available for people in this room. So let me just tell you what's in there in terms of our research to frame some of the discussions over the next few days. The first thing is that if you look at cities literally across the world, there is a trend that the more that we urbanize, the better the wealth is. Measured in a very conventional term, GDP. In other words, how much money you have in your pocket. That is not the only criteria for wellbeing. In fact, that's being challenged by economists and others around the world. But certainly there's a story there that needs to be understood. So when you go and see the skyline of Addis changing or the skyline of Nairobi or elsewhere, one understands what is actually happening in terms of job creation, wealth, but also the risks associated with that in terms of inequality. Africa today actually is more urbanized than perhaps many of us thought. It's already at 42%. These images which you'll see compared different continents show the sparsity of urban development that there is in certain regions, obviously the Sahara and so on and therefore the potential, but also the enormous distances. The more the color is red on this map, the more dense some of these cities are. But look at that. Same diagram for Asia and particularly India. Look at the concentration of urban development and sheer number of people together in the northern regions of India and sort of elsewhere. And compare that to the old continent of Europe where 74% is urbanized. We could have also and you'll see it in the document in Latin America where it's even more. So we have lessons to learn here. It's not the first time that there has been urbanization and Joe Beall mentioned that the LSE was born effectively at the time of intense, not so rapid urbanization in Europe. Why is that happening and how is that being serviced? For the first time in this document in the work that we've done, we've actually tried to connect, understand the connectivity between cities in your continent and the rest of the world. And we were incredibly surprised by how the connectivity by air has actually increased dramatically over the last decades. By design, Ethiopian Airways Addis Abba Airport is there. But no, from this diagram here, it's the purple lines on the left, which are the ones that are increasing more than the ones on the right. It's quite interesting. Therefore Asia, China, et cetera, becomes very significant. Clearly that relates to trade and foreign direct investment into this country and also others. The two are clearly connected. So physicality, connectivity, investment, social wellbeing are all bundled up. That's why at the urban age we like to talk about it as one story. And if one just looks at the shifts in trade with different foreign partners across Africa, it's pretty clear which one is the dominant one, which is the Chinese one on the one side of the equation. Now we have put together in this document a lot of new research, much of which has been supported by the organization's mentions above. I don't expect you to read or understand this from where you're sitting in the room, but I hope you spend some time looking at the data there. But the most important thing about this report is that we've taken seven African cities, in this case all sub-Saharan, and we've tried to compare them across a whole range of parameters, and I'm going to pick up on two or three, with all the other cities we've been working on for the years. It's the idea not of benchmarking or ranking and say who's better or who's worse. It's just saying this is what density is here, this is what density is there. This is what transport equity is like here, that is what there. Not because one is better than the other, this is how it is, and it's a good starting point for I think policy development, and that's why we've done this work. So apart from Addis, we've looked at these six cities in some detail. Let me just pick up a couple of points. I mentioned before the population growth per hour. Addis is pretty high already at 23 people per hour. Dar es Salaam is nearly double that, but this is pretty slow compared to Delhi, just to put things in context. And if we were to look at what's happening in Europe or other parts of the world, not only would it be flat, in some cases it's even negative. So the notion of shrinking cities is a part of the global problem. If we look at the density, which I've referred to, and I'll show you in illustrations in a moment, actually Addis is more dense than perhaps maybe some of us thought at the beginning, but it's not as dense as Nairobi, but it's, which is more or less the density of Seoul, one of the sort of models that is being talked about. And if we look at how cities are organized, purely in terms of how people get around the city, it is fascinating how in many of the cities that we've looked at, still 50% or thereabouts in some cases more, people walk to work or cycle to work or use other means of what might call sustainable transport for the moment. So where cities go are going to be important. So where cities go, and now I come to some of the key parts of the report itself, relates very much to form and shape. And we can control that. It doesn't have to be the way it is. We've looked at Guangzhou in China just as one example of a city that has grown, look at those statistics. In from 1990 to 2015, 25 years, the population has grown by nearly a thousand percent, nearly a thousand percent. But the built up area, the area it occupies, which is in light blue as opposed to the dark blue, the two dates, has actually grown by over 300%, right? So you actually see an enormous difference in terms of what happens. That means that it's a city that has sprawled enormously. And we'll come back to that. On the top over there, I went too rapidly, I think. Well, I won't, yeah, sorry, you see Singapore, which has also grown in terms of population, not as much, but it's maintained its growth within its own footprint. In other words, it's a more sustainable way of actually growing the city, higher density, better public transport. These are models that we're going to be talking about. And we've been able, and you'll see the detail in this document of looking at how Addis, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, and others have grown in the same time period in the light oranges where cities were about 20 years ago in the darker brown oranges where cities have grown. And you can recognize how many of them are also growing outside the boundary of the city where the mayor is in charge. So that's a big issue in terms of governments, which we can come back to. There you see the same for Kampala and others. Now, the question of density I've already talked about. What does density actually mean in this context? On the image on the left is the density of where people live, more or less, in Shanghai. The taller the spike doesn't mean the higher the buildings, it means the number of people in the space, in a square kilometer, roughly. The more you go up, the more people there are. So if in this room there were twice the number of people there are now, which would be pretty amazing, but I mean, it's pretty good as it is, you would have a double the spike. So what you see here is the story of Shanghai that that city has very much moved on intentionally is that the densities have doubled or tripled to make it a global city. But it's also been accompanied by vast investments in transport, 280 new subway stations, and much more with it. You can't really do one without the other. And it's fascinating, look, these are all to scale. They're all the same scale. They're not distorted. How a city like Cairo, there are a number of colleagues here from Cairo who will be speaking, which is a city which is not 20 or 30 story high. It has six or seven story buildings or higher, but many of them lower. But the density of that city is absolutely astronomical. So these are issues that need to be understood and compared. Let's talk about a number of social issues here. If you look at the city not in spatial terms, but in terms of who's actually living in it, it is striking that in Addis, if you look at what we call an age pyramid, a very large proportion of people are below the age of 20. These age pyramids are heavier at the bottom. It's interesting if you look at other cities across Africa, of course the story is roughly the same. But look at Tokyo. It's actually nearly the opposite. It's an aging city. So the problems are completely different. They're about providing infrastructure of those my age and older rather than young people. And we're going to be talking about that in the first session that follows. All this relates to governance. In the end, unless you govern a city, you have democracy, you have investment. The issue of governance is fundamental and we've studied this and it's presented in the papers. We've looked at where federal government is important, where city government is significant and how different forms of government, for example, in London or elsewhere, either help represent the voice of the people or probably even hinder that. And that is very central. And transport becomes a key area of analysis, particularly my colleague Philip Roder has been working on this with colleagues here where we map not just the official transit systems, but also what one might call popular transit or unofficial, the taxi, the minibuses and other, which are so dominant in cities across this country. How can we learn from understanding that and going back to this issue of how many people actually get to work in different ways of transport, either using a car, but most importantly, what's going to happen in the future? Add us at the moment, roughly 15, 16% use a car. What's going to happen in 10 years? What's going to happen in five years? What are the effects of that on air pollution? How many cars do we actually want to sell? Where do we stand in those sorts of issues? So those are the broad themes and questions that I think we'll be addressing in the next few years. There's a lot of that work over here. Let me end by talking about the program, but by also pausing a moment on the very important comment that was made earlier by Anna. As you gather, Anna is Alfred Herrhausen's daughter. We would not be here literally if we were not benefiting from the contribution and the collaboration. And it's wonderful to have, in fact, Alfred Herrhausen's wife, Troudel, actually being present at this event. So it's great that you're witnessing the growth of this project from its inception to its current state. So I just wanted to reiterate that. The program, you can see one thing. It's crowded as hell, right? There are a lot of people speaking and some of them have the tendency a bit like me to speak a bit too much. But let me just go through the logistics here. They're very important. We will have a number of updates and inevitable in an event, international event like this that some people have to change their plans. Philip and I, mainly Philip Brode and I will be announcing those changes as we go ahead. As I said, there's one newspaper per person, but you can access the online version. We will have coffee breaks where you were before. We actually have a five minute bell and a two minute bell to make sure you come back. We're gonna start whether you're here or you're not. So please be here on time. It's very, very important to have this sort of conversation going. The lanyards you have, these things, can you keep them so you don't need to register for tomorrow? You just come straight in. Just makes life much easier. We have in the central pages of this document the CVs of all the speakers. So we have asked all the chairs and the moderators not to spend time just repeating everyone's CV. It's there, please look at that. And chairs don't be tempted to read them out. We don't need to do that. We have two forms of discussion at the table amongst the keynote speakers who come here or stay at the table. And it's basically a discussion between six, seven, in some cases, eight people at the table. We hopefully will have cameras that pick up people's comments and expressions, but you will hear the sound. We will also have a number of open discussions whereby all of you in the room may want to contribute. When we come to that, can you please raise your hand, try and make contact with the chair, with Philip or with me, and can you make sure that you say who you are, wait for a microphone. That say who you are should be short. This should be I am X from Y. And please just make a statement or ask a question but don't go on for a long time. In order to make sure that that is managed properly, we have a very, very simple system, which is a series of signs, which tell you when there are three minutes left, five minutes left, and the gentleman over here who looks calm and charming is actually Lawrence will be responsible for that. And that applies to all of us, me included. So today we will have a series of discussions. I'm not going to introduce the themes. I just want to summarize how it is. We will end at around 6 p.m. today. We will start tomorrow with a slight change in program. Vera Songwe, the executive secretary of the ECA will be starting the day together with the British ambassador, Susanna Moorhead. We will then basically keep the program exactly as it is, but with a half an hour shift. And then we will end the day, in fact, with the German ambassador and Anna Herrhausen. So as I say, the most important thing of what I've said is remember this to the speakers, three minutes, one minute, and stop. Thank you.