 Thank you very much, Ms. Karan. Distinguished guests, it is a pleasure and a true honor to be welcoming you all here for the 17th Urban Age Conference. My name is Anna Herrhausen. I am the Executive Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft. From the beginning in New York in the year 2005, the Urban Age has been a collaboration between the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and Ricky Baudette, Philipp Rode and their team at LSE Cities. In the last 18 months or so, we've been particularly fortunate to have found additional important collaborators. Without the following institutions and the people behind them, we would all not be here today. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the mayor and city government of Addis Abiba, the Ethiopian Ministry for Urban Development and Construction, the Ethiopian Institute for Architecture, Building Construction and City Development at the University of Addis Abiba, the Forum for Social Sciences, and the Ethiopian Civil Service University. Thank you so much for your input, for your support over these past months. For some of you in this room, this is the 17th Urban Age Conference. At this point, I would like to particularly welcome Ute Vailand, my predecessor. The Urban Age is in large part also her baby. Actually, it's not a baby anymore. I would say it is a confident and able young adult. Thank you very much, Ute, for coming. For some, like me, this is the fourth or maybe the fifth Urban Age Conference. And I believe for many of you, it is the first. So I hope that all the veterans in the room allow me this brief introduction. All of you in this room are here because professionally, you connect to the phenomenon of urbanization. You come from city or national governments, from academia, from businesses, from the media, from civil society organizations or from the arts. You govern cities. You research cities. You write about cities. You advocate for certain stakeholder groups. You conduct performances in and about cities. You build cities. Most of you have the words urban, city, or metropolitan in your professional title. So you all have something in common. And as I've seen this morning and yesterday, during the course of the day, I think the connecting is already very well underway. But who exactly is Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and what do we have to do with it all? We are a nonprofit organization dedicated to the legacy of Alfred Herrhausen. From the Wikipedia entry, you will learn that Alfred Herrhausen was a manager. He was speaker of the board of management or nowadays we would say CEO of Deutsche Bank until his assassination in the year 1989. What you will realize when getting further into his biographies that on another level, this manager was also an activist, a politician, and a philosopher. He was always interested in and working for the creation and maintenance of a free and open society. He would have fitted very well into this crowd and he would have truly enjoyed being here. Why? Because he would have understood that the world's urban age is upon us and that this final leap towards the urban age needs urgent exploration. The big questions for mankind come out in cities. Questions of welfare, of social cohesion, of sustainability, of security. Questions of values, questions of governance. You will rightfully ask, if this is the 17th Urban Age Conference, don't you have some answers as well? And all I can say is yes and no. Our experience of the last 18 months has been humbling at times, motivating at others. We have all learned a lot and I would like to thank our four mentioned collaborators again for welcoming us with patience and with an open mind. The dynamics of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, the drivers behind this trend and the rationale by which it plays out are in many ways different from what we've seen in other parts of the globe. The current challenges however, and I'm aware that this is a strong statement but I wouldn't be here today if I didn't believe it, the current challenges are arguably not so different in Addis Abiba than they are or perhaps have been in Medellin or in Singapore or in Leipzig for that matter. We have tried to reflect this asymmetry in the program of the next two days. In terms of how to deal with rapidly urbanizing regions in sub-Saharan Africa, I hope you will support us in teasing out where the commonalities and where the differences lie, where we can transfer practices and where we should develop something indigenously. Where we should plan and coordinate or where we should allow for trial and error. I hope you will all contribute to the discussions and I hope you will all take something valued away from them. Please enjoy the conference.