 Well, good afternoon everybody and thank you for your very good presentation Wendy and it's good to be part of the third Asian Pacific. I'm going to be talking about the city of Leeds, which started out as an industrial town in city like so many in the north of England. And it didn't actually move as far forward as it should be in terms of making itself a good place to be. Until that is, we had a report, and I will move on to hopefully the next. Yes. Leeds is the third largest city in the UK, and it lies in the fourth most populous area. The area has about two and a half 2.6 million people in it. It is one of the most diverse economies in all the UK employment areas and has, which is rather good. It's one of the most diverse, fastest growing private sector jobs. That said, the character of the city is diverse in appearance and density but the public realm to be perfectly honest did lack distinctiveness. As in most cities can enjoy the city most by walking around it on foot or possibly by bicycle, but Leeds was fundamentally designed round vehicles. And that is not very helpful. Leeds came in 2014, when a report by the public health England on air pollution in cities and supported by the World Health Organization found that over 320 people per year who lived or worked in the city centre in Leeds died from diseases caused by air pollution. And that triggered a lot of very quick rethinking thinking how on earth, can you have a city where you know that that number of folks are going to die. So things moved on. And yes, it's easy just to draw cartoons of situations. It doesn't make them really any better. That is the centre of Leeds. And the some of the areas I'll be talking about is is the head row, which is that road there. Cookridge Street, which goes up there and one or two other places bond court there. The sovereign square down there and the city square. As a result of the poor. The city produced an open spaces strategy, and the strategy embodied a vision of the creation of a vibrant inclusive. And much more pleasant world sort of centered city, as they call it. And it was really the whole object was to make the public realm worth being in trouble is you actually can't do that overnight. You can get a Harry pot a stick and wave it but it actually doesn't work that quickly. And the first scheme in order to get people convinced that things were going to happen was really getting rid of a car park and turning it into a city park. It was the first part that had been built in Leeds for decades. And the second was a scheme called bond court, which we will see in a moment. This was the our spaces strategy, and the reason it took a number of years to get going was really because of public engagement. It is so important, not just to say right now we're going to do this. And people are not involved. We have people from 170 different countries living in Leeds, and there are 140 languages spoken, not by everybody as you can imagine. So it is a very versatile city, and it takes time to engage with people. And you can engage rather consult because consulting communities tends to be top down. And when you've done it you sort of say oh well we've done that, and you carry on engagement is what it actually says you engage with people, and they have a say. So the first square that we built was sovereign square. It was fairly quick off the ground. We got a lot of money actually from private sector because they said wow, you're prepared to do a new square. And the car park that it replaced actually made a lot of money for the council, but I'm glad to say they sort of said no, no, the square is got to be done and we've got to do it as quickly as we can. But well, it had a large rain garden which you can see going off into the distance there. That little girl isn't about to do something terrible by leaping into that water. That water is actually only 50 millimeters deep. And it was put there so that children could upset their parents by actually jumping in it and getting wet. Because again, how you give pleasure, if you like, or potential pleasure for young children in the city. It isn't just about shops and trees, although that is critical. It's also about what you do if you're a little kid, but trees were very much part of the square. It was actually very successful. And the good thing about it was that people were very happy with the fact that the council actually did what it said it promised to do it, and it actually did it. And that helps a great deal. We then moved on and built bond court, which was quite easy to do because again, it was in a slightly commercial area. Art started coming in. Art is the tree of life, if you like. But again, a lot of trees were planted and we started started changing the species a lot because a lot of trees originally were pyrus caloriana. And Fraxness and Gustaf earlier Raywood, which of course was a problem because we have ash dieback disease. But we started expanding the species quite dramatically. Very humble little space, but it's amazing how it actually changed things that was a large London plane tree, which we put in the ground it's got 28 cubic meters of rootable area. It started growing the very day we put it in there. And what was originally just a gray little bit that people nipped through as quickly as possible. All of a sudden people were happy to sit there in this this this one, admittedly fairly large tree and it cost a lot of money to put it there. And then cafes started opening up and all sorts of things. It was amazing what just planting a large tree can actually do. The other thing that we had to start doing was controlling vehicles. And the principal city streets are the key points of arrival for so people entering the city by bus or train. They're deemed to be part of the highway infrastructure and therefore there were far too many vehicles high traffic volumes and noise and air pollution. Now, many of these streets are dominated by pedestrians together with an increase in the planting of trees. And we have an amazing park and ride system, which I'll show you in a moment, which is actually the only one in the UK to be totally so the power. And all the buses that take people from there into the town center are electrically powered. And so it can be done. This was a street which was pedestrianized it's not perhaps quite as designed as some people would like but it was important to keep people being able to move the building on the right hand side is a big hotel who were against it originally. And now they just say it has changed the whole way our hotel works, the number of people that come here. So just booting the cars out and bringing people in helped amazingly place called corn exchange which is that large building in the middle which is what it says really it's a very old market going back for very long time. But now it's full of very small, but but rather fine little shops, the rents are low. So if you or I wanted to start up a shop to sell whatever it is. That's probably the good place to start. Again, vehicles were pulled out public transport goes down that road there. All these areas which used to be for vehicles cars have been booted out. They've been modernized and more trees being added. The head row, which I mentioned previously has still got public transport down the middle bit. It had four lanes of traffic before it now only has two footpaths have been troubled in wits and tree planting. And that's what the city has gone on. Again, the retail side of things has just rocketed, because people have got the time to actually look. And as the trees grow, it will get even better. The park and ride I mentioned as a place called oddly, which is on the edge of Leeds. But you can see there's one wonderful proposed big one fact speed built now tree in the middle there. All around it and that the woodland all around it. It was an absolute gem. And again, it's absolutely full of cars and people now who think yeah, yeah, well I can drive in from any part of the Yorkshire North of England Park there, get in the town buses. There isn't actually a timetable because they run every few minutes or so. So again, the cost of it which initially people thought who do this is going to cost. They said no, it cost a fortune but look what the benefits have actually brought to the city. There's a lot more happening now, as I say it took several years to actually get going. But the program is moving fast. The greatest thing which I have to confess it surprised me a little bit but I was will go into it but slightly involved with this. This is the central square in the middle of the city. The station is down here people come out and move through here retail area is over here. That for anybody who lives in Leeds was the center of the city. It was terrible. It was traffic was all the way around here you really didn't you could just about get across the road and then you pollution. So all traffic has already been booted out we haven't actually built this yet. This is called the Glade. And this area of Yorkshire once upon a time was the forest of Lloyd ease which goes back to Celtic times. Now, the center of that forest is now going to be city square. We're going to be planting 170 trees in the square, and they go up the adjacent streets. As I say, the hotels and the cafes, as you can see it moving out. And it's going to be a wonderful space. I was very surprised that the, that, to be honest, the politicians sort of said, what, this is the central square and you're going to turn it into a, an urban forest and said, yeah, as you've got to approve it. And they did. So that was brilliant. We are going to do to double the canopy cover of the city to 19%. That's a lot lower than some cities in Europe. But at the moment, or when we started out, the tree cover was only about 6%. It's now well over 10% now, and obviously is going to go further. Wendy mentioned, I'm chair of the White Rose Forest Leeds as you can see is in the middle there, and we cover over 9000 square kilometers of the north. And things are going very well. We've got 3.5 million pounds from the government this year, we've got 254 sites which we're planting up covering 850 odd hectares. A lot of those are peri urban woodland round leads, but also a lot are street trees, and we have a green streets project as also going into the areas of dense terraced housing around the edge of Leeds and the old industrial areas, and basically retrofitting them, because if you live in those areas you just as entitled to the urban forest as anybody else. So there'll be certainly the old bits of brown to the land we're putting in mainly mini forests because a lot of the streets are too narrow to put street trees in. But it's on the go. The R Spaces project strategy is ambitious, but it does present a realistic picture of what Leeds will look like as Leeds says a world class city. It will be substantially greener. It will be better connected. And it will be a much cleaner city and more accessible to people and recognizable as a unique place to be. It does take time, but it's getting there and certainly by the time the program is finished, which is 2030 things are going to be much better indeed. And as you can see things are moving forward quite well. Biggest benefit. And I'm speaking personally I suppose here is get rid of that is that city design used to be like that. We're pulling in different directions highways planners developers urban designers architects, urban forest is all pulling in different directions and some poor souls just trying to pull glue into it and bring it together it has changed. And this this places and spaces strategy has changed it we're now all working together and pulling in the same direction. And as I tell to professions we've all got a benefit in success. None of us can just succeed on our own, just pursuing our own narrow way, we've actually have worked together. I'm glad to say this program has really helped that. Thank you for your time.