 So I introduced myself very briefly before. My name is Ricky Burdette and together with Philip Rother and other colleagues run the Urban Age and LSE cities and in my introduction this morning. I have two tasks I want to introduce the structure of these two days and I want to pick up on what Paul has just been talking about Which is what the theme of shaping cities is about Can I make sure that those of you who want to hear me in Italian? Please use the headsets which are being provided So we've heard from Paolo Baratta that the exhibition of Aravena is about understanding Certain processes architectural design processes from around the world and this image that you see here on the screen which is the poster effectively for Aravena's exhibition International Architectural Submission is of a German archaeologist picture taken by Bruce Chapman looking, getting up on the steps to be able to see the landscape and Understand the world better and bringing back the information collected. It's a very powerful image This image is behind what the exhibition that Paolo described Which is to bring Back in a way the meaning of architecture with social and environmental realities and how they confront them with the ingenuity All you need to do is go outside this wonderful structure And walk around this part of the binale let alone the Giardini and the rest of the arsenal and see a project Say by Norman Foster or right in front of us a floating school By Kune Adeyami who will be speaking tomorrow To begin to understand what it means to have design ingenuity This is a floating school which was actually constructed in Lagos to deal with the problems of that city So it's very much about understanding the social dimension the social implications Impact as Paul has just called it of what design means What we've done, and I'm sorry that we've taken This wonderful photograph and slightly distorted it is used exactly the same image the same metaphor But to understand and bring to this table here The on what is happening in terms of the dynamics of cities Either cities that 70 80 percent as Juan Claus will tell us on others in more detail later today Which are growing informally. This is a part of Mexico City or Cities which are growing like this Which are being planned and perhaps not planned very well So this is exactly what we want to talk about here And it's all to do with helping construct this Extraordinary dialogue that the world is facing about the future of cities in habitat three Now we've already heard from Paul that the urban age is something that has been going on for some time It's not just the conference. This is part of it What starts today is the beginning of a dialogue between people and with 25 people at the LSE and many others of course in The Gershelstrasth we work together to do not just these events But to do the sort of research that you see there I'm going to quiz every single one of the speakers on these figures by the end of the conference They're inside this here now We were fortunate this time to be asked to do two things We were asked not only to hold the conference, but also to do an exhibition and Effectively round the corner in the arsenal as you go out here and turn left You will be able to see the exhibition that we curated very much around the themes Conflicts of an urban age which to a degree our self-explanatory but much more importantly will be talked about here Let me talk briefly for a few minutes about the structure of the two days Much of what you need is in this wonderful little program yellow document Which if you haven't picked it up, please get one at the break in a moment What you have in it is the detailed structure of the next two days, but also some other information Let me just cover a few key points It's a two-day event and we hope you'll be here for all of it You're allowed to leave momentarily, but we want you back And it's important to have your participation throughout We'll see in a moment that we've organized the program around six core sessions and around core themes Three each day and then we have coffee breaks and lunch breaks some of you as you know There's an invitation process and you will be able to take part of that We're so happy that there are so many of you in the room that we can't possibly feed all of you But those of you who are invited are very welcome to join us This event is not just being attended by roughly 400 or even more people in the room But by those who are following the whole Conversation live streamed in English and in Italian so welcome to all of you as you who are outside this room The hashtag as you see is up there. So please use it to tweet your thoughts and comments If you need any help just ask one of the stewards or one of our team who has one of these things around their neck But in yellow who are around you the simultaneous translations I've already talked about that two different channels, but one key point and this is really said to all my colleague speakers We're being translated as we speak so speak slowly Get excited, but make sure that someone can understand what you're saying and take it slowly And make sure that someone is there and can understand that and when you have finished with the headsets and you go out Please leave them outside. We haven't asked for your documents. We trust everyone in the room Make sure you leave them there and don't take them home Now we have more than 40 speakers from 25 cities from five continents How on earth do you manage that well what we really do and I'm going to come back to this and all my co-chairs Will do this is please keep the time We've all learned that actually you can say the same thing in 10 minutes and it takes 30 minutes to say So not only the core speakers. We've been talking about that for several weeks now But we want to make sure that even interventions from the floor are succinct and to the point We're not going to read out people's extensive CVs because in the central pages of this document you have a Summary of the major sort of background of the individuals who are speaking and in fact all of you who are Participants and you can look that up The conference is divided into keynote speeches from here Panel discussions at the table in front of you and some sessions. We will have time for an open discussion Asking you from the floor to contribute I'm sorry when that happens. There will be stewards with the yellow t-shirt with roving microphones When we ask you to speak can you say in one line who you are one line not your biography? And please ask a question. Don't make a statement if you make a statement. We have ways of dealing with that Now for the speakers, we also have another mechanism, which is very very simple We have a big yellow card which says two minutes one minute stop Because that's the only way to ask you all to keep to time. So don't take that personally Enrique Pinalosa who's the best speaker in the world and who enthuses everyone We have to do it as a sort of sport to make sure he has only one minute left But unfortunately he will probably be to time so it won't happen, but do bear that in mind I don't want to go through the program as a whole, but there's six themes I'm going to return to as I say in we interrupt for lunch for coffee and The we end each day at just before six o'clock Which of course is when the biennale ends we are very fortunate as you know That paolo barata and his team has actually offered all of you the chance of actually seeing these great exhibition and when you have time But not while the conference is going on. Please go and see everything So let me talk in the remaining minutes about the theme of shaping cities Shaping in English is both a verb and a noun and actually that's quite significant. It's not just a linguistic device We are talking about who decides The verb of how to shape cities, but we're also interested very much on the shape of the city What is that artifact? What does it look like? But what does it do to the inhabitants and of course what does it do to the environment? So let's just take some of those things who shapes the cities will hear in the first panel a lot about the voice of the citizen Or the absence of the voice of the citizen many cities Including Barcelona have elected mayors are the collars here were delighted But so has Rome recently elected mayors who represent in many ways those who have not represented the voice of the city We have Abdul Malik Simone who in this elegant and beautiful quote He will be talking this afternoon Also reminds us that it's not easy to identify Whose voice is being heard and therefore actually defining describing Talking about whose voice needs to be heard and understanding that is just as significant as just having this sort of great Statement that we have to give voice to the community But then the urban age is interested in the shape This is an image of Mexico City and you see different shapes. You see the shape of the new city This is new typology. It's very identifiable. I don't even need to point out But that's the new city and then you see the city as non-planned the informal city people just get on with life and Just do what does that actually mean and what does that mean when? Large percentages of the city will come back to this a lot Especially in Africa parts of Latin America less so are growing in completely uncontrolled ways What form of regulation do we need? Maybe not this one But this is a reality. It's a reality and happens to be in China. It could be elsewhere This is a private village where everyone owns a share effectively in this place, which is a sort of uber gated community Now that is a public space. I can imagine it would have no ball games allowed But because in a way the design of the space works against the notion of togetherness tolerance and difference In the work that we've done and you'll see that in the exhibition and in some of our documentation We focused a lot on mapping change and all this map Means and is important to remember is that in the darker green areas is where urbanization is going to be most Intense in the next 20 30 years and you can see where it is. It's in Africa. It's in China. It's in Asia. It's in those regions of the world Latin America has slowed down Europe and North America have actually stopped or in some cases think of Eastern Europe think of Detroit It's actually gone the other way Fundamental issue will be discussing later and again tomorrow is what is the nature of this growth? And the work done with my colleagues and friends from NYU the Marin Institute the Lincoln Institute is Absolutely fundamental and new in this because just look at these numbers out of a hundred and sixty eighty six cities The population has grown nearly three times 275 percent But the spread the footprint the amount of space is actually occupied is much much larger than that. It's nearly five fold There's one city Guangzhou. Where does it stop? Well, that's the extraordinary statistic that you see there It's a city whose population has grown a thousand percent But it's footprint 3200 percent That's what we're talking about think of the impact in terms of travel distances the environment and all This is not the only way to go, but this is one way in which things are happening as you see in City in Africa in formal growth eating up the countryside unplanned this is exactly the same impact but planned and how these decisions are taken are significant population growth and cities is fueled particularly by Population growth natural birth rates and by people moving into cities But all of us are aware that the environmental challenge is actually pushing more and more people into cities Which are more and more dangerous in many cases because they're even more exposed to risk In Europe we're now facing an agenda that we all understand and one of my colleagues will be talking about the effect of the migrant City the different city on the dynamics which happened within them Turning to the last few points of my presentation I want to just focus on an issue which is very much of the heart of what has been said already this morning, which is density Basically, if you look at where cities are going to grow in the next 30 up until 2030 and you were to choose That all the population were to either develop at the density of Hong Kong or Los Angeles in 2030 in the whole world If you went Hong Kong style you'd occupy northern Italy if you went Los Angeles now You'd occupy the whole of Europe just think of it in those terms. That's what we're talking about and There are choices in terms of design Many new cities are designed with this sort of language, which you see on the right hand side This is what they feel like Can we talk about that in ways that can be understood and processed in terms of their dynamics? And this is where architecture and design comes in all of tomorrow morning We will be talking about the top-down bottom-up approach This is a famous image of the great architect with his hand his male hand Determining what should happen to the center of Paris. Thank God it didn't happen You know is the same thing happening in Africa today Let's talk about that as we go ahead and these are realities that we can see anywhere in the world This happens to be Istanbul, etc But this exhibition of Aravenas that Paolo has talked about shows that there is ingenuity and Dynamics which come from the other end of the scale doesn't mean just small but the work done in Medellin for example the water Cisterns and their use and much else in terms of public space is Significant and the work of one of our colleagues Julia King on effectively adding sewers and toilets shows the Incremental effect of how you can work and retrofit Buildings, but you can also do this at the level of the city in fact That's a Joe who was Secretary of State in the UK during the Olympics very much oversaw the fact that London also retrofitted and change Addis Ababa is doing the same Addis Ababa. Sorry is doing the same in terms of retrofitting itself with public transport Mumbai is doing it in not such a subtle way in terms of actually adding new housing But also what you see there is social housing So there are ways of doing it and this is exactly what we want to do in trying to influence the debate These are the questions that we're going to be discussing in the next few days And we'll end with a session at the end of tomorrow where maybe some of these questions can be more fully discussed Let me end by reminding us of what this means. It's not the first time That cities have faced growth 200 years ago 150 years ago many cities grew slower not so fast, but did grow from Millions to tens of millions New York City grew, but with this extraordinary grid now just Look at this. This was the great plan by the condition commissioners of New York City who were not actually architects But it was completely changed to add this thing here What is the defining feature of the city? It's Central Park, but it's actually a plan That is my point which actually has adapted to the needs of the contemporary city and perhaps Barcelona in many ways In a positive way shows us that a plan of 1859 has also been able to adapt and change But not everything is perfect and in a moment We will hear from other Colau that the city which has been able to sort of put itself very much on the map Bring young people there has also created problems on the other side in terms of too many people perhaps or too many people Who don't have the same? Interests and different organizations going back to digitalization have an impact on that So this is very much an intent to give you an overview Of what we are going to talk about and the structure of the day So thank you very much for listening and could I please ask all the panelists for the first panel to go to the center of the stage Thank you very much