A few images this week, to start. We are in Dakar. Welcome to the participants from Dakar. The goal of our video is to further our understanding of cities. In this instance, our understanding not only of African cities, of course, but of cities in general, with three observations. First, we observe that for the past few years, maybe decades, cities have become a focal point of attention including from the media. Cities are talked about more and more. Second observation: some cities have become massive economies, richer than some countries, undoubtedly. There is a creation of wealth, a whole economy around cities, a very important one. Third observation: cities have started competing with each other, like companies. It's all the more interesting to witness a renewed interest in cities whereas, just to take one example, statistics largely ignore cities. There are national statistics, regional statistics, county statistics, municipality statistics, depending on the administrative divisions of each individual country. But conurbations or metropolitan areas as such are very hard to get a grasp on. It clearly shows that we haven't moved on, as far as statistics are concerned, just to take that one telling example, that we haven't completely moved on to a management of cities. We still have a relatively traditional way of dividing up a given territory. And that is the opposite of the renewed interest and renewed media attention that cities get. Cities are gaining importance. They are becoming societies in and of themselves. And they intend to attract as much people as they can: tourists, dwellers, companies, conferences, sports events. Think of the Olympic Games or the Football World Cup, for example. Cities try to attract to them flows and influxes: capital flows and influx of people. To do that, a city is truly a logo. Coming from that is a reflection in terms of image and advertising, just like for a manufactured product. We will talk in a minute about what I call "the Towers war", and the image that it conveys. Another point. Cities have moved from a technical management to a marketing management. Evidence of it are the different logos. In that respect, African cities are absent. All of them haven't redesigned their logo. But we see that all these cities, like any brand selling any product, have thought about a logo that they can disseminate through pamphlets advertising, sometimes events on TV. The most striking example of it is probably Mexico City. This is the new logo. Here is the old one. The city moved from one to the other. Showing this is a way to show that you have moved into modernity, into a type of management that is highly about marketing. The "Towers War" I mentioned earlier. What is it? Every city wants to host the highest tower in the world. Today, for the moment, the winner is still, for a few months or a few years, the 828-metre high tower of Dubai. We observe that all these cities have competed one against the other: Paris, New York, Shanghai, Taiwan, Chicago, the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, and many others. What's obvious is that every city wants to boast a tower, the highest possible. Why? Because it is a way to show a high level of technology that belongs to the city. It means that there are in Dubai the technological capacities to build a 828-metre high tower. It also shows that the city, and in that respect Dubai is the extreme, has enough wealth or hosts enough companies and investors capable of building those huge towers which, economically speaking, are probably less profitable than smaller towers, but which are so important in terms of image. About this competition, there are three major changes taking place. Or that have taken place, but are still ongoing. Cities have moved from a discreet system, that is to say one within well-known limits, within well-known borders, to a completely blurred system. We don't where a city starts and where it ends. It is blurred across the territories. Lifestyles, or rather consumption styles, tend to be the same pretty much in every city in the world. Let's take the example of a soda beverage that everyone on the planet, almost, with very few exceptions, very few places or countries, almost everyone drinks this soda beverage. Or could drink it, because it's not free. Then, third point, third urban transformation: new centres are appearing. Urban networks are being reshuffled. Today, state borders have clearly been overstepped. I would say cities today are not structured according to states, regions or municipalities anymore. They draw networks far beyond the national borders they are in. These are cities that are reshaping themselves, creating networks with each other, regardless of where they are. The case of global cities exemplifies it. These are the three ongoing transformations, which started a few decades back already, but which are widespread, concerning today every city on the planet. These profound changes, in the end, gave us fours forms of cities: spread out cities or sprawls, mega-cities, global cities and mid-size cities. There again, there can be sub-categories. But these are the four main forms of cities we find across the planet. Of course, mid-size cities are the most numerous, since not all are spread out, mega or global. The majority if cities, really, can be called mid-size cities. I'll take the example of a global city and a mega-city to show that it is not exactly the same thing. A mega-city is here. Population makes it: Tokyo, Delhi, Mexico, New York, Shanghai. Here we move down from the most populated one. The main factor is the population. This is the mega-city. Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Karachi, Calcutta, Dakar. Then, we have a ranking of global cities. This ranking takes into account not the population, but a set of indicators that are flows, most of the time, economic flows. We have seven indicators here in the report that is taken into account here, in this chart. There are indicators about political stability. Of course, quality of living in these cities, but above all what matters are the economic flows. In that respect, London comes first. In the ranking of mega-cities, it is clear in the first 30 cities, London comes 30th. So, not exactly the same kind of ranking. Another example, Zurich, which has a population of about a million people, is in the ranking of global cities, but not necessarily in the one of mega-cities, with just a tiny million people. We will come back, now, to the issue of the stakes and the challenges. Some may think these are synonyms. We differentiate between a stake which is a situation, and eventually a diagnostic. Here is the situation. What is at stake in African cities? We talked about it in the first video. We are going to go over these different stakes and talk about challenges awaiting. Some stakes can be challenges as well, but we see a difference. For us, challenges are actions to take. The stakes are the current situation, and the challenge is the choice that is made, vis-Ã -vis the current situation, to act or not to act on these various stakes. So, let's go over the main stakes once gain, briefly. We have seen these charts in the first video, but I'll show them again briefly, to have them in mind. Population growth in cities. Another stake: urban growth without necessarily economic development. There is a break between economic development and urban growth whereas in traditional models, so to speak, cities develop at the same time as the economy or the industry does. Climate change, giving rise to deep undercurrents that are extremely important and that we'll have to take into account. We'll see if they are taken into account in our challenges or not. This is the end of the first part. I will meet you again in the next video.
