Colleagues, it really is good to be here. And it's particularly good because when I look

around the room, there are in fact some faces which for me represent the kinds of partnerships

that bring an applied knowledge agenda into fruition. So I looked on and I see people

who I have worked for in their capacity when they were at GTZ. I've seen co-authors, I've

seen people who I've worked with in workshop collaborations, I see students, I see funders,

and I see people who are just genuinely interested in trying to address some of the big issues

of the day. And as we try and work our way through what I hope is a fairly big picture

context for some of the problems, it's quite a PowerPoint heavy presentation because I thought

you might not follow my South African English accent. If you're not and you're having real

trouble and you need me to slow down, just wave, okay. Yeah? And hopefully the combination

of as you get into my voice and what we have up on the presentation will actually get to

some kind of coherence. I thought it might be helpful to tell you what I'm going to say.

So if you're going to fall asleep, just hold on for a minute, okay? I've got four things

I really want us to cover tonight. Firstly, I think there's a tendency to see small and

medium towns as somehow subject to different forces as everything else, as big towns or

as rural areas. I want to spend just a little bit of time looking at the general trends.

The numbers are important. The numbers of scale, the numbers of pace, the numbers of

magnitude, what are we talking about and why is it so important that we get moving now?

Okay? So I actually do want us just to all get on the same page in terms of understanding

that. The numbers are dreadful, but let's work with what we've got. That's the first

thing I want to do. Secondly, it's not a fantastic academic literature. It's not a very detailed

academic literature. Some of the authors of it are sitting in the room. I want us to

revise what we know already, and then I want to be just a little bit provocative about

some of what is in there and perhaps to suggest that we might be asking slightly different

questions even of what we already know. Then I want to point out that there are some very

important, very significant new drivers of change that we cannot ignore that might just

change profoundly how we think and act. Then finally, I want to step back into what you

could consider to be a very academic mode. In fact, I want to suggest this is where the

real politics starts of action because it's how we think affects how we act. Okay? So

please don't, if you're one of the people in the room who's interested in practice,

that's the critical part I want to suggest to you. Okay. So that's where we're going.

So you can do whatever from there. All right. A couple of big points about the numbers.

I like that line which some people use which says, the three billion, have you heard it?

China, India and Africa. I think it helps give weight in a world where everybody understands

that China and India are big and important. Walmart, if you listened to your news today,

clearly understand that because they've just bought out MassMart, which is checkers for

anybody else in the audience, the South African retail store that is providing food shops

across Africa. Yeah? I think that tells a story. So that population is important and

it's growing fast and we'll come back to that rate of growth. So in relative terms, the

take home message is that in both absolute and relative terms, the numbers in terms of

cities are important and we'll disaggregate them in a second. I also want to make the

point and I don't know if this is the same in German. In English, the word urbanization

has two meanings at least. One is about the movement of people from countryside to town

and the other is about the percentage of the population that is urban. If you're a policy

maker, both are important but I can't tell you how many policy makers confuse them. And

we need to make sure we're sharp about what that difference is. Secondly, I want to make

a high level point about Africa's small and medium cities. Now I don't know what you consider

to be a small or medium city but I will tell you a story. I've recently been involved in

the National Urban Development Framework for South Africa. Happens to be a document that

cabinet keeps refusing to pass. I don't think it's because we wrote a bad document. I think