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Good morning everybody. Once again, a very warm welcome to our meeting on cultures and

disasters. First of all, let me see to check out the microphone here. There will be a video

recording so we need to use the microphone although the lecture hall is small enough

and we have loud voices so apologies for that. Welcome, welcome to Erlangen, our little university

town and first of all, a warm thank you to colleagues from Geology. This is not our institute

but we always get mixed up geography and geology. This is their institute but we are using it

and that's great. We can use their lecture halls and their facilities. I would like to

first of all extend my warm thanks to our masters students, the students of the University

of Erlangen-Nürnberg, who have helped in preparing and organising this conference. I think they

really did a great job. We do have in one of our masters programmes on cultural geography,

we have a compulsory module, a course, that's called Research Workshop. I want the students

to have to do for one semester, probably even one year, either help organising a conference

or attend a conference somewhere else and get to know how research disseminates ideas

and results and debates etc. So this is the intention of that course and they've been

engaging in preparing this conference and I think they've done a great job. So thanks

to the students who are here and registrations etc. Now having said that, let's go right

into our topic. Alex and myself will do a brief intro into our topic which before actually

we were planning or in the process of planning this conference we had some fierce and lively

debates on the focus of this year's conference. As you can see, Cultures and Disasters 3,

it's already the third in a little series of conferences we've had. We've had a few

of them in the past, but I think we've had a few of them in the past. So I think we'll

do a little series of conferences we've had. The first one is now over seven years ago,

Cultures and Disasters in Bielefeld, which is organised by Greg. And the second one was

here in Erlangen, but it was five years ago already, so time's running fast. And we thought

it might be a good idea to have another one this year with a more focused topic, a topic

focusing on justice in the broadest sense. And we might want to have another one in about

two or three years or so. We'll see where this leads us. It's a very open, very relaxed

way of discussing what we want to discuss. So at this time I will hand over to Alex to

do the first bit of the intro. Thank you.

Okay, thank you Fred. Also, warm welcome to all of you from my side. You may have wondered

why we've chosen this picture for the invitation to our conference and for the posters. And

first of all I would like to explain some of the underlying issues for this. Maybe some

of you know it. This is a mural. It's part of many different murals, a series of murals

in Kathmandu that have been realized by NGOs. And they were created in the aftermath of

the earthquake 2015 and of course directly referred to that event. And in general street

art has become quite a popular platform in recent years for activism and social commentary

or even for social change in Kathmandu and all over Nepal. And I was talking to some

people last year, two years ago, and most of the people were aware how to behave in

the case of an earthquake, how to get safety. But obviously there was a lack of open space.

There was no place they could go to to be safe. So yeah, this what the intro picture

is telling us. It's the fact that people were not able to get safety.

This of course raises the question how this could happen. There's unplanned development

in Kathmandu Valley and it led to a rapid and uncontrolled sprawl which is characterized

by irregular, substandard and inaccessible housing development. And this of course had

led to loss of open space and decreased livability. There's uncontrolled immigration and lack

of housing. There's uncontrolled densification. As you can see on the left picture, the buildings

are standing very close to each other and they are missing or even disregard of building

regulations. And so many urban projects in the recent decades have contributed to

impoverishment, to social segregation and increased vulnerability which is producing