Mr Balzer,

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

It is a pleasure to welcome you here, at Hamburg City Hall. With City 2.0, you have chosen to devote yourselves to one of the most exciting topics of our time. Populations the world over are continuing to move to large cities. This is where decisions are made about the key economic, social and cultural issues of our time.

Large cities are laboratories of modernity, catalysts of change. If you want to know how our societies are going to develop, take a look at major cities. This is where an era's technological, scientific and social transformations are clearly visible.

There are many conferences and congresses addressing this topic, including in Hamburg. It makes perfect sense that a TedX conference has now become one of them. Many of the questions regarding urban development today are concerned with the digitisation of our everyday lives. It is certainly a worthy undertaking to bring together these different opinions and competencies.

So we are very pleased that a conference that is concerned with and seeking to help us understand this process of change, is taking place in Hamburg tomorrow. This is fitting for several reasons:

Firstly, because the topic of Big Cities is very close to our hearts. I'm not speaking about megacities and their immense problems, but the opportunities and development prospects offered by cities that are large and yet governable. 

Peter Glaeser's book "The Triumph of the City", in which he writes about what social and socially influential services cities are capable of offering, really got me thinking. I was also touched by Doug Saunder's book "Arrival City", in which he describes the wishes, hopes and personal stories of people moving to the big cities.

Much of the everyday life that is experienced by more than 1.7 million inhabitants of a metropolis has been described in depth in these two books.

The dynamics of change.

The increase in creativity and productivity caused by the close proximity of life and work. 

The cultural diversity and technological boldness.

The optimism of new arrivals. 

This is also of personal interest to me and I feel it is the responsibility of Hamburg's Senate to attempt to effectively exploit the potential there is.

We are trying to do this with HafenCity, Europe's biggest inner-city development project, in which a completely new district is being created at the harbour.

Furthermore, with the International Building Exhibition and the International Garden Show taking place on the Elbe islands, we are demonstrating just how successful the revitalisation and ecological modernisation of a neighbourhood can be.  

These are only two examples among many of what is possible if politicians get personally involved and take responsibility for the city.

We still face enormous challenges: With the digitisation of the city, we are currently experiencing what electrification meant for the city in the late 19th century. This is a technological transformation that could fundamentally change the way we live and interact together.  

While we are still busy exploring the potential of electrification, for instance with electromobility, completely new opportunities are arising through intelligent ways of sharing data, through new, interactive interfaces and, generally, through the decentralisation and fragmentalisation of data, which characterise digital change.

City 2.0 initially arose without any concrete intention, yet we suddenly realise that it has given rise to something completely new and different than before.

This is certainly fascinating, but it is also important that a democratically elected government acts to ensure that everyone understands and can participate in this process of change. This is also why I am happy that we can look forward to so much international input tomorrow about processes and developments that undoubtedly still lie ahead of us.

We should look forward to these. They will make our cities better places to live. And it's nice that you, too, have committed yourselves to this wonderful task.

Cities are never complete, but must be recreated anew every day. Day in, day out, this gives us new opportunities to do things better. We will make use of these opportunities.

And we look forward to the inspiration and ideas that will flow tomorrow at the TedX conference.

Thank you very much!

The spoken word applies.