Smart Cities, Happy Citizens World Summit 2020

I’m so excited to share that I’m one of the keynote speakers for the Smart Cities, Happy Citizens World Summit, airing this Saturday, November 14th, at 10:40am EST. The summit - as its name implies - aims to provide strategies, tactics, and rationales for moving toward not just Smarter cities, but Happier cities as well! My TedTalk-style keynote (seriously, it’s under 18 minutes!) will put forth a passionate plea for integrating a more data-driven approach to citymaking - as the best means to an end of livable, equitable, and sustainable places people can access and love!

Register here - and get a little preview of what I’ll discuss below!

The costs of poor urban design are clear and significant: every 25 seconds, someone dies in a traffic collision; every year, over $31T is spent treating chronic diseases tied to health-limiting built environments; globally, one in six deaths is tied to air quality. And never before has it been more glaringly, painfully obvious that these costs are borne inequitably: Before Covid disproportionately ravaged vulnerable communities, the poor and people of color were unduly suffering from the effects of urban floods, heat waves, poor air quality, obesity, diabetes, and more…all partly as a result of the lack of access to good urban design. Meanwhile, these same communities are continuously being priced out of walkable, livable, and sustainable neighborhoods.

If cities weren’t already aware of these structural inequities and spatial injustices before 2020, Covid and the global Black Lives Matter protests have made them unavoidable issues that must be confronted and addressed. Accordingly, the already broken, status quo approach to Citymaking - based on ideological, expert-driven, top-down mechanisms - cannot meet this moment and is unsustainable in a post-Covid world. Continuing to base planning, design, and development on intuition and gut that translate merely into “beautiful plans” is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is an untenable barrier to building the kind of community trust needed to deliver safe, healing, thriving, healthy, and resilient places.

This talk will discuss why data-driven citymaking - that allows for evidence-based, community-led, bottom-up approaches to creating more walkable, livable, and sustainable places - is needed to create a more transparent and accountable process that leads to more effective, cost-efficient, inclusive, just, equitable, and healthy places - that embrace all of us.