Day 1 - Opening of Symposium | Future Cities Symposium & Exhibition 2025

It's my great pleasure to be here. As was alluded. This is of course a bit. I'm sitting between two seats. Until quite recently, eight weeks ago, I was still working for ETH and heavily involved with the team here at SEC in building or working on the whole project, like Future Cities. And now I'm on the other side. But I think it's a good opportunity because it has been an immensely fruitful collaboration between Singapore and Switzerland. And this is now the chance to actually deepen this further and I hope that we can achieve great things. So this is now 15 years of future Cities Lab here in Singapore. Without the help of the NRF and SUBOT is sitting here, this would not have happened. And I think we achieved a lot in that time. Why did ETH come here? I think we have people more qualified to answer this sitting in the audience, but I'll spare you from asking.

I think Singapore is an amazing ecosystem.

There's solutions needed, especially in urban design. And the city moves extremely fast and that's a big advantage if you're a scientist and want to shape the policies, shape the agencies work. And I think this is why a lot of people from ETH wanted to come here and build this. And this has been successful for 15 years and not just within Singapore, but also as the FCL Global, which has its hub in Switzerland, to go beyond city development, urban development, in the climate, in the tropical climate here, but also to establish worldwide systems that transverse this. So I think it's a model for collaboration. I hope. I don't have 10 minutes, this is beer, but then we're saving some time for the other speakers. So I think it's a model collaboration and I think it is a blueprint for other things that can be done between Switzerland and Singapore. AI compute that SUBOT is heavily working on is the next big topic, I would guess, and I think there's more to come. So I'm very happy to also listen to the keynotes and I'm really looking forward to the talks here. Congratulations on 15 years of success and I hope this will continue and go into the next phase and help shape the city, shape the policies, but also have an international impact, not just a Singaporean national impact. And without further ado, thank you very much and enjoy the conference.

Thank you. Professor Wolfram, it is now my honor and pleasure to invite our next guest, Professor Dr. Subo Maisalka, Executive Director for Academic Research at the National Research foundation of Singapore, with his leadership at NRF and past roles at ntu, who has been Instrumental in advancing partnerships like FCL Global that strengthen Singapore's research ecosystems and drive science based solutions for sustainable urban development. Please join me in welcoming Professor Subodh.

Thank you.

Thank you. I have a few slides so. But firstly before I get going, I really just want to thank ETA for partnering Singapore. I think ETH is. And Ambassador Grutter is also here to support. Very happy to see you here. ETH is famous for bringing the railroad to Switzerland and I think it has a strong tradition of making a difference.

Beyond academia. And that's exactly what we see here as I'll highlight in a few slides. So it's a pleasure to be here and be with a very distinguished audience. The National Research foundation really sets the strategy, sets the policy, as well as coordinates the funding across the Singapore research ecosystem. One of the areas that we are really proud of in ANCHORING is an experiment that was started by our former President Dr. Tony Tan on Create. Create is of course an acronym that stands for Campus for Research Excellence. And what you see here today in terms of global cities is Research Excellence. We also go beyond research in terms of technological enterprise and I hope to share a few examples of that as well. We help anchor More than 10 global research partners and from Europe these include Imperial, these in Cambridge, eth, cnrs and so on. These partners work with us on almost 20 different programs. And these programs, very loosely put, we can bucket them in environment, health potential.

As well as urban systems and food. But in reality a lot of these programs are multidisciplinary and work across each other. I'm just going to highlight only two programs. Each of these programs bring together 30 to 50 researchers in Singapore plus another 20 researchers globally as well. And actually I see Prof. Lim KV in the audience as well and he is the visionary who started FCL 10 years ago or something like that. But in today's presentation I'm just going to focus on two examples. I'll focus on the Future Cities Laboratory Global and I'll also highlight another program that cuts across urban systems as well as healthcare. So this slide thankfully was put together by my SEC colleagues and this started in 2010 and several folks in the audience have helped shape this. In 2010 we began asking the questions on what are sustainable cities and how do we have sustainable settlements. Over the years there have been many research.

Teams that have been carried forward and and these themes have been shared with the public. Firstly in Zurich, but also in Singapore. We were very pleased to see that in addition to Singapore there was a Zurich hub that was set up and that goes back to something that Christian mentioned. The impact of this program is not purely in Singapore, but the team is now taking it global. I also want to talk about one of the things that future cities looked at is how do we address the possibility of cooling Singapore? This chart really shows over a 20 year period how the temperature extremes have changed. On the left hand side of the screen you'll see a lot of blues. But as you move towards the right hand side you'll see a lot of reds which are appearing. This is a very important challenge that we will face not just in Singapore but globally. Everyone has heard 40 degree summers in Europe as well as other parts of the world as well. So very proud to note that FCL as well as ETIHA launched a program called Cooling Singapore. And this program really looked at how do we provide parametric options or other technological solutions to the planning agencies like you are a very pleased to see Ban Thong here and this is really the effort that is a strong partnership between government agencies and researchers. I also do want to share another challenge that we are facing. Heat stress for example, will cause a problem from the perspective of upstream determinants of health. I think city planning can play a very key role in terms of how we deal with heat stress. This is an effort that we have started with the University of Cambridge. We are really looking at longitudinal data that is being pulled up from SG100K and this is a very nice example of how environment and behavior will shape health in our cities. And what can we do from a city design perspective that would, that would address the challenges in terms of heat stress but other behavioral factors and address the upstream determinants of health. So I've used up five minutes. I just want to use this slide to firstly highlight how Singapore has transformed over the years. The picture on the left hand side is Clark Key and Boat key in the 80s and 90s and on the right hand side what we see today. Of course a great shout out and congratulations to the ministries and the agencies. But again I want to highlight the ministries and agencies would not have been able to do this without you. It is this research community here that provided policy options that provided technological solutions. And I sincerely want to thank the research community which is in this audience and beyond for making this possible. So thank you so much.

Thank you Professor Segol. We now welcome Dr. Lee Min He, Director of Research for Singapore's center for Livable Cities where she leads trust strategics and collaborations on sustainable urban futures. Please welcome Dr. He.

Thank you so much. Welcome to the Future Cities Symposium on Future Cities Science, Design and Policy for Urban Transitions I'm very pleased to be sharing an opening address for this key event of Urban Science Week 2025 for which we are a co organizer. Urban Science Week stems from the joint commitment to evidence based approaches and the advancement of local capabilities in urban science. The Science of Cities approach is recognized as a key enabler for our livability framework through its methodological foundations and analytical tools that help us better understand our cities. This symposium represents an opportunity to strengthen the vital connection between research and practice, ensuring that our collective work leads to meaningful urban outcomes. We face increasingly complex issues that require sophisticated cross domain solutions. Climate resilience, demographic transitions and technological integration demand and responses that bridge traditional sectorial and disciplinary boundaries. It is precisely in this space that collaboration cross domain research becomes invaluable, providing the analytical frameworks and insights needed to support more integrated strategic policymaking. The research and discourse showcased throughout the Urban Science Week exemplifies how research can inform practice across different scales from neighborhood level interventions to city wide systems thinking. The presentations and discussions this week demonstrate how both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of urban solutions work in the space of the city. Urban Science Week therefore helps us share solutions, build a community of practice and deepen capabilities in harnessing urban science for cities. Looking ahead, we like to highlight research collaborations that further strengthen.

The knowledge and practice nexus with livability outcomes in mind. We will be sending out a call for researchers later this year to showcase your projects at the Science of Cities Symposium during the World city summit in 2026. We have also extended our reach to through the International Journal on Smart and Sustainable Cities, providing a platform to influence urban thinking globally. These initiatives represent our commitment to fostering a robust ecosystem where research and practice continuously inform and enhance each other.

I wonder if no, I don't have slides. Okay I thought I will have a slide. The QR code and I encourage all of you to continue fostering deep collaborations. Your combined expertise creates a powerful synergy for urban solutions and the Science of Cities approach we are advancing together is particularly significant, providing policymakers with evidence based frameworks for decision making while offering researchers opportunities to develop and test new approaches in real world context. This collaborative approach has already yielded promising results in areas such as urban resilience, social inclusion and sustainable development. The urban challenges we face require both theoretical rigor and practical wisdom. Through platforms like this, we can ensure that research translates into effective outcomes and that practical needs inform research directions. The discussions and exchanges over Urban Science Week will undoubtedly generate new insights and approaches that will help shape the future of cities. Thank you. And I look forward to the productive exchanges ahead.

Thank you Dr. He. We will now welcome Professor Dr. Sasha Menz, Executive Director of FCL Global and a leading architect and urban planner. Please join me in welcoming Professor Menz.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. And I would like to express really a special thanks to Subot and the whole nrf. Without this support, we would have never been where we are now. Thank you Subodh and of course thank you eth. I don't thank you anymore because you're not part of it, Christian. So I thank to those who are absent now. But it's also great that of course ETH supports and I'm so happy that we will have a new partner. And Stephanie LaCour, Vice President of EPFL is here and I really warmly welcome you here and now you are part of us. That's wonderful. Thank you EPFL for joining in the Future. It was 1995. Many in the audience when I look around were not yet here. Maybe only in the glimpse of the eyes of her parents and some others when I look around with gray hair were there. I landed in Singapore 1995. I was a student of Architecture, DTH and I was not sure what I want to be in the future because I was designing bicycles at the time and I thought it would be the Far east who would help me to produce this bicycle because Europe was not so ahead, let's say also in technology in this sense. And I, I thought Asia would help and Singapore was the perfect hub and is still now the perfect hub. And so I arrived to this city and I've never seen a city like this, of course, because I was coming from Switzerland, from I'm more a mountain person than a city, an urban person. At the time this has changed. And at the time I would have never thought that what would happen in the future and that now I'm involved since 15 years in the Future Cities Laboratory. So, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and friends, so let me welcome you here. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all here at this symposium and exhibition on science, design and policy on urban transitions, hosted of course, under the auspices of our program, the Future Cities Lab. Through science by design in place over time, these four guiding principles shape our work at the Future Cities Laboratory Global. And they also encapsulate the spirit of today's gathering. Our shared mission is to explore and address the complex challenges of sustainable and livable urban development.

Not abstractly, I would like to say, but in direct engagement with the realities of our cities, our communities, and our shared environment. The Future Cities Lab, established in Singapore as we heard in 2010, has grown into a pioneering platform for international research on urbanism. From its beginning in Asia to the expansion into Europe with a second hub in Zurich, FCL has brought together scholars, engineers, designers and policy makers to think and act across scales and across cultures. As we look ahead to the next phase, FCL4 and I'm looking to Subot now because we need his support and I'm looking here to eth, which is not yet here. We aim to deepen this dual perspective and to extend it into new global networks. At the center of our work lies the notion of settlement systems. Traditional categories such as the city or the metropolis no longer capture the networked realities of contemporary urbanization.

These systems include not only neighborhoods and buildings, but also hinterlands, ecosystems, flows of water and energy, mobility networks, and cycles of production and consumption. They remind us that urbanization is both spatial and temporal, shaped by rhythms of agriculture, commuting, neighborhood life cycles, and the long horizons and challenges of climate change. To engage with this complexity requires new methods of research and tools. We turn to complexity science, mathematical models, network theory, agent based simulations to understand feedback loops, resilience and adaptation. But beyond theory, we work directly with governments, agencies and communities, just to mention some examples. In Singapore, FCL collaborates with the Land Transport Authority on adaptive mobility systems and with the Urban Redevelopment Agency Authority to embed our research into the E Planner platform. In Zurich. Our research examines adaptive reuse and circular construction across both hubs. Our aim is to generate actionable knowledge, knowledge that is rigorous but also transformative in practice. This brings me to a central theme, transformation over demolition. If we continue to build as we have built before, linearly, resource intensively, and on the premise of perpetual growth, we will undermine the very foundations of a livable planet. Sustainable construction is not merely about more efficient technologies or better insulation. It is about rethinking how we use what already exists, how we reuse buildings, how we adapt infrastructures, how we build less but achieve more. The future urban resource is not raw material. It is the existing building stock, the spaces and systems already around us. In Singapore, a city state of limited land but extraordinary planning capacity, the challenge is to balance innovation with continuity, density with inclusivity. In Switzerland, technologically advanced but culturally conservative on its building practices, the challenge is to confront structural issues of governance, of spatial justice and land use. In both contexts, the real test is to redefine sustainability not as a technical option, but as A cultural and ethical imperative. Our research has shown that resilience emerges not from expansion, but from recalibration. Cities must absorb shocks climatic, economic, demographic, not by growing ever larger, but by adapting, reusing and reimagining what is already there. This is not a limitation, it is a cultural opportunity. The exhibition and symposium you encounter here are not simply presentations of research results. They are invitations to imagine, to question and to participate in the co creation of new futures. The projects displayed illustrate how interdisciplinary methods, innovative tools and cross sectoral collaboration can inform the transformation of urban life. I would like to close with a provocation.

The central question is no longer how we can build smarter, but how we can think differently about space, scale and value. How can we in our respective context do more with less less extraction, less carbon, less land, while achieving more social, cultural and ecological impact? The future lies not in demolition, but in transformation. Our task is to make this future visible, tangible and desirable. Thank you and I wish you an inspiring symposium and exhibition.

Thank you Professor Menz. I would like to thank our four opening speakers for the day today. We will now move on to our first keynote session for the day. It is my honor to invite our first keynote presenter, Professor Dr. Susan Parnell. Professor Parnell is a Global Challenges Research professor in the School of Geography at the University of Bristol and Emeritus professor at the African center for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Please join me in welcoming Professor Parnell.

Anybody who tells you that you do not have to be physically agile to give a talk is wrong. You've got to look at the screen, you've got to look at this, you've got to look at this, you've got to decide where your pitch is. But I think we should manage. It's wonderful to be here. I'm very struck at this idea of the FCL global community. A community that's got a history, a short term and a medium term history. And I'm happy to have been part of its medium term history, but also some new faces, at least for me and I hope for those of you who have not participated that you will become part of a wider conversation.

I want to pick up on the challenge of the symposium, that invitation that Sasha talked to us about on this imperative. Given the challenges that we face of really finding energy, finding creativity, finding ways of thinking differently and energetically about a new urbanism and to do that I'm afraid I'm going to appear to be extremely self interested.

I am actually speaking very directly to a book which came out earlier this year.

Not because it's the only thing I have to talk about, although it is one of the things I like to talk about. But in fact, because I think you will find that it resonates with the intonation, with the spirit of the inquiry of FCL Global and the city's called the book is called Cities.

A New Urban Disposition. And crucially.

I want to introduce you to the co authors because it is a collaborative work. You can already see that there's something about this connection and the people concerned are important.

There's somebody called Edgar Peterser some of you may have met. Professor director at the African center for Cities, but also a major advisor to the city of Cape Town, to the Western Cape Provincial government, on the board of the African Development bank, major advisor to the African Union, leader of the Bloomberg Mayoral Committee. Yeah, he's not a conventional academic. Then there's Michael Keith, the guy on the right in the top photograph, professor of anthropology at Oxford University. And that's pretty academic. No, Michael chaired the East London borough at the time for the Labour Party. At the time they were developing Canary Wharf had a major role not only in that development, which I think most of us have heard of, but also in some of the cultural precincts that were associated with it. And the other author, probably standing up on the edge, I did not have a very good photograph of him is somebody who may be known to you. He's Gautam Barn, the dean at the New Indian Institute for Human Settlements, the only now university, I'm very happy to say, that deals specifically with urban questions for the training of that absolutely critical cohort of urbanists for India. I feel very in very illustrious company with those authors. But I give you their profile because it tells you about the kinds of people who have fingers or feet in many places, multiple identities and ways of being in the city.

We came together partly at the end of COVID partly at the end of a big project called Peak Urban and round about the time. Do you recognize the photograph of our wonderful tour through some of the laboratories at eth and we in fact were quite depressed about the state of the world and we were overwhelmed by the amount of material that there was out there to read about cities and how to think about cities. And so cities rethought is not a summary, it is not a textbook. It is an intervention that is really a juxtaposition, if you like, with urban theory. It's an attempt not to provide the next paradigm. The ambition that was set out perhaps in the frame of this symposium, but rather to just try and think in parallel with alongside some of these other bigger developments, we wanted to take a moment to use our collective energy. And the collective was important in this, to reflect at a time that was difficult, when the language that we had clear of urban science, which we found enticing and with which we engage quite directly in the book. But we wanted to bring together the multiple parts of our lives. And I think people in this audience have that. You're urbanists, but you're teachers, but you're also practitioners. You may also be civic activists. And so what we were looking for, really, and none of us was young, Gautama was probably the youngest, was a new language, a new way to talk, a freshness in what it was that we had been doing between us for some decades, collectively. And ironically, what we found was that we needed to step away from the present moment. It was a moment of deep despair, I have to say. There's an excitement, Sasha, to talking about the city in the moment. But there was also for us, a heaviness, a sense of the global economy. The global political system was in massive transition. And we were writing before January 2025, okay, but even at that time, the poly crisis, which has been generative because it has made us talk to each other and talk across the line, across disciplines, actually was really fairly scary. And we were writing from India, South Africa and the UK and in our national Conte, felt there was much less room to move than there had been previously. So the conversation that we started was really about how do we rethink the city? And ironically, because all of us have been part of that movement which puts forward this idea that cities are at the origins, cities at the center of the global crisis. The solution lies in the city.

We still believe, we still put forward this idea that time and space matter, place matters. But curiously, it was in the stepping back from this idea of the centrality of the city, and rather, excuse me, in finding a way to think differently about change, about transformation, about the ability to achieve the larger, perhaps unimaginable, that we had to step back and to think differently in general and to be able to do so in place, to be able to do so in time. In other words, we were able to let go of in order to refresh our engagement with the city. And so we sought a much softer idea, the idea of a disposition.

I don't know, it's a funny word in English, isn't it? It's a kind of a mindset, a way of being in the world. It's a sensibility It's a tendency, an orientation, a way of when you meet somebody where you kind of feel like, yes, we believe that there are things that can be done differently in and through cities, whether it's my city or your city or all of our cities collectively, that system of cities that we were talking about. And so we wanted a way that we could re engage with the places that we were trying know the way that we saw them and the way that we made them. And we thought that that needed to be done collectively. So this disposition that we think of, and I think I introduced this very briefly the last time we spoke when I was doing a critique of global urban science. I don't know if you remember that. And I was saying, you know, we've got to be careful, because it's more than just the AI innovation that will take us to this place. There's something else. It's not an anti AI statement. It's not a. But there's something about kind of who we are, how we operate, how we bring ourselves collectively. And so what we put forward is three interlocking ideas of the normative.

The analytical and the operational. Now, you've already heard Sasha talk about the normative this morning. Okay. The normative that we must reuse, that's a normative position. And we ask what are the kinds of normative questions that we ask? I'll flesh out in a second. We think we need to be able to talk analytically about the city. How does it actually work around complex urban problems? And then operationally. And if you're observant, you'll see that those are three cities that we come from, and it should be able to work wherever you are, at whatever moment in time. That disposition is everything. It's both. And there's no point in having norms and values if you aren't able to analyze problems or work operationally. And similarly, it's no point having a really good, sound technical understanding if you're asking the wrong questions and doing things in the wrong way. These things have got to be connected in critical ways. And so what we do in the book is to both go through what we mean by those things and then to give a series of examples. But effectively, if you want to listen to me, rather, you can make the slides available later, and the book is, in fact, downloadable. But what we're saying is that, crucially, it is not to get to a single normative position, but rather to be able to center and articulate our collective or individual normative positions so that we can understand where we differ. In other words, it may be that your normative position is a very high order, one like we've already heard about reuse. But your normative position may also come out of your professional disposition. It may be about making sure that the money works. It may be about being much heavier on the inclusive elements than anything else. And what we position there is this idea that you have to surface your normative positions so we can understand and work collectively. There will be some incommensurable articulation of normative positions, but by and large, it's easier to work together when we understand what the questions are that we think are important. Having done that, we go back to core professional and disciplinary practices. The analytical. Except that what we argue is that what you have to do is not just to know what you know. I know it as a structural engineer, I know it as an anthropologist, but rather that we seek to ask and answer puzzles that emerge in the urban environment through an act of what we call analytical redescription. And simply what redescription is, is it's an. A methodology, if you like, a doubleness. It's an attempt to ask a question about something which is not designed simply to describe what is happening, but is done in order to change it. Okay, so your analytical task is not simply to say what is a bridge? It is to say, how do we repurpose the bridge either for lots of different materials, or for a different time, or for different people. So that act of looking through a series of different lenses remains in place. And that ability to navigate the complexity of the urban inevitably means that the act of analytical redescription demands that we work from different points of view across different methodologies. It certainly means that you have to engage the political not just at the level of the neighborhood, but also at the city, the nation and the global scale. It means that you have to focus on institutional configurations. You need to know how things work. You have to understand the multiple elements that drive our urban processes of change. And they may be physical, they may be material, and they may indeed be social. And that takes us not to the last element, because we argue in the book that you could actually start from this point of departure. So I don't know who's a practitioner in the room, clearly a knowledge based practitioner, if you're in a place like this now. But part of what we're trying to say is that sometimes the questions we ask the analytical expertise that we have comes out of practice, not leads to practice. The Science Policy interface is the policy science interface or connection in critical ways. And some of the ability of skilled practitioners is to understand the specificity of the moment and place and context and resources.

Crucially, and you will have worked with people who are like this. Some people seem to just manage this naturally. Garsham and Edgar for me are really good examples of this. You need to be able to sense the opportunity. We talk about the pulse, reading the pulse. It's like a surfer. You know which waves you're going to catch, you know which waves are going to sustain you, you know which waves are actually going to enable you to deliver, and you know when to hold back. Sometimes just as important. Crucially, in cities, you probably won't get there alone. There are very few lone urban scholars. There are people who make a contribution that urbanists draw on from individual scholarship. But the collective is quite important. And finding your co travellers is really, really critical. And perhaps most importantly, we need to be able to sit back and to reflect. And I think that's. I love the fact that this appears in the operational space. This is not simply an intellectual, scholarly act. It is also an act of the practitioner, of somebody engaged in, able to go back, think about the normative questions, redefine the analytical problem, come back into practice. The ability to judge is really, really crucial in that regard. And so, colleagues, I'll leave you as we begin to move forward into what I hope is two really exciting days, to think about your urban disposition, to craft your urban disposition individually and collectively. First by asking interesting normative questions, secondly through sustained, robust analytical redescription, and then finally by building, as I hope we're doing here, a community of practice that knows how to read the moment, can read the pulse, and reflects actively as we go forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Professor Parnell. We will now invite our second keynote speaker for this session, Professor Dr. Stephen Goldsmith.

Professor Goldsmith is a CLC visiting fellow, Derek Bock, professor of the Practice of Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Director of the Data Smart City Solutions Program at the Bloomberg center for Cities at Harvard University. He's recognized as a leading authority on local government and applied technology. Please welcome Professor Goldsmith.

Thank you.

I sit at a point between academics and practitioners. I'm a former mayor, deputy mayor of New York, and I've been an academic when I'm not a practitioner. So most of my work is involved in trying to translate between academics and practitioners and get the practitioners to use more of what the academics are saying. So my comments today deal more with how one thinks about solutions in the urban area and let Me just go through a few.

There are a lot of things to look at here. Let me just go through a few components. Why place matters as an organizing theme for change, how we work across sectors, how we navigate the governance of those issues, and how we measure the benefits. So let me just do this quickly. So every complex problem, right, is a cross sector, cross agency.

Solution or problem. So how do we organize communities and government to respond to difficult, grand challenges or wicked problems? So let me first start by saying that we've been much more active recently in using map layers and map visualizations so people can understand problems in their place as an organizing theme for cross sector collaboration and for cross agency collaboration as well. Because visualize layers let people understand what's happening in their community and help bureaucrats understand context. So this is just a slide from a few years ago. But the point of this slide is to say, if we see this is a Los Angeles.

Map that reflects by color the quality of services in a particular neighborhood, and that allows a person in that neighborhood and it allows an official serving that neighborhood to say, well, our services are worse than they are across town. And you can see that by color. So I'm suggesting that visualizations enhance collaboration. And this cross sector solution is also organized the same way, right? Because there's no single cause. Any problem that's complicated doesn't have a single cause, it doesn't have a single intervention, it doesn't have a single sector, it doesn't have a single agency. So we need a way to organize. And I'm just suggesting one way to organize of significance is around place. So place as a basis of cross sector collaboration. Secondly, how do we work across sectors and how do we work across environments? So this is.

A project I've got now at Harvard with 10 cities. And let me just do this quickly. So the question we asked is how do we improve the environmental quality in a particular location, right? So where is air or carbon or heat particularly dangerous to a certain community? And what can we do about it? So that led us to try to understand what are the forms of exposure. But more importantly, because that happens obviously in a broad range of places, our question was, what are the levers of government, local government, that will allow an intervention that will reduce the causes of those pollutants, which will improve the public health of communities? So we start with what are the levers? And then what's the evidence that researchers can bring to bear that will allow a mayor or community leader to apply an intervention? So, and this is just another map expression of this. But one of the cities we're working in is Washington D.C. and the question is, where are individuals in under resourced neighborhoods most likely to experience.

Particulate matter or carbon, which causes chronic childhood asthma? So map the, from the health researchers, map the causes of, map the incidences of asthma. And from the air monitors, map the sources of pollution. And from the mayor's office, say, what are your tools that you can utilize to reduce those? So all I'm suggesting is that the ability to kind of negotiate between the sectors and between academics and practitioners makes a difference. Now this is pretty obvious, but worth mentioning. You know, I'm basically a city official. And you know, in the average city you have a parks department, you have a sanitation department, you have a street department, and fill in the blank, right? But nobody lives in the parks department. They live in, on a corner, right? And they live in a place. And so you have to tie that together. And the fragmentation that comes from metrics at an agency level reduces the ability to do that. So this is a way to suggest that collaborative challenges require us to take disparate organizations, cross sector organizations, and bring them together. And what's interesting to me in particular on this chart is that we all have our own cultural biases and our own context. Until we start doing this, it's very difficult to understand the context in which a community lives. And this is then another map expression, which is to say one way you can think about the earlier Los Angeles map. Was its place based by the agencies in Los Angeles? This suggests where are all of the stakeholders arrayed around the problem, how can they be aligned? And then how does that produce a solution? So you have on the right businesses, citizens, academics, journalists, you have on the left kind of planning, engineering, right? So how do we organize all of those pieces in order to respond to the most difficult problems? And finally.

I spend a lot of time trying to get cities to use data. But it's not very motivating, right? What's motivating is the narrative around the problem that we're going to address that will make people's lives better. And so that means as we push and shove and say to an agency or to a nonprofit, we need you to do X, then we need to remind them that the goal of that is the outcome.

I've got 2 minutes and 52 seconds left. So I, I want to do, I want to do one political story. So I do a lot of work with Bloomberg Philanthropies, and several years ago they made a large grant to Chicago to set up A data analytics center. It was very sophisticated. The woman who ran it was very sophisticated. And she said, I'm going to organize the agencies around the use of data. She brought in academics and technical experts and found that none of her operating agencies was particularly interested in the exercise of how to organize around data. Then she said to them, well, I want each agency to name a problem that data may help us answer. And the first question came from, this is not a Singaporean problem, but maybe it's a Chicago, New York problem. The first question came from was, if you can help us understand where the rats are going to be before they're in neighborhoods in Chicago and so that we can intervene before they're there, then we're interested in your data experience. So we call this the kind of rat example, which is identify the problem for which the data is invaluable. And that's kind of the message here, because we expect people to operate differently and to participate. So finally.

Our effort in these city exercises we're doing, so we bring together cities, we bring together the academics, we bring together the data experts. But it's not as if we're trying to suggest there is an answer. What we're trying to suggest is there's an iterative process of asking questions, receiving the next layer of kind of discoveries, and moving on. And today we have so much data from sensors and individual resident inputs and daily observations from field workers and the analytics of providers that the amount of data is substantial. The questions become that as well. And we're suggesting that all the smart data experts in a city shouldn't forget asking for participatory ideation from the residents in those communities. So just in. In closing, then, I think about it as the following kind of, what is the responsive city circle? Right? What's the virtuous circle where we ask residents what their problems are or expectations? We anticipate those before the problems even occur. We use the data and science to intervene. We remind citizens that we've solved that problem. They therefore have more trust in government, for which they then participate more. And this cycle that allows us to use data to preemptively solve the problems to respond to residents is one that can produce substantially more trust in a period of time where there's very little trust. The problems in cities are significant. Problems in US Cities are quite significant right now, but the tools to address those problems, if they're thought of as cross sector, have never been greater. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Professor Goldsmith. We now invite Mr. Masanori Kobayashi, Chief economist for Infrastructure Policy Policy Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in Japan please welcome Mr. Kobayashi.

Okay. Good morning everyone. I'm truly honored to have this wonderful opportunity today. Today, I'd like to share my experiences, especially from my work as a policymaker in the Japanese government.

First, I'd like to share some recent research initiative on policy innovation for urban transition in Japan at the global level.

In considering our policies for the transition to sustainable cities, we are fully aware that we are facing a global environmental crisis, and we believe it is essential to seriously rethink our existing socioeconomic systems.

So now.

We need the fundamental socioeconomic system changes to sustain the earth for the future. So we are doing study about four action levers to promote system transformation such as sustainable food, land use, water management system, sustainable cities and communities, and decarbonization of energy, industry and transport.

Then we have set up G7 sustainable ABBA ministers meeting for the first time in Potter den, Germany in 2022, establishing a framework for dialogue and practice aimed at promoting the transition to sustainable cities through collaboration among practitioners from G7 countries, international organizations, university researchers and business community. And in 2023, I was involved in the planning and management of the second meeting which took place in Takama City, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan.

What the Kagawa Takamasu Declaration emphasized at this meeting was the advancement of policies for the transition to sustainable cities through collaborations with subnational groups such as NGOs and associations of researchers from academic institutions as well as emerging economies like Global South.

Recently, we have been working through multilateral cooperation on information exchange and joint research regarding methodology for infrastructure impact assessment at the OECD International Transport Forum and International Infrastructure Forum, as well as a certification system for quality infrastructure and as a blue dot network. In this way, we are advancing policies for the transition to sustainable cities through international level of collaboration.

In Japan, we are placing strong emphasis on promoting green infrastructure through public private partnership. In the government National Land Formation Plan, the importance of developing green infrastructure is clearly stated. Based on this, the government is demonstrating strong leadership in the transition toward environmentally sustainable cities by making strategies to promote green infrastructure in collaboration with university researchers and private companies. In Japan, the Green Infrastructure Public Private Partnership platform was established about five years ago, and now more than 2,000 stakeholders, including researchers, local government officials, companies, NGOs and individuals are participating to deal with climate change, regional flood control, creation of green spaces in cities, ecosystem conservation, and so on.

Last year, together with university researchers and the private sector experts, we officially announced the recommendation for Green Infrastructure Projects and finances. This initiative seeks to expand investment and financing to green infrastructure from investors and financial institutions by introducing best practices with high economic and environmental impact.

Currently with the government. Within the government, we are conducting research in cooperation with experts and researchers on monitoring and improving the utilizing green infrastructure related data to promote ESG investment making analysis the impact of green infrastructure project and moving forward, moving toward the international standardization of evaluation methods. In Japan, social challenges such as depopulation, rapid aging and disparities between urban and rural areas are becoming increasingly severe. To achieve sustainable cities over the past decade, we have been promoting compact and walkable city and smart city policies in Japan. We praise great importance on transit oriented development. We are promoting residential development along public transport stations and to support the revitalization of city centers where elderly people and women raising our children can live together comfortably.

Over the past 25 years, the government has advanced urban regeneration in major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka through the introduction and widespread use of subsidies, grants and tax incentives for more effective land use and urban restriction.

Japanese smart cities are characterized by a student centric approach. In 2020, the government, in collaboration with university researchers, developed smart city guidelines based on these three fundamental philosophies including citizen and user oriented and five core principles such as awareness and inclusion and so on.

And a key feature of Japanese approach is digitalization of cities by public private partnership. Smart city initiatives are being implemented in about 100 cities nationwide. In recent years, even smaller local cities have launched many digital transformation projects supported by government subsidies and regulatory reforms. Lesson 3 Efforts have been underway across Japan to evaluate how citizen centric sustainable smart city policies contribute to improving well being. Government and the municipal officials, in collaboration with researchers and companies are using data to analyze the links between policies and their impact.

And now we are discussing this assessment model for citizen centric sustainable smart cities with domestic and international smart city experts, practitioners and researchers with aim of promoting international standardization.

In Japan, addressing the aging of infrastructure has become a big challenge.

Through cooperation among industry, academia and government, smart infrastructure management using advanced technologies such as drones and AI is underway.

University researchers are taking the lead, promoting the use of advanced technologies as well as advancement of data analysis.

As part of the Strategic Innovation Promotion program, the government has selected a smart infrastructure management system as a key topic. This joint research is focusing on how to enable local government officials can effectively address these challenges.

And recently, the use of open data and big data in urban policies has dramatically progressed about 300 municipalities. And now, using Project PLATO 3D data based platform for urban development, city planning and consensus building, this number is expected to increase to 500 municipalities within a few years. Traditionally.

Infrastructure policy and urban management have emphasized cost benefit analysis and value for money or project. More recently, however, there has been a shift toward infrastructure governance that place greater importance on making analysis about broad welfare and wider economic impact on local communities.

Finally, I'd like to introduce some of the discussion taking place in Japan regarding the transition towards sustainable cities. For example, the University of Tokyo's Institute for Future Initiatives are actively conducting transitional studies. These studies focus on conditions and environments under which the transition to sustainable society takes place employing the theory or multi level perspective. According to this framework, existing regimes are stable and tend to maintain the existing system, making it difficult to accept disruptive innovations. However, when pressure arises from the broader landscape, regimes may become destabilized, thereby opening windows of opportunity for niches. These niches can then expand and ultimately transform existing regimes.

So, based upon this theory, we are trying to change existing urban and infrastructure policies by industry, academia, government collaboration regarding how future infrastructure projects should be evaluated. Collaboration with Variation Task Force in UK is helping to improve methodologies for evidence based policy making in urban and infrastructure policies.

One lesson learned from the UK is that evidence based policy making in infrastructure policy is advanced not only within government agencies, but also through regular information exchange with groups of researchers and experts in each policy field such as the Hoodworks Network. Japan is now going to introduce similar frameworks.

Finally, to promote the transition to sustainable cities and to generate urban innovations that address diverse social challenges, we are conducting research on the holistic framework for growth of Innovation District in cooperation with the global institutions or Innovation District. By effectively utilizing economic assets, assets, physical assets and networking assets, we aim to strengthen community connections, create high quality urban spaces and enhance R and D capacity. This will attract a connection, a concentration of industry and foster the development of Innovation district. Such outcomes cannot be achieved by government policies alone. By integrating the scientific knowledge and research outputs of universities and academia with expertise and financial resources of private companies, and by building cross border networks, we believe the transition to sustainable city can achieve more effectively and successfully. I sincerely hope to collaboration and work together with all of you in advancing efforts towards sustainable cities. Thank you very much for attention.

Thank you.