Day 1 - Policy Innovation for Urban Transitions | Future Cities Symposium & Exhibition 2025

You.

Welcome to our panel on Policy Innovation for Urban Regulatory Frameworks and Incentives for Sustainable Development. It's my pleasure to moderate this discussion. Our focus today is how research can move from insight to policy impact. We will explore. We only have 50 minutes or so for this, but we will try our best. We will explore how scientific evidence, evidence and design research can shape planning codes and governance models. We will also look at the value of policy sandboxes for experimentation and learning. And last but not least, we will discuss how global research and networks translate into local policy impact and the role of institutions like the Future Cities Laboratory Global as translators, conveners and catalysts for such transformations. So thank you all for your earlier presentations and for sharing such valuable perspectives. Let's now turn to the discussion. Li Min, your work at CLC focuses precisely on bridging research and policy. How can pathways from scientific evidence and design research more effectively shape planning codes governance models in Singapore?

Thank you, Thomas. Maybe I would just like to set the context for.

This in Singapore. Singapore is both a city and a country and we are land scarce and resource scarce and we have to perform both as a city and a state. So in a way what CLC has developed, the Livability Framework talks about the need to balance the outcomes for livability precisely.

A high quality of life, sustainable environment and a competitive economy. And to maintain this delicate balance, we need to develop systems enabling systems such as integrated planning, dynamic urban governance and collaborative ecosystems. And at the same time we face pressures that many cities face. The need to decarbonize aging population and technological disruption. And now modern, well, I guess all through history, you know, global uncertainties, right? And so our.

System in a way depends on iterative feedback loops between planning, planning outcomes and governance frameworks such as our long term plan review process. And what I view is that we kind of need to. Cities like Singapore need to harness the science of cities approach. And what I mean by the science of cities approach is evidence based.

Research as well as being able to harness technology and digital tools for planning for integrated planning and to manage trade offs between competing priorities while optimizing cross domain benefits. And some examples of the science of cities approach that we have been doing in Singapore is by adopting advanced modeling and simulation tools to plan our city in smarter ways. So URA's E Planner and HDB's work with Astar on the Integrated Environmental Modeler which has been applied to the design and planning of towns such as Punggol, Queenstown and Tenga and also to apply smart technologies to enhance the built environment Management such as the Open Digital Platform adopted in the Punggol Digital District by JTC and GovTech. The ODP pulls together and overlay data from a variety of sources to enable control systems to talk to each other through an interoperable platform. And this allows for the simulation of different operational scenarios through a digital twin and providing a high degree of situational awareness, sense making and automation over the energy and resource performance of a district. So maybe a kind of a longish answer to your question Thomas okay, thanks.

Thanks Limin. I want to follow up with a quick second question. How do you see the role of institutions like CLC and of course FCL Global in translating global insights into Singapore's planning frameworks? I mean we have been working for a number of years together, we're co organizing this event. But I would be very interested in hearing a bit more on your perspective moving forward with a possible next phase of the program program and your own ambitious plans for clc.

Well, I think you know what FCL brings is really a truly global perspective.

To kind of apply some of these findings. And in working with the universities and agencies in Singapore to develop the local context, what Professor Goldsmith talked about talk about like the contextualization of problems is very important. So how do we bring some of these ideas into the local context? And I think over the last few days we have been talking about, you know, the difficulty of adoption and that adoption process itself is a research that needs to be done. And so I think increasingly there has been talk that there's a big gap between research findings and finally being able to adopt this in Singapore. And I think the research process itself should extend along this spectrum and take on that adoption perspective as part of research rather than leave that to just the receiving end agencies and so on.

That is a lesson we have learned over time. And another role I thought institutions such as CREATE and FCL could really help in is to develop this community of practice. So not just talk about this but really conduct workshops.

To create this ecosystem of research upskilling capabilities and capacities not just among the research community but also to involve the public sector agents within this capability building so that we can create a well functioning research ecosystem and community of practice.

Thank you. Li Min Steven, your career has spanned both government leadership and academic innovation. First question for you. At Data Smart City Solutions you have translated very complex research into actionable insights for local officials. You shared some examples in your talk. What practices have proven most effective to ensure research informs policy making and design decisions?

I'm not sure any practice has Ensured that. But.

Let me react generally. So I'm in the Bloomberg center for Cities at Harvard and the theory of that center is that there is expertise in academic disciplines throughout the university and our purpose is to bring those to bear on cities. Right. So first is that how do you, how do you integrate that data? Secondly, you can think about this in, in two different ways or three different ways. One is that a fair amount of our work is on management and leadership, which is not the subject today. But if you don't have management leadership, the data doesn't make any difference anyway. So kind of how do you teach management leadership, particularly evidence based management leadership? So that'd be second. Next, what I would say is there's a model that says, well, we're not sure what the answer is to this problem, we need to change our approach. And we sometimes call those executive sessions where we bring together folks over two or three year period of time. So you have different disciplines, you have academics, you have different sets of practitioners and you actually debate and evaluate what an answer might be. So that's more seeking an answer. Then the next level would be, okay, we think we know some answers. How do we cause those to actually be adopted in cities? And that looks a little bit like the following. We'll bring the experts in, we'll.

Nominate three or four cities to be pilot cities to do the project. We will try to raise the money to put data fellows in the cities to advance the data capabilities of the cities. And then over a period of time, we'll experiment in those three pilot cities and then report their results to a larger array of cities so that we can be taking advantage of the expertise. And all of that is to suggest that the, the academy can be the source of ideas, the source of analytical experience, the source of research evaluation, or the source of management leadership and the other skills necessary to implement. So we try all of those things and some work.

Very good. Thanks, Stephen. I think I asked you the same question or in a similar way yesterday when we met at the NUS City Symposium. But I think it's worth sharing this again your thoughts on this from your time as deputy mayor in New York and mayor of Indianapolis. What lessons from being a consumer of research can guide today's local leaders in working with researchers?

Is anybody here who was yesterday? So I don't have to say the same thing?

Very few.

Okay, so I could be inconsistent. Okay, please.

So when I was deputy mayor of New York, I had, I'd been a mayor and then I'd gone to Harvard and Then I went to New York and so I was kind of attuned, I was about the opportunity of this relationship. So first thing I did was I sought out academics with expertise in areas of substantial city problems and tried to create partnerships that was so. So because the academics were, they may have research funding, they had a very narrow view, they were very precise in what they were trying to accomplish and they were our partners so long as we were advancing their research. Right. And which was okay for them but not perfect for us. So we needed to create a better translation and integration of applied research to the, to the city. Eventually that led to Mayor Bloomberg's initiative with Cornell Tech to develop a whole university structure designed to present to participate. Another thing that we did, which I think has great applicability, particularly with the substance that's here, was we asked university graduate students to take on urban problems. So I would say all of our data subject to personal information protection is open. You nominate a problem you want to take on, help us solve that problem and have an ongoing approach to it. And we had some really brilliant graduate students who would do data analytics and come up with preventative solutions for a problem. But they would need to be assigned, I mean, it had to be almost their graduate thesis for a period of time so that they would work in an iterative way with the department. So it's a long way of saying, I think that it's easier to aspire.

To say that academic city partnerships should occur than it is actually to do them and to align the interests.

Thank you, Stephen. Sue, your research looks at urban transitions globally, particularly the Global South. My first question for you is what do you see as the most promising pathways from research and design evidence into real regulatory change?

Switch it up.

We've got to swap ideas as well as material resources in order to address the challenges of the Global South. And it is actually interesting because Stephen's involved in a particular program at Harvard and I'm involved in the African center for Cities where there's a very similar. Well, it is the same program doing the same things. And one of the bits in the book I was telling you about is from, it's called how do you delete? How do you work with a deleted future? In other words, what do you do when you're talking to a mayor? There's no resources in a walked on conflict context with very little infrastructure, with a bulging youth population and unemployment. And you have to come up with a set of solutions. And you go to the textbooks and there are none. And I think what we have to recognize is that there are some very generic ways that science policy interfaces work. And I really like what Stephen just gave as the example of ensuring that we're getting the youngest and the brightest people to come up with solutions based on the information that we have and to identify some of those solutions. And it seems to me that that's one of the really critical things that has to happen. It's not just that the university works with the practice community. There's a critical interlocutor, and that is the emerging professional, the emerging researcher, and the student. And the reason that those people are so, so important is probably because they're the smartest, they're the most up to date and the most in touch, but it's also their future. It's their city. And so for me, one of the things that research processes tend to, the metrics that we use to assess research, maybe this is a point for how we think about these things are quite often about what changed in the city. Instead of saying what changed in the cohort that we are training, what changed in the kinds of people that we are producing. And that's why, for me, one of the things that these structures that we're able to pull together, which we call research policy interfaces, is that they are incubators of the future, and we've got to think about them like that and make people excited about what they're doing, connected to other people who are doing those kinds of things and skilled so that they are able to do that. And that's where that thing, for me, of going back and saying, of course we need a person who can. I'm going back to the bridge analogy. Of course we need people who can build a bridge that stands up, but if that's all they can do, we've got a problem. And if that's all they can do in a context where there are no resources to build a bridge and they can't think about the problem more creatively, and for most of our cities, that is the problem, then what are we going to do? And it seems to me that that's where we need to be building the kinds of institutions that address those sorts of dynamics.

Can I amend my answer?

Absolutely. Stephen, please.

I want to take one minute because Susan inspired me. The thing I mentioned, I failed to mention that Susan mentioned, was that the academy, and particularly younger students, also have the ability to inject innovation into an organization that is used to producing the routine. I don't know if Singaporeans have the hammer and nail analogy, but, you know, if you do have a hammer. Everything is a nail. And so it was Susan's comment about young folks I just wanted to mend, to add, injecting innovative, different ways to think about addressing a problem is one of the most important. Sorry to interrupt.

No, thanks, Stephen. I think that's a very important point. In the prep discussions leading up to this event, sue, we also talked about the importance of sandboxes, policy sandboxes. So I have a second question for you. So, again, policy sandboxes are gaining traction worldwide. How might they work in rapidly urbanizing contexts where governance structures differ significantly? And I'm sure in your work you come across, you know, many of these differences.

I mean, I don't know if you've ever been involved in one of these opportunities, and I hope through FCL Global that you are. For me, one of the opportunities of being in a kind of a sandbox is not only that you get to talk across the disciplines and cross personalities, but quite often across different place contexts. I wish it was also different time contexts. I have to say, I think we should have a historian in each of those boxes to remind us that the present was not always like it is now, and it won't always be the same going forward. But it's fantastic when you watch somebody from Sierra Leone talking to somebody from Nairobi describing how cities work in their place. And you hear it often here, not like this in Zurich, I know, but in Singapore. And in the process of learning to speak to each other, we have to find the language to describe our own context, to make it abstract and to reflect on where it is the same and where it is different. So for me, one of the real values, and that takes a little bit of time, and it's often quite iterative, and sometimes it requires trust because you have to ask the questions that for which you don't always have the answer. I'm sure if I asked all of you how Singapore gets its money, you wouldn't have a complete answer. You wouldn't know what the different tax systems are. You wouldn't know who really pays. You know, how different is that from Japan? And that's quite difficult to talk about. And so we don't always have the confidence. So sandboxes to me are an opportunity to build our confidence, to develop a comparative gesture, and in the process, to redescribe that analytical redescription that I was talking about quite often takes place in a sandbox.

Very good. Thanks. Thanks. Sue Masanori. Japan has been at the forefront of experimenting with urban policy innovation. I Think your presentation was a lot about that. It's great to hear that. First question for you. How can global research initiatives from G7 discussions to OECD and Blue Dot Network be effectively linked to solving national and local challenges such as climate adaptation or aging societies?

Okay, thank you. It's very difficult to translate our global framework into a local language. So I think university researchers or.

Expertise of private consultant can play key role to build bridge between global discussion and local level. So, and secondary, I think it's very important to involve local people from the early stage of the project or conversation. So the government of Japan are trying to engage the local communities or you know, we have about 1700 municipalities and 47 prefectures. So you know, it's very difficult to share information with local people. But we are trying to involve the local committees of people from the beginning of the discussion. And sadly, you know, disparities between major cities and rural areas becoming serious issues in Japan. So people who live in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka can easily access the information or international conversation like this kind of symposium, but it's very difficult to share with local communities. So even though a lot of people use SNS or a smartphone in local elder people, but it's very still difficult to, you know, get involved the local people. So I think capacity building or real conversation is very, very important. So actually we are opening a lot of webinar led by the government. But I think, you know, communication by using this kind of symposium is really important to share and promote understanding with local communities. Thank you.

So, ma', am, I just wanted to add to that. I mean, I think for me, what's been so important about countries like Japan taking the leadership, and Japan's not alone in this, but in taking a leadership role in the multilateral system through things like the G7 and the OECD and the SDGs has been that it's created not just opportunities for building a global consensus, but it has created pathways to scale those sandboxes. And if you were to trace, maybe a PhD will student will do it one day. If you were to trace the people who've landed up in influential positions of soft power around the question of cities, I think what you'll discover is that quite a lot of them have come through a local sandbox, a comparative project like FCL Global have got involved in these larger kinds of processes like the Urban Working group of the G7 or the SDGs. And that's really, really important in shifting the overarching narrative about what we want and what we imagine so yeah, just to reinforce how important I think it is and not just for those world leaders. I mean if you were to take the African case and look at the mobilizing that's been enabled through piggybacking on some of those interventions where mayors meet, where there is a possibility for discussion, it's really, really formative.

Thanks Sue. I think we can come back to some of these points later in the discussion. But before we do that, I have a second question for Masa Nori. You showed very nicely in some of your slides Green infrastructure, which is of course a topic I'm also personally very interested in what role do researchers play in advancing nature based solutions and what practical challenges remain from your experience.

Thank you. As I said, we are promoting a green infrastructure project by public private partners partnership system. And I think the researchers, university researchers and expert academic experts can contribute to find.

You know, scientific evidence or deliver.

Ideal evaluation tools to the local community. So and so there are a lot of, you know, a small green infrastructure project read by local government but they are facing with sort of issues like you know, they don't.

Find the solution or they don't don't find the evaluation system. But you know, researchers and experts can support by using the theory or you know, the use of data. So we are, you know, supporting creating the corporation system among expertise, researchers and the local government.

Thank you. Masanori. I want to stay on the topic of sandboxes for just a few minutes. Limin CLC has also been involved in experimental spaces for policy learning. Could you share your thoughts on the value of policy sandboxes for urban innovation?

Thank you for that. I actually want to say that sandboxes is not just the purview of government and I think there have been excellent sandboxes that have been pioneered. For example, I see Kipo sitting there. The College of Design Engineering at NUS have actually.

Been piloting zero energy campus starting with the design of one of the buildings. SDE4 was the first purpose built zero energy building in Singapore that was completed in 2019. And I think Quipo shared with me that as of January 2020 it succeeded and exceeded in its net zero energy target and has been able to supply surplus energy to the rest of the campus micro grid. And in so doing.

Several other buildings in the campus took on some of these strategies. And NUS is one of the leading examples of kind of a district led pathways towards decarbonization. And in many ways this is led by university leadership rather than the government. So I think if institutions like the Universities and private sectors sector able to lead some of these sandboxes and you know, be able to scale up. I think it's really powerful. As I mentioned earlier, this idea of the collaborative ecosystem. I think government cannot do this alone and it really needs the efforts of, you know, research institutions like fcl, like the universities, like companies who are able to invest in.

You know, for example, infrastructure for decarbonization, to be able to pilot this, you know, together and be able to, you know, help the city as a whole, for example, reach its net zero targets.

Thanks, Limin. I wanna, I wanna touch on a totally different topic since I have all of you here and I want to address that question. First to Stephen. Building on your slides, how do you see tools like AI supporting cities not only in improving performance, but also in engaging communities? AI is a huge topic also here in Singapore for the university. So to get your perspective on this would be incredibly helpful.

Let me start, but thank you.

Let me start by saying there's a whole issue of AI regulation. I'll let the other panelists handle it. Let me just talk about the use of AI. It's contrast to the regulation of AI.

So we have a couple projects now that suggest, you know, I'm old enough that I was around at the beginning of the open data movement and that started with you'd put a PDF online and say your data was open even though nobody could use it. Now we have massive amounts of data that are open.

And the average community representative can't use it still because there's so much of it. So we've been looking at government performance measures, city performance measures, like what does a city evaluate in terms of performance? And then trying to use AI for two purposes. One is to say that inside the enterprise of government, more public servants should be able to use natural language to inquire about what's driving performance, like what is causing that problem to occur over and over again. So you can, if you create, if you can be creative and iterative, you can ask. Secondly though, the next part of the project will be to say, how can we train community organizations to use generative AI to explore the data related to their community? So this massive open data, including data that is image data that the community can say to the data.

How do our trees compare to someone else's trees? How do our accidents compare? What's the reason we're having so many pedestrian problems at this? Right? So that the ability of the community then to use generative AI to ask natural language questions of the data and then to Explore the answers with the city. I think it's quite exciting and we're in the early stages of it, but I view it as quite transformative.

Thanks Stephen. Can I direct the same question to Sue? You also had some mentioning of AI in your presentation.

Yeah, look, I mean I think there are enough people in the room and specialists are going to work on this, on the detail of what AI can do and how it is embedded in the processes of running a city. And that's exciting. I'm not in that business and I'm going to leave it to those people. What I am in the business of is trying to think about African cities.

And here one of my worries, and it's the provocation in a way back to the AI community is the information isn't really nearly as good for some of those places. So what is it that you are synthesizing, bringing fast tracking? Probably more importantly than that, because I think we're on the cusp of a revolution even in data acquisition for Africa. Not all of it, because so much of it is satellite and other based. It's not necessarily ground truth sufficiently. But perhaps as important is what questions and what level of education and what kind of education do you require in order to train.

The AI processes and mechanisms? What kind of information and training do you require of your professionals to be asking the right questions and of your politicians so that they can be using. So there's for me a much. There's the question of AI and the city and then there's the question of what is the urban ecosystem that is going to emerge around AI that we're not thinking about because we're focusing on AI. In other words, what else is there that we should be thinking about? And so for me it's those wider kinds of societal professionals, political questions that we really need to be embedding in those systems and attached to that. And Stephen, I don't know if you're saying the same thing, maybe you are, but certainly in the African context the question of intellectual property of data and the role of the state is really fundamental. In other words, who owns data? Who owns the quality control on data, the verification on data, the decision of which data should be archived and held and protected, and some those kinds of questions at the urban scale, it seems to me we are nowhere near asking because we are leaving the development of AI to effectively profit making entities. And so how that then feeds back to become a public good and how we become are able to use that for the kind of comparative ways that would be beneficial seems to me we're lagging on.

Thank you.

Sue, can I speak after Susan?

Yes, please. Yes.

Because every time she says something I get like I want to. You should respond, please just I only take 15 seconds. 1 the data acquisition issues and the bias and the data. Huge issues. Thank you. The other thing that you mentioned that just the reason I interrupted yet again was we're trying to use AI to improve the quality of the questions, not just the quality of the answers. So if you have AI that's Persona organize, then how does that help that person ask better questions and therefore have better insights into the answer. So thank you.

Thanks for interrupting. Stephen, this is a great comment. Masanori, in the, in the prep discussions leading up to this event we also talked about AI and you mentioned smart infrastructure management, using drones, etc. What are your thoughts on this big topic?

Yes, thank you for question about AI and advanced technology. As I said, we are trying to introduce the advanced technology like a drone and AI but we are facing a lot of challenges like you know, a lot of local communities.

Have to deal with funding shortage or they are also.

You know, facing the issue of the shortage of, you know, skilled professionals or knowledge of adoption of new technologies. They are also lacking of, you know, knowledge of the use of data. So the government and.

Advanced university like University of Tokyo doing joint research about data governance or data ecosystem. So we have a lot of policy recommendation about data governance including AI issues. But the problem is how to implement these policy recommendations into local regions. So it's very difficult to share this recommendation into local communities. So we, I. So I think design thinking is very important. You know, we have to share empathy and that, you know, the local committee's regions problems. So and ideation is also very important. So we are trying to introduce design thinking to deal with advanced technology or issues in Japan. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Masanori, I want to open it up now to the audience so I think we have time for maybe two to three questions. Do we have a mic that can go around? Are there any questions please? Now is your chance. Subot. Yes please.

Yes.

So Subodh, you were already introduced so I don't have to ask you to reintroduce yourself.

No problem. My question is on data and question really is about open data. The data which is most valuable is sometimes that cuts across different sectors. So you need of course data from pollution data from health care, socioeconomic data. And the concern is how do you make all of this open source?

We grapple with that. So data privacy and de Identification of certain data is often a concern, even if you go towards synthetic data. So I was just wondering, how do you, how do you safeguard that? And I have a second smaller part of the question. If you make data available to the public that could have, you know, negative consequences, such as the pollution data can lead to drop in property prices in that neighborhood. So how do you, how do you tackle with, how do you handle that, such issues?

Who wants to take that first.

Step?

Well, there is no answer to either one of those questions. So.

Let me do the. Well, they're both impossible to answer. Let's do the first one.

So we've been looking at small language models as well as large language models in order to figure out how to put the walls around with the data that's available. That doesn't help when you have the public involved, but it does help when you have just the city involved. Right. So because you're not leaking the data outside into others.

One, two. I think if you have an organized governance process and you have a rule driven system by who can see what data, you can reduce a little bit the problem. We've had very serious challenges though in.

What is anonymized health data. Right. Because we're trying to identify what neighborhoods have the highest incidences of chronic childhood asthma. Right. Well, our interventions are better. The more discrete the answer, and the more discreet the answer is, the less likely it is to be anonymized. So I just think you need to have rules in a referee. And there is no really good answer, I think, to the question. It's a great question.

Sue.

Yeah, I mean, I would just say there's a wider issue for me of ethics because they're the technical questions on what is is open data and what isn't. But actually quite a lot of the most useful data we don't even think of. So we think of health data and we know that there's a problem around the releasing and around individual confidentiality. But what about the individual mortgage data, the individual credit data? We don't even think that that should be in the public domain. So I think that that's part of my point about there's a sort of a wider discussion about what we come to know through making more data available and what we come to hide that we don't even know. And so some critical reflection on that as well as some technical discussion about making data interoperable seems to me to be the way that we need to be going.

It's a very slippery slope on the second question to say, well we're going to open the data, but if it leads to a negative implication, then we're not going to make it open. Right. And referring that is.

Impossible. Right. And in the US the best example of that is, well, we understand crime data, we'll understand crime will also drive down the property values of where the crime is. And so but once you start saying, well, we're not going to let people see that, then it's hard to draw the line.

Thanks. Limin Masanori, do you want to respond to this, to these two questions actually by subat?

Yeah.

Normal Japanese are very conservative, so it's very difficult to introduce a system and open data. So it takes time to.

Share.

Pro and cons of AI with people. But in Japan, we actually are setting regulatory sandbox also or super city district in a city of Tsukuba and city of Osaka. So in Osaka they are trying to use AI and advanced technology aggressively. But you know, and also we are learning from a sidewalk global project in Toronto. So we have to, to think about privacy and negative impact of AI. So in Japan we are going to take time to, you know, discuss and share the positive and negative impact of AI with the people.

Thank you, Limin.

I was just thinking of a point that Professor Goldsmith made at a workshop earlier in the week. He talked about, you know, the role of a data broker. And I thought, hey, you know, that sounds like a great idea and a great business model of.

You know, getting private sector players, of course, you know, to be licensed and contracted in certain ways that would protect data. But as a business model, the data broker may have more.

More incentive to make this data interoperable, correctly collected.

Analyzable, and can be shared across domains. So why not think of this as a new form of business now that we have all this data floating around and why not create businesses out of it?

Okay, Subodh, you asked two very complex questions. Time's flying and I promised we would finish on time. But before we, we do that, before we wrap up, I would like to ask each one of you for a short reflection, maybe a minute or so looking ahead, what is one policy innovation? Because we want to discuss policy here you believe could make the greatest difference for sustainable urban transitions.

Limit. Do you want to take this first? No.

Stephen, no.

Okay. No takers. Too loaded of a question.

Sure.

I'm happy to say one for the audience.

I know you're going to say no too because it's so difficult and you don't want to be recorded on it, but I just come back to the title of the session about regulatory frameworks. And I think one of the things I would say is that is to keep regulatory frameworks at the forefront of our consciousness about the city. Because quite often innovation takes place outside of regulation in the sense that it's new, it's innovative, and until it gets regulated, it isn't embedded in the everyday systems. And real innovation is not an individual case. Real individual innovation for sustainability takes place at scale in a city, across cities and in the composite of cities. And that to me often only takes place when it, when we find a regulatory register. You say that regulatory register to ensure that, that we've got it. Right.

Thanks.

So.

Taunts. You should always answer before I do. So.

I'm going to answer, but not on a policy implementation, on a governance implementation. Right. Which is for advanced civil service government. Singapore, uk New York City. The processes of government are the enemies to this problem because they're hierarchical and they're very narrow and there's a lot of command and control designed to make sure that government does the same thing every day in the same way. But the problems are big. And if you're going to have kind of big policy implementation, cross sector, cross agency, then you have to create a governance mechanism that's a system that addresses the system and not the activities that would unlock more big policy innovation.

Great, thanks. Mazanori, any thoughts on this?

Yes, thank you for asking about innovation. I think interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary approach is very important to promote innovation in Japan. We have a lot of research center in my ministry, so. But you know.

As Professor Stephan said, we have to break through the sectorial administrative silos. So we have to, you know, promote multi stakeholder coalition to promote innovation. So. And.

Today I found that FGL Global is a very key hub to promote innovation internationally. So I like to collaborate with FG L Global in the future and I'd like to learn from you, all of you. So thank you very much.

Well, thank you very much for this statement. Limin. Last call.

Okay. I think.

I want to go back to the livability framework because I think, you know, you know, for, you know, a person in living in the city, you know everything, every system like transportation, transport. I know housing, affordability, municipal access to water, energy and so on. I mean it impacts the same person and a person perceives this not through silos. So I would just say that for any policy innovation, livability needs to be at the forefront. People need to be at the forefront of making these policies. So I think we shouldn't kind of get lost and too many ideas, but just to put people at the center of policies.

Thank you very much to all of our panelists.