Firas Saffiedine is a spatial design practitioner whose work spans urbanism, design, architecture, neurotechnology, and art. He is the founder of his own practice called Spatial Forces, the director of the platform Urbanitarian the Chief Metaverse Architect at Gamiumcorp and the Director of the NeurotechX Hackathon. His upcoming book called Spatialization Takes command: Notes on the Future of Urbanism, the Internet and life as we live it, is a commentary on the evolution of the internet and on the emergence of a new Spatial Internet.

This is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came out and I think you will also hear this through the episode. We also decided to record the computer screen as we go through google maps and explore the cities to actually give a spatial dimension to the discussion and something interesting came out. It's not the standard approach to the episodes I’ve been putting out for the last couple of years, this is a much more laid back discussion between two friends and urbanists.  To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit: ⁠https://www.urbancollabs.com/

This is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came out and I think you will also hear this through the episode. We also decided to record the computer screen as we go through google maps and explore the cities to actually give a spatial dimension to the discussion and something interesting came out. It's not the standard approach to the episodes I’ve been putting out for the last couple of years, this is a much more laid back discussion between two friends and urbanists. To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit: https://www.urbancollabs.com/

According to some estimates, in the first two decades of the 21st century, 79 global big cities have suffered extensively from a drought disaster. Meanwhile, climate change has magnified urban droughts in both frequency and severity, putting tremendous pressure on our cities’ water supply. This year Spain was in the headlines due to the record breaking heat waves, the lack of rainfall, the trucked-in water and disappearing lakes. It’s enough to make you wonder. Instead of ringing the bells of doom and saying that all is lost, we need to understand the scale of this problem, its source and what we - people - can actually do about it. It seems that the right thing to say is not that we are running out of water but that water access is becoming unpredictable. Sometimes it's not enough and other times it’s so much it’s destructive. Therefore, environmental, climate-change related reasons aside there is another major issue that we need to understand. The way we travel and the way we grow and design our cities with impermeable surfaces is permanently altering the cycle of water. As a result we are not able to close the circularity of water, in other words we are not able to recycle it and we are polluting it. It’s not that we don’t have enough water coming from the sky, it’s mainly that we don’t invest in the right infrastructure to clean and recycle the water we have access to. What we need is a strategy. For this reason, Alejandro Guerrero Neira and Jayashree Chandrappa will share with us the ways we can incorporate resilient strategies and innovative systems to face this increasingly challenging access to the most important resource there is. Water.

If you have lived in the same city for the last 15 to 20 years you have most likely seen parts of it change. Many times, foreign investors move into the city and big global retail brands start altering the fabric of a city’s cultural identity. We’ve all had this moment where we’ve walked around different neighborhoods of different cities and we’ve witnessed the exact same stores selling the exact same stuff.  In very rough terms, that’s how most people experience what we call gentrification a term that is very commonly associated with the deterioration of a neighborhood’s cultural identity.  However, these changes on a neighborhood’s cultural identity tend to have disproportionate effects on minority communities as one of the main effects of gentrification are an increase in property rental value. Displacement due to gentrification is a very real thing and needs to be looked at closely as there’s a severe lack of policy to protect migrants and minorities. Maria Ivanova and Ruby Chen will help us explore the inevitability of socioeconomic growth and the different ways we can make its impact less traumatizing for migrant ethnicities who are forced to relocate.

Not sure if you are aware but we are currently living in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yes fourth. There were 3 others. This one is the one that is all about automating traditional manufacturing and industrial processes through what we call smart technologies, machine-to-machine communication, and the internet of things. This new way of manufacturing is rapidly expanding to all corners of the Globe and it's not only disrupting old industries but also creating new ones. What we call Industry 4.0 has led to the development of smart city initiatives in order to make living in cities more sustainable. This is mainly done through the use of advanced technologies whose development is accelerating. Now as innovators and engineers are racing to build the next iPhone cities are proving to be the perfect environments, rife with talent and a very necessary competitive spirit. Just like the well known business districts of cities we now have innovation districts that are popping up in environments all over the world. San Jose, Barcelona, Tokyo, Huston, Paris, London and many other cities compete on which will attract businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, talent and which will gain the global recognition by establishing itself as a leader in a certain industry or sector. But what does this all mean, for us citizens? Imagine you are a startup entrepreneur. Which city would you find the most promising to start a new business? This is the question that Roman Pomanzan and Naohiro Miyaguchi tried to answer. With their help we are going to look at the different markets and try to figure out which city is an option, what opportunities and challenges you could meet, and identify their entrepreneurial culture.

It’s 2:00 am, you’re walking back home from a night of dining and drinking with your friends at the local bar. The streets are awfully quiet, a street light is flickering and all of a sudden a car alarm goes off in the distance. The hair on the back of your neck stand straight, your heart starts beating faster and you find yourself walking a bit faster as you feel more and more uncomfortable. You make a right turn and enter that scary alley you hate. You know it’s the quickest way to your door. The minute you enter the alley you see a guy walking towards you. He seems drunk as he’s stumbling on his steps. You walk slightly faster. You’re getting closer. You’ve already grabbed your keys and are thinking about the minimum amount of movements required to insert the key in the keyhole, open the door and close it behind you as fast as possible. The guy gets closer, closer, and that’s it, he just walked past you. You’ve made it. You rush to open the door, but you don’t really want to show you’re scared. Your adrenaline is through the roof as you enter the elevator and think to yourself: Shit, I need to move out of here. Sounds familiar? One way or another we’ve all experienced something like this, especially in big cities. The thing is that safety and comfort are tightly associated. They define a city’s quality of life and attractiveness. However, what we can do as planners and designers to improve the safety and feeling of comfort of our cities is not entirely clear. The perception of safety changes with gender, age, profession, religion, class, time of day and many other factors that relate to the individual and the context it finds itself in. Urban Planner and Architect Vasia Bakomichali, wanted to explore this lack of clarity and take a deeper look at the way women experience public spaces in an effort to create new insights on the way we plan and design safe cities for all.

The way we unravel the complexity of our work- whether it is in front of one person or of 1000 - is crucial to the development of the audiences’ understanding of the thing that we are trying to communicate. The ability to turn years of research into a succinct narrative that can be communicated in the form of a story is nothing short of a craft and a skill that many scientists lack. The few scientists that manage to become popular to widespread audiences are usually deprioritizing the complexity of their scientific methodology and promote a superficial distillation of their work’s outcomes and conclusions. I personally find this a very important topic to talk about and one that I feel is not addressed adequately in the scientific and academic community. Today’s popular opinions on topics like climate change, space exploration, renewable energy, automation, artificial intelligence, are shaped by the collection of short, bite-sized pieces of information that are haphazardly scattered around the internet, its websites and social media platforms. As a consequence, people have exchanged the limited but deep understanding of science for the unlimited collection of shallow information. In the academic, the scientific and the professional world of urban sciences we are seeing two extremes. One the one side professors, students, researchers and professionals who are driven by a scientific, rigorous method, they write papers, publications and focus on accurate, deep and complex descriptions of reality. They see beauty in this complexity and are not afraid to show it even if it means that they will be blamed for being uninspiring, cold, and making endlessly boring papers and presentations. On the other hand, are the ones that are driven by a passion for communication, creating an emotional response in an audience and finding the hidden story within the research. They are the orators, the storytellers, the ones that spend time debating which is the right font and animation for a 15 minute presentation, whether their tone should be compelling or convincing, and whether they should present sitting down or standing up. They see beauty in the reachability of this simplification and are not afraid to show it even if it means that they will be blamed for attention grabbing, clickbaiting and dumbing down work that they didn’t even produce. By the way, I’m more often than not in the second category and have huge appreciation for the ones in the first. However, I really can’t stand watching their presentations even though I know there is real value behind their scientific work. Now, the really good ones are the ones that are able to adapt their communication techniques according to the audience. They are the ones that know 15 different ways of explaining the same thing to 20 different people coming from a variety of ages, backgrounds and interests. To better illustrate how difficult it is to do this, Diego Giron and Christos Grapas, decided to explore this with me. With their help we will see how a notoriously complex issue such as “Urban Vulnerability” would be deconstructed and eventually communicated to different audiences.

On August 8th 2023, the World Meteorological Organisation reported that the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which was implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission, confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded. Samantha Burgess, the Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service said that we just witnessed global air temperatures and global ocean surface temperatures set new all-time records in July. These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet, as they expose us to ever more frequent and intense extreme events.. 2023 is currently the third warmest year to date at 0.43ºC above the recent average, with the average global temperature in July at 1.5°C above pre industrial levels. Even if this is only temporary, it shows how urgent the ambitious efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are, which are the main driver behind these records. Sadly though, still for many people, climate change is a buzzword. A concept rather than a reality. It’s thrown around now and then in conversations - usually to end them. It’s something that is not an immediate concern and is now taken for granted. However, this is a reality for millions of climate refugees who live on the frontlines of the climate crisis. For someone living in a cushy apartment, it’s a rainy day but for others it’s a flood that threatens their home and livelihood. For them, it’s very real and it’s happening now. And as this threat of climate change increases globally, millions of people will find themselves on the precipice of vulnerability. If we continue like this, according to some estimates, there could even be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Greenpeace UK’s journalism project called Unearthed, shed light on the hardships faced by a farmer from Kenya, named Susan Akal. The continuous arid conditions dried up their local pasture and water and it eventually killed their livestock, which was their means of survival. Let’s listen to the video and later we’ll hear more from Reda Petravičiūtė and Julia Thomas who produced this special episode on Climate Migration.

During the last decade there have been so many innovations in the world of technology. Self-driving cars, smartphones, space exploration, bio printing, internet of things. The list goes on and on. We are definitely undergoing a technological revolution. Among those was the recent deployment of a series of AI-powered chatbots that have opened new frontiers for the generation of images, videos, 2D, 3D models, text, code as well as art such as music and movies. The way we access and generate content has taken a major shift as we are finally seeing the first truly sophisticated results of years of AI development.  However, innovation has a cost and the fact that we have access to these new tools permits intelligent people to make decisions which will protect as well as aggressive people to make decisions which will destroy. Subsequently, the world of computer science and the world of politics are finally having a face to face discussion as experts around the world are dividing opinions on what kind of future we should expect. Many want us to be excited. Many want us to be concerned. And both sides have solid arguments. David Ruess and Hiranya Ganatra are two urban planners who wanted to explore this conundrum and to see what this all means for the way we design, plan and run our cities. Are we looking at a future in which there’s going to be an AI consultant in every meeting politicians have about the state of public urban infrastructure? Is urban design going to be transformed from a creative and investigative practice to a curatorial one? Really, there are no ways to give a general answer to these questions. As we know very well, context, culture and environment are still able to define the role of technology in societies and cities. With this in mind, it is still an important moment to reflect, pause and think about the kind of future we want to design.