 Hello, and good evening. Thank you for coming out here. This is Studio X. It's a great pleasure tonight to welcome Hannah Wright. You're the fourth of our speakers in this Istanbul 95 talks discussing together with us what is the future of childhood in cities. Hannah is our urban planner and knowledge integrator. I would like to know what a knowledge integrator is She has an international experience of seven years working, among other things, at Arab preparing the cities and live guides, as well as working as an advisor to the BANAT Foundation efforts. So, welcome Hannah, and looking forward to your talk. Okay, wow, microphone. Yeah, thank you very much for having me, and thank you for showing me such a warm welcome over the past few days. We've been doing some really nice lectures, workshops, and it's been great to hear your ideas and to do some knowledge integration over the past couple of days. But tonight, I've been asked to speak to you about a project that I've been working on in India and share some of that experience, which I think is quite timely. So just two days ago, it was Children's Day in Turkey. And at that point, the president's press office said that their greatest desire is to prepare a much brighter tomorrow for our children and youth. And he was quoted saying that, as a nation, Turkey sees the children as the most precious asset in the world. So I'd like to use this example to really test that theory and to set a challenge, perhaps, for how you can really create cities for children. So I'll be talking about a project that we did in India for their 100 Smart Cities mission and how we were trying to take children from a situation where they were only surviving to a situation where they have the potential to thrive. I've been starting all of my presentations with this quote, which has really inspired me this year. It's a quote from a psychologist called James Hillman that says, how we imagine our cities, how we envision their goals and values and enhance their beauty, defines the self of each person in that city. And that quote, for me, is very important because it acknowledges the interrelationship between health and well-being and the built environment. Our surroundings really influence the way we experience the city day to day. And all of that influences the way that we develop as people and as citizens to be able to deal with challenges in the future. That self, importantly, is defined very rapidly in the first three to five years of our lives. So the Bernard Van Lea Foundation have a project called Urban 95, which focus particularly on children under five years old. The reason being that in the first 1,000 days of your life, you will develop most rapidly. Here you can see a chart that shows the ability to change your behaviors, declines as we go through our life and the amount of effort that it requires for us to change our behaviors, increases as we go through life. So there's a real window of opportunity to provide a good start in life in those first three years. Importantly, our experience of the first three to five years changes very rapidly as well. So the way that we move around and learn and interact with our environment from sort of being on our bellies, crawling, walking, eventually gaining some independence, changes very quickly and also the experience for the parent or caregiver changes very rapidly. So from pregnancy to carrying the baby, to walking, hand-holding and eventually allowing some more freedom from the child. So that interaction is also very importantly changing. If you were to compare three to five years as a timescale to sort of underline this importance, it's about a similar sort of timescale as a construction project in a city. So the time it takes to build, perhaps I don't know how long the project is, the Galata Port project could be this important window in a childhood and important influence on the life and the future. So if you imagine all of the different experiences of the city in terms of construction, noise, vibration, air quality, dust, those different challenges, how does that impact the first three to five years? Trying to underline here the importance of development in the child's experience. Particularly as the way that you experience those construction projects really varies at the street level. And it can mean a sort of reduced experience for a more difficult experience for the child or the caregiver. The other example I was gonna give is five years as a political term. So the choices that decision makers are making in those five years can have a huge impact on childhood in the first five years. This is an image from a story I've been learning about in the last couple of days where after losing the local election, somebody who had put in a playground two weeks before the elections then took it down because they weren't re-elected after that point. So the decisions and the choices, yeah, the decisions and the choices that are being made by politicians really affects that experience as well. And most likely the decisions that are made in those five years do have repercussions for the next five years and so on and so forth. I'm gonna be talking about some of the values that I was involved in developing as part of this Cities Alive Arab Initiative. I think there are copies available. So this was a project that I was leading with Sam Williams, Felicitas Udonna and Tim Gill while I was working at Arab. The idea behind this initiative designing for urban childhoods was to put child-friendly urban planning on the agenda for cities, for developers and for built environment professionals. And what we were trying to underline here is that actually if you can design a city for children, it should work better for everybody. I'm gonna run you through just some of those principles because I think child-friendly urban planning is new to some people here. So as I said, it's a vital part of creating inclusive cities that work better for everybody. And the presence of children in the public realm is a good indication of quality of life. So if you have a street or a space where children are out and playing and enjoying themselves, also there's a good indication that that place is safer, more inclusive, working better for a greater range of needs. We try to encourage multifunctional and playable public space. So not thinking of spaces for children in the city only as play spaces, as particular parts of the city, but in thinking of the entirety of the public realm as a potential to experience everyday freedoms. By everyday freedoms, I mean self-directed play as a fundamental human expression and a very important part of child development. And also the ability to move around with your parent or your caregiver. Also to be able to spend time with families between different age groups and not only have to go to a space that's exclusively for one group. We talked about the interventions at the neighborhood scale as a really good opportunity to offer safe and enjoyable journeys every day. So this is the importance of routes and streets as well as destinations. Your first steps out of your house, out of your door are what influence the behaviors in the rest of the city. If you can have that as a good start between the public and private realm, then you have a better opportunity to enhance those healthy behaviors as you continue your journey through the city. And the neighborhood scale is a scale that identifies well for children and for the community in terms of their range of vision and what they relate to. But also it works with the roaming range of kids and how far they can get around in the city. Finally, and this is an important one for the project I'm gonna be talking about, that the needs of children can act as a unifying theme for the promotion of progressive ideas and ambitious actions. So we found as we were developing this project that where there'd been trouble dealing with issues, say let's talk about air quality for example, where the carbon emissions lobby and where the climate change lobby did not have such an impact. If you could close the streets traffic, improve that air quality and see children out there spending time with their relatives and enjoying the space, that was gained more traction and could really kind of connect all of these difficult very abstract problems for cities and really bring them home. And it also encouraged people to work across different departments in the city to make change happen. One of the things that we were talking about to make change happen was inviting actors to be opportunistic and strategic to improve existing and new urban environments. And we talked about how big change is possible by a series of small coordinated interventions that can be scaled up and adapted to different contexts. And I'm really happy to be here actually today to have been testing this project, these concepts that was advocating as part of Cities Alive on this project in India. And to see what we learned from it because we've been trying these things out now. So I'm gonna be talking about ITCN which is the acronym for Infants, Toddlers, Caregiven Neighborhood as a smart way to build neighborhoods to thrive in which is this project in India. I really like this quote from Bill Gates that came up which also I think gives a bit of a smart city feel that the first five years have so much to do with the next, how the next 80 turn out. And what I'll be hoping to show throughout this presentation I'll come back to these is how we were opportunistic and strategic in our approach on the India project, how we generated globally inspired but locally applied ideas and how to translate a national level program to something that has a real impact for families at the neighborhood level. So I'll be talking you through a little about some context of infants and toddlers caregivers in India. I'll talk about the smart cities mission and how that relates to ITCs and the ITC neighborhood. I'll be saying ITCs as infants, toddlers and caregivers just so you know, they're the mouthful. I'll talk to you about the framework so what we actually did and then I'll talk a little bit about what we've learned through that process. So infants, toddlers and caregivers in India. So India's population is about 18% of the world total and it's one of the youngest countries in the world which really underpins the importance of doing something for children's futures in this context. In addition to that, children of not five years make up about 29% of the population in India. So there's a huge proportion of the population that we could potentially impact through this project. Much of the population is going to be living in cities and as the pressures of urbanization continue, it's really important that we think about how we can enhance those cities and enhance the experience of those young children in India. And when we think about how children are taken into account in the public realm, the public realm is something that is really designed by adults and we forget what it's like to be a kid and we forget to take kids into account when we're designing the public realm. They tend to be the group that's out most in the city spending most time in public space but design for them is the least deliberate. So we can think about this idea of planning for infants, toddlers, and caregivers as a way to empower and give some influence back. I talked about the initiative of Urban 95 that asked the question, if you were to experience the city from the height of 95 centimeters, which is the height of a healthy three-year-old, what would you change? And 95 centimeters in India, the view actually of the city street, it's mostly vehicles, mostly the exhausts. You're about the height of a car bumper, which is a very different experience for young kids than it is for adults. That seems to be something that's obvious but actually is quite surprising to see when you sort of crouch in these different spaces or you consider it from that perspective how different and how overwhelming the experience can be. The challenges that we're facing in India, these here are some of the challenges that have been encountered that we try to address as part of this project. We try to sort of underline that actually the damage that's been done in cities and the challenges that have been created are all very possible to undo. In India, those challenges that we were coming up across was the overwhelming car centricity and the pollution. So real car dominance and the influence that it has as a physical barrier, but also in terms of air quality, noise and your ability to move around whether or not you're able to get about outside of a car and not be dependent on the car to move around. Obstacles, uneven surfaces, difficulty without sidewalks moving around the city. The security and threat of personal crimes are how safe you feel and how safe you actually are as you move in the city also has an influence on your experience at that age and also for the parents. Poor access to public facilities are all the types of services that you need to be accessing regularly in those important first years like healthcare services, like even public bathrooms, places to eat, places to sit. A problem with beautification instead of play, so things that look aesthetically good to adults rather than something that is fundamentally valuable for children and a lack of maintenance. So once places have been put in place, they're not well maintained, they can fall into disrepair and that can cause problems later down the line. I'll talk a little bit about what children do need or what they don't need. So children need response and focus from their caregiver and the physical safety of women goes hand in hand with the physical safety of children as well. If in India, caregivers are often female, so how safe you feel as a woman in public space, how stressed or anxious you feel will influence your ability to provide that nurturing care for your child. And young kids take their cues from the expression of their caregiver, they're constantly reading their faces, so any kind of stresses that happen in the public realm also influence the development of the kid. So to be able to provide a good response, responsive attitude from the caregiver, we also need to design for their own health and safety in the public realm. Children need repetition of supportive behavior every day. So it's not only food and cleanliness that keeps them healthy, the difference between surviving and thriving is actually between not only the caregiver but also the built environment. So how you've fed your daily hygiene but the quality of the air you breathe, water that you drink, who you play with, who you interact with are all very important points. So responsive, playful, really meaningful interactions, storytelling with your caregiver are very important and they are also impacted by your surroundings as well as by your family. Children need quality time outdoors on a regular basis. So the physical environment's been called the third teacher of children as well as the parents of the first. So this is again, your ability to sort of play, explore your surroundings, be stimulated and not overwhelmed. It's really depending on those opportunities, interesting things to see, interesting things to touch, all influence the way you develop. Particularly nature is really important for children to thrive. Exposure to nature has been shown to be really positive for health and well-being and to also reduce the stress that we feel as adults. So in terms of learning about natural materials, the complexity of nature is a really fundamental thing for kids as well. Importantly, I'll come back to this point that creating cities for children can create quality of life for everybody. So a city that's thriving for children should also be thriving for all other city dwellers. I'll talk a little bit about the 100 Smart Cities Mission. This is just an introduction to ITCs. So the reason why we were talking about it in the Indian context. So the 100 Smart Cities Mission was a national mission from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, involved cities competing for funding, applying for funding, where they would be implementing pan city and area development projects. They had the objectives to look at sustainability, inclusion, the health and safety. And what that meant for most cities in India was that they wanted to upgrade basic infrastructure. The idea is to drive economic growth and improve quality of life. And they wanted to do that by enabling this local development and also harnessing the potential of technology. And what we tried to show through this project was that actually investing in infants, toddlers and caregivers, because of all the reasons I've mentioned before, goes really well hand in hand in terms of supporting economic growth. And that actually, it was a really good investment in the future if you were going to invest in this first five years of life. And what this is trying to show is this different smart city features along the bottom, how that can fit, how those resonate with the values I've just been talking about. The daily mobility needs of ITCs are really different to other urban dwellers, which we've been talking about a little bit this afternoon. So when you're moving across the city, the difference between a kind of lone person journey and a caregiver, a child journey is very different, looks very different. And so actually if you only think about economic growth for a certain number of the population, it's not going to match up. And if this is what influences decision making, these kind of peak commutes for efficiency, it's not going to be a true representation of the experiences that happen in the city. So you can see here that the middle one is moving between caring, home making and employment, and the further one is that multiple caregivers all interacting, the different places that you spend time in the city, the destinations that you have to visit and how you interact is far more complicated and far more challenging than urban decision making takes into account. We talk about neighborhoods because it's a really important scale for children to grow up. So how well your neighborhood is planned, the journey that you're making, whether or not you have to go across the city for those different destinations in the last slide, or whether you're able to do it within your neighborhood is really important. So the types of services that you can access within that range close by is super important. So for example, if you have healthcare available in your neighborhood or the school available in your neighborhood or if you have to travel across the city, if you then have to travel across another part of the city for work, that can really be restrictive for the quality of the interactions that are able to happen. We talk about an ITC neighborhood as something that produces a safe, vibrant public realm with neighbors. You can include trusted providers and wider community services. So there's a mixture of the neighborhood scale, good routes, good journeys within the street, parks and open spaces, different utilities, different public services, all being part of this multifunctional neighborhood scale. And the destinations being evenly spread, really walkable to encourage people to spend more time out in the public realm and to really facilitate the move of family life from inside the home to outside in the neighborhood. So we thought it was part of this 100 Smart Cities mission that actually the idea of this neighborhood, the ICT neighborhood, was a really good way to link into these different objectives of the Smart City features. As a unifying lens, as a unifying theme for sustainable, healthy, safe and inclusive improvements. And to see the ITCN as like an anchor for all Smart Cities, to make sure that the developments that come out as part of these pan city and area-based developments to be more meaningful for families and to ask the question, who's gonna benefit from these Smart City improvements and to try and enhance the impact that you can have for families, particularly because it's such a young population there. And importantly, this top graphic is trying to show that by influencing the kind of area development, you can have a multiplier effect on your neighborhood. So it's something that can be replicated and scaled across different neighborhoods at a time to create a wider benefit for more communities. And I'll talk a little bit more now about the framework itself and what we did. So actually the 100 Smart Cities mission and the request from the ministry to produce these guidelines was a really rare opportunity to transform this kind of national scale influence into family impact on family life. We were producing quite a comprehensive package which has just been launched so you can now download this online, check it out afterwards. We were developing this to support the health and wellbeing of infants, toddlers, and caregivers. The framework includes a sort of conceptual framework, principles that all of the 100 Smart Cities should follow and to guide these kind of pan city and area-based developments. It included design guidelines for new developments, policy workbook for how it can be integrated into the policy environment, evaluation monitoring to find out how well those things are working and best practices for inspiration. So the idea with this is that it provides a clear and common objectives that can guide through the 100 Smart Cities and that can give an indicator of how well those cities are performing in terms of impacts for families. It's also designed to equip city managers with the language and the tools to be able to do this, improve experiences for families every day. So knowing not only why it's important but what can they do and how can they relate it to their own role and make sound decisions. So this is what the guide sort of looks like. We were trying to deal with help, different types of decision makers. So from the sort of central decision makers top level to heads of department and technical teams all the way down these different layers. So the framework, the conceptual element might help with making the case, the policy workbook sets the environment that then enables the design guidelines and also gives some ideas on what practically at a smaller scale can you actually do. And the people who are involved, so the smart city mission with the people asking for it. Bernard Van Lea Foundation, where they're once leading that as part of the Urban 95 initiative. We worked with local partners, BDP, who were executing quite a lot of the work and then we drew upon some sort of global expertise and an expert review panel across Bernard Van Lea's network. So there's a whole load of kind of knowledge that have been building around this Urban 95 initiative that was then brought into the project. So this kind of global expertise that's been building over time. We had the opportunity to really build that to get there and see what was happening with it and try and test it out. Which is for me, very exciting. The framework itself sets the vision and objectives for the 100 smart cities. So here we've got a series of how many five different objectives. So although the way that they are implemented will differ for all the different contexts in India, there are some fundamental principles across all of them that should be followed and respected. So those include playful, green, safe, accessible and inclusive neighborhoods. And the idea is this is that you, the objectives have like corresponding design guidelines that then explain how do you achieve a playful neighborhood, how do you achieve an inclusive neighborhood and they also link through to the evaluation framework. So you have this kind of stage process. The idea is that these would work in like a dynamic interplay and be implemented in an integrated way. So you don't pick and choose how they work. You might be able to prioritize some to be able to get started on your project, but they should all be complementary and working well together. And I won't go into all of the details on this, but you can see more in the guidelines themselves. The best practice case to do is provide some inspiration. So we were looking at examples from India and also from across the globe and assessing them in terms of their safety, the greenery, the playfulness, the inclusivity to provide some inspiration about what can be done and what can be learned, how to achieve those objectives. The design guidelines define an approach for that and the way they're divided is into this sort of neighborhood streets, parks and open spaces, public services and utility. So we're trying to get all the different angles that can contribute to the experience at the neighborhood level. And it also limits the interrelationships between physical components and tries to deal with some of the trade-offs that happen in decision-making. It's pushing for quality while optimizing the benefits for families. So this is where the question comes up about who's really benefiting and how can you enhance the benefit of your infrastructure improvements? So in the example here, we've got a graphic that shows the value to the development of infant toddlers and caregivers and how many are reached. And what we're trying to get across is that if you can put 100 benches in, that are just benches, and that would probably benefit more families, but the value to those families would be far greater if you put in 30 that were very well shaded, well lit, that were well placed, that had some interactive elements around them. So you can create a higher quality intervention that can actually go further with your infrastructure improvements if you're more thoughtful about it. I talked about taking decision-makers through some of these processes, so knowing what to do. And this is just really trying to acknowledge that on a day-to-day basis for planning and design, you have some really tough decisions to make and you have a lot of conflicts to resolve and address. So by setting out what the design challenges is, how to resolve these different viewpoints, all of the different challenges, all of the different asks from stakeholders that you need to deal with, helping them to prioritize and find different entry points to start a conversation and to resolve those conversations can start to help to prioritize those spatial needs and what can actually happen. So it's equipping them with the kind of insights and rationale to take things forward. And that can also help to build some synergies and coalitions in the process to continue to show who's benefiting and how the recommendations that they're making really comes back to family impacts. It's also providing options for applications. I'm going to talk you through an example of some of the conversations that we've had as part of this design guideline development. And some of the, yeah, some of the challenges of this kind of globally inspired but locally applied interaction. So one of the things that we advocate for playable spaces is a connection to nature. Really making use of natural materials which are irregular, which have far more value for children and for caregivers. But when we started to have this conversation we came across a challenge. Is that in India, there's quite a lot of stray dogs around. And so the conversation when it's just like, okay, well, we've got these stray dogs. There's going to be sand around. There's going to be all these natural materials. That's going to create a conflict and a problem. So does that mean that we can have like nothing natural at all in the space? And actually what we were saying, the kind of typical or reactive response might be that, okay, get rid of everything natural. Maybe put in a fence to prevent the stray dogs from interacting from this place based to protect the kids, make them safer. And what we tried to explore was that if you're actually going to put in a fence does that mean that you can keep the natural materials? Because you've actually already got this other element in place. And if you're going to have a fence, could you do something more interesting with it? So could you make it climbable? Can you build it out of natural materials? Could it contribute to biodiversity or maybe spaces to interact with? Or could it include some interesting elements like music or sound, for example? So this was only part of the conversation that we were having and the way the design guidelines developed will be very different for the different cities. But it's just an example of how you can, you have to go through this capacity building and kind of design negotiation on every project to really deal with the local challenges in a way that can still benefit children. And these are the types of compromises and challenges that we're addressing all the time. So this is another way that it provided options for applications who actually in the design guidelines they have different street layouts to try and deal with different scenarios, to try and deal with different types of situations and examples of how that can be done. I mentioned the policy workbook. So this is like really trying to embed it in the policy framework and remove any kind of policy hurdles that would stop any of that from happening. So if you were to have a policy that said that you can't have natural materials or you have to have a fence, for example, that would be problematic, which may well be the case. It's not a simple kind of negotiation. This also provides a basis for the evaluation framework. So we took elements of the existing guidelines, so they're all acronyms, but down the left is all the existing guidelines, tried to look at the existing processes and strategies and integrate this idea into all of those existing processes. So it wasn't like a new system that had to be taken into account or a new process. And what we were asking was, how do the existing guidelines meet those principles of the ITC neighborhood? What stakeholders need to be involved in the process? Which ones are already involved in the process? Are there any kind of roadblocks or challenges that we need to be aware of and try to overcome? And how do you, how can the guidelines overcome those with live examples? We also developed an evaluation and monitoring framework. So this was, again, based on indicators that were already in the existing guidelines and also some neurons. We looked at indicators for each of the objectives. And then we looked at something that was called service level benchmarks, which were already existing in India. And we decided, okay, what would mean it was a surviving situation? Then we had a middle one, which was striving situation. And then how could you move that into thriving? So for each of the objectives, we had these different level benchmarks that we could measure performance across. And we also developed the idea of a dashboard to be able to monitor how well cities and developments were working against that over time. So here are some of the indicators, just an example from the safety side of things. So I'll just take the top one. So whether there are cycle routes in the neighborhood and any major bordering roads. So the level, the extent to which that indicator is being met in the neighborhood would indicate whether that is performing in a surviving, striving or thriving situation. Yeah, the indicators measure the spatial components. And so they actually lead into infants, toddlers and caregivers well-being and kind of provide this overarching, holistic view of how well that's performing. The last thing that it was just demonstrating how the data fit into the transformation process of the neighborhood. So this data gathering, we were advocating being done at the neighborhood level, which can be quite a challenge. Often data is not really gathered at that level. But we were trying to create this multiplayer effect and join all the elements together. And if you can have a consistent set of indicators, I think there was 65 in the framework, then you should be able to make a comparison between different neighborhoods, but also across different cities in India to see how well that's performing. So having this kind of common set of, let's call them KPIs for each city to measure themselves against also helps you to share those ideas and have some comparability between situations to help with this kind of learning and improvements in the transformation of the neighborhood. Importantly, this framework is guidance and we know that actually it's only gonna work if it actually happens. So one of the things that we tried to advocate with this idea of the dashboard is that it would be embedded into practices and that actually through the dashboard you could measure how well you're doing it, what the projects are, how well they're performing, how well they're meeting the objectives, and that the guidelines, ideally, the framework would be reviewed and developed over time to incorporate this learning in a cyclical process. Things that we learned from the process. Let's bear in mind this is one of the first times we've done something of this scale. I'll come back to these ideas I was talking about. So being opportunistic and strategic, globally inspired and locally applied ideas and translating national level programs into the neighborhood impact. So being opportunistic, so this was a piece of work that we knew was gonna take at least six months and the time scales for the project that we were given by the ministry was six weeks. So we wanted to jump on that opportunity to be able to do something to improve the situation and put these guidelines in place for young children and their caregivers, but we also need to do it in a strategic way. So what it meant is that the comprehensive guidance that we built up was designed to have this kind of replicable and scalable quality, so you could have these neighborhoods generating and also recognize the need for different responsibilities to be taken from different departments. So by having these different levels of the decision maker, the technical guidance, the kind of managers in between, we're trying to provide an opportunity for all levels of influence to take into account. So they can see how it connects to their role and how they can all contribute to the framework together. Globally inspired and locally applied ideas, so because of this project being pushed so quickly, actually one of the real successes of the project was being able to pull together all this global network of knowledge. So it involves a lot of capacity building actually when you're looking at child development, bringing that together with the needs of young children in particular and also relating that to good local design. It's always a process of learning on a project. So the opportunity to be able to gather that expertise from the Urban 95 network from around the globe and to have the involvement of the expert review panel really helped to review and feedback and improve in a very quick way that enabled us to deliver. We were looking at the national level program as having a neighborhood level impact and I think that a very idea that we're using neighborhood level interventions would hopefully improve that. But this is quite a challenge to look at the neighborhood level as I said because it's not a typical scale that development is done at. So this is quite a new idea but we think it's really important to be able to ensure that there's kind of local evaluation and local impact for cities in the future. So I'm going to finish by just saying that we don't have all the answers for the 100 smart cities. What we've done is we've tried to put together this framework to set a good tone and hopefully there'll be opportunities to continue that learning and continue the way that the guidelines are developing over time and to see how the potential for learning can continue. Thank you. Questions, reflections. Thank you, Hannah. This was amazing. Like to hear or maybe hear from you how you have imagined that there is a kind of continued engagement with the city or the implementers because I assume that though they have the guideline they still need hand-holding once they have to start implementing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really important with any guidance like this that it's not just given and then left. And actually that you don't expect people to go through it and read it themselves and know what it means. The interpretation of the guidance and the way it translates into practice is fundamental. So we don't know for sure what the next steps would be. There is an intention to do some capacity building with the people who'll be implementing it in the different cities. So there should be like a training process to then see not just help people to know how to use it and how to implement it but also to continue learning about whether it works or not and hopefully continue to improve it. So that's an intention but we don't know yet how that's going to continue. Any questions from the room? Otherwise I'm sure it's all right. Thanks Anna. One question kind of from the beginning. What, who integrated the childhood perspective into the smart city conversation? Like how did that come about? How did it come up? I'm not sure I know exactly how it came up. There was an interest from the decision making level about what it could be and there was a series of different guidelines that were being produced. So it was one of I think maybe four or five different guidelines that could be produced for the hundreds of smart cities. Rushda who's the Bernard Van Leer representative in India did some great work sort of raising the awareness and the agenda for Urban 95 in that context and my impression is that it happened quite quickly but I don't know what it was that made them change their mind if you like that be interesting to find out. Because I'm curious because India of course is also a big technology producer and exporter also in some ways. Yeah. And were there any challenges that you had in that regard like that the expectation for the smart city was actually more technology driven? Yeah. Maybe because all most of everything that you have shown us is of course technology driven that it has to be done with knowledge but then it's not really technology-driven. Not digital. There's not much silicon in there. Yeah. Yeah so again I'll reflect on this from the conversations I've had and experiences on the project. So actually the way I understand it was a concern that people might be overly focused on technology because it's called smart city but each of the cities who were applying for funding could decide what they thought a smart city meant and actually on what they needed to provide this quality of life and sustainability and healthy cities and across the board it was relating to basic infrastructure more so than technological interventions. So they had the choice to relate really to what their own objectives for the city were and that's what came out most. And just to clarify for myself also so the 100 cities are 100 Indian cities? Yes. Yes. Because they have more than 100. 100 cities across India, yeah. Do you know how many cities exist in India? I don't. Okay just I'm curious like what that target is. Yeah what proportion it would be. Yeah I'm afraid not. Well that's fine. I'm sure you have a question to Alexis. Somebody clearly very interested in design guidelines. I'm just really curious because after years of thinking about design guidelines I really felt compelled that the whole system of delivery had to be hacked. That you know four point framework with a kind of policy guideline evaluation. Strategic thing it's a little bit you know not just bureaucratic but it's not inviting and it's very linear and a lot of these processes aren't linear and we've really tried to reflect on the actual format, the object itself to invite new types of participation because this linear format is just again very alienating. Yeah. You know you're presented with four policy books, the images that are presented to you or typically stock photographs. It says it's relevant and yet the topics are very generic and abstract for most people like what does safety mean? It means very different things. And I'd be very curious after you've now achieved this content some of the thinking that you have to actually reinvent the design or framework to actually get this in the hands of people. Yes yeah I think that's a really valid point. Yeah the extent to which this guidance is used yeah it's crucial as I said it's only going to be done if people can make use of it and actually put it into practice it's not good enough that it's only a framework. Yeah and I think you're right also that some of this information can be overwhelming and can be abstract. So there were ways that we tried to deal with that through the information that we included and I didn't have time to go through it today but the guidelines do get pretty specific in terms of what safety means and how you measure it. But there's also a danger that you can be too specific or you can make too many assumptions and you also need to apply it to that local context. So the types of elements we included in this sort of decision making process were designed to prompt people to think about what their questions are, what their situations are and how they can apply it. And my opinion is that the capacity building that goes alongside that is the most important thing. So actually the training that's involved sitting with the designers, being able to take a natural design problem and apply these principles to it and work through it together in a collaborative way would be far more valuable. I did a review of guidance for Urban 95 to see how well some of that guidance was working and some of the challenges that came up and what came back from that review was that it was really important to have a common vision and a common set of objectives to work from so that you can measure performance against it and I think that's what this guidance does well. The other feedback that came back was that it's people that make the difference and the skills of those people and how able they feel to champion an idea, how well they think it relates to their role and I'd like to see this be kind of coupled with some more interactive, more engaging, maybe workshops or processes that can really integrate it into the design. So I think actually working on guidance that is more interactive, that is simpler and more usable is a really valuable point. Actually my other reflection would be that, yeah, I know that Nacto, who've been doing the Global Street Design Guide, we've talked a lot about how comprehensive guidance should be, what decision makers or managers might ask for is like a book that tells them everything and it's all in one place and then you have all of the answers. You know, if you tell us what to do, we'll just get on and do it and that thoughtful interpretation that's so important is not, it requires a lot of energy and a lot of effort. Independent thinking is not always desirable. So I think actually the way you approach it and you deal with the particular challenges of the people you're working with is also really important. I had a good conversation with Nacto about the guidance needing to be comprehensive enough that you can sort of provide answers to kind of go to and to technical enough that you get through some of these hurdles that might come up in implementation. So you know, just dealing with the objectives isn't enough and that specificity is really important because it's all very well saying that you need to have an inclusive neighborhood. If the design that they come up with that's inclusive then meets a policy hurdle later down the line then you're gonna fall over in the process. So it's always a balance between yeah, the level of detail that you include. But I wouldn't, yeah, I don't know how this is gonna develop in the future but I do think it's valuable to couple it with a different set of guidance styles if you like other questions. You're on the spot, you're on the spot as well. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I was wondering about this hundred cities because hundred is a big number actually. Yes. And deal with and do this project is, I believe it's a huge work but I was wondering about the scales and the cities because probably they are not like have the same population or same industry or same economic level. So how did it work with these guidelines and this totally different hundred cities? Did you, what did you learn about it? Yeah. Yeah, again, so this was the balance between you're doing something that's, I would say global enough but nationally enough that each of those cities can have this kind of common objective but the way that it's interpreted the local level is really gonna change. So of course, I mean, the difference in neighborhoods across the city is totally different and diverse let alone the difference in cities across the country. So we were trying to give suggestions of indicators that could be sort of hooked on to but I think there is a little bit of room for interpretation as well. I actually don't know the answer for how well it's gonna be interpreted. Yeah, that's still to be seen but I think we're gonna be keeping a close eye on that. How it develops in the future. Yeah. Thank you. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more about the next steps. So how, what is going to happen really? Yes. I don't, honestly, I don't know the answer. I know there's a discussion going on about if there is potential for capacity building and for example, the use of the dashboards. They were kind of options or opportunities that we put into place for this project. For the foundation and the work that I'm doing, my next steps are gonna be to reflect on these experience how quickly this process came up. Pulling together this information, this framework, how well that worked or not. I'd like to bring those lessons into other pieces of guidance. And I think particularly I would like to look into some of the common challenges that come up in terms of design guidelines. So I gave the example of like fences and play spaces and natural materials before I'd also quite like to take a look at having a discussion about parking and sidewalks. I think that would be a really valuable one to look at. Surveillance, you know, trying to look at more, I don't wanna say innovative, but more interesting ways to deal with common challenges that come up. Management and maintenance, perhaps, that can still have a value for children. And some of those lessons are gonna be coming out in different Urban 95 guidelines. So we're working at the moment on developing the next version of the starter kit, which gives these ideas for action. And we're also working on an implementation framework to kind of get to the how part and not just how in terms of spatial interventions that can be done, but also how do you start to work with people? How do you build a team? How do you build that awareness? How do you make sure that you can translate the brief into design practice? We're trying to give some tangibility to those as well. Yeah. Also, one more additional question. Yeah. Do you know details of how do you get local knowledge? Because India is actually famous with the frugal innovation. I mean, especially these kind of examples, like what type of fence you should use to separate between stray dogs and the park or sand park, let's say. Actually, India is quite innovative in this sense, itself. So is there a channel that you are learning from India? Yes, yeah, yeah. So we had local partners on the ground who were BDP. They would do the majority of the work. And it was the case of kind of taking this, the kind of child development urban 95 knowledge that we had and then working very closely with them to understand what that meant at the local level. So this was the example that I gave was one of the conversations came up, but it wasn't necessarily how it was resolved. And it was also part of my learning because, obviously, I didn't know the Indian context before. So what works in different cultural, social, political situations was really important. So yeah, I think I would probably underline the importance of doing that local knowledge. I don't think we should be assuming we know best. Hey. I think you had spent some time in the city. You came earlier, I think, to some more do you have some specific observations, including, I mean, within the Istanbul 95 project to the city? I mean, for Istanbul, let's say. Yeah, reflections on the experience here. Yeah, so the things off the top of my head that really struck me, yeah, are in terms of challenges, topography in the city. So I was watching a lot of people pushing strollers up and down hills. We've talked a lot about sidewalks, and we had a conversation about useless sidewalks or how effective the sidewalks are with kind of parking. So those, I mean, and those things are, it seems to be the type of thing that people think is like, OK, obvious or, I don't know, kind of straightforward to resolve. But the sidewalks are all over the city and every single street and the impact of everybody's journey. So they're important to get right. On the positive side of things, I have been really, I think there's a really good energy in Istanbul. I think the openness to interaction has a lot of potential. There's a lot of really great street life going on, interaction between people that seems to have been very naturally. So I think, actually, if you can sort of enable that by providing the setting for those things to happen, it could be really valuable. So, yeah, I feel good about Istanbul. Yeah. I crossed with this project like six months ago by mistake, like my chance, I guess, when I was doing my research in India, Jaipur, it's one of the smart cities also. And we crossed with many steel elements which written smart cities, this logo. But they were many of them were ruined. So we thought that it's a bit ironic that that's why it's actually took our mention of it. And I talked to my professor about the project and she was really enthusiastic about the project. And she was about the smart cities. Yeah. And she was talking about how it can be and what's the potentials. But in that time, it felt a bit technical. Like, to me, it felt in that way because it wasn't really adapted in that time, probably for some cases. But I also crossed with this example that I thought maybe it could work in that sense. In Nepal, after earthquake, people were supposed to build these houses in better condition. But people were not able to do it. So people were doing by themselves again. And local governments were like, were know it. And people, they were adding some guidelines into cities. Like, it wasn't the proper way to do it, to build a house. But they were showing some tricks. So how can you make it more stable if you're doing by yourself? I thought these fences and other green parts could be added. Because it's also, yeah, that's all, I guess. Yeah, that's a really nice idea, actually. Because if those types of efforts are being made anywhere but anywhere by the community, why not share some ideas? Yeah, they were also super, sorry for it. They were also super, there was a potential to do many things. And with this, like, if they can really get together, they can do something just. Yeah. And I suppose this is also a good example of being opportunistic, because if there's things that would go alongside that, so as you're rebuilding the home, you can also do something with the fences, as you said. Or if you can do something with the roads and then provide something else in a low-cost, kind of simple way, that it would actually build the movement and the benefit of those interests. I think that's a nice example, actually. Could you share it with me afterwards? There you go. Thank you. Nice. Oh, yeah, OK, let's start from the back. Which countries are at the forefront of ITC consideration when looking at time planning at the moment? Would it be like Scandinavia or? Ah. It depends on which way you look at it. I would say that there are, yeah, it depends on how you look at it. So I would interpret a way to measure it more broadly in terms of playing independent mobility. Scandinavia performs well in terms of independent mobility, so kids being able to spend time outdoors, unaccompanied by adults. But that's a very particular set of kind of context. And actually, we do a lot of study tours that tend to come to Amsterdam and Copenhagen to look at examples of how good, child-friendly urban planning can be done. But for me, it's more interesting to look at, actually, what steps, not with the comparison between cities globally, but the steps that can be taken in any context. So each Urban 95 has a series of different cities in South America, in Eastern Europe, in India, where there's very different efforts being made. But they're using the existing resources that they have, and they're dealing with a different context. So for example, there's some great work being done in Bogota on children's priority zones, where they're using paint and very low-cost interventions to change the way that people see priorities for children in a certain space. Here in Istanbul, there's been really great work being going on in terms of pop-up playgrounds and play spaces. I really liked your stroller order that you were doing there. I thought that was a really interesting idea. In Tirana, they've got a child development officer that's working across different departments. At Tel Aviv, I'm working on improving walking environments with tactical interventions. So it's difficult to say which one's doing the best. I think, actually, we should look at the change that's being made in those cities and how they improve it, because they can all learn a lot from each other. It's like a politician's response. Sorry. Thank you for the question. Any last questions? So I have one, I think, last question. You have a question. Two last questions. So last questions. Oh, I know it's not last questions. But I guess just trying to connect to what Alexis is saying, I guess since you asked from the authorities to provide the guidebook, then I know Alexis has been working from the other end a little bit. So of course, you can't really merge those two. Maybe you can, I don't know. But there's two different ends of the spectrum of approaching change in urban space. So I was wondering if I can't really imagine that you could give your guidebooks to the politicians and they will say, OK, great, that's a great recommendation. Let's do it. And vice versa. But it could be interesting to find a middle way. We have given them to some politicians, no? How could we work together, Alexis? No, I mean, I think this is the real struggle. I think there is the middle way that shouldn't be bottom up or top down. This is the whole idea of empowerment and participation in our democracies. Who's serving who, right? The politicians are supposed to be serving their constituents and the constituents are supposed to be serving their community. I think this is the framework, at least, that's been presented in the 21st century or 20th century as far as citizenship. What is the role of citizenship? And I think that's one of the things that maybe to take the question one step further and the question that people are asking in the sense, maybe bring all these conversations together, because I think do-it-yourself urbanism, tactical urbanism, it has a currency, but it also isn't the same of enduring proper intervention that you really do need this top-down type of city building because that's what makes it coherent. You can't just constantly do something pop-up. And the pop-up economy actually has a lot of vulnerabilities this way. And I do think one of the things that I found very disheartening being from a developing economy is that a lot of the guidance is coming from a very particular voice of a very particular idea of the city. And it's a very impersonal voice and it's a very abstracted voice. And I don't know how much that resonates in the sense of citizenship because when you look at kind of democracy, it's about making intimate relationships and interpersonal relationships. And that includes mayorships or local mayorships. And actually when there's a lot of trust capital between the mayors and the citizens, you get a lot of really cool stuff done. But when it's not there, you don't. And I think I'm sure your guideline addresses trust capital, but I somehow feel like we have to totally reinvent or innovate the actual thing to include somehow these diverse voices without being a kind of mash-up of pop-ups or even just stock photographs or stock ideas or stock. I mean, I feel like we're borrowing like, and cities the more and more that I look at, I was even very heartbroken recently going to Copenhagen feeling this, it's kind of like everything looks the same after a while. And these cities that have such a unique culture and history and subtlety and nuance even amongst themselves and diversity is being lost in, I believe some of the ways that we write guidance in best practice because there is this universal idea of what some of these things are. And I do question it a lot in my own thinking. So I'd be curious what you think about that. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think that at the kind of high levels of decision making, they would be sure in responsibility if they did rely on pop-up and temporary spaces and tactical urbanism. I think they're really great efforts, but I think it's not enough for policymakers not to be contributing to this debate in a strategic way so that the benefits can be spread and so that it can be, yeah, I mean, I say replicated, but it would have to be, it doesn't mean the same intervention, it means that you can contribute to similar benefits or similar principles in a local way. I'm really interested in how we can, how do we provide guidance that does actually get to that interpretation? And I don't know how to do that well yet. I think it's a really valid point that some of the global guidance becomes diluted maybe or there's only certain ways that it can be applied to different contexts and how, I don't know, does that mean that we then produce more local guidance? My intuition tells me that it's more about the approaches and processes in getting good teams together, not to produce more guidance, but actually just to work on live projects and see what happened and to build a good team for those processes. I don't think that you would find the benefits and the answers that we're looking for and I think the good things that you're looking for, I don't think you would find that from guidance in this type of form. I think you'd find that in the interactions that you have on a day-to-day decision-making and day-to-day projects. So that's where I'd like to influence. Any more questions? No. Okay, one last question on my end then. Are there any academic institutions that are being pulled into this conversation of the 100 cities and the work that you're doing in India? Yeah, I don't know, actually. Yeah, I hope so. We were working with some people who I know had academic links. I didn't work with any universities in particular but I would hope so. I'll ask the question to see if there's some learning that we would love to connect, basically. I guess it would be, to use a lovely word, missed opportunity not to integrate some universities to this process because then they can help also with the learnings, especially from the implementation side. Yes, definitely. And that would evaluate the impact would be really important. So we would be also very happy to be put in touch when you guys look at those. Nice. Okay. So thank you so much. This was, we will have actually, let's make an announcement also. Thank you, Hannah. And on Monday, okay. On Tuesday next week, actually we have a few events related to Istanbul 95 effort in Istanbul. On Tuesday at four o'clock, we will be hosting and actually having, let's say a small training session about playground and safety from the CEO of Nordic Playground Institute, Einar. He's a really amazing, also very passionate person about play and what it means, a dangerous playground. Is there such a thing and what it means to work with risk and what, and he knows it from a very kind of numbers and hard data and standards point of view. So if you're interested in this conversation, please join us on Tuesday at four o'clock. It will be here. And we will have an event on Wednesday at five p.m. Barry Zuckerman. I don't know the rest, sorry. I know the rest. I just didn't know the time. But I know the story. Barry is one of the leading experts around the world, actually, apparently on reading books to children. So he comes from another point of perspective, but he is here to work with Uskudar University, but then we borrowed him to also lecture at Studio X. And part of it is we are really hoping to have more designers who are interested in doing things, pop-up things in playgrounds and maybe actually do book readings in playgrounds. It really takes no effort. Ege has been practicing this at Studio X Library for the last two months now. Every Thursday we have a reading hour. So actually, I think those of us who are burning to do things in the public space, we are trying to create the opportunities and also the learnings necessary to put that into practice. So that is on Wednesday at five. So you're also welcome to join that. And please spread the word even if you cannot come, if you know people who would be interested in joining to those two events, we would be very happy to host them. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me.