 I wanted to start by saying that we all designers urban designers and we design things but the most exciting thing to design is your life right so we're gonna talk about that today and we're talking about how we don't make a master plan for life because master plans are static as we say in the studio and we create a strategic plan so that's like more algorithms if this then I can do that if that I can do this so they're very dynamic and they let you take a lot of opportunities so everyone in this call is really successful which is why you are here on the call so we know that you know how to succeed which is great but I just want to underline that that in all this semester plan of a strategic planning exercise what's really important to keep in mind is what are your values and when you look back 10 years on your life will you be able to say that I design my life in sync with my values so I think that's like super interesting so I'm going to Emily's also here welcome Emily I'm going to let Kaya talk about the rules of this event Kaya please. Hi everyone so we're excited to see so many faces and and thanks to the situation faces from all over the world including our panelists who some of you know for some of them it's late at night a few quick rules so Sushita and Joy have collected presentations and will for the most part air their screen and steer sort of the visuals for these short presentations anyone who has a question for the speakers take them in the chat and at the end we will do two panels three speakers now and then the second then a short Q&A where we will ask we Gita and I will read the questions and then we will ask you to ask your question and that the speakers respond and then we do the same thing again with the second panel we've also prepared a little breakout rooms for the end we're trying to make this as close to a real event as possible so after the formal part of this is over you can go to any of the breakout rooms and continue conversations with the speakers with us with each other for a little bit longer and formally you have to grab your own drink no wine provided by Gisa today but hopefully this will be fun and very informative about you know many different ways to think about the next steps after graduating and the places where you all made end up you know next month next year 10 years from now if you know that's sort of the range of some of our speakers so with that I want to hand it over to Emily and all the speakers we ask you to introduce yourself we will just sort of quickly say your name and Emily is actually one of the few speakers who is from New York in New York great yep great hey everybody can you hear me yes yes we can hear you great yeah so my name is Emily Weidenhoff and I work at the Department of Transportation in New York City and I just want to share a few quick slides to start to talk a little bit about what I think is certainly so important about the the field of urban design but has also been I've found critical to kind of creating your own path and certainly I graduated in a recession nothing nothing even close to obviously what what we're dealing with now but certainly I think recognizing resources and understanding what we have to work with and what we can do with them is immensely important to the work that we do and to creating really powerful outcomes on the ground for people am I advancing the slides or am I gonna okay great so when when I graduated I made a very kind of concerted goal for myself not to go back into the architecture field I had an undergraduate degree in architecture and I really went into urban design with a keen interest in as I like to say continuing to salmon upstream up the decision tree to get to a place where you know my thoughts and ideas were better impacting outcomes and so I went from you know feeling frustrated with designing bathrooms and and apartments for rich people to you know entering the amazingly powerful and thoughtful dialogue at Columbia and in the urban design program where we were talking about a much more sophisticated set of issues that impacted so many more people and we really were looking at at the larger systems and so what you know what really drove me after graduating is really trying to figure out who was actually doing something who was actually making a change in in New York City and I went and worked for a couple different folks before at the time in 2009 I found the Department of Transportation and one of kind of the the founding motivations for all the work that under Mayor Bloomberg and our former commissioner Jeanette Sadek Khan the it was the realization of streets as a resource the streets in New York City make up a little over a quarter of all land area and it makes the Commissioner of the Department of Transportation the largest single property holder in all of the city and so with that realization of streets as a resource and with recognizing that they had been over designed for vehicles for so many years and our streets had so much more capacity to be redesigned and thought of for people for people on bikes for communities that triggered a really amazing set of implement implementation a lot of rapid response projects that were really able to change the landscape of New York City over the past decade so really quickly just want to run through a few of our programs which have continued to evolve and I think just go through the slides looking at you know we continuously look at how we can change our streets to meet the needs of the people who actually live in the city so this is our weekend walk program where we look at pedestrianizing long corridors through neighborhoods when vehicle volumes are low to really bring out all of the kind of social and culture infrastructure that's happening in buildings in neighborhoods and bring it out onto the street and make it a resource for everybody next slide this is our seasonal street program which kind of kicks up kicks the weekend walk program up a notch and is our attempt to in a more more robust way not just a couple days on the weekend but for a series of months or you know during for half the year every single daytime really transforming streets and in a more precise way managing our resources for the majority of users we see so many of our streets majority of people on our streets in the daytime are pedestrians and so how can we better design our resources for for who is actually using them next slide this is a another evolved program over the years but rethinking the parking lanes certainly something that many cities have been doing for for a long time and something we continue to push and evolve in our in our work and starting to think about not just a couple seats in front of a restaurant but how we can repurpose a parking lane for parking for people for parking for bicyclists along a much larger scale corridor long impacts that also help not only with facilitating you know biking and people gathering but also making our streets safer slowing vehicles creating sort of slower crossing distances things like that next slide shared streets which is something that has been working well in in many countries for a very long time but over the past couple years we finally been able to turn our engineers and are the larger public around into giving you know giving our streets a more flexible design that allows pedestrians a lot more ability and flexibility to use the street as well as really creating designs that really slow vehicles down and keep both vehicles unintentionally and intentionally creating spaces where it's much harder for for crashes because of better design for pedestrians next slide and then also I'm continuing to kind of entirely transform roadbed into space for people and really looking and targeting the spaces and communities throughout New York City that need these resources the most over the past many years we have really worked to retool our programs and advocate for funding so that we're able to deliver kind of what you see in Times Square we're able to deliver these types of quality of life amenities to neighborhoods who don't necessarily have the institutional capacity to take care of them this is a photo of a plaza in Jackson Heights and last slide everything I just showed you is totally up in the air right now because we all can't be together so everything that I do and so much of what New York City streets are about we haven't been able to kind of connect because of that but what I have learned through doing this work making real change in real communities on the street trying to get it out there quickly learn from it and evolve not kind of have something perfect in the beginning but just continue to iterate um we've seen over time that um crisis while um you know an incredibly kind of serious and profound time for people who are experiencing major losses for people who have radically transformed their lives to help try to save others there's also an amazing opportunity um certainly as urban designers we think every day about ways we can redesign our cities and have great ideas and one of the biggest challenges is convincing others that changes good that our ideas actually will will make a better city and so we are at a moment moments I've seen on smaller scales before in the city where we have a global community that is starting to internalize and understand that we can't go back to the way things were before and so there's a huge opportunity as you all think about your steps and in the future of our cities globally there is a real opportunity people are listening people are understanding people are looking for solutions and I'm I'm sure that all of you have had amazing ideas um and so I think um while now is an incredibly um sobering time it's also a tremendous moment of hope um and a real um a real moment to embrace the kind of creativity that I know you all have um and and use that to guide your next steps thank you Emily that was wonderful um and next up is Mansi Saru who joins us from Mumbai hello everyone um my name is Mansi um I um I'm a graduate from Columbia I graduated in 2011 and moved back to India in by the end of 2011 um should I share my screen oh yeah there it is so um it's just a graphic that I truly love that somebody from my office did for a project that we did for Dal Lake in Srinagar um if you can go next please so I'm sure there are a lot of questions in your head when I graduated I think the biggest question was because I fell in love with urban design while I was studying and all the different ideas and different ways of practicing urban design were so overwhelming that I constantly talked to myself and wondered how am I going to practice urban design when I go out and um you know looking back at the last nine years uh I think it has been uh truly amazing because I think that question has always uh made me do more uh and even today I keep asking myself the same thing so I I was in New York uh at the time when jobs were especially not there for immigrants and people who are coming I needed visas uh but at the same time I was working with Earth Institute and I got an opportunity to work for the Millennium Cities Initiative in Accra and when I went to Accra and started working with the mayor of Accra I realized the amount of capacity building that you can do as an urban designer working with the government especially of developing countries and coming from India I knew how much urban design and urban planning is required so I I don't think I spent too much time but I decided to go back uh to Mumbai I found these two brilliant partners of mine because I don't think I could have survived this journey alone um I worked with an architect and when I came back I realized there were different kind of organizations in Mumbai but there was no pure urban design organization it was always an interior organization that also had urban designers or an architecture organization that also had urban designers and what we really wanted to do was really take up and even our planning offices are full of engineers and nothing against engineers but there's no mix and diversity so we realized that there is definitely a need for a pure urban design practice and in seven years I would just like to say these amazing faces that are there on the screen are the faces of my studio today and they represent different universities from the world they've all come back and joined a form that is purely uh trying to do urban design in India if you could go next please so there are different questions that are there in everybody's mind how do I get a project how do I start a practice how do how does one do I need to network do I need to have no people to get projects and I just like to share this story with you for a project that's very close to my heart this is a first this is a heritage urban design toolkit that we did for the government of India the lead was TRCI India it's a heritage conservation firm and the head of that firm Gurmeet Rai is an amazing woman that I met at a conference and I had just started a studio part it was we were a year old we had done a couple of documents and we really wanted to work on a heritage city like Puri because it is someday if I have more time I'll show you this project but it's one of the four pilgrim sites for Hindus in India and the idea was to create a conservation plan a lot of champions of different cities chose buildings to conserve and Gurmeet chose the city as as the site and decided to create zones and each zone had a toolkit that was talking about the pressures that that organization was putting on the heritage city and how the city must develop and what are the kind of guidelines that no matter if you're doing an interior project or house renovation or if you're doing an infrastructure project how do these guidelines remain the same and I met her at her conference and I introduced the firm and I said please give me any work and if you pay me I would love to do any kind of urban design because I know you cannot do this without an urban designer and I know you don't have an urban designer on your team and that was something that I was just bluffing but really she didn't have an urban designer on the team and I think after stalking her for about a month she called me back and said okay I would like to work with you on the urban design toolkit so why don't you have exactly a month because I'm short staffed and if you have a firm then you have a you have a month to make this 500 page toolkit for us so if you're up for it they let me know and because we were so excited and we were like yes for sure one month is fine we'll be able to do this and in a month we were able to produce a toolkit which I'm very proud of it is definitely one of the documents that a lot of people have come back to me and said they thoroughly like the way the approach a very academic and professional approach that we took it is also selected for the IBR Biennale for Rotterdam this year so it will be presented there as well and a lot of work on ground is also going on since the past six years using the toolkit so this project is very close to me because I feel like this saying which is down there that if they don't give you a seat at the table bring a folding chair is exactly the kind of approach that you need every you know like as urban designers I'm sure anything you touch which represents humans you can definitely have a say and you can definitely make it better so you know don't don't think that oh I only need a job in an architectural firm or I you can work anywhere from streets to furniture to interiors and if your base of urban design is good I'm sure you'll make it better so this is just something that I carry with myself in every project that I pitch for is that no matter how big the project or how small you need an urban designer on the team and I'm the urban designer you want so if you can go to the next slide please um this was uh this was also a very amazing project for us I think uh in in urban design the teacher collaboration is key and you know no urban designer can work without collaboration I don't know if you realize yet but collaboration is the most difficult thing you'll do in your life or at least it has been the most difficult thing for me because it might sound easy but it's like a very difficult relationship that continuously needs uh communication and if you do it right then you you get a good product but um is definitely something that the firm is doing with different people so this project came to us because we have great collaborators who we are working with on and off they're actually a finance company they only work with numbers they're all MBA graduates and they only work on excel sheets and they came to us with this project and said that there is something called non-fair box revenue plan and this plan needs an architect and I know you're an architect so can you work with us because we're going to work with the metro line of Mumbai and they want to in they have taken a lot of loan from the world bank and they have to make a revenue plan in order to get enough revenue which is not from the ticketing but from everything else so from the land that they have or from the kind of footfalls that they can get a kind of retail that they can make in their concourse all of that contributes to that revenue and can you work with us and can you find the best places to put the advertisements for us and that's that's your scope so we said okay sure it doesn't sound like an urban design plan but if it's you know if it's got something to do with the metros we'd love to be involved so we started working with them and I think in the past one and a half years that we've been working with them we have managed to change the station designs to make the make it more accessible to commuters we have managed to tell them what is the kind of good integrated planning that they can do for the excess land they had that they have acquired for their stations we have managed to reduce the amount of unusable concourse area that they had planned as just as areas that were you know in an architectural plan somewhere in the corner and through this and with good collaborators we could show them how good urban design can also be profitable can also be integrated can also be something that will increase the amount of footfall and we gave birth to something that is really big in Mumbai right now it's called direct access because all the metros are above ground and they're really high and so they're starting to talk about how do plots that are adjacent to the metro take maximum advantage of this and we've also managed to start conversations about to do policies so just when they got us in for putting advertisements we ended up doing so much for them and through the process they were able to claim 15% of the revenues through nonfare box through good planning and numbers so it was a very good learning for us where key collaborations work so if you can go next please so that's another learning that I've had is that collaboration is key the private sector this is something very interesting and I'd like to talk about this in in India if you're working for the private sector it's considered like the devil so if you work for them you've kind of sold your soul and you know if you're working for an NGO then you know you're a saint but I think and at the same time in India we have always given planning for free a lot of our senior architects a lot of the very renowned architects in India usually give planning for free with architecture so it's included in their fee so one of the biggest struggles that we've had is to actually create a scope of work for urban design for an urban design consultancy firm especially in the private sector because they're so used to getting it for free and for the government it ends up becoming a pro bono effort from some big architect that is doing it as a pro bono effort from the community so again they're not used to paying for it so in the private sector we've realized that we're working on a couple of master plans for godridge properties and we've realized that we were able to crack the perfect urban block with all the constraints that they have with all the efficiencies that they need to kind of achieve it's just the fact that we were there and we could constantly push back and say you know if you break the grid it'll be walkable if you create a front sorry if you create a front plaza then you're going to have a good visibility and more people are going to come here and it's going to be more livable and more children will play and very simple and common sense things that urban urban designers say that somewhere get lost between efficiency and numbers and all the other things that they're so used to talking about so that's something that we've done and we've worked on multiple master plans for different townships we've created wayfinding strategies they've kind of pushed us towards landscape urbanism right now yes yes and also if you go to the last slide the other things we've also done is we have created different initiatives a Portland initiative is something Geeta has been a part of since the day we started it and we've also started something called bridge where we are talking to the youngest stakeholders of our city and trying to see what their aspirations are so these are some things that we do that actually help us connect and with and also talk through different exhibition stations design shreds and stuff so it's really a mixed bag that I have the kind of practice that I have but the core has always been urban design so thank you so much thank you Mansi and we'll go right up to the next person Melton Garabito he graduated a year before Mansi is originally from Colombia and joins us from the west coast thank you thank you Kaya so you can go to the first slide I'm gonna be sharing the screen or oh there we go so I did my undergrad in Colombia and I worked for the city government or the department of advocacy for public space in Bogota that was during the first administration of the former major uh Enrique Peñalosa and then I came to California and I worked for this joint venture at the time between the Greta and Nandum Wilson International and then I went to the graduate program in Bogota in Santa Colombia that was in 2010 uh and after graduation my practice has been pretty much between I mean between my solo practice and working for order architects and also between architecture and urban planning and design so you can go to the next slide and then in my solo practice that was in 2012 I designed this a unit apartment building in Koreatown in LA consultas were both in LA and Bogota city and then in collaboration with other architects you know the design group we designed this commercial development project in Hawaii they designed it was to be a site-seated energy by using solar panels and the parking area to power the entire commercial complex and after they approved entire elements of the city planning in Hawaii and then after the design development stage the project was nominated for the North American design and development and Beatles awards by the International Council of Shopping Centers it wasn't built at the end for budget issues but uh by the property group the owner here in LA but it was nice to learn about the vernacular architecture in Hawaii the opportunity to apply green green practices but as a sustainable side that that was a nice experience uh the next slide and then also with Piroda we work on this pavilion for the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association uh at the time the LA Zoo have the support of the National Geographic and the plan was to and also the worldwide fund uh the plan was to have the admission fee at the pavilion where people could learn about the giant panda to provide support to the giant panda conservation programs in Asia so that was a beautiful experience working in this pavilion at the LA Zoo and then I work for Robert Heidi Architects in low density housing this master plan in Orange County and I think I could share this experience with Professor Geeta just a couple weeks ago that lessons learned about these low density housing projects and in California and pretty much in the U.S. I believe it's something that needs to be revised you know the the index used for low density housing which is four and five units per acre I think there's something that needs to be revised and changed in suburban areas in the U.S. because I my personal experience was chalking to see this uh this market low density housing you know for wealthy families in Southern California and again other parts of the U.S. uh it's something that doesn't really contribute to the environment and increasing the footprint in you know in many places I believe again it's something that needs to be just revised you know for for the next slide and then in 2018 they became more active with the LA the AI LA uh in the urban design review sessions basically the Los Angeles Department of City Planning we're welcoming architects and urban designers to volunteer and provide feedback or comments for the upcoming projects located around the city so early last year I joined also the I had the opportunity to join this group of architects who were also commenting and providing feedback for the new version of the city-wide design guidelines the objective was to not only be a communication as for the organization tool for the Department of City Planning but also a communication tool uh uh we developers you know with the specific and critical to critical topics for for the city of Los Angeles mainly the there were three approaches established by the Department of City Planning which was to have a decision oriented neighborhoods in Los Angeles to have developments that considered and respect this around in context through a 360 degree design and also developments that apply green building practices and just simply promote healthy habitats healthy neighborhoods through our climate adopted design those uh besides guidelines we can affect it last year in October in 2018 and they are being they have been used during the design review sessions which is again I have the opportunity to attend once the month well now lately it's online also those with the design review sessions and then also in 2018 next slide uh with my thesis partners uh from Columbia well first of all we became very good friends after the program uh Pedro who was in New York and moved to Denmark over a year ago uh many various uh he's originally from Mexico City and he is also here in LA we started this conversation of a consulting group um I think pieces came together at the right moment with the right people uh she's not only you know my Columbia colleagues but also close friends in Columbia and other disciplines uh we we started this conversation having or having a global consulting group a global collective action initiative for sustainability and uh we noticed that there were some topics that we have in common in our professional practice uh the common denominator really just addressing and mitigating all the effects of climate change that was pretty much the what we found in common on the thing uh and by joining efforts and expertise we came out with this idea of having an interdisciplinary group you know sharing the same passion for for sustainability uh for promoting sustainable developments so our goal is to integrate the practices of sustainability through design planning and management uh 3D measures that we you know we think can you know we can promote sustainable developments um so based on our expertise and our backgrounds again with my thesis partners the work experience that Pedro Padén, York, Maniki, and LA and my friends in Columbia we established these three working areas which is this integrated regional management already setting strategies and collective impact collective impact refers to social integration projects for sustainable communities um we are currently consulting in Columbia with the Inter-American Development Bank for the emerging series program phase two which is the diagnostic phase of the program um here in U.S. we moved from a consulting group to a non-profit to to find sources it would be easier to reach out to philanthropists or groups to fund research projects and the think tank um we are still just brainstorming you know generating ideas about and models uh we are working in this model for the controlled urban growth in the emerging cities specifically in rural and convention areas in Latin America and the Caribbean we are also brainstorming you know and creating ideas about our regulatory scheme for the urban design and the economic use of public space in Bogota this refers to the fact that there's a lot of immigrants from Venezuela moving to Colombia the last few years and not only an employment is becoming an issue but also public space so we are create you know working in the model that is only the design component which is the urban design strategy but also a business model either because it's private fund or public fund or both uh based on my friends experience we know that the business model I think was going to need a design you know uh we are looking forward to partner with all the non-profits in Europe, Pedro is working on that uh there are some organizations with experience in petition for design and integrated regional management topics like circular economy, industrial symbiosis etc we are looking forward to partner with them to bring that experience to South America and then with this you know with this crisis we believe that there is a lot of potential too you know in terms of the urban real and the and sustainable development I think we see a lot of opportunities from there and that's it okay great thank you I don't see any questions in the chat and um that's okay because we're kind of from very tight on time but that's also just means please do start writing up your questions for a Q&A session at the end for all of the panelists because not talking and not asking questions is definitely not the right way to go in in sort of finding out what to do next but I want to hand it over to the next three speakers and Gita will introduce them and in the meantime please don't be shy to fill the chat with additional ideas or questions everyone thank you so let's welcome now a ban who graduated in 2018 and is joining us from Nairobi and going she's going to talk about her work with UN habitat ban thanks so yeah as Gita said my name is ban I'm from Jordan I'm currently an urban planner working with UN habitat based in Nairobi Kenya um I'll give a bit of introduction about myself to just to give you a bit of background so before my masters I started I studied architecture in the UK and I worked a bit there on the private sector and I also had the same feelings that I did not want to go back to working in a corporate private sector environment I felt I wanted to be more engaged within governments and with the governments and I also kind of picked up a few skills in urban design and the program that I felt like are worth and more important more valuable for me to look into such as more I felt like I was more of an analytical person I had stronger analytical skills and conceptualizing ideas and design and having background research to support that so I knew that I wanted to do something more in a larger scale and funny enough at that time one of the alumni from the program which taught you in the summer Carmelo had just joined and moved to Nairobi to work at UN habitat for a few months so he came back once and we we spoke and he said I think you'll really like UN habitat and you'll really fit in there and then I tried and I applied and I've been so far with them for two years and I'll explain to you a bit of what UN habitat does and the kind of work that I do with them right now so if you can go to the next slide please I'm sure some of you have heard already about the global goals for sustainable development which are goals that have been agreed on by member states and countries to achieve within 20 by 2030 and I'd like to focus particularly on SDG number 11 which is on making sustainable cities and communities inclusive and leaving no one behind as UN habitat that's part that's our mandate we are the custodians of SDG number 11 ensuring that all cities and communities are sustainable and inclusive well planned and well designed and managed to do that we in UN habitat started in 1978 through a habitat convention and then that recently happened in 2016 in Quito in Ecuador and they released this document called the new urban agenda which is a document to explain how cities can be well planned well managed for better urbanization especially putting more and more emphasis on the fact that the world is becoming more and more urban recently we had a restructuring and they had a new strategic plan so our focus mostly on is on reducing spatial inequality and poverty enhancing shared prosperity of cities and region strengthening climate action as well as effective urban crisis and response and we do that through also addressing cross cutting issues ensuring human rights are addressed children use and older persons are included throughout the including gender inclusiveness as well as disability if you go to the next slide please we as I said earlier we the headquarters are based in Nairobi where most of the employees are based there and then we have country offices in each in many of the member states that we work with where there are smaller teams but all most of the work so the work is a mix of operational work that's on the ground as well as normative where we write publications based on what we have developed and explored on the ground so there are regions and there is different country offices as well as the headquarters and they collaborate to work mostly on different themes of work so mostly on plan planning finance and economy housing land and shelter urban basic services but also looking at as I said finance legislation mobility and social inclusion for those so as I said it's a mix of both on the ground and operational and if you go to the next slide I'm I am in a currently in a section called the planning finance and economy section within a section that is called the urban planning and design lab the urban planning and design lab is more of an integrated facility with a new inhabitant where we work mostly with cities the private sector NGOs and try to collaborate and as well as with donors to link them together and develop different profiles and analyses of cities to recommend projects and to recommend what needs to be done so I was particularly when I joined I particularly started working on this project funded by the UK government called the prosperity fund global future cities program and the program works in 19 cities globally to ensure that cities are inclusive and increase prosperity while also improving business trade between the UK and the cities but the focus of the projects are mostly on urban planning transportation and resilience so the projects vary in scale and in range but what we had to do in the beginning is to analyze the cities see how they grow what the different patterns are considering mobility resilience urban planning the growth of the city the population but also look into governance structures and how to engage these stakeholders so how is how is the city organized who has the most authority how do they deal with stakeholders how is the planning happening are they collaborating together are they sharing data and all of that we've written into reports to develop these city context reports or urban profiles that we do and then recommend projects so for example I worked on Bangkok and we had three different projects one is dealing with developing a transit oriented development plan to mix transit urban planning but also looking into resilience because it was in a in a flooding area we also had a project on developing a data hub for the city and another one for developing a decision support system for the floods that take place there we we also work in cities such as in Turkey where we develop a master plan for non motorized transport and such as that these were all developed they were finalized last year and then the UK government sent them out for bidding last year around this time and then now the private sector is on board so our role mostly is to see their work to monitor it is it in line with the work that we do are they including gender are they including social inclusion are they considering issues of how the project can continue in the long term and we do that all through engaging the stakeholders so if you go to the next slide what we have done in the past actually two months ago right before all of this happened I was I was traveling to Myanmar, Vietnam and Indonesia to go and have workshops with the cities to discuss with them what their challenges are what the opportunities that they see within the project what they think that the private sector should prioritize and take into account that they have not taken and even through all of this we've engaged civil society we've engaged academia to also see what are the current trends that are going on the ground and how to best ensure that they are achieved through the projects that we have so this is a bit of what we work on the ground and how to implement it and then based on also the problems that we see within the cities or common themes we also write reports on them so currently we are looking at drafting reports based on the cities that we have in particular one on smart cities and the use of data in cities and one on financing because that's a huge issue for many of the cities on how to implement such projects and another one on ensuring resilience within design of projects to ensure that it is taken into account considering the crisis that we're going through right now but also other environmental and natural disasters and then finally if you go to the last slide apart from the work that we do on the ground there's also considering the larger agenda of the agency and seeing seeing more of the scope of work that what is happening globally so the image of the right is showing one of the workshops one of the events that we had organized for the World Urban Forum so where we try to present our work to member states to partners to universities to academia to show them what is currently going on and the trends of what is happening and how they can come on board and leverage those opportunities but we also work on engaging with other private sector offices and studios to ensure that we are also learning from what they do so in September we went to Copenhagen to have a masterclass with gel architects to discuss public space projects how we implement them how we manage them and how to improve our opportunities to ensure that that is taken into account in the work that we do I'll stop here and if there's any questions I can address later thank you thank you very much Bon let me now invite Johannes who graduated in 2012 and is with us today from Austria Johannes hello good afternoon to everyone in New York and I guess good evening to everyone closer to my time zone or even ahead I'm curious to see all the presentations and those discussed later on with you I am myself left New York in 2014 after working for two and a half years with Kate Orff at escape studio we were mostly dealt with post hurricane sandy measurements and since then I've been focusing both in academia and then my professional practice on migration and social sustainability both in urban and also in rural areas so I'm going to show five slides that are also split between what I do in the office for urban design and architecture called studio flies trail with space here in Vienna my research and teaching activities at TO Vienna and also my independent practice where I'm going back and forth so this first project is the result of an international competition where I was working as a project manager on behalf of the office studio flies trail with and really I think it reveals the impact the design has on the built environment but also in the regular laboratory framework so we were challenging the status quo here but actively proposing alternatives to a competition tender which asked for buildings in the flat brown zone so we did the opposite and the brief was to create a new creation space in an inundation zone of the River Daniel the River Daniel is crossing Vienna at the length that is comparable to Manhattan the length of Manhattan and we decided to move all the built structures the new ones but also existing ones above the 1000 year flat level and created a radically urban beach that you can see here at the top image and we also introduced the term called dynamic FAR or dynamic floor area that was basically a term or like a measurement for mobile street vendors and foot tracks to in order to settle here in this vast beach area that is flat fully floodable so we reconnected Vienna with its river and made it safely to access this water but also accepted the reality of a flood protection system and make it perceivable for the residents of Vienna the next project when you go to the next slide is moving to academia this it's called states of refuge and the private premises here that not every problem can be addressed or will automatically lead to a building or master plan or so this is a long-term research project that i'm doing with my research partner Nina Korotnik here at the two where we investigate accommodation of asylum seekers in Austria and we also critiquing with this project the role of the architects or the role architects play most often in these environments and we are to take on a passive role and oftentimes execute government initiatives so we are advocating for an active role that is addressing needs pertaining to housing the right to self-determination but also needs regarding privacy and identity we are exploiting or critically exploit the researching the design tool mapping in this project and establish an urgently needed research basis for spatial practitioners wanting to become active participants in this field of migration and asylum studies and these findings that are can be seen here in multi-dimensional visualizations have the goal to bring the invisible or unknown or the consciously hidden also in this case the deep politicized refugee into the architectural but also public discourse all these mappings have been produced in a constant feedback loop with refugees and the ultimate goal is to also for them to regain the public voice through participating in this project and the next slide is moving to a built project again which I was working on behalf of a studio fly straight with again and starts from the initial statement that the majority of our built environment is in a majority of our built environment in cities is made up of housing so our starting point was how to create a city within a city so if you want to change basically the city also have to change the way we live together the way our residential buildings look like and this city within the city basically accommodates commercial spaces for micro economies all the spaces for startups apartments of course communal spaces and also shared facilities and these highly flexible floors on nine floors run in parallel with a research project where we collaborate with sociologists sociologists structural engineers but also experts that conceived alternative financing strategies based on solidarity or solidarity between market rate and affordable units within that building itself so it was quite a unique competition again an architectural competition that not only asked for us to bring a concept to the table but also bring already the users to the table even before the building was finished almost four years ago so between then and now we had a lot of participatory planning sessions with the community and we went all the way to detailing this building and the communal spaces the one that you can see here in this slide is called city lodger that is fitted with fully retractable doors that are normally used in fire brigade stations but what they do basically is to really connect the inside and the outside with each other so public space becomes private and vice versa and even the paving pattern runs into the into the building so that this line is definitely completely blurred in this building this delimination between the public and the private next project is called silent trace when you click one thank you and this is an investigation on the relationship between voluntary and involuntary migration networks conducted in north and patagonia and chile i was also co-teaching a summer school on resilient coastal landscapes and wetlands last year this research project is addressing a cultural landscape in the border region of chile and argentina argentina a very inaccessible landscape or very hard to access and it's a collaboration with the austral university of chile and valivia we traced here a cultural landscape that is under constant change ever since it's the start of the colonization of this area and we did it through archival research and extend the fieldwork including gps recordings gs-based analysis of satellite imagery then their chronological field samples and constructed these mappings some of these are excerpts here on the slide that show historic and recent migratory routes and settlements and through this mapping process we also revealed the practice of deforestation by fire clearance which made it possible for some of these settlements to establish that later then disappeared again and we did it in cooperation with local landscape architects forestry scientists and also historians and the next slide please and this is the last slide that is part of your house increase it's still a very very early phase it's a very much much smaller scale the challenge here was to basically build a building within an olive grove without destroying the trees that have stood here for hundreds of years the programmatic and spatial composition of these buildings the direct result of wind direction and sun position and we really wanted to keep a productive landscape and combine it with combine it with this domestic program while we also had to tackle problems like soil erosion that we are stabilizing with native plants that have been cleared for agricultural reasons and part of the task is also to install and design a drainage and water retention measurements and produce a closed water cycle again a sort of construction of this project is expected to start in the fall and that's it for now and I'm happy to answer any questions later on thank you so much Jonas that's great we come back to questions later but let me welcome Zarith to make her presentation please hello everyone it's really great to be here with a low view today um I first want to start off by saying I know a lot of you are not at home you're far away from your families and it's a pretty scary time so I just want to you know give everyone my best I hope everyone's safe and healthy and everyone's families are well I'm a little under the weather and I have a little bit of a brain fog so forgive me for any um you know whatever but in the question and answer section I'll be able to you know if you have any doubts about the work I'll be able to get into it so I'm going to start sharing my screen now and I'll show you a little bit of my work let's see so I am the founder of Territorial Mbifi Territorial Mbifi is a non-profit design lab and essentially what we do is um we're a network of volunteers really we're right now all over the world and I've come together to advocate for the people in the places that are often overlooked and the people that we really think about and kind of like our focus is around women children and migrants and displaced people and this really came out of um frustrations with the way that professional practice sometimes work um so I after the urban design program I went to work at Deluxe Y a firm here in New York City and I was tapped to work on this project the district 15 diversity plan it's the first community-led um racial integration plan um dealing with public schools in New York so I don't know if you guys are familiar but New York City has the most segregated public schools in the country um and that's something that I didn't really know about until I kind of took this project on but it's really um going through that experience was really eye-opening just the inequality that we that people face every day just to get their kids a decent dedication and part of that work since it was community-led um had a had a big community engagement component so I spent almost a year traveling all over the city but particularly uh Brooklyn talking to communities of color talking to them about their needs to make sure that their voices were really included in this program and what I found through this work is that community engagement sometimes tokenizes communities of color and you know we think about you know all of these like sexy words inclusivity um you know community-led engagement etc but but that really looks like um there's a huge gap from doing it well and so there's language barrier language barriers there's so many different things that um really really affect communities of color but I just I got a little frustrated with the way that the project was being handled not necessarily by the firm but the way that communities of color were really being tokenized um you know they would get a native spanish speaker to kind of you know um you put in these like gosh journalism situations etc so that the plan would look inclusive and that really frustrated me because understanding the data understanding the the situation I I made me angry that communities of color the onus was on men um and so that was also happening around the time of the election and you know when all of these things happen um as a designer as um architects we all have all of this amazing array of skills for storytellers we can do so many different things that I decided that I'd really had enough I was I wasn't happy with the way things were being done and I said um I'm gonna save up for a couple of months and I'm gonna leave and I don't know what I'm gonna do but I'm gonna figure something out and I'm gonna do good work for good people and territorial empathy was really born out of this specific project which I'll talk about briefly and again we can talk about um on our company assault so this project specifically um was really the moment I started working on this project is when I finally decided to quit my job and I just couldn't I just couldn't you know I couldn't keep ignoring things that were happening knowing that I had this feel to do something to help so I was having drinks with a friend one day and he was telling me we were talking about the children that were separated at the border and he was telling me that there were there was a facility where his friend worked here in New York where these kids um were being held um and we've all seen the images and you know the terrible things and he told me that his friend was really struggling with PTSD from just seeing these kids in these terrible conditions and that there was this huge crisis of sexual assault in in these facilities the kids are being held um they're not separated by gender or ages and the assault was often happening from the people that were in charge of taking care of them and he said that to me and I I just couldn't believe it my heart stopped and I was like you know these kids are the perfect victims for for assault they're far away from home they don't speak the language they're vulnerable and I said how is no one talking about this how can people just you know continue living their lives why isn't this a thing and so I set up a Google alert that same day for any information on on this I did research I looked everywhere and I couldn't find any information a couple weeks later because of that Google alert I saw and that this represented it from Florida Tech Doge had released this data set um and I briefly there were some pictures of that before um and the data set here let me go back um this is what it looked like and it said basically we've been doing a lot of research on the crisis of the children separated at the border and we just found this treasure trove of documents documenting sexual assault and so one of the things that the Trump administration is doing with any investigation really is that when there is a freedom for information request or something they don't release digital records because they want to slow down investigations as much as possible so one of the things that they're doing is that they literally get entrance to scan documents over and over again to make them almost impossible for text recognition to happen and they just like bombard congressional offices with like stacks of paper so it takes a while for people to get to the truth and so he posted about this and he said I can't he was just fed up he said this is this is incredible like I can't believe that no one's doing anything about this and I saw the data and he was like the you know it notes you know hundreds of pages of documents and so when I saw that I saw that I said boy I think there's something that we could do to help there has to be all this information has directions it has places all the reports explicitly say what happened with the assault they say the the cases have been investigated by the DOJ or the FBI and I said well this is something that I can do I can figure out a way to digitize this information and do something with it so I've reached out to um to do it his office was wonderful I said those and so and so I have these different skills if you give me access to the state I'll see what I can do about it and they're like right you know we don't have the tools to do it we don't have the the bandwidth here you go let's do something about it so it really um it really became this wonderful collaboration between both of us and then um I took all of this information through machine learning and different tools we're able to digitize it and create this dashboard that tells you in English and Spanish this exactly what happened the the whole picture was assault and this abuse where the kids are coming from their gender their ages and then it ends up in a map showing where all the assaults have happened all over the country and then you can click on one of the care centers and you can see the reports what happened a description etc and so this tool has been used by congressional investigators to advocate for these kids and after having worked on this I decided you know what this is what I'm gonna do with my life I I don't know how I'm gonna do it I don't know what I'm gonna do but I know that private firms sometimes run their projects because everyone has special interests because everyone has different agendas and are sometimes not the most honest and they really don't have people's hearts and minds and present at the forefront of the work and so I said well then that means that it has to be on on profit and then I started thinking well I don't you know I'm an architect and an urban designer I don't know how to start a business I don't know how to do any of these things but I just knew in my heart that I couldn't keep having these things happen and not do anything about it when I knew that I had the tools to do it and Territorial Empathy we just had our first year celebration this last week and it's a non-profit privatization by the IRS and since that first project we've been fortunate to work on so many different issues and really we've done projects around the world we've I've been able to travel I'm unable to do all these things that I never in my wildest dreams thought that I could do and it really was all about putting people first putting people's needs first looking at the people that people forget about because they might not have the money to do the work that may not be able to speak the language to be like hey I need help and so we've done work in Bogota we've done work and looking at going north and is one of the projects and it's really exciting and this was looking at the relationship between climate change and migration from Central America so when we think about our environment and we think about migration you know we know objectively that these things kind of go hand in hand but we also know that there's so many vulnerable people and that people don't want to leave their homes people don't want to leave their families people don't want to immigrate illegally to the United States and there's kind of this notion that you know people are gang members or whatever and all these things that get peddled in the media but this really was investigative work to look at the dry corridor of the northern triangle region which is in between Honduras El Salvador and Guatemala and looking at drought and rainfall and then correlating that with migration informal migration rates and so this project was going to be presented and understood and voiced by the World Bank in Singapore but because of the crisis that's been delayed and so I just want to go back to the home and I want to talk specifically about COVID-19 and one of the things that we've done because we have this amazing network of volunteers that are just so wonderful and we have people in South Africa we have people in Lebanon people that have just reached out to us from online or press or coverage that say hey I want to help and I think that's been so beautiful and I think that's something that I want you all kind of to know that when you're doing good work and your heart's in the right place it's it's weird and I never thought this would happen but it's a magnet and people want to support good work people want to people want to help they want to be inspired and it's so beautiful so one of the things we've launched this week is our COVID-19 ambivalence essentially we're doing pro bono work to anyone that's working with vulnerable communities and specifically in the crisis and emergency services response area and right now because of this we're currently working with the city of Syracuse to like a domestic violence we're working with the department of education we're on the task force to advise the chancellor and the mayor on how to make education remote education accessible inclusive to communities of color and it's just been really great and and I think I just want to make a call to all of you you know in these times where everything seems so scary we do have agency we have so much agency and this is kind of a cute little thing that we put together to just kind of think the folks that do this work that are we're just so impressed by and blown away and a lot of them people of color the people that deliver your groceries the people that you know there are so many vulnerable people that don't have a luxury of working from home and so we put this little video together and you guys can go on the website and check it out I'm not going to play all of it but essentially and it's just celebrating people that are doing great work and we all can use these design tools and it was just like a little love letter that we put together to be like you guys are the best and we're so proud of you and this was our response to the UN call for global creatives to just bring awareness to to the part of people that are kind of going through all of this and so I just want to start off by saying that when I end by saying that you know they always say if you want to make god laugh make plans and I think the situation is so indicative of that I never in my life ever thought that it'd be doing this work but and that people would support it or that you know that I anything but it can be done and I especially encourage you know women it's so it you know imposter syndrome all these things that happen you know after nuts and meetings and have had people think that on the translator or the assistant or all of these different things but just to push through I mean we can really do anything when we put our mind to it and I never thought this would be something that I would be doing but it is and we're just I feel so blessed to be able to to do this full time this is now what I dedicate myself to full 10 minutes really truly a blessing so I just encourage all of you to kind of you don't have to know how to do it but just you know one step at a time and you are able to be entrepreneurs and creatives and rely on your values with your work thank you thank you wow wow wow this is amazing Zaryd and everyone else who presented it's just such amazing work that you all are doing and we are so just thankful that you are all with us and our students here so we have a few minutes to just quickly do some questions while we are still in this room before we break out and go into separate rooms where each of our speakers will be able to speak to students more and just a couple of questions so some of the questions who are coming through are about you know several many of you have started your own firms and the students are asking how do you find the funding what kind of capital do you need to jump into starting your own own company and the questions were for Mansi I don't know if she's still here because it's there she is it's past 1 30 am for you and and then the other alumni who've also started their own firms can jump in so why don't you start Mansi how did you find the capital and how much do you need um so this was actually a question that I asked myself and my business partners that what is the kind of money target that you want to do at the end of the year since we were just three of us who started the firm and the thing we realized is that you cannot have enough money capital to start but the but the first year's target was actually to find three other people who had a similar vision and wanted to work with us and we did not I had a loan on my head paying for my tuition I came back to India and I was paying that loan so we never did any work for free because I still have had a lot of financial responsibilities but the target that you need is not capital you need the kind of vision um and of the kind of firm that you want to start and you definitely need the team I think if you have the vision and the team then you're good to go and then everything will kind of fall in place if you have your heart in place like Zareth put it really well is that things work out in the weirdest ways if you just keep pushing in the right direction so that's that's my answer to that Johannes do you want to add to that I guess there's again two pair of shoes when it comes to academia we have in the Austrian example is very specific because we have we have funding through universities but we also have a lot of grants of course for doing this research but we also actively like looking for sponsors and like third party donors if you will but also sponsors who want to sponsor a publication so that has been like a growing amount that also consumed more time of what we've what we've been doing to sort of look for for third party money so to say and in regarding to to starting basically also your own firm I think it needs of course dedication of and and time and depends on what kind again on what kind of projects you're you're working in and how big your team is what sort of what sort of plan you're making what sort of business plan you're looking at so I guess in my case I'm looking at I have I have teams teams that assemble project by project so it's like not like an an office that is like constantly constantly running because I have the academia I also work at professional practice as a project manager so thank you my setup great yeah I think balancing with academia is very interesting Zarith already talked about how she found funding for what she did and Milton do you want to give half a minute answer to how you found money especially for your collaborative yeah I think I agree with what Nancy said that it was more about the interest and the team was the capital really you know sharing the same interests that was really the capital other than having just funds to establish an office here in LA copying Ag and Singapore and what was that it was mostly capital joined the to show you know in order to qualify for these applications initially asked with the intermedical development back it was just a pre-experience of course that was the capital right the background but uh we were bigger as a group as a team so that was really the capital of the team and we didn't plan it to be you know all over the world it was okay my brother is in Bogota I'm from Bogota I'm in LA moved from New York to Copenhagen and then this another try now in Singapore we didn't really plan it that way it was just the team was the capital and it will be so all of you had some kind of a strategic plan you found the partnerships and then you were able to run with it which is great kaya and there were some other questions yeah I wanted to keep to maybe transition the conversation to another sort of theme of questions that were around skills right and I think Nina asked that very directly about how do you know what kind of skills did you need or how did you market them to working for someone like you and how did that but maybe we can also open this up to everyone as sort of suggestions of how does what what we're doing now in the ud program the kinds of skills and the way of thinking translates into something that you want to continue call it market or communicate to potential collaborators clients or employers in the future and you want to start with you and habitat yeah sure um I think at that point as that said earlier we are great storytellers and we pick up a lot of skills through the urban design program on telling a story through our visuals through our elevator pitches through our presentation so I think that's a very strong skill that can be desirable to many of the agencies because you're able to narrate all the thoughts and link them together to come up with a compelling storyline for people for donors for private sector to all to understand and see where you're coming from so I think that was very a strong skill that I think can be highlighted as well as in terms of your visualization and how you visualize the data that you have you analyze it and you show it to support your story I think also one of the key skills and components that have transferred into my work right now and based on what I learned from the urban design program was on the community engagement and participation component I'm sure a lot of you in the through your global travels but also through the fall semester and the summer semester you've had to engage with community members discuss with them and try to understand their challenges and their opportunities and how you can engage them in that sense so I think that is also a skill for you and an opportunity for you to see to highlight that you're able to speak to people to engage to different stakeholders at different levels so that's also another two two set of skills that I can highlight for now. Thank you and Emily I've seen you've been already pretty active in responding in the chat but do you want to expand on this maybe a little bit about who you're actually pitching to and what kind of skills are relevant for work at DOT? Sure I mean Bon really well said about stakeholders and storytelling skills I think something that I've seen over the years is you can have a perfect pitch and you can have an amazing idea and it just falls flat if you don't know who actually needs to be hearing it and you don't actually pitch it at the right time you know sometimes we also know who we're pitching to but because they are distracted with something else I mean something we're experiencing right now we have a city government in New York that is you know feeling with kind of the the largest group of infected people and deaths and so it becomes incredibly difficult to pitch kind of second and third tier solutions which the city needs but you know when when the decision makers are so distracted with something else it becomes you know incredibly difficult to get a good message across so it also just a perseverance you know continuing to continuing to push continuing to refine your pitch is just incredibly important because it falls flat once or twice doesn't mean again it's a bad idea so I'm still pitching ideas I've been pitching for years and and I have seen things move you know five years later when when the time is right so just encourage perseverance. What other skills are you looking for who can we how about Milton do you want to speak to that? Yes I think I think for recent graduates something that is important when you show your fantastic good presentations in your design portfolio I think that is important that annual office will see is that your projects had a base the data that you show where the proposal comes from you know where where are the data they're supporting your project and when you can speak about it you know I think that's important when you you know getting an interview in an interview with a designer or a design office or an architecture office the way you support the projects we contain the data where the ideas came from. Thank you I think we want to sort of conclude the official part of this event so Shmita will explain to us how we all move into smaller rooms and smaller conversations for those of you who want to in the next couple of minutes. Thank you big big big thank you to all our speakers so inspiring also really inspiring to hear what urban designers can do right now other than sitting in front of their screens at home and really be involved or from their screens at home I should say right thanks a lot. I just want to say that that we are very respectful of the time of our speakers so we expect you to be there as long as the speakers are able to if they are able to and of course our students will know not to stretch their hospitality too much and also feel free to change the room speakers can also change rooms so Shmita why don't you describe how that works. Yeah so we have six breakout rooms one for each of the alumni and panelists and the students will be pre-assigned to these rooms in the beginning and you can always break out from the room to come to the main room in order to switch to any of the other panelists rooms and I can facilitate that. Okay big big thank you big applause to everyone.