City 2.0 is a virtual innovative conference that starts on September 4th featuring 50 visionaries, designers, teachers, and leading edge practitioners from different industries, sectors and disciplines, from all over the world, for a conversation about the future of the city. I feel honoured that I have been invited to participate in the first session about the ‘eco-region’ together with prof. Karen O’Brien from Norway.
The conference organizers invite everyone interested in the future of cities: “We’ll dream, dialogue, and design together. We want your voice to be included. This groundbreaking event completely free because we believe it’s just that important. We hope you’ll join us and share in the learning, inspiration, and envisioning”.
Creator of this conference is Marilyn Hamilton, author of the book “Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive”. Her belief is that we can envision and capture the most innovative ideas and best practices for creating a sustainable, thriving planetary future. She wants to create a positive shift by bringing together passionate, informed people who put their heads together with visionary experts in diverse disciplines.
This event is a four week action-research inquiry. In essence, the central question is: “How would we design a new operating system for the city?”. Each week focuses on a different theme:
– Week 1: “Planet of Cities”
– Week 2: “Gaia’s Reflective Organ”
– Week 3: “Aligning Strategies to Prosper”
– Week 4. “Amplifying Intelligence”
The conference will be delivered over 4 weeks from September 4-27 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. There will be three sessions each day – each 90 minutes long with thought leaders, designers and practitioners. These live sessions will occur on an advanced tele-conference bridge, which means all you need is a phone or internet connection/Skype to participate. You can attend the conference from virtually anywhere in the world!
For people in Europe the Pacific time scedule can be inconvenient – it is 9 hours later here- therefore you can also download the sessions later via the website. All the information you can find on the website: http://www.integralcitycollective.com/fe/27589-about-the-conference. Your free Expo membership includes:
– Instant free access to 10 Prologue (Pre-conference) Interview recordings with some of the key speakers that will be presenting at the Expo
– Free access to all 36 live conference call presentations and group discussions with some of the brightest minds in sustainability, community building, conscious capitalism, city design, leadership and personal development.
– The opportunity to converse and collaborate with the other participants worldwide via our interactive teleconference platform and web-based online discussion forums.
If you want to dive deeply into this and roll your sleeves up, then you can choose to be integrally involved in this co-creative journey, by joining the Integral City Collective as an ‘eLab member’. You will then get access to downloadable MP3s of every live session, summary notes, implementation planning tools and so on.
If you have questions, visit the website or contact Lummina.horlings@wur.nl.