The Masterplan

Yohan Wadia and Parshav Sheth are India based urban planners and co-founders of @LABS, a platform that engages in education, consultancy and innovation on urban issues. Find out more:https://www.labsonline.in

Ramon is the CEO and Founder at Aretian Urban Analytics and Design and an Urban Design Researcher at Harvard University. He co-authored the book City Science: Performance Follows Form. Find out more:https://www.aretian.com/

Angelos Chronis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Infrared City, Co-Director of the Master in AI for Architecture and Business Innovation at IAAC, and Senior Research Engineer at AIT. More info at:https://infrared.city/https://iaac.net/https://www.ait.ac.at/

A conversation with Ocean Jangda and Firas Saffiedine. Ocean Jangda is a real-estate manager and urban technologist. His recent thesis at the MIT Center for Real Estate, titled Urban Technology: Rethinking Real Estate Development for the 21st Century, challenges how we build cities and argues for a development model that is deeply connected to biology, technology, and the biosphere. Firas Saffiedine is an author and founder of the architecture practice Spatial Forces. We explore questions about the future of development: What responsibilities do developers have? Can cities behave like living systems? How does information, matter, and energy shape urban futures, and what does it mean to design for the planetary scale? This episode dives into the mental models, ethics, and cosmic perspective required to rethink how and why we build.Find out more about Ocean and Firas here:https://oceanjangda.orghttps://www.spatial-forces.com

Ocean Jangda is a real estate expert, currently studying at the MIT, with a passion for technology and urban development. Find more about Ocean here: https://oceanjangda.org

Mario Gonzalez Nevarez is an urbanist based in Puerto Rico with a background in political science, architecture and climate adaptation. Find more about Mario here: www.linkedin.com/in/mjgn/

Jordi Vivaldi is an architect and philosopher based in Vienna.  PhD Architect (IOUD, Austria) and PhD Philosopher cand. (EGS, Switzerland), his areas of research include various forms of Speculative Realism and New Materialism, as well as 21st century’s theory of experimental architecture, art and technology. His current field of philosophical investigation puts in relation the notion of ‘reason’ with the concepts of ‘mimesis’, ‘finitude’ and ‘fortune’ in pursuit of plastic modes of rationality. From an architectural perspective, Jordi’s research focuses on mobilising the notion of limit as a spatial device of limitude, liminality and limitrophy in order to recreate the concept of hospitality in the context of the Anthropocene.  Jordi works or has worked as theory faculty/researcher in several international universities such as the University of Innsbruck (IOUD) and the Vienna University of Technology (TuWien – ATTP) in Austria, the UCL Bartlett in Great Britain, the IAAC-UPC in Spain and the Shenzhen University in China. In addition to several articles, essays and lectures, Jordi is the co-author of the book The Threefold Logic of Advanced Architecture (Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2021). More information on Jordi's work: www.jordivivaldi.com

The following is a conversion with my friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. It's Leyla's 3rd time on the show in our recurrent series we like to call "From the Top". Join us while we catch up, figure out who actually invented the airplane, how one can be in Mali and the Senegal at the same time, talk about Leyla's latest projects and try to unpack Advanced Urbanism, Ancient cities and Social Transition.  To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit: https://www.urbancollabs.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you happy? I know, I know it’s a tough question. It’s too subjective and too abstract. I mean what does it even mean? We say it depends on the person and it comes and goes based on so many different factors. However,  we all deserve and are invested in the pursuit of happiness. This we can at least agree to, right? Don’t worry I’m not going to turn this show into a therapy session. At the end of the day we are planners and what we are interested in is cities. And this is exactly what Dimitris Lambriadis and Yohan Wadia were interested in as well: How to design and plan a happy city. For them, it all started when they discovered Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index a national survey that aimed to measure the happiness levels of its citizens providing an innovative approach to measuring welfare. However, what the world quickly realized is that happiness is not only largely subjective but also largely contextual. Now, why is this important? You see, according to some estimates, today, there are more than 4 billion people living in cities … and tens of millions more pouring in every year. Fundamentally we are adding the equivalent of eight New York Cities to the world every single year. With such an unprecedented amount of new environments being added to the mix every year, planners need a clear gauge to measure how an urban environment and its inhabitants are performing and GDP is far from being enough as it paints a very rough picture focusing solely on economic factors to measure wellbeing. So aside from happiness and productivity, I believe that this opens up one of the most pressing questions of our time. How do we measure the success of a city?

During the worldwide shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many reports emerged of urban wildlife sightings. Sea lions were seen on a sidewalk of Mar del Plata harbor, south of Buenos Aires, a herd of buffalo was seen walking along an empty highway in New Delhi, a cougar was spotted in Santiago jumping onto a wall and finding shelter in an empty apartment and dolphins starting coming more frequently up the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul. The increase of similar sightings all around the world indicated that in the absence of “human” life, “wild” life reemerges. Although we are still trying to understand what exactly happened in each context, what is clear is that the relationship between humans and wildlife in urban settings changed during the shutdown, and outlining the reasons for that change could most definitely inform urban ecology and conservation. To help me understand this further I have with me Pushkar Runwal and Jiyun Lee. Together we will discuss the relationship between wildlife and cities in different places around the world and investigate how simple urban strategies can address long-standing questions in urban ecology, inspire the conservation of wildlife, and inform the design of sustainable cities.

In all honesty, I have no idea where the things I eat really come from. Like most of us, I grew up in the city and everything I ate always came from the supermarket. Even today I remain somewhat unaware of the links between the sourcing, production and distribution of food, and the ways in which I consume it. In many ways, I think we are all strangers to the journey our food takes before arriving at our table and it’s clear to me that the distance we’ve put between our kitchen and our food’s source is one of the main reasons that the global food distribution system has turned out to be the second largest greenhouse gas emitter. What I do know though is that there’s an ongoing revolution that is taking place where people around the world are actively trying to reinvent the way we produce food in cities. Some call it kilometer 0 food, others urban farming or even urban forests. You hear of plant-based meat, vertical farming, aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, the list goes on and on. The main objective is to bridge this gap and scale down the production levels. One of the oldest and most prevailing practices in sustainable food production is permaculture. It's a concept that was created in the 70s by Australian academics Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. It was defined as “the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.” Hmm, a conscious design of agriculturally productive ecosystems. Sounds like exactly what the world needs today right? So this time, with the help of Karim Abillama and Júlia Ferreira Veiga we will put permaculture at the center of the discussion, in an effort to understand what it is, what are its principles and how we can envision and implement other sustainable food production practices in our kitchens and our cities.

Have you ever been present for that magic moment when all the street lights in your city turn on at the same time? When I was a young kid I used to picture a person - a night light conductor - sitting in a room looking at their wristwatch and when the time struck 7 they would flip a big switch turning on all of the city lights. Now I’m older and I know that neither this person nor this big night light switch exists and that this magic moment happens thanks to a preset automated system. In fact, cities today that are filled with sensors, cables, and digital networks rely on thousands of software running in parallel giving their citizens reliable and functioning automated systems. Just like the night lights. They control our traffic, street lights, underground metro systems, telecommunication antennas, wifi routers, energy and water distribution, weather monitoring you name it. Only a handful of urban infrastructure operates on gears and cogs and the rest is digital. Fundamentally this means that a “smart city” is a “hackable” city, a reality that needs to be addressed as we embellish our cities with more and more digital infrastructure. So, whether we want to think about it or not, cities and their citizens today are more vulnerable and exposed than ever to digital threats. Urban Technologists Julia McGee and Kriti Nirmal have taken a deep dive into the fundamentals of cybercrime in cities and through this discussion, we will talk about what can be done to avoid them and how we can improve the security of smart cities.

Imagine if Instagram and social media closed every day at 6pm like a shop. We would all be forced to meet up and speak to each other in real life, to be present with our families, to work out, to go outside, to read, to make art, music... what a drag, right? It’s been 3 years since Steven Bartlett a British entrepreneur and co-founder of SocialChain posted this tweet and since then it’s been constantly resurfacing on the internet. More and more studies are being conducted on the average time that we spend in front of some kind of screen and the findings are not getting any more flattering, especially after COVID. We could say that most of that time is mindless scrolling and browsing through memes and TIK TOK videos however what this also indicates is that a vast majority of what we consider meaningful interactions are taking place on some part of the internet. Business, trading, artistic expression, politics, social encounters, romance - the internet has it. Our attention, time and energy are being highly capitalized on, the effects of which are directly impacting the city and the way we experience public spaces. Therefore, to us urban technologists the way the digital and the physical are interwoven has become an essential part of understanding the city and the way we citizens interact with it. And as this interconnection is becoming stronger and the digital world is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the physical one this discussion is getting hotter and hotter. To tell us more about this I have with me Aida Hassan, Kish Buhari and Maria Magkavalli, 3 urban technologists that felt that it was high time we brought this to the surface and took a closer look at not only where we are but also at what’s coming. And you guessed it, it’s quite meta.

I’ll never forget the day I downloaded my first Twitter dataset. I was a student working on a submission, it was late at night and I was trying to find a way to make a map of what the citizens of Barcelona were saying on Twitter about their city. I was working hard on making my algorithm work until I got that damn line of code just right, clicked on “Run” and boom: my spreadsheet started to be filled with thousands of rows of information on all the tweets that had been posted in the last 2 months mentioning the word “Barcelona”. Along with the text, I had gained access to the Name and surname of the users, their age, the time they posted it, their location, any images they had attached to it, any links. In a matter of seconds, I had gained access to the back-end of Twitter and I had broken 0 laws. It was a powerful moment, that made me think deeply about the power of this technology. I had to pause and look at my computer screen while the spreadsheet kept registering more and more rows of data. At that moment, I understood how easy it was to scrape the internet. I thought of Facebook, I thought of Google, I thought of privacy, I thought of morality. It’s been 6 years since then, and now all the students that came after me learn how to do this at some point in their studies. Personally, I’ve come to understand that data is meaningless, as it’s just the act of recording something. What matters is why you want to record it, what information you plan to derive from it and what actions this information will instruct. Just as with any other technology, intentions matter. For architects and urban planners, data science has truly become a game changer as it allowed us to move away from the world of speculation and go straight into what we call informed decision-making. Architects and Urban technologists Weronika Sojka and Joseph Bou Saleh went through a very similar journey this year and thought that it was time for us to get a fresh perspective on this complicated, ambiguous relationship that the world has with data.

In 2015 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national “Smart Cities Mission”, an urban renewal program with the goal to develop smart cities across the sub-continent, making them citizen friendly and sustainable. The mission initially included 100 cities, with the deadline for completion of the projects set between 2019 and 2023. As of August 2022, which is when I’m recording this episode, the effective combined completion of all the commissioned projects stands at 11% which has put a lot of pressure on the national government to accelerate the completion of the remaining cities. The whole project has been shrouded in a mixture of unprecedented transparency and controversy as it set out an ambitious task to put India on the top of sustainable urban development. This is not the first time that a smart city project creates such ambiguity. Today, smart cities are still making headlines with projects such as India’s Smart Cities Mission and Saudi Arabia’s Neom Project getting a lot of media attention. However, historically speaking the concept of the smart city has always been criticized for being somewhat naive as its implementation of technology comes off more as a marketing scheme to attract foreign investment rather than a means to improve quality of life. And I mean if you think about it, the name itself implies that typical cities are inherently “not smart” which I’m sure we can all agree is debatable. If we’ve learned anything throughout the years is that the idea of “smartness” changes based on the surrounding context. So, with this in mind, it’s time to get down to basics. For this episode, I have with me Parshav Seth and Gayatri Agrawal, two urban technologists who have tried to deconstruct the concept of smartness. Together we will try to understand how smartness is understood around the world and to prove that a lot of the time it has little to do with sensors and flying cars and a lot to do with the citizens who are meant to use them.

As a kid, one of my favorite books was Heaven & earth: Unseen by the naked eye by Katherine Roucoux. It showed - chapter by chapter - intricate landscapes of increasing scale and distance, captured by microscopes, x-rays, satellites and telescopes. Each photograph was accompanied by an extended caption that explained it in detail, offering a dose of scientific information connecting it to the human scale. I absolutely loved it because it made obvious this mysterious correlation that seemed to occur between different natural systems. Regardless of whether you were looking at a human eye, a city, or the andromeda galaxy, it was impossible not to see the similarities. To us urbanists, this opens a discussion for a more holistic perspective on urban planning and design, one that is inspired by natural systems. To guide us through this discussion I have with me Maria Augusta do Amaral Kroetz and Ocean Jangda, two graduate urban technologists from IAAC’s Master in City & Technology along with 2 very special guests, IAAC's Head of Studies, Dr. Mathilde Marengo and AIT's City Intelligence Lab Director, Angelos Chronis.