Future Cities · Sustainability, Energy, Innovation, Climate Change, Transport, Housing, Work, Circular Economy, Education & Environmental Solutions

Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives in...

"So by looking at the effect of Earth Overshoot, which we think is the second largest risk for humanity, it actually becomes easier to address because all things come together, and you start to see the self-interest to act. Because if you're in a world of overshoot, and you're not able to be resource-secured, really it's going to hurt you. So it's not just being nice to the rest of the world. I me...

Mathis Wackernagel is Co-founder and President of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph. D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporation...

"The circularity, of course, has existed in nature for a long time. Actually, nature's circularity is by evolution. There is no plan, there is no liability, and there are no preferences. It's simply the cycles such as marine tides, CO2, and water cycles, plants and animals, and basically by evolution,  the best solution wins. Also, there is no waste. Dead material becomes food for other anima...

Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is a...

"Much greater investment in public transport infrastructure is enormous with about 40% of our carbon pollution in cities coming from cars and transportation. That really needs to be focused on and prioritized, and of course electrifying everything that we can, both in that sector and beyond, including in our buildings. I believe roughly 60% of our carbon pollution in cities is coming from building...

Britt Wray is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. She's a writer and broadcaster researching the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she investigates the mental health consequences of e...

"I think water is taking a backseat and personally, I feel like water is the messenger that delivers the bad news of climate change to your front door. So in the work that I do, it's heavily intertwined, but it's taking a backseat. There are parts about water that are maybe separate from climate change, and that could be the quality discussions, the infrastructure discussions, although they are so...

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA...

"Cities are certainly a great place to start because the way that we do them - you can see it if you go up in an airplane and look down - you can see that they're built against nature. You can see it in the color of the city. It's interesting. We reflect it in our maps. Cities are gray, and the rest of the world is green. We build them against the natural world, and the way that we do it - concret...

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication o...

"How can you get to the point where people are actually not moving around as much and reducing their carbon footprint in various ways? The main way we're planning on doing that is decarbonizing the economy. This means electrifying a lot of things. People still are moving around. They're now using electric cars, but they're still using cars. How can you build new cities that don't require that in q...

Kevin Trenberth is a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder and an Honorary Academic in the Department of Physics, Auckland University in Auckland, New Zealand. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Ch...

“We have prepared a selection of solutions for the specific needs of cities – construction, ways to make buildings carbon neutral and much more efficient, new heating systems, mobility, of course, supply chains, waste management. We really focus on cities and would like to make an alliance of all cities interested in these solutions to start to use them and test them everywhere. So that's one of t...

Psychiatrist, aviator and explorer, Bertrand Piccard made history in 1999 by accomplishing the first ever non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and a number of years later the first round-the-world solar-powered flight. Piccard has dedicated his life to demonstrating sustainable development opportunities. He is Founder and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation, which has assembled a verified...

"Cities are acting, local governments are acting, nations are acting, at all levels. The technologies for renewable energy, for energy storage, are increasing really rapidly. At the same time, we're starting to see what the pathway might actually look like to strongly mitigate climate change... Some of the recent work that I've been doing has been to really start thinking about what happens after...

Dr. Charles D. Koven is an Earth System Scientist, working in the Climate Sciences Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He investigates feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle. Dr. Koven’s primary research focus is on high-latitude feedbacks to climate change, and in particular the role of soil carbon in permafrost soils, and its response to changing climate. Dr. Koven i...

"Certainly on the perimeter of urban centers, water farms are able to provide water and then brought into that city center or other ways. Roofs of buildings is an area where we can deploy hydropanels, where you can plumb directly into a building, so you can imagine in a more urban context, that's a way to bring water directly into that building itself... Water insecurity and water scarcity is affe...

Neil Grimmer is Brand President of SOURCE Global, innovator of the SOURCE Hydropanel, a renewable technology that uses the sun to transform water vapor in the air to clean, safe and perfectly mineralized drinking water. The Public Benefit Company’s mission is to bring perfect drinking water to every person, every place, and Neil leads its marketing, consumer packaged goods and last-mile water solu...

"Changing cities is going to mean changing how we do politics in them. What kind of decisions do cities get to make? This changes pretty widely across countries and even states within the United States where cities can either get the benefit of the doubt that they get to decide what happens within their jurisdiction, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the United States, that's called Home Rule,...

David A. Banks is the Director of Globalization Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of the forthcoming book The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America published by University of California Press. He is also a delegate to the Troy Area Labor Council and the co-host of the podcast Ironweeds. "Changing cities is going to mean changing how we do politics in...

“So cities are amazing. Now, why are they amazing? Well, there's one aspect that relates to some of the work that my lab does on human social interactions, which is the main focus of what my lab does. We look at the mathematical, biological, psychological, and social underpinnings and consequences of human social interactions... As the size of the population grows, the combinatorial complexity, th...

Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist and physician who conducts research in the areas of biosocial science, network science and behavioral genetics. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis has authored numerous books, including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society publis...

“I was originally drawn to bees because they're social creatures. And as humans, I always wanted to know about ourselves and how we can be our healthiest selves and our healthiest society. Bees and wasps, and all of these organisms have been around for so long. Bees especially have been around for 100 million years.” Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph. D. , is co-founder and CEO of The Best Bees Company, the la...

Noah Wilson-Rich, Ph. D. , is co-founder and CEO of The Best Bees Company, the largest beekeeping service in the US. He is a 20-time published author and 3-time TEDx speaker. He’s on a mission to improve pollinator health worldwide as a means to support our global food system and support the transformation of urban areas from gray to green. He is the author of The Bee: A Natural History . “I was o...