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

Ibrahim AlHusseini was born in Jordan and raised in Saudi Arabia by parents who are Palestinian refugees. He emigrated to the United States in the 1990s to attend college at the University of Washington and he currently resides in Los Angeles.  AlHusseini is a venture capitalist, sustainability-focused entrepreneur, and environmentalist. He is the founder and CEO of FullCycle, an investment c...

“Is it okay that you benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else? Is that a way that you really feel like you are winning at life? If not, then reconsider what you’re doing and just realize that we all live in this inextricably connected closed sphere in the middle of space. Anything that harms one area harms every area. There is nobody who can escape dirty air, dirty water, dirty food,...

Ben Pring is the director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. In 2018 he was a Bilderberg Meeting participant and in 2020 was named one of world’s top management thinkers by Thinkers 50.  He co-authored Monster: A Tough Love Letter On Taming the Machines that Rule Our Jobs, Lives and Code Halos with Paul Roehrig, and Future , What To Do When Machines Do Everything with Roehrig &...

Ben Pring discusses the future of work, cities, and the upside and downside of technology. “They’re single-purpose engines doing one thing in extraordinary ways, and they’ve been encouraged in that by the ecosystem around them, by the funding that’s being pumped into them by people whose only motivation is simply to make more money–and you can see the results of that in the world as this technolog...

Giulio Boccaletti, Ph. D., is a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he holds a doctorate from Princeton University, where he was a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow. He has been a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a partner of McKinsey & Company, and the chief...

36% of cities will experience water insecurity by 2050. Giulio Boccaletti discusses the politics and history of water. “The problem doesn’t really reside there. The problem is that people have gotten used to thinking about water as a technical issue that can be solved by somebody sitting in a room somewhere with a white coat. The reality is that the history of water shows that this is probably the...

“I think the next crisis is going to be a materials crisis. The whole point of moving from a zero-sum game–like who makes the best cheapest product at the lowest price and can find lowest labor somewhere around the world so someone can be happy with a new laundry machine and buy another one in five years–that’s not going to work for us.” Tiemen ter Hoeven is founder and CEO of Roetz, a manufacture...

Tiemen ter Hoeven is founder and CEO of Roetz, a manufacturer of circular bicycles and e-bikes. In the Netherlands alone, about 1 million bicycles are discarded every year - whilst many parts can still be used perfectly well. In the Roetz Fair Factory, the parts are cleaned, repaired, and reassembled into new bicycles by people with poor job prospects. Roetz’ mission is to bring circular design an...

Ashley Dawson is currently Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center , City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY . He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. He is the author of three recent books relating to these fields:  People’s Power  (O/R, 2020),  Extrem...

“The political struggle is really hard today and I feel like we haven't been winning, but I think it's important not to think of this as either we win it, or there's catastrophe and that's the end. We win or lose, and there’s this big tidal wave that kills us all. That's not the way the climate crisis is going to play out. It’s going to be a long, slow, attritional crisis punctuated by forms of na...

“In Edo Japan, basically life was pretty good, and they recycled everything. Everything was reused, upcycled. Waste was considered taboo. A person who was wasting was considered an ugly person. So there is a lot that we could talk about: design, the layout, scale. Buildings were rarely taller than two stories. Very good use of environmental features, microclimates, use of wind for cooling, passive...

Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Just Enough, Small Spaces, The Japanese Dream House , The Very Small Home, and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry . He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown...

“I mentioned before that one of the reasons why we haven't been able to overcome many of the climate crisis factors is because people don't understand what it means. What is it about? What can I do? Usually, when we hear these experts speak about the climate crisis, at least me, I don't understand 9/10ths of the speech or the document. Simplifying the message, allowing that difficult scientific kn...

Yolanda Kakabadse’s work with the environmental conservation movement officially began in 1979, when she was appointed Executive Director of Fundación Natura in Quito, where she worked until 1990. In 1993, she created Fundacion Futuro Latinoamericano , an organization dedicated to promote the sustainable development of Latin America through conflict prevention and management. She was the Executive...

“This is a very important question because cities are really living labs of everything that we're doing in terms of energy policy, and it’s extremely important that whatever we are putting forward in terms of policy, if it is not embraced by the citizens in cities on the local level, the best policies will not serve any purpose if they not really taken up by citizens. 
Of all of the Sustainable De...

Paula Pinho is Director of Just Transition at the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy. She was responsible for Energy Strategy and Policy coordination and then for Renewables and Energy System Integration Policy and Decarbonisation and Sustainability of Energy Sources. She was Acting Director for Energy Policy where she has overseen notably the work of international energy relations...