Cities as Drivers of Well-being

As the global economy treads cautiously to recover from recent crises, our combined endeavors seek to rejuvenate urban landscapes, ensuring they are economically vibrant, environmentally sustainable, and fundamentally people-centric.

In ancient Greece, the polis was conceived as an ideal organized community gathered around a territory. In less than ideal circumstances, our cities or modern polis find themselves at a crossroads where the need for economic recovery and growth after great shocks intertwines with the greater needs for sustainability and well-being: for growth and recovery to be sustainable, we need cities that can absorb, recover, and prepare for future shocks with a green and human-centric lens.

Resilient polis are urban spaces that thrive by championing the identity of the place and their peoples, projecting beyond crisis and into the future by creating and sharing narratives about how we aspire to live. As such, cities are not just hubs of economic activity, but living organisms that reflect the aspirations, identities, and dreams of their citizens.

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The process of making polis more resilient to meet the needs of present and future generations underscore the importance of sensible observation and designing using a holistic perspective. The side event celebrating Urban October is meant to showcase experiences in which this way of thinking is being implemented successfully or where there is an opportunity for integrative methodologies of urbanism to be integrated as a way to improve the lives of the inhabitants of the future polis.-