Conscious Cities Festival 2019 | Day 1 | Building Resilient Communities
How our cities fare under environmental, social, or political stress is a measure of their resilience and ability to protect and support individuals and communities. Whilst resilience in urbanism usually refers to how built infrastructure can cope with natural disasters and climate change, Day 1 of the Conscious Cities Festival will focus on the resilience of the city’s social fabric.
How can we design cities to promote social cohesion that not only ensures communities thrive through challenges, but also that individuals aren’t left behind? The day’s events will propose paths forward through case studies and the development of science-informed architecture, urban design, and decision making
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Mission Statement
The mission of the 2019 Conscious Cities Festival is to provide a four-day learning environment to explore how science-informed design can create a healthier, more inclusive city. Using a multidisciplinary approach grounded in principles of racial equity and social justice, the festival aims to facilitate dialogue among individuals, organizations, and institutions working towards common goals in efforts to spur collaborative and creative solutions for achieving just communities.
The 2019 Festival
Building on the conscious cities movement’s previous events, each day of the festival will tackle pressing issues facing today and the future’s urban population, grouped into four themes: Resilience, Families, Aging, and Mental Health.
Designers, community planners and organizers, advocates and activists, decision- and policy-makers, and behavioral scientists will present forward-thinking approaches to share knowledge in the week’s workshops and public lectures. We will be joined by representatives of New York’s City Hall and other city agencies interested in the latest innovation in planning and engagement with local communities, and how psychology and neuroscience can inform the design of our cities.
Hosted by our venue partner Pratt Institute, the festival will highlight how behavioural science and design can inform one another to better suit the needs of communities and individuals. Participants will co-develop human-centered measures of impact and promote political and economic arguments to sustain investment.
Conscious Cities and The CCD
The Conscious Cities movement began in 2015 emerging out its Manifesto which advocates for environments that are aware and responsive to the needs of people. It is envisioned as the integration of technology and science-informed design, taking insights from psychology and neuroscience to create a healthier, more inclusive, and democratic built environment. Since then, numerous events and publications have contributed to promoting positive social impact through design that is grounded in research and evidence.
The CCD is a think tank focused on using design to address urban issues facing society today and in the future. We see the continued urbanization of the world population presenting both challenges and opportunities to building an environment that improves health and wellbeing. The centre acts as a home to the Conscious Cities movement and as a hub for human-centered and science-informed architecture and urbanism.
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen writes, lectures, and consults about the design of architecture and landscapes, cities and urban design, infrastructure and public art – all the things that constitute the built environment. The author of the widely discussed Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (HarperCollins, 2017).
Goldhagen is a contributing editor at Art in America and Architectural Record; for many years, she was the New Republic’s architecture critic, and taught for a decade at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Goldhagen has been an invited guest lecturer at numerous universities and colleges in the US and Europe, and her award-winning essays appear regularly in professional and general-interest publications.
