Future Cities Forum

What will today’s cities look like with tomorrow’s technologies?

Our cities are increasingly powered, influenced, or controlled by algorithms, driven by rapid advances in ‘smart city’ technologies with incredible potential for disruption.

But incredible disruption can mean the displacement of old powers as much as it can mean the displacement of the disadvantaged? How will we work together to weather the disruption ahead? As the city gets smarter, how we will manage this ‘intelligence’? Will the algorithmic city eliminate or perpetuate bias, prejudice, and inequality? Will these new technologies be an invisible force creating a new sustainable city or will it be a machine world almost unrecognizable to us? The reality of the future city will, most likely, be neither dreamland nor nightmare, but some complicated in between.

The Future Cities Forum is not about making a prediction, but preparing to be a part of the inevitable change ahead. We want you to ask the question, in the city of the future what role will I play?

Smart cities need smart leaders

Artengine and Impact Hub Ottawa are bringing together emerging young leaders from the technology, social impact, and creative sectors to explore and examine possible futures for our cities. The Future Cities Forum will be an opportunity for knowledge exchange and relationship-building between these sectors, and aims to provoke critical inquiry about these possible futures.

The Forum will kick off with an evening of keynote speakers who will share their speculations on future cities in the context of emerging and disruptive technologies, which will be open to the public. The second day is a more hands-on and experiential, aimed at a curated audience of young professionals – talented individuals who will be in positions of leadership and influence in the coming years and decades – to help equip them with the knowledge, networks, and collective capacity to better understand the social and cultural implications of smart cities and their inevitable disruptions to the way we live, work, and play.

Join us

Stay tuned for more information in the new year. To be notified when tickets go on sale for the public event and registration is open for the conference, please contact Eszter Gero at eszter@artengine.ca.