So, the future is already here. This is a quote from a favorite author we like, sci-fi author, William Gibson.

Hello and welcome everyone to our talk, Entrephinur, Liberating the Casual Workforce. Right. So how do we intend to affect this liberation, to set free the casual workforce? We achieve this liberation through our architectural project, Urban Totem.

Yeah, myself and Eileen, hi everybody. We are both architects and as such we study society. And we study society in order to build environments that facilitate social habits and modern behavior.

So that makes us pretty bad voyeurs. Essentially, as architects, we aim to project a collective future. And we find that this is the digital era, we know we live in the digital era. But yet somehow in the contemporary cityscape, physical and digital worlds are still somewhat kind of separate.

And we would like to change that. Good now. And so our project, Urban Totem, focuses on connecting these two worlds. Urban Totem is a street-level tangible piece of infrastructure that functions as

a display space, a social beacon and provides access to the digital multiverse. Urban Totems, digital refueling stations, we like to call them, provide every conceivable digital resource to the passerby. So whether you're out having your curry roast and you're looking for a place to work on your laptop,

or you've been out all day and you realize your handy is out of battery, we're all somewhat connected to our digital devices. That's probably an understatement. And so, but no one more so than a character that we like to call the entreflanur.

Right, so strange word. Maybe your new word for the day everybody. So it's essentially a mash-up. We've taken entrepreneur and flanur, mashed them together and we've created this new character called the entreflanur. But who is, what is a flanur?

Well, essentially Wikipedia put it best when they described them as an urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. But like you, if you're not too up on your linguistic history, maybe you don't know this term. But we can see our old flanur on the boulevards of Paris circa 1842

and his modern day counterpart, the entreflanur, circa right now on the streets of Kreuzberg or Mitte in Berlin. So, Baudelaire says of the flanur,

the crowd is his domain as the air is out of the bird or the sea to the fish. Strolling around the city, lounging in the cafes, soaking in the atmosphere of public spectacle. This is this guy's job description. And it acted to fill and drive his creative well.

Which all sounds really great as a job description. But most of us have to be a bit more rigorous with our work. That's where the entreflanur part comes in. Yes, I mean we acknowledge that work has changed. It has been revolutionized and the revolution is ongoing. So in this post-climate crisis, companies' hiring practices have been altered.

And so individuals armed with the tools of digital connectivity increasingly seek to become their own companies. So, like us, our modern day entreflanurs are highly skilled, educated and agile.

And part of their impulse towards creativity and innovation is directly linked to this connectedness, to this mobility. And all of this engenders a great sense of personal freedom.

So for them, the idea of being rooted to physical space for work is increasingly unattractive and kind of absurd. And so let us take you on a quick look back at the work landscape from which our entreflanur evolved.

Right, so we can start with office buildings and the dreaded office cubicle of the circa 1950s, 1960s era. Let me cut to the mid-80s when personal home computers became affordable. The home office enters the house.

Then, by the early 2000s, the mobile telephone becomes ubiquitous, especially when they're not the approximate size and weight of a brick. Poor Michael Douglas. So, now we have mobility and a free-range working where part of

a continuum that led to globalization and produced a round-the-clock work environment. This is no longer the nine-to-five work day, hilariously portrayed by one of our favorite movies of that name, which we recommend.

But, so, sorry. Right, so then we get to this de-formalized work space, culminating in a start-up culture or a freelance culture, a culture of casual work, where the lines between work behavior and leisure behavior are increasingly blurred.

Yeah, I mean, we now see bigger companies adopting these kind of informal and flexible work practices back in. They take them back into their environments. And so we see faces like Google and Facebook and Pixar all really proud of their soft rooms, their chill-out zones, and their play areas.

Yeah, lots of play. And, essentially, these are really all an attempt to create this sense of play and freedom in the office environment.

Right. But the Entres Lenor requires real personal freedom over these artificial types to fuel their productivity and to energize their creativity. And so they go where 90% of human interaction occurs, certainly here in Berlin, the cafe.

You know. You know. A place where lounging and working occurs seamlessly between mouse clicks, where going to work is less of a displacement in space and more of a behavioral shift. Like the flanors before them, Entres Lenors revel in the cosmopolitan metropolis, a place of anonymity and spectacle.

But, unlike the flanors, Entres Lenors require social media, digital space. So, this digital space can be thought of as part of an invisible infrastructure.

This invisible infrastructure is something like the telecommunications networks, the fiber optic cables, the satellite data transmissions, financial algorithms, all these invisible structures that we can't see. Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing. Like, we're surrounded by them every day. And, you know, just imagine for a second if they were all revealed, if we could see all of this data and radio waves and algorithms, you know, all of this stuff all around us. What would it look like? I kind of have a feeling it would look like a crazy digital soup.

And we're somehow all in it. So, yeah. So, in that digital soup, and with the Entres Lenors in mind, we'd like to show you briefly our project Urban Totem, which is a digital refueling station. And it links the physical and digital worlds. We designed the Urban Totem essentially to harness these invisible infrastructures,

and dedicate them, or kind of, especially for the modern knowledge worker. So, Urban Totems are mini outdoor rest stops, fully teched up, and all powered by hybrid solar energy.

As the name suggests, Urban Totems are a stacking, a vertical stacking of vital digital functions. And key amongst them, here's a little info kind of graphic. Key amongst them, there's lots, but key amongst them are high speed internet, digital device charging, when you're on the go, and web access.

And these are all free to the user. Yep, totally free. Also, integral in the Totem is new iBeacon technology.

So this means that you can connect your mobile device anywhere within the radius of the Totem. And this iBeacon technology facilitates seamless two-way communication. So, essentially, somewhere nearby in the new feature, on the streets of Berlin, you will

be lounging at a Totem, flaneur style, and you will be able to charge up. You can access our website, which has got great cultural content and things like that, and a really good insider city guard.

We like to think of it also in these terms. Okay, yes, so we think of it also, these Urban Totems, as a kind of urban acupuncture, connecting the invisible energies of infrastructure through key points along the city's collective body. By connecting Totem to Totem, or city to city, this gives rise to

an entirely new model of connectivity, one that is virtual and physical simultaneously. This is the city of the future. Orla and I are inspired by Berlin's use of the streets to speak civically through art and demonstration.

And so, Urban Totems are purposely put into the streets, creating a brand new symbiotic relationship between the streets and the web. Yeah, and this symbiosis occurs through the transfer of information backwards and forwards via upload and download. And across three key platforms, we have the Urban Totem website, the mobile app, and the interactive screen.

And the interactive screen is really important because it acts as a real -time window, a highly visible showcase for a new generation of startups and innovators. Also for video artists, musicians, a future multitude of creative endeavors.

And thus, we hope to create a new cultural stimulus for Berlin. Additionally, Urban Totems identify a yet undeclared need in society, that of providing a new type of workspace,

essentially docking stations, accessible, domestic, free, for the migratory worker, the freelancer, and the entrepreneurs, roaming around with their personal mobile devices, looking to plug in. Yeah, because, you know, let's face it, we all want to be everywhere.

We want to be in the virtual domain, and at the same time somewhere interesting and inspiring in the real world. And Urban Totem is that place. It's not just a digital refueling station for when you're running low on juice, but it's also a vital resource and a cultural beacon. And the natural habitat of the antroflanur.

So check us out, urbantotem.de. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. We will have a little discussion on all the three projects afterwards, so you can have a seat if you want to sit here or over there, as you wish.

So please keep all your questions in mind about Urban Totem. The next project that we're going to learn about is Connecting Cities. And please, Sousa Popp, welcome to the stage.

She's the founder of Public Art Lab and a designer and a curator, as she said. Is it going to take some minutes?

Yes, because if there are any questions, maybe we can just have them now. Questions?

Who actually designed the Urban Totem? Oh, sorry. I thought it was on. Yeah, we work this out between us.

We work it back and forth. I'll work on it for a while, then Orla. And that way, it's more of a rounded discussion rather than an ego trip. Okay, but yeah. Hello, everybody. Yes, thank you for the introduction.

My name is Sousa Popp, and I'm the initiator of a project called Connecting Cities, where I'm going to shortly present you today. And it's a project which is a multi-annual EU funded project, a culture program, 2007 and 2013. And we collaborate with 12 European cities, and now it's a worldwide expanding network.

Most of our partners are institutions who, yes, deal with this whole issue of urban screens and media facades and the cultural potential of these infrastructures. Maybe just a couple of words how we started.

I actually started with Miriam Stupak, who is an urban planner and now living in Torino. And we organized a couple of media facades festival here in Berlin at 2008. It was the time when the first, yes, huge, how can I say, digital screens have been set up at the media spray project

at the river of spray in Kreuzberg, and yes, as they were only showing advertisement, we have been thinking what is the socio-cultural potential of these infrastructures.

And as they are set up in the public space, they should also, yes, show cultural content. So with this sense of reclaim the screens, we started this first media facades festival and asked artists to develop participatory projects with these urban screens.

And it was also interesting at this time to find out that they are all operated through the internet. So the next step after 2008 was to think about networked infrastructure. In a European media facades festival, we connected already seven cities with these screens.

And yes, and what is, how can I say, the potentials? This is what I'm going to show you today with this Connecting Cities project.

This was too much, sorry. A little bit sound is nice, but I'm also going to talk.

Yes, so some of these partners which I'm going to present to you, they use the screens for a temporary usage to show cultural content, and others are owners of media facades. And so they have quite different challenges.

And we also use, of course, projections. And what is interesting with this medium is that we often define it as a membrane between the internet and the public space, the urban space. And so therefore, what we created and what you will see when you have a look at this film,

a lot of do-it-yourself tools and devices for social interaction with the urban screens. So, for example, some of the partners, what I said, like Linz Ars Electronica,

their challenge is to show permanently cultural content, and it's a role resolution media facade. So depending on the resolution, of course, on the place and, of course, on the urban context,

it is the criteria of what kind of content you are going to show and how you would like to challenge or use them as a social platform for interaction. We had three city scenarios, what we explored in the last years. The first one was the network city, so how to use these infrastructures

for citizens to have an intercultural dialogue from one to one city. And the second one was the participatory city in 2014. Here we explored the space around the screen, in front of the screen, as kind of shared encounters.

How can the people use them for opinion building? But also, of course, for all kinds of, yes, co-creating cities and exchanging with each others. And this year is the visible and invisible city topic,

where we are going to use them as zones for visualization of invisibly generated data or technologies. And all of our partners, we co-curate and co-produce the content together, so there is always an open call where artists can apply, and we select the projects together.

And then everyone is creating, every curator is creating his or her own program, depending on the local context. I think it's very important, if you work with these massive infrastructures,

to start from a site specific point of view. Yes, it's a global medium, it's very important to think about the local community, your audience, with whom you would like to develop the projects. Collegium Congaricum, for example, here in Berlin was a wonderful place for us,

and still is a wonderful place, of course, with a real projection window. You could add the four plays, we could experiment a lot, and in total, I think we now curated and co-produced around 70 projects.

And yes, so for example, if you have a look at this project, which is a good example for networked city, you have been looking into other cities, your eye was tracked and projected in the other city, and watching the other people. And also artists like Jeremy Bailey, who used them as a more mobile screen,

here he is represented on the iPad, and talking to the people remotely, yes, telepresently from his office and studio in Toronto. So these are a lot of examples for networked scenarios, most of them are playful, but of course you can also use them in a critical way.

And what is interesting about this medium, that we are very often invited to Smart Cities conferences, so when it's all about this bottom-up approach to Smart Cities, or social Smart Cities,

then it's of course interesting to have a look at this medium as a place for shared encounters, and of course also to have a look at the possibilities of how you can participate and co-create your city. I think this is the interesting part.

Yes, most of the projects also go to the neighbourhoods, it's not only that they are just in front of the screen, like this project here, the Telepuppet show, they go to the neighbourhoods, include the people and bring them back to the,

yes, it depends whether it's the projection wall or media architecture, in general we are talking about the urban media environment. And some projects, for example, like this one, I would also like to mention Smart Citizens Dashboard, it's an interesting project of Nina Valkanova, so they were asking, for example, the people about their cities,

and they could, on different topics and issues, vote and give their opinion about the living, or about housing, about working situations in their cities. And also this one, for example, what you see here in the background,

is like a flash mob dance, where the people use mobile devices, and it was a choreography, how they were dancing all together, and using the screen as a kind of platform for meetings,

and after they had this excursion to the neighbourhoods. Another one from two Istanbul artists who used them for opinion building, so they were also asking a lot of political questions where the people could answer, and they were visualised on the media facade of the Ars Electronica Centre,

but also in other cities. And yes, what I would say is this whole exploration of this medium started with urban screens, and of course we were also collaborating with a lot of urban screens networks,

but they all have their own business models, and this business model has of course a lot to do with the outreach of a mass audience, so what they prefer of course is that a lot of people pass by the screens in a very short time,

and so they are not so much interested in social interactions with screens. So more and more we collaborated with institutions, cultural institutions, or city-run screens who use them as a community platform,

and where of course we can create much more projects who have this participatory element. And now this year the visible and invisible city will take place in Jena in Germany,

it is a small town and a centre of optical technologies, and here we cooperate closely with companies and the universities, so the artists are invited to use these optical technologies to make invisibly generated data technologies visible to the public audience.

And it's a project for which we created the City Culture Science Lab, a platform where the companies but also universities and city actors meet constantly, and have the possibility to co-create this festival, which will take place in October from the 7th to the 11th of October,

and as one part of the Connecting Cities activities in eight further cities. So in Jena we will also be connected with the Ars Electronica festival, but at the same time with Guangzhou, which is the partner city in China.

And yes, so you of course are warmly welcome, and so far this is the last project of Julian Oliver, who were working hacking the screens with a wireless access point,

and transferring the content to the public screen. There are a lot of partners involved, and as I already said it's funded by the European Union, and yes, so thank you very much for your interest, and I think further questions we can ask afterwards.

Thank you very much. So the third project we will learn about is Make City. I welcome to the stage Francesca Ferguson. She is founder and CEO of Urban Drift. She is curator of architecture and urban issues. Do you have a microphone? Yes, good.

The stage is yours. Hello and thanks to Republika for this opportunity.

I'm here to do a brief presentation of something which has evolved over the last couple of years in Berlin, and with Berlin a lot of different partners, Make City. The Festival for Architecture and Urban Alternatives. I'll put up the German title because it's actually bilingual, the whole thing.

The Festival for Architecture and Urban Alternatives. It's taking place in June, and so it's evolved from a position where looking at what Berlin might need, or should need, or seems to need.

I'm a curator of architecture and urban issues, and I have actually been in this city pretty much continuously since the wall came down, and there's never been a kind of complete format or festival that's dealt with the intense pace and level of change

that have dominated Berlin, and the current state that we're in, in particular. So, when I say it's evolved, this festival from and with Berlin, what struck me always over all these years is that the city has kind of always been the site for sort of small scale,

middle scale, larger scale urban prototypes. For example, using the roofs of the city for urban gardening. We had a situation where we had one of the largest spaces of commons, of urban commons in our city, Templehof,

where it became very clear when there was a referendum, in 2013 now I think, and over 65% of citizens decided to vote against the Berlin Senate's urban master plan

for developing the space of the former airfield, Templehof, and the surrounding of this vast piece of tract of land. It was a resounding no vote, and this was a kind of a wake up call for the local government, I think, to sort of rethink how citizens want to be involved,

and can be involved, and perhaps should be involved, in the process of urban development. Another background to make city is actually something that you may have experienced yourselves if you've been here a longer time. Temporary gardens, projects like this developed with cultural funding

by Atelier Le Balto, landscape architects. There are numerous urban intervention and urban space projects that have been developed, not only in Berlin but in other cities, under the kind of guise of a cultural project, i.e. this is art, this is not about urban development. And I sort of wanted to encourage a shift in that perception,

because I think that when you have projects like this, temporary gardens developed at the back of museum spaces or in interstitial and leftover spaces of the city, with very, very minimal means. The landscape architects Atelier Le Balto developed a particular aesthetic

based on what's already there, including weeds, overgrowth, you know, just brach and vegetation, as you might say in German. And it's a very significant thing to have done, and it's done in the guise of being an art or artistically funded project.

I think this has to do with a completely different perception of making city, whether this be a small scale or whether this can be developed on a bigger scale. And so this quotes in German, because I think some of you also may be German speaking. One of the things that drove this idea of make city

is the fact that more and more people are looking upon Berlin at a moment where there's an extreme paradigm shift going on. You have increased amount of interest from investors in the public lands of the city, or in general the land and the spaces to be developed. Berlin has been selling off its public lands to the highest bidder

for a number of years. And architects who established here, including David Chipperfield, and others who are looking upon the city, have a saying that basically even though Berlin is not known for its industrial and economic strength,

it's discovered something that is much more interesting, which is a kind of, it's extreme contradictions, a kind of richness based on the extreme complexity and contradictions that epitomize the city. And on that basis, we are looking with make city at the notion of something which is, I think, a relevant issue

when you talk about the moment in the city that we're experiencing right now, this paradigm shift. On the one hand, you have this huge interest in development. On the other hand, you have a kind of increasing pressure on housing, on raising rents.

There's a lot of gentrification going on. Some people may say this is a classic normal development of any city that's undergoing a change, and that this is standard in a place like London. Perhaps we hardly ever talk about gentrification anymore. But we talk now with make city,

or we rather try and assemble a whole scene, a whole discourse, looking at the resources of cities. The sort of theme of make city this year, in its first, let's say, inauguration as a festival, is resourcing the urban. Which means looking at the resources of the city on every level.

And there is a kind of a European discourse here, because we are trying to bring together participants, thinkers, city makers, who are reflecting upon economies, urban economies, that are increasingly under strain.

I mean, in Europe, we have a situation where we're talking about austerity economics. What does that mean? How does that impact on the public services of a city? So, make city is kind of governed by, perhaps, or led by three main themes. We're looking at the notion of urban commons.

That's definitely inspired by what I was showing you before, these temporary gardens, moments in Tempelhof, and an incredibly powerful, I would say, politicization of the citizens of Berlin. On the basis of the fact that public lands have been sold to the highest bidder,

and citizens groups are realizing this is something that should be stopped. You have the development of round tables and civic groups that are protesting, that are trying to stop the Berlin Senate from continuing to sell land to the highest bidder. And what's evolved now, interestingly enough, is people are talking about a Berlin model,

even though Berlin is not the initiator of this, but it's called the Conceptverfahren in German. The notion that a concept needs to be attached to any property development notion of a space that is available, a piece of land that is available, that it's no longer okay that the investor with the high,

that bids the most, gets a piece of land or a piece of property in the city. And quite recently, the federal government stopped the sale of a huge area of Kreuzberg called the Dragona Arial, and this was a message, in a way, on a federal level too,

that this pressure from below, from civic groups, regarding public lands, and we could talk about this as commons, as land property that is shared, that this is going to create a very powerful change in the way one deals with further urban and property development

in the city. So the notion of commons is absolutely paramount to make city look at what's happened in this massive former airfield of Tempelhof. You have community gardens that have been built by civic groups, by individuals,

completely helter-skelter, completely ad hoc, very cheaply, very basic, and this is far away from the notion of the allotment or the Schreibergarten, that you have your little plot of land with a fence around it. So there's completely different forms of sharing and neighborliness that evolves from projects like this.

We're also looking at landscape architecture based on the notion that it can be developed in a participatory way. For example, this is a project by Topotek Landscape Architects in Superkielen in Denmark. It's an extremely formal realization of the notion of multiculturalism, which is debatable,

but it was developed in a participatory way, i.e. the citizens in this part of Copenhagen were able to submit designs or rather photographs and sketches of elements in public space and in public gardens that remind them of their own culture

and Topotek, as landscape architecture, selected those individual pieces to create a kind of a manifestation of multicultural space. Whether or not that functions in reality is left open that you'd have to experience it yourself. But the notion, can you actually design for diversity

is one of the issues when we're talking about commons. Another of the themes that is linked, of course, to this whole notion of civic engagement is urban open source, where we're using the expression from coding, in German we talk about participation and sharing,

but the notion of open source, that everyone, in the case of coding, of course, we're talking about experts, not amateurs, who are working on code, but we're looking at the idea that actually civic groups and citizens can manifest and design

and be part of creating an urban environment. Examples like this, we have guests coming from Zuluarc, a Spanish architecture collective that basically occupied a piece of abandoned land in Madrid and created the Campo de Sabada, which became a kind of a commons, a sort of ad hoc design commons.

How to maintain and design that notion of a shared space of commons is sort of debated and debatable within the festival. And of course, there are the sort of classic notions of participation, where children are involved, let's say, in transforming their own Kita, there are practitioners, architects,

like Susanna Hoffman from the Baupilorden, who have been doing this for years. A lot of this festival is in a way about drawing attention to small-scale, small acts that collectively say something quite powerful about alternative ways of making city, or urban alternatives. And I think it's really great to be part of Republica,

because, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that this year the Wissenschaftia, Zukunftat, City of the Future, was able to create a push for this debate on urbanism within the context of Republica by funding this. I think it's really interesting because what we're trying to do with Make City

is not bring together the usual crowd of architects and developers, or even architects who usually sit amongst themselves and developers who sit amongst themselves, and art practitioners who sit amongst themselves. And what we're trying to do is bring all of these elements together in a way that people will say is quite contradictory,

because in the festival center we're going to have a mix of people talking about the civic economy and crowdfunding. For example, this bridge in Rotterdam was a crowdfunded project organized by Zeus at an architecture in Rotterdam.

We're bringing together these ideas of new technologies, of the notion of transparency and sharing information, so a discourse that's actually definitely coming out of the design scene and also even the hacker scene,

and bring this together with people who are talking about urban governance and how, in fact, all of these new technologies that enable a different form of information sharing and a different form of transparency can, in fact, impact on the way that local government or state management is carried out is determined.

And you have these projects where you have the Berlin Senate, for example, local government talking about the concept for fun, the notion of conceptual development of an area. One of the largest development sites in Berlin is Zugliche Friedrichstadt, southern part of Friedrichstrasse,

a former flower market, Blumengroßmarkt, a vast area where you have three different groups of architects and investors developing individually plots of land and building commercial development and housing and a mixed use.

And what's happened here is that the architects themselves created the conditions for a shared conceptual development of the area, i.e. they went far beyond what they were commissioned to do by the investors. They made a push and won the bid for these pieces

of land at the Blumengroßmarkt, and they're politicizing their whole practice. That means they're getting together and they are talking not just about their building in the square meterage and getting the maximum rental or sale price out of each square meter,

they're talking about how to go beyond that to develop the spaces around the buildings and to develop a social project. One of those social projects is going to be the Bauhutte, which is basically a kind of a social container, if you like, for a whole connection with the local area. So this is the kind of thing people will be talking about. And we're looking at new forms of living

and working in the city. That's one of the third big themes. And we are sort of looking at Bauhutte and looking at forms of creating new architecture where actually there are social and communal spaces created in residential spaces. We're talking about urban high-rise

and buildings built entirely of wood, because this is another way of thinking city differently and designing city differently. And of course there's always this kind of nostalgic look at how parts of the city, and this is connected then to a wider debate because this is not just the case in Berlin, how waterfronts are developed.

How much of the waterfront is public? How much is private? How much do we have to fight for the fact that there needs to be greater accessibility on the water side? You have huge lobbies that also determine, particularly in Germany and Berlin, how the water is used, how the waterways of Berlin are used.

And so we'll have landscape architects and people talking about how to develop a different form of public park or public walkways along the banks of the Spree. Of course there's going to be a festival centre, and that's a site for debate, the former Czech Centre in the middle of Berlin. And one of the really important things, I think,

in trying to go, I haven't talked about one of the most important things, which is how this is financed, but I'll get to that. But one of the most important things that we're trying to do is to make this notion of making city, thinking city differently, urban alternatives, or andersmachn, making that accessible

and something that can be experienced by everyone. So Make City Open is one of the formats. It's a whole series of tours, over 45 different tours around the city. Carried out by people who are not professional tour leaders. Like, for example, we'll have a performance group talking about Kotbussatur, where there was a social movement

against the raising of rents, of a huge area there of social housing. We'll have landscape architects talking about urban landscapes of commons and how to design them in an intelligent way. But also, new models for living together, because I think one of the phenomena, and I can say this is why this place

may be such a magnet at the moment to so many people of different walks of life, is because there's a notion that there's still a certain amount of free space, conceptually speaking, financially speaking, to develop other forms of,

other models of living, or a project with a difference. So we're looking at, in this respect with Make City, we're looking very much also at different ways where people have come together to create a multi-generational

residential space out of a former school in Karlshorst, or we're looking at former industrial areas that have been converted to cultural use. It's about trying to make different forms of living together, even communal housing or co-housing, something that can be experienced by the audience.

So there's a lot of cultural centres included in this festival. I think one of the most important things to say as a final note about how this project evolved is that we didn't receive the classic funding from the Berlin Senate,

or we have funding from the science here, but in fact this whole festival, or rather almost two-thirds of it, has been financed by founding partners, so individuals and architects that have contributed an average of 1,500 euros each to make this possible. And those people are co-designing the event.

So when you see all the different partners involved, they've actually co-designed and co-curated it. So it's participatory, and it's trying to be different from, let's say, a classic Biennale or festival that is kind of top-down, managed by a handful of curators. And I think that's the exciting thing. So there's a whole kind of mid-level

also seen of architects and designers and planners, young, established, successful, mid-scale, who have determined the ideas and the debate. And I think that's one of the things that I think is kind of very exciting for me personally to have experienced in the last eight months or so,

in the evolution of the festival. Thanks. Sorry, I've taken a bit longer. Thank you very much, Francesca. Would you join the others on the stage? So we now have the possibility to have some questions. Are there any questions?

So you know now that we need some questions. You can think about them. My question would be for Urban Totem is there are so many people that want to occupy these spaces, so what was the reaction of the city

and other people when you said we want to put those Urban Totems in the city? Is this on? Yeah. Generally we've had a really good reaction so far. I think the key is that it offers something back that of course

the financial model will have to be funded partly by advertising. That's kind of just a reality. And we're working on the basis of so many digital businesses that people get content and information for free and ours is a service, I guess, services for free. And in return there's a kind of trade-off, I guess, of a small amount

of advertising. But for us as architects and interested in the arts, etc. For us the main thing that I can give over to the city is this kind of showcase, this very visible space for people to display their ideas. So in that way I think

it's had a good reaction. Generally we've had a really good reaction. So when are we going to see the first totems in the city? That's a good question. Our parents are asking as well. Well, we have a timetable that's dependent on a few ongoing negotiations. So hopefully

the first launch will be next summer. That's what we're aiming for. Would this be in Berlin? Yeah, we have to start it here. We're in love with the city. I think what's interesting in this case is how you've basically been quite you know, you're working like in a way a start-up. I mean, you're just basically

putting out this product and making sure that it gets it manifests itself in the city. No one's commissioned you to do this, right? No. No, it is a start-up. No one commissioned you to do media screens either. No one commissioned me to do my city. I think that's one of the interesting things about these kinds of evolution. It's not

commissioned. It's not someone... It's a new way of for architects to work. We usually wait for a client to roll in the door, but now it's sort of, we're kind of doing the other thing, starting up, doing start-ups because it's kind of possible lately.

So, yeah. Okay, any questions to these three interesting projects? So this Make It City? Make It City. You're saying you didn't get any local

yes, from the city, but what did the city say? Will they listen to what you're... Well, we hope so. I mean, what's happening now is that the pressure is kind of greater because a lot of the participating architects, collectors, cultural centers that are developing program for the festival, they are actually calling

upon various local politicians to be at their events. So there's this suddenly there's this collective pressure on representatives of the Berlin Senate. So it's less me personally asking them. I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to involve them in the discourse and in the evolution of the project, but there's

a long history of Berlin authorities being extremely hands-off with things like this and waiting very much to see if a format is successful or not before they associate themselves with it. So, but you still now have the thinking that they might be listening because they need to listen to you, don't they? Well, I mean, I think

as I say, there's a kind of in a way there's a kind of absurd freedom to having of course we have our commitments to founding partners. It's a commitment because we're doing we're offering them a platform. So we have to, we have contracts with them all, but there is

beyond that, having a kind of sponsorship money, et cetera, and having a kind of a very interesting form of funding which is purely by chance from the city of the future, which the Wissenschaftzia Zukunstadt, the city of the future theme this year, purely by chance. They're just happy that some projects like this evolve

so they don't interfere. And I think there's a great freedom there to say things. I think that's what a lot of the architects are doing. They're basically using the festival, not just oh, I open my doors, there's a few crates of beer in my studio, and you can come in an evening and talk to me about stuff. No, they've actually developed a program

according to our three key themes. So the whole program is, that's the one thing we said. There's a framework, there are three main key issues. Please relate everything you do whichever format you choose to those issues. And that's what they're doing. And they're using it as a political platform, many of them.

Okay, so any questions? Evolving? No? I have a question, actually. What I find interesting in the Make City idea is this relationship between the experts, whether they be coders or architects, and the

community, and how that interaction happens. Because you mentioned the Ephile project, the one with the Blumgarten and that one's really interesting because, as you said, the architects not just make the building or the details for the building, which is quite a thing in itself, but to design the interaction with the community. That's another entire design

of stuff. So I find that very interesting in a way that we're all kind of stepping outside of our comfort zones, maybe. And trying these new formats, whether it's a start-up, whether it's community organizing, because you want to empower people but you want to also direct all that energy in a really

good way that's productive. Voices are heard and it's interesting. Yeah, and also it's never economical for an architect ever to indulge in participatory planning unless, like the project in Copenhagen, in Denmark,

there is the city as an investor and they pay a company that is specialized in participatory planning and design. And they do the website and they talk to all the citizens and they organize all that. But actually beyond the sort of symbolic post-it citizens can put their wishes on a

post-it sticker and stick it on a wall. I mean, the moment you really start to get to grips with true participation of the future users of the building or the future residents, you know, you grapple with a lot of issues and a lot of problems and it's sweat equity. I mean, you're not paid for it necessarily, but

investors have to wake up and listen a bit more to this because the fact is they're going to be under pressure to prove that they are in fact developing with the future residents or the local residents in mind and they won't just be able to get away with plonking down another kind of loft living development

or, you know, with offices attached. You know, you can't get away with that so much anymore. That's great. That's true. Do you have a question? No, I'm having assigned no more questions. So thank you very much for your interesting projects and we will continue in 15 minutes.

Thank you.