Shows
The Masterplan#22 - Ocean Jangda: Technology as a lens for Urban ScienceOcean Jangda is a real estate expert, currently studying at the MIT, with a passion for technology and urban development.
Find more about Ocean here: https://oceanjangda.org2025-01-272h 54The Masterplan#21 - Mario Gonzalez Nevarez: Climate Injustice in Puerto RicoMario Gonzalez Nevarez is an urbanist based in Puerto Rico with a background in political science, architecture and climate adaptation.
Find more about Mario here: www.linkedin.com/in/mjgn/2024-08-282h 42The Masterplan#20 - Jordi Vivaldi: Architectural Philosophy and the Materiality of ReasonJordi Vivaldi is an architect and philosopher based in Vienna.
PhD Architect (IOUD, Austria) and PhD Philosopher cand. (EGS, Switzerland), his areas of research include various forms of Speculative Realism and New Materialism, as well as 21st century’s theory of experimental architecture, art and technology. His current field of philosophical investigation puts in relation the notion of ‘reason’ with the concepts of ‘mimesis’, ‘finitude’ and ‘fortune’ in pursuit of plastic modes of rationality. From an architectural perspective, Jordi’s research focuses on mobilising the notion of limit as a spatial device of limitude, liminality and limitrophy in order to recreate...2024-08-142h 42The Masterplan#19 - From the Top #3 with Leyla Saadi from Urban CollabsThe following is a conversion with my friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. It's Leyla's 3rd time on the show in our recurrent series we like to call "From the Top". Join us while we catch up, figure out who actually invented the airplane, how one can be in Mali and the Senegal at the same time, talk about Leyla's latest projects and try to unpack Advanced Urbanism, Ancient cities and Social Transition.
To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit:
https://www.urbancollabs.com2024-07-181h 21The Masterplan#18 - Firas Saffiedine: Spatial Internet, Metaverse, Architecture, NEOM & Ground Zero UrbanismFiras Saffiedine is a spatial design practitioner whose work spans urbanism, design, architecture, neurotechnology, and art. He is the founder of his own practice called Spatial Forces, the director of the platform Urbanitarian the Chief Metaverse Architect at Gamiumcorp and the Director of the NeurotechX Hackathon. His upcoming book called Spatialization Takes command: Notes on the Future of Urbanism, the Internet and life as we live it, is a commentary on the evolution of the internet and on the emergence of a new Spatial Internet. 2024-03-313h 01The Masterplan#17 - From the Top #2 with Leyla Saadi from Urban CollabsThis is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came...2024-01-061h 29The Masterplan#16 - From the Top #1 with Leyla Saadi from Urban CollabsThis is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came...2024-01-0658 minThe Masterplan#15 - The Urban DroughtAccording to some estimates, in the first two decades of the 21st century, 79 global big cities have suffered extensively from a drought disaster. Meanwhile, climate change has magnified urban droughts in both frequency and severity, putting tremendous pressure on our cities’ water supply.
This year Spain was in the headlines due to the record breaking heat waves, the lack of rainfall, the trucked-in water and disappearing lakes. It’s enough to make you wonder. Instead of ringing the bells of doom and saying that all is lost, we need to understand the scale of this problem, its sour...2023-08-231h 12The Masterplan#14 - The New against the OldIf you have lived in the same city for the last 15 to 20 years you have most likely seen parts of it change. Many times, foreign investors move into the city and big global retail brands start altering the fabric of a city’s cultural identity. We’ve all had this moment where we’ve walked around different neighborhoods of different cities and we’ve witnessed the exact same stores selling the exact same stuff.
In very rough terms, that’s how most people experience what we call gentrification a term that is very commonly associated with the deteriorati...2023-08-2249 minThe Masterplan#13 - Competing MetropolisesNot sure if you are aware but we are currently living in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yes fourth. There were 3 others. This one is the one that is all about automating traditional manufacturing and industrial processes through what we call smart technologies, machine-to-machine communication, and the internet of things. This new way of manufacturing is rapidly expanding to all corners of the Globe and it's not only disrupting old industries but also creating new ones.
What we call Industry 4.0 has led to the development of smart city initiatives in order to make living in cities more sustainable...2023-08-211h 05The Masterplan#12 - Text me when you get homeIt’s 2:00 am, you’re walking back home from a night of dining and drinking with your friends at the local bar. The streets are awfully quiet, a street light is flickering and all of a sudden a car alarm goes off in the distance. The hair on the back of your neck stand straight, your heart starts beating faster and you find yourself walking a bit faster as you feel more and more uncomfortable. You make a right turn and enter that scary alley you hate. You know it’s the quickest way to your door. The minute you en...2023-08-171h 01The Masterplan#11 - Vulnerable CommunicationsThe way we unravel the complexity of our work- whether it is in front of one person or of 1000 - is crucial to the development of the audiences’ understanding of the thing that we are trying to communicate. The ability to turn years of research into a succinct narrative that can be communicated in the form of a story is nothing short of a craft and a skill that many scientists lack. The few scientists that manage to become popular to widespread audiences are usually deprioritizing the complexity of their scientific methodology and promote a superficial distillation of their wo...2023-08-161h 20The Masterplan#10 - Climate MigrationOn August 8th 2023, the World Meteorological Organisation reported that the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which was implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission, confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded.
Samantha Burgess, the Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service said that we just witnessed global air temperatures and global ocean surface temperatures set new all-time records in July. These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet, as they expose us to ever more frequent and intense extreme events..
2023...2023-08-1532 minThe Masterplan#9 - AI GovernanceDuring the last decade there have been so many innovations in the world of technology. Self-driving cars, smartphones, space exploration, bio printing, internet of things. The list goes on and on. We are definitely undergoing a technological revolution. Among those was the recent deployment of a series of AI-powered chatbots that have opened new frontiers for the generation of images, videos, 2D, 3D models, text, code as well as art such as music and movies. The way we access and generate content has taken a major shift as we are finally seeing the first truly sophisticated results of years...2023-08-141h 09
The Masterplan#8 - Happy CitiesAre you happy? I know, I know it’s a tough question. It’s too subjective and too abstract. I mean what does it even mean? We say it depends on the person and it comes and goes based on so many different factors. However, we all deserve and are invested in the pursuit of happiness. This we can at least agree to, right?
Don’t worry I’m not going to turn this show into a therapy session. At the end of the day we are planners and what we are interested in is cities. And this is e...2022-08-2750 min
The Masterplan#7 - Wildlife in the CityDuring the worldwide shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many reports emerged of urban wildlife sightings. Sea lions were seen on a sidewalk of Mar del Plata harbor, south of Buenos Aires, a herd of buffalo was seen walking along an empty highway in New Delhi, a cougar was spotted in Santiago jumping onto a wall and finding shelter in an empty apartment and dolphins starting coming more frequently up the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul. The increase of similar sightings all around the world indicated that in the absence of “human” life, “wild” life reemerges.
Although we are s...2022-08-2124 min
The Masterplan#6 - PermacultureIn all honesty, I have no idea where the things I eat really come from. Like most of us, I grew up in the city and everything I ate always came from the supermarket. Even today I remain somewhat unaware of the links between the sourcing, production and distribution of food, and the ways in which I consume it. In many ways, I think we are all strangers to the journey our food takes before arriving at our table and it’s clear to me that the distance we’ve put between our kitchen and our food’s source is one...2022-08-1943 min
The Masterplan#5 - How to Hack a CityHave you ever been present for that magic moment when all the street lights in your city turn on at the same time? When I was a young kid I used to picture a person - a night light conductor - sitting in a room looking at their wristwatch and when the time struck 7 they would flip a big switch turning on all of the city lights. Now I’m older and I know that neither this person nor this big night light switch exists and that this magic moment happens thanks to a preset automated system. In fact, ci...2022-08-1838 min
The Masterplan#4 - The New SocialImagine if Instagram and social media closed every day at 6pm like a shop. We would all be forced to meet up and speak to each other in real life, to be present with our families, to work out, to go outside, to read, to make art, music... what a drag, right?
It’s been 3 years since Steven Bartlett a British entrepreneur and co-founder of SocialChain posted this tweet and since then it’s been constantly resurfacing on the internet. More and more studies are being conducted on the average time that we spend in front of some...2022-08-1550 min
The Masterplan#3 - For the Love of DataI’ll never forget the day I downloaded my first Twitter dataset. I was a student working on a submission, it was late at night and I was trying to find a way to make a map of what the citizens of Barcelona were saying on Twitter about their city. I was working hard on making my algorithm work until I got that damn line of code just right, clicked on “Run” and boom: my spreadsheet started to be filled with thousands of rows of information on all the tweets that had been posted in the last 2 months mentioning the wo...2022-08-1339 min
The Masterplan#2 - Smart (City) ContextsIn 2015 India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national “Smart Cities Mission”, an urban renewal program with the goal to develop smart cities across the sub-continent, making them citizen friendly and sustainable. The mission initially included 100 cities, with the deadline for completion of the projects set between 2019 and 2023. As of August 2022, which is when I’m recording this episode, the effective combined completion of all the commissioned projects stands at 11% which has put a lot of pressure on the national government to accelerate the completion of the remaining cities. The whole project has been shrouded in a mixture of unpre...2022-08-1047 min
The Masterplan#1 - The City as a Natural PhenomenonAs a kid, one of my favorite books was Heaven & earth: Unseen by the naked eye by Katherine Roucoux. It showed - chapter by chapter - intricate landscapes of increasing scale and distance, captured by microscopes, x-rays, satellites and telescopes. Each photograph was accompanied by an extended caption that explained it in detail, offering a dose of scientific information connecting it to the human scale. I absolutely loved it because it made obvious this mysterious correlation that seemed to occur between different natural systems. Regardless of whether you were looking at a human eye, a city, or the andromeda...2022-08-0834 min