The festival brings to public attention and debate some of the new thinking about cities taking place around the world. Cristiana Fragola (Rockefeller Foundation) talks about resilience; Eva Gladek (Metabolic, Netherlands) speaks on cities, systems thinking and the transition to a more sustainable state; Richard Sennett (LSE) puts forward the case for a new Charter for Athens; Brent Toderian (Toderian Works, Vancouver) looks at making cities liveable; Charlie Catlett (Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago) talks about cities and the Array of Things and Mark Walport (Government Chief Scientific Adviser) identifies the key new lessons to come out of the Foresight Future of Cities work.

Speaker biographies:

Cristiana Fragola is the Regional Director for Europe and the Middle East of 100 Resilient Cities, pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation. She was previously the European Regional Director for the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. In that role, she developed and managed relationships with 19 European cities, connecting them with the C40 global network to support the successful implementation of their climate action plans. She also promoted city-to-city strategic partnerships for participation in EU funded projects. Prior to joining C40, she served as a legal advisor to the UN Development Programme, Deputy Director of Sustainability of the New York City Housing Authority and Director of MillionTreesNYC, a PlaNYC initiative.

Eva Gladek is the founder and CEO of Metabolic, a cleantech development and systems consulting firm. Her work integrates knowledge from across the natural and social sciences to develop innovative solutions in sectors as diverse as agriculture, electronics and information management. She began her scientific career as a molecular biologist, and continued on to work as a science journalist and television producer before developing her expertise in industrial ecology. She is an expert in technical environmental management techniques such as Life Cycle Assessment, Material Flow Analysis, and applying green design principles.

Richard Sennett is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University and a member of The Decent City, a Social Science Research Council project. He is also the co-chair of Habitat III's New Charter of Athens project. He is the author of a number of books, including Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation and The Foreigner. He is currently writing Making and Dwelling, a book about open systems and urban design.

Brent Toderian established TODERIAN UrbanWORKS, a Vancouver-based consultancy providing services in advanced urbanism, city planning and urban design, in 2012. Previously, he was Vancouver's Chief Planner, with accomplishments that included 2010 Winter Olympics-related planning and design; the EcoDensity and Greenest City Initiatives; new visions for multi-modal mobility and active transportation; place-making and public place design strategies; and the Laneway Housing program. He has been an advisor and collaborator with many global cities, from Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and Rotterdam, to Sydney, Medellin, Ottawa and New York. He is the founding President of the Council for Canadian Urbanism.

Mark Walport was appointed Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) and Head of the Government Office for Science in April 2013. As GCSA he is co-chair of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology (CST). He has also been Director of the Wellcome Trust; Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Medicine at Imperial College London; a member of the India-UK CEO Forum and UK-India Round Table; a member of the advisory board of Infrastructure UK; and a non-executive member of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research. He received a knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours List for services to medical research and was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2011.

Charlie Catlett is a Senior Computer Scientist at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division and a Senior Fellow at the Argonne/University of Chicago Computation Institute. His current focus areas include cyber-security, distributed computing and mobile/embedded computing. From 2007-2011, he served as Argonne's Chief Information Officer. He was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 to 2004.

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