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Welcome to What is the future for cities podcast! I am incredibly honoured that you have chosen to listen to this podcast. My name is Fanni, and this episode is especially for the introduction of the podcast and myself, being the host.

Let’s start with the shorter part, myself. I was born in Hungary, lived my almost whole life there and graduated as an architect-engineer from the university. During my tertiary education, I went to work in Hungary, Switzerland and Shanghai, being all over the world and experiencing very different parts of my profession, including architecture, engineering, urban design, project management and consulting.

Architecture, for me, is a profession, first and foremost, not a job. With architecture, we can solve problems spatially, bringing together vision and reality, imagination and physics, desires and budget. For me, it is much more than just pretty houses on paper. Plus, I am infused with designer and technical parts at the same time, which creates marvellous insights and sometimes internal tensions in planning for me.

While I was working as an architect, a project manager, an urban planner, a master planner, a heritage handler, and so on, on the side of the client or the developer, I realised something with my profession: the practitioners whom I worked with were rather lost in the daily tasks instead of consciously creating the future. I was no better than them; I did the same. It was just weird to see the great practitioners planning beauty without really thinking about this beauty’s future.

Thus, my own PhD research was born, situated in Australia, with the main question of how the design professionals approach the future of cities and how they operationalise this approach in their own practice. Since I was interested in this regarding cities, the designers meant architects, urban planners and engineers, because they are the group of people who actually have influence on the built environment. As I experienced it in my work, I wanted to encourage better places in our built environment, and for the start of my research, this better place was the smart city concept.

Research usually starts with getting to know what has been done in the field to understand what has been already achieved and understood. So I read a lot about smart cities. However, as the research went on, I realised that there is no real smart city; the concept is basically a huge mess, with different understandings from all over the world, as the scientific and practical literature proved.

The next step of my research was to interview practitioners to collect their understanding of the smart city concept and the practicalities of using such a concept in real life. However, this was also proved to be a little hard – many of my interviewees did not agree with the smart city concept but had different ideas for the future of the city, which varied widely. Additionally, they acknowledged the need to get to know scientific literature, as it can enhance the scientific inventions’ inclusion into the design practice, but they did not have the time and or resources to do so. Moreover, they were keen to know how others think about the future of cities.

And this is how the podcast’s idea came to life in 2021. As a researcher and a designer at the same time, I am in a unique position to provide the bridge between theory and practice for the future of cities.

Therefore, the podcast will look like this: there will be several research episodes, marked with the letter R, summarising one research article each, in about 10-15 minutes – I promise I will keep this limit, although sometimes it is really hard to do so. These summaries are not produced to substitute the article but to give a sense of its topic and encourage everyone who is interested in that topic to read the article itself.

And there will be several interviews, marked with the letter I, with people who are actively working towards the future of cities. These interviews will vary in lengths depending on the interviewees themselves. There will be one-on-one interviews most of the time, and sometimes a round table discussion will also be introduced.

As the futures of our cities are diverse, numerous and interesting for many professions, the interviewees will not be only designers, including architects, urban planners and engineers, but every professional who is actively working towards a specific urban future. They will be asked how they arrived to their understanding and how they approach this in their practice. One set of questions will be asked from every interviewee:

1. What does the future of cities mean to you?
2. What are the three biggest concerns regarding the future of cities for you?
3. What are the three biggest opportunities regarding the future of cities for you?
4. What are the three biggest strengths regarding the future of cities for you?
5. What is your role in the future of cities and in the establishment?

There is no agenda with this podcast; I do not wish to prove any concept right or wrong. I simply wish to discuss its merits to the fullest possible depths and to start the discussion even outside of this podcast. My interviewees for the PhD research proved to be a versatile group with different ideas that could easily complement each other. Therefore, this podcast aims to help everyone who wants to work on the future of cities with scientific evidence and, hopefully, interesting conversations with very different approaches. The discussion could help us find a way, a better or just a more conscious way towards the future of cities.

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting introduction for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!