Listen to the episode:

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Check out the trailer:

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“We are architects of our life, not victims of it”

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Are you interested in the city as the emergent property of the urban agents? What do you think about collective responsibility? How can we create better urban futures?

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!!!!Book giveaway details at the bottom!!!!

This is a very special celebratory birthday episode because I am interviewed by a very special guesthost – Ben Vass, Graph Shaman. Ben interviewed me because I finished my PhD and thought it is time to share my knowledge with you guys – using the birthday celebration as well. We talk about my vision for the future of cities, smarter cities and smarter approaches, collective responsibility, Vitruvian and many more.

Fanni Melles is a future of cities researcher, an architect by profession, and a project manager by experience, born in Hungary and now living in Melbourne, Australia. Her enthusiasm for the future of cities led her to create the WTFforCities? podcast (What is The Future for Cities?) where she summarises research articles and interviews people who are actively and consciously working for the better future of our cities. Fanni is completing her PhD studies at Swinburne University of Technology about the future of cities, smart cities, and their operationalisability in practice. Her unique ability is creating practical and orderly systems from chaos and ambiguity to answer questions and improve systems. Fanni firmly believes that cities are the emergent properties of the people living in them so she is working on helping people to have better urban influence. She is also convinced that each city needs a specific future and she wants to facilitate their transformation.

Ben Vass is the kind of person who wants to build a Dyson swarm and explore the stars, while in the meantime wants to understand how this consciousness thing works. He is always standing between 2 worlds and trying to connect them. Due to his strange brain he sees everything as a network of networks, and tries to find the next intellectual thrill. In the past he had worked on swarm intelligence projects, spectral graphs, fraud detection, and GNNs to name a few, and also he contributes to Open Source whenever he can. Everything is a network, you just don’t see it yet, according to him.

Ben’s voice can be very familiar because he is the voice in the intro.

You can find out more about me through these links:

• ⁠Fanni Melles⁠ on LinkedIn;
• ⁠@fannimelles⁠ as Fanni Melles on Twitter;
• ⁠Fanni Melles⁠ website;
• ⁠Making future cities ‘smarter’⁠ PhD thesis at Swinburne Research Bank
• ⁠WTF4Cities⁠ podcast on LinkedIn;
• ⁠WTF4Cities⁠ website;
• ⁠@WTF4Cities⁠ as WTF4Cities on Twitter;
• ⁠Fanni Melles⁠ on RTRFM On Record program;
• ⁠Fanni Melles⁠ on RRR ByteIntoIT radio;

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• ⁠No.003 – Interview with Frans-Anton Vermast⁠;
• ⁠No.138 – Interview with Luis Natera⁠;
• ⁠No.147 – Interview with Damian Hewitt⁠;
• ⁠No.154R – Smart city, smarter city, smarter approaches⁠;

!!!!Book giveaway details!!!!

You can enter the giveaway to get one of the books very connected to this podcast:

• Antifragile from Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
• What we owe the future from Will MacAskill or
• Brighter from Adam Dorr

You only have to answer at least one of these questions on LinkedIn or twitter below the birthday episodes’ announcements.

1. What did you learn this year from these episodes?
2. What was the most interesting and important for you?
3. What would you like to learn more about in the future?
4. What action did you take after these episodes?

After a week, I will draw the winners and let you choose from the books whichever you prefer – very exhuberant audience members could even ask for my thesis if wanted, but the give-away is more about the books not my thesis. So answer at least one of the questions on LinkedIn or twitter in the coming week and you can enter the draw!

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