Theme: CITYx

CITYx is an idea, an invitation, and an experiment. It is where we live and who we are. It is our joys and dreams made manifest. CITYx is where we illuminate our blind spots, set fire to our assumptions, and reinvent the world we make in our image. CITYx is TEDxVienna’s annual salon event concerning all things urban. In 2015, CITYx turns its attention to cities of the future and the future of cities.

MAK Museum für angewandte Kunst
Stubenring 5
Vienna, Wien
Austria

Adrian Atkinson

Practical Utopian

Born in Britain and raised in Switzerland, Adrian has worked and lectured in over 50 countries on all continents. As an urban strategist, he works primarily with local authorities and environmental NGOs. Over time he co-founded a number of organizations involved in planning and environmental management and/or campaigning and thence in developing methods in Local Economic Development. For many years he taught graduate students at University College London and between 2003 and 2008 was appointed Professor in Berlin’s Technical University. Although well-past retirement age, he continues teaching and writing books and journal articles.

Andreas Förster

Andreas focuses on where design, cities, and code meet. He is a founding member of both “Animal Design Studio”, a strategic design practice revolving around sense-making, and “FragNebenan”, a hyperlocal social network for urban neighborhoods in Vienna. Other projects include “Neighbourgood”, a book that looks at how urban communities are shaping their immediate surroundings, and “Transformap”, which maps urban commons and socio-economic innovation. Questions driving his work include the role of technology at the local level and how a human scale can be applied to social technology.

Eric Corijn

Eric Corijn is cultural philosopher and social scientist who is currently Professor Emerita in Social and Cultural Geography at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). He is the founder of “COSMOPOLIS, Centre for Urban Research” at the VUB, vice-chair of the Brussels Studies Institute, and director of the Brussels Academy. In addition, he is the author of more than 250 publications; his latest book is called “The Brussels Reader”.

Eugene Quinn

Eugene Quinn was born to Irish parents in London, and grew up in London, Leeds, and Toulouse. He has broadcast on BBC and FM4, and organizes art events across Vienna. Before the UEFA Euro 2012, he reported from Kyiv and Donetsk on the situation in Ukraine in the buildup phase. Quinn regularly stages urban interventions to play with the city, build social capital and send out new political messages. Furthermore, he is a founding member of "space and place" with which he organizes "Vienna Coffeehouse Conversations", "Vienna Ugly Tours", "Der Grosse Marsch durch Wien", and "magdas Social Dinners".

Herr Finnland

Herr Finnland’s company, “Herr Finnland E.U. – Veranstaltungsdramaturgie & Production”, specializes in creative concept design for large events such as Fête Impériale, Life Ball Vienna, and many others. In 2011 he created his event concept series, “Nesterval – Adventures in the City”, which comprises public and private adventure tours, historical treasure hunts, and corporate team building events for brands including Swarovski, FM4, Kunsthalle Wien, and Pro7Sat1Puls4.

Lucy Bullivant

Lucy Bullivant is an award-winning author, critic, curator, and consultant specializing in architecture and urban design. She is a founder and editor-in-chief of “Urbanista.org”, a webzine about urban design and contemporary social, cultural, and political patterns. Her global urban research of contemporary masterplans and adaptive planning convinces her that societies need to plan their community environments. Today both the formal and the informal city benefit from urban design frameworks grown from existing realities, helping to build social and natural capital.

Mahir Yavuz

Mahir Yavuz is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher, and artist based in New York. He works as a creative director of data science and visualization and he is a Ph.D. candidate in interface culture at the University of Art and Design, Linz. His research analyzes data driven cities and the social impacts of big data in future cities. Besides creating data driven artworks as wearables, sculptures, and performance, he also creates rich visualizations to display how data is being used in the context of cities. His work is mostly motivated by politics and the social impacts of data and technology.

Mirjam de Klepper

In 2014 Mirjam de Klepper founded "Vienna Shares", a NPO about sharing economy, collaborative consumption, and general sustainable wellbeing in the city. In 2015 she co-founded "Vienna Skill Smiths", a new kind of school about everything, where everybody can learn and teach. This social enterprise offers affordable, short, single-session classes ranging from “Understanding EU politics” to "Longboarding for beginners". A third project, "Étiquette. Mode mit Geschichte", is on its way. It aims to bring together generations through sustainable vintage fashion. "Étiquette" has been short-listed for the Social Impact Award 2015.

Sabine Knierbein

Urban Researcher

Sabine Knierbein is an international expert on public space. She studied landscape design before concluding her Ph.D. in urban studies at Bauhaus Universität Weimar, where she started exploring relations between public space, the philosophy of science, and research as action with impact. Sabine is an innovator who (re)designs academic curricula and research fields for engaged urban professionals. As director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space (TU Wien), her fields include urban theory, urban governance, spatial resistance, and urban emancipation. Her lecture addresses spatial dilemmas between crisis and innovation and offers a different utopian approach to the city by relocating public space in the spatial presence of our own actions.