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Creating better cities together.
Thursday September 24, 2026 4:15pm - 5:30pm CEST
Buildings designed for 100-year lifecycles are financed on quarterly returns and planned within 5-year political cycles. Who is responsible after the ribbon-cutting?


Drawing on The Futures We Build playbook - developed as a collaboration between Perkins&Will London, Portland Design and the Royal College of Art - through cross-sector roundtables with 80+ built environment practitioners, this session introduces seven provocations that challenge short-term thinking in placemaking: from designing friction to counter algorithmic isolation, to treating emptiness as cognitive space, to extending accountability beyond handover through ongoing curation.


The session will explore how these provocations translate into action for placemaking practitioners: 
- What if loneliness is a shared design problem?
- What if great design isn’t meant to be frictionless?
- What if overstimulation is the design flaw?
- What if agency mattered more than perfection?
- What if art is as essential a utility as plumbing?
- What if opening day wasn’t the finishing line, but the starting gun?
- What if change was built in from the start?


Utilising these provocations through interactive discussion, participants will gain a diagnostic framework for identifying where short-term pressures eliminate long-term adaptability in their own placemaking work and explore how intergenerational responsibility shapes belonging, collaboration, experimentation, and resilience in public space.  
Speakers
avatar for Elisa Cecilli

Elisa Cecilli

Strategic Foresight - Senior Associate, Perkins&Will and Portland Design
Trained as an economist, I gravitated early towards its most intangible edges: culture, ideas, innovation, and the forces that shape how people live and what they value. This has defined over fifteen years of research and foresight work combining design thinking and cultural intelligence... Read More →
Thursday September 24, 2026 4:15pm - 5:30pm CEST
Kathy Madden Room - Wroclaw Congress Center (RCTB) Wystawowa 1, 51-618 Wrocław, Poland

Attendees (7)


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