S04 Ep. 13. Joni Baboci - Cities in Flux: from Bureaucratic control to Participatory Ecosystems

In this podcast, we dive into the shift towards a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci, an architect, planner, and urban enthusiast. We discuss how the modernist paradigm of deconstructing everything into individual parts and putting them back together linearly is becoming less relevant. Instead, we see a shift towards a more organic, bottom-up approach that looks at the city as a complex and multi-layered system.

Joni Baboci is the founder of Layer, a spatial orchestration platform that empowers teams to govern through tactics and patterns while leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has previously served as the General Director of Planning and Urban Development for the City of Tirana and the director of Atelier Albania, a structure of the Albanian government dealing with national and regional strategic planning. Joni has executed planning, design & development projects at different scales at the national, regional and local levels.

Joni shares his insights on how technological advancements such as AI and blockchain are enabling bottom-up processes in planning and thinking about cities. We also delve into the challenges of making these ideas practical and building a process of making them a reality. Joni highlights the importance of reinventing physical production through local value loops, and incentivizing the interconnection between urban and rural scapes.

We also discuss how DAOs and blockchain technology can improve local governance and participation, and how cities can invest in citizen-based entrepreneurship that let them decide how to perform a job or access a service rather than relying on a top-down approach.

Join us as we explore the potential of a more decentralized and organic approach to city planning with Joni Baboci.

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/joni-baboci

Key highlights