A conversation with Ocean Jangda and Firas Saffiedine.

Ocean Jangda is a real-estate manager and urban technologist. His recent thesis at the MIT Center for Real Estate, titled Urban Technology: Rethinking Real Estate Development for the 21st Century, challenges how we build cities and argues for a development model that is deeply connected to biology, technology, and the biosphere.

Firas Saffiedine is an author and founder of the architecture practice Spatial Forces.

We explore questions about the future of development: What responsibilities do developers have? Can cities behave like living systems? How does information, matter, and energy shape urban futures, and what does it mean to design for the planetary scale? This episode dives into the mental models, ethics, and cosmic perspective required to rethink how and why we build.

Find out more about Ocean and Firas here:

https://oceanjangda.org

https://www.spatial-forces.com

Ocean Jangda is a real estate expert, currently studying at the MIT, with a passion for technology and urban development.

Find more about Ocean here: https://oceanjangda.org

Mario Gonzalez Nevarez is an urbanist based in Puerto Rico with a background in political science, architecture and climate adaptation.

Find more about Mario here: www.linkedin.com/in/mjgn/

Jordi Vivaldi is an architect and philosopher based in Vienna. 

PhD Architect (IOUD, Austria) and PhD Philosopher cand. (EGS, Switzerland), his areas of research include various forms of Speculative Realism and New Materialism, as well as 21st century’s theory of experimental architecture, art and technology. His current field of philosophical investigation puts in relation the notion of ‘reason’ with the concepts of ‘mimesis’, ‘finitude’ and ‘fortune’ in pursuit of plastic modes of rationality. From an architectural perspective, Jordi’s research focuses on mobilising the notion of limit as a spatial device of limitude, liminality and limitrophy in order to recreate the concept of hospitality in the context of the Anthropocene. 

Jordi works or has worked as theory faculty/researcher in several international universities such as the University of Innsbruck (IOUD) and the Vienna University of Technology (TuWien – ATTP) in Austria, the UCL Bartlett in Great Britain, the IAAC-UPC in Spain and the Shenzhen University in China. In addition to several articles, essays and lectures, Jordi is the co-author of the book The Threefold Logic of Advanced Architecture (Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2021).

More information on Jordi's work: www.jordivivaldi.com

The following is a conversion with my friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. It's Leyla's 3rd time on the show in our recurrent series we like to call "From the Top". Join us while we catch up, figure out who actually invented the airplane, how one can be in Mali and the Senegal at the same time, talk about Leyla's latest projects and try to unpack Advanced Urbanism, Ancient cities and Social Transition. 

To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit:

https://www.urbancollabs.com

Firas Saffiedine is a spatial design practitioner whose work spans urbanism, design, architecture, neurotechnology, and art. He is the founder of his own practice called Spatial Forces, the director of the platform Urbanitarian the Chief Metaverse Architect at Gamiumcorp and the Director of the NeurotechX Hackathon. His upcoming book called Spatialization Takes command: Notes on the Future of Urbanism, the Internet and life as we live it, is a commentary on the evolution of the internet and on the emergence of a new Spatial Internet.

This is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came out and I think you will also hear this through the episode. We also decided to record the computer screen as we go through google maps and explore the cities to actually give a spatial dimension to the discussion and something interesting came out. It's not the standard approach to the episodes I’ve been putting out for the last couple of years, this is a much more laid back discussion between two friends and urbanists. 

To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit:

https://www.urbancollabs.com

This is a special edition to the podcast. I recorded these episodes in the summer of 2023 with my good friend and colleague Leyla Saadi from Urban Collabs. Urban Collabs is a consultancy, Leyla is an urbanist and urban designer. They do really cool work, so definitely check them out. Back in the summer of 2023 we thought of doing something different, we thought of sitting down in the living room, opening google maps and exploring cities from the top view (hence the name), cities that we know and lived in. From this idea, this experiment, a very fun experience came out and I think you will also hear this through the episode. We also decided to record the computer screen as we go through google maps and explore the cities to actually give a spatial dimension to the discussion and something interesting came out. It's not the standard approach to the episodes I’ve been putting out for the last couple of years, this is a much more laid back discussion between two friends and urbanists.

To find out more about Leyla's work and Urban Collabs visit:

https://www.urbancollabs.com/

According to some estimates, in the first two decades of the 21st century, 79 global big cities have suffered extensively from a drought disaster. Meanwhile, climate change has magnified urban droughts in both frequency and severity, putting tremendous pressure on our cities’ water supply.

This year Spain was in the headlines due to the record breaking heat waves, the lack of rainfall, the trucked-in water and disappearing lakes. It’s enough to make you wonder. Instead of ringing the bells of doom and saying that all is lost, we need to understand the scale of this problem, its source and what we - people - can actually do about it.

It seems that the right thing to say is not that we are running out of water but that water access is becoming unpredictable. Sometimes it's not enough and other times it’s so much it’s destructive. Therefore, environmental, climate-change related reasons aside there is another major issue that we need to understand.

The way we travel and the way we grow and design our cities with impermeable surfaces is permanently altering the cycle of water. As a result we are not able to close the circularity of water, in other words we are not able to recycle it and we are polluting it. It’s not that we don’t have enough water coming from the sky, it’s mainly that we don’t invest in the right infrastructure to clean and recycle the water we have access to.

What we need is a strategy. For this reason, Alejandro Guerrero Neira and Jayashree Chandrappa will share with us the ways we can incorporate resilient strategies and innovative systems to face this increasingly challenging access to the most important resource there is. Water.

If you have lived in the same city for the last 15 to 20 years you have most likely seen parts of it change. Many times, foreign investors move into the city and big global retail brands start altering the fabric of a city’s cultural identity. We’ve all had this moment where we’ve walked around different neighborhoods of different cities and we’ve witnessed the exact same stores selling the exact same stuff. 

In very rough terms, that’s how most people experience what we call gentrification a term that is very commonly associated with the deterioration of a neighborhood’s cultural identity. 

However, these changes on a neighborhood’s cultural identity tend to have disproportionate effects on minority communities as one of the main effects of gentrification are an increase in property rental value. Displacement due to gentrification is a very real thing and needs to be looked at closely as there’s a severe lack of policy to protect migrants and minorities.

Maria Ivanova and Ruby Chen will help us explore the inevitability of socioeconomic growth and the different ways we can make its impact less traumatizing for migrant ethnicities who are forced to relocate.