Newsha Ghaeli, Research Fellow at MIT where she is Project Lead at the SENSEable City Laboratory, initiated the conversation on the second day of conference proceedings with her keynote presentation on work currently engaged by her lab. Her focus acknowledges that, “Over the past few decades, an emerging suite of miniaturized, networked, and pervasive digital technologies has woven itself into our urban environment – our buildings, urban infrastructures, objects, and communication devices.” She further suggests that, “These digital technologies are embedding a new functional layer over our cities, and are creating a digital nervous system with which we interact on a daily basis.  Advents in data analytical tools allows for these systems to be simulated, informing planners, policy makers, designers, researchers, and citizens alike.”
In her presentation, Ms. Ghaeli demonstrated how the mining, analyzing, and synthesizing of big data can “…transform the analysis, design, and ultimately the inhabitation of urban space, while working with industry partners, metropolitan governments, individual citizens, and disadvantaged communities around the world.”

Dr. Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture at the University of Newcastle, UK, launched the conference proceedings with a summary of the current state of human affairs, capturing what she and others characterize as the  “Anthropocene Age” of geological history, a time when our pervasive human presence is “reverse terraforming the world”, through an “irreversible loss of biodiversity”.  She  then challenged us to shift the very “mythos” of the human journey from the brink of the 6th great extinction to embrace a new story, an “Ecological Era, which has been shaped by a range of overlapping developments in many disciplines including  philosophy, science, technology and cultural history – particularly over the last century.”

Danny Wills, Project Architect, Urban-­‐Think Tank Researcher and Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH, Zurich wrapped up the first day of proceedings with his keynote presentation on the concrete examples of his work creating bridges between first world industry and third world, informal urban areas. Danny professes “Environmental equality and human rights are intrinsically intertwined across all scales in the bio-­‐sphere.”  He assumes a dedicated activist/advocate role in fighting “…for an urbanism that establishes commensal relations between diverse communities as well as human and non-­‐human biotic systems.”
His presentation grounded us in the reality based work of Urban-­‐Think Tank in Caracas, Venezuela and their most recent project, the ‘Empower Shack’ housing project in the townships of Cape Town, South Africa “…as it addresses the challenges of today’s rapidly globalizing cities…through the combined efforts of architects, civic engineers, policy makers, environmental planners, and local communities.”