The Programme

Coffee and breakfast by Kopi Boy. Doors open at the Glass Dome — arrive, caffeinate, find your people.

Six years of quiet work — opened to the room and pressure-tested by people who measure cities for a living. A spotlight on Copenhagen, the Capital of Cool, which tops the Conscious Cities Index (an XDG Labs initiative).

A masterclass with Charles Landry, woven in three movements.

Two practitioners who aren't theorising habitat — they're remaking it on the ground. Neither urban nor rural, their work sits in a third space and quietly rearranges what we expect places to be.

Act II begins at the table. The 100-Year City — a WSDM Haus initiative — launches not as a panel but as a meal. Guests are seated across hosted long tables and introduced to each other by what they're working on, not their titles. A question card sits at every seat. Food comes from Kazbar. Conversation starts. Midway through, one Singapore builder offers five minutes — one true thing they've observed. Lunch closes with a shared prompt and the walk back to the Glass Dome. The medium is the message: longevity is built through food, conversation and shared responsibility.

Three speakers, twenty slides each, twenty seconds a slide — a rapid-fire Pecha Kucha on the Experience Improvement District: where it's applied, what it measures, and what it would take to make wellbeing the standard metric of urban success.

Two women, two practices, one quiet insistence: cities change when we slow down enough to sit, listen and write it down. Erin Lee convenes strangers in public space through The Big Sit. Shradha Biyani — journalist, Harvard-trained planner — helps citymakers find the words for what they're building. A deliberate breath before the Crescendo.

A 15-minute pause before the Crescendo — coffee, conversation and a moment to reset.

Two of the most consequential urban stories of our century — a billion-strong India urbanising at unprecedented pace, and a city-state that rewrote the playbook — in the same room, in the same hour. A fireside exchange across two very different theories of the city: what India can borrow from Singapore's compact discipline, and what Singapore, in turn, might learn from the scale, pluralism and improvisation of India's transition.

The festival's quiet question — what is the role of the creator in the life of a city? — answered by the Anchor Resident for 2026. Helen Marriage has spent two decades answering it in public: closing London's streets for a sultan's elephant, lighting Durham with Lumiere, turning whole cities into playgrounds of the imagination. A keynote on wonder as infrastructure, and on what cities are actually for.

Twenty years ago Charles Landry gave the world a phrase — the Creative City. In a half-forgotten Sicilian town called Favara, a notary and a lawyer took it literally. What followed — Farm Cultural Park, the Countless Cities Biennial, a Museum of the Cities of the World — became one of the most quietly radical experiments in urban regeneration on the planet. The next-generation Bartolis bring the story to Asia for the first time — and unveil what comes next: Countless Cities Asia.

From inside the Glass Dome — Landmark of Good — a conversation with Melissa Kwee on what it takes to build a City of Good: the quiet civic architecture of giving, volunteering and belonging that turns a high-performing city into a kinder one. A fitting close to the on-stage day, in the room that carries the idea in its name.

The hour the day has been pointing toward — a festive close to Act III and an open invitation into Act IV. Postcards arrive from the next decade and from cities across the Asia-Pacific, the room rises for three toasts, and The Citymaking Circle is officially launched. Drinks, music and unhurried conversation carry us into the Finale.

A live Oxford-style debate presented by The New York Times, moderated by Lily Kuo. Six debaters take on the motion; a four-person jury renders the verdict.

The day spills out of the Glass Dome and over to Offbeat for an open, unhurried hour, with Matty Wainwright on the decks. By the end of the day, everyone in the room is a citymaker — carry it into the night.