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.

A full hour to eat well, wander and meet someone new. Lunch is catered by Kaz Bar. The best ideas of the day usually start between the first plate and the second helping.

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.

The 15-minute city measures distance. The 100-year city measures life. A moderated conversation on designing cities for the full arc of a long human life — across housing, mobility and belonging — and what platforms, planners and policymakers need to get there.

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 20-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.

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.

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.

The Games are not the legacy — the city after the Games is. A conversation on Brisbane 2032 as a citymaking question before a sporting one, and what it takes for a generational moment to leave a generational mark.

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 afternoon spills off-stage. The SEQ mayoral delegation opens the hour with short postcards on what each city is carrying into the run-up to 2032 — framed by Charles Landry on what the rest of the Asia-Pacific might learn. Drinks, toasts and unhurried conversation follow.

A live Oxford-style debate presented by The New York Times, moderated by Lily Kuo.

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