Episode Details

"We are architects of our life, not victims of it"

!!!!Book giveaway details at the bottom!!!!

Are you interested in the city as the emergent property of the urban agents? What do you think about collective responsibility? How can we create better urban futures?

This is a very special celebratory birthday episode because I am interviewed by a very special guesthost – Ben Vass, Graph Shaman. Ben interviewed me because I finished my PhD and thought it is time to share my knowledge with you guys – using the birthday celebration as well. We talk about my vision for the future of cities, smarter cities and smarter approaches, collective responsibility, Vitruvian and many more.

Fanni Melles is a future of cities researcher, an architect by profession, and a project manager by experience, born in Hungary and now living in Melbourne, Australia. Her enthusiasm for the future of cities led her to create the WTFforCities? podcast (What is The Future for Cities?) where she summarises research articles and interviews people who are actively and consciously working for the better future of our cities. Fanni is completing her PhD studies at Swinburne University of Technology about the future of cities, smart cities, and their operationalisability in practice. Her unique ability is creating practical and orderly systems from chaos and ambiguity to answer questions and improve systems. Fanni firmly believes that cities are the emergent properties of the people living in them so she is working on helping people to have better urban influence. She is also convinced that each city needs a specific future and she wants to facilitate their transformation.

Ben Vass is the kind of person who wants to build a Dyson swarm and explore the stars, while in the meantime wants to understand how this consciousness thing works. He is always standing between 2 worlds and trying to connect them. Due to his strange brain he sees everything as a network of networks, and tries to find the next intellectual thrill. In the past he had worked on swarm intelligence projects, spectral graphs, fraud detection, and GNNs to name a few, and also he contributes to Open Source whenever he can. Everything is a network, you just don't see it yet, according to him.

Ben’s voice can be very familiar because he is the voice in the intro.

You can find out more about me through these links:

• Fanni Melles on LinkedIn;
• @fannimelles as Fanni Melles on Twitter;
• Fanni Melles website;
• Making future cities 'smarter' PhD thesis at Swinburne Research Bank
• WTF4Cities podcast on LinkedIn;
• WTF4Cities website;
• @WTF4Cities as WTF4Cities on Twitter;
• Fanni Melles on RTRFM On Record program;
• Fanni Melles on RRR ByteIntoIT radio;

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