Conscious Cities Festival 2021: The Person-Space Continuum

Accra • Adelaide • Amsterdam • Barcelona • Bengaluru • Berlin • Bhopal • Bhubaneswar • Boston • Brisbane • Dhaka • Gurugram • Guwahati • Helsingborg • Ibiza • Islamabad • Lagos • Lahore • Lima • London • Madrid • Mexico City • Milan • Monterrey • Mumbai • Munich • New Delhi • Paris • Rome • Stockholm • Sydney • Tel Aviv-Jaffa • Toronto • Umeå• Vienna • Warsaw

Between October 24th-30th, 2021, The Centre for Conscious Design (CCD) presents Conscious Cities Festival 2021: The Person-Space Continuum. City chapters of the global Conscious Cities movement will be in dialogue on how to meet the needs and aspirations of local communities through a new paradigm in placemaking. Featuring talks, panels, workshops and other activities, the festival will explore the future of people-centered, community-led and science-informed citymaking. 

“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. We are apertures through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” ~ Alan Watts

Last year, the Conscious Cities Festival looked into how Conscious Cities are wired to shape and be shaped by people. This year, the festival is led by Conscious Bengaluru, the first Conscious City Chapter that transformed the manifesto into a movement. Conscious Bengaluru has been actively catalysing a global Conscious Design community in the process of curating and coordinating the coming together of 37 cities across the world to collectively explore the Person-Space Continuum. 

The Person-Space Continuum as a theme celebrates the richness and diversity of placemaking and city-building endeavours. The continuum is a step towards intersecting the parallels that perpetuate decision-making bottlenecks in humanity’s pursuit of wellbeing, community resilience, and sense of belonging. It is an approach that seeks to revolutionise the way design thinking can be augmented into ‘Conscious Design’ by focusing on observation, articulation, measurement, and representation of the person-place dialogues. 

As Conscious Bengaluru reflected upon the Bhartiya Samskriti (the wisdom from Indic civilization), they delved into an extensive cross-disciplinary research to develop Conscious Design. The situated and native perspectives on the philosophy, psychology and science of Consciousness and unravelled three dimensions within the Person-Space Continuum - enactivism, equity, and empathy. 

What if our consciousness goes beyond our brains and bodies into objects and spaces around us? Enactivism frames such a refraction of consciousness and phenomena. 

What if power was dispersed as truly as the potential of individuals and communities within the ecosystems of planetary beings? Equity guides the dispersion of power and potential. 

What if we could craft and reflect each other’s needs and aspirations as a collective in harmony? Empathy facilitates transformation across scales. 

All the participating cities bring their unique regional, methodological, and cultural beauty to meaningfully examine the intersections of local urban challenges as they answer and reinterpret these principles. The festival is a platform for cities around the world to gather, share, and enrich perspectives on the future of ecological and social sustainability with cross-disciplinary research, situated practices, hyperlocal knowledge, socio-political and economic systems. 

“The Conscious Design of Cities is the Design of Conscious Cities.” 

The Conscious Cities Festival 2021: The Person-Space Continuum will showcase some of the most unique talks, debates, workshops, forum, and curated artistic performances. Building upon Conscious Design’s emphasis on principles as solution frameworks rather than ‘one-size-fits-all solutions’, this year’s theme intends to facilitate and encourage cross-chapter problem-solving, co-creation, collaboration, and communication. The unique grassroots nature of organising the festival empowers and activates broad ecosystems of communities, decision makers, designers, researchers, technologists, funders, and artists to collectively, actively, and effectively envision the future of ‘Decentralised Spatial and Urban decision-making’. Here’s to  building momentum for the collective aspirations of a growing Conscious Design Community.

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