Transcriber: Yeon Choi Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hello everybody.
My name is Koen.
My big passion is
Making City.
As other great cities in the world,
the city of Antwerp is growing extremely fast.
By the year of 2030,
there will be 15% more people
living in our city.
This extremely changing and growing city
will cause big stress on our urban environments.
It will cause stress on our urban mobility,
it will cause stress on our public space,
it will cause stress on the education of our children,
and of course, it will also cause big stress
on the political context of our city.
As we are facing right now.
The big question is,
"Who will tackle these big challenges?"
Will it be the hundreds of politicians in our town?
Will it be the more than 8,000 civil servants in our town?
Or will it be you,
you the 900 most creative people of our city?
Right now,
we're consulting the city.
We're asking a thousand people in Antwerp
what they would like to discuss with each other.
Surprisingly or not,
Antwerp people want to talk about everything.
Antwerp people have also an opinion about everything.
And Antwerp people want to have influence
on everything.
You'll all know him.
He's a curator today, he's one of those
Antwerp people that wants to have influence on everything.
And I totally agree.
Everybody in this city has influence on our urban community.
The next question is,
"How can we engage all those 500,000 'mayors'
that are living in our town?"
That's why we've built a so-called
digital co-creation 'citylab',
where everybody can challenge everybody
to find new solutions, to find inspiring ideas
about [the] future of our town.
Because our town needs more than ever,
an inspiring, hopeful future,
an inspiring, hopeful vision
about how we're going to evolve.
But inspiring ideas won't change our city.
The other thing we need is urban introspection.
We think that all the people in Antwerp
have to come together to think on
how we can collaborate, and how
we can create new powerful partnerships
to tackle those big challenges.
And we have to create new partnerships
between completely different actors and stakeholders in our city.
That's why on November 11th,
we organize the city town hall meeting
on making city Maakdestad.
And I would be very honored to see you all there
creative Antwerp to come and to discuss with us
about the future of our city.
Because we believe that true change
can only start where collaboration begins.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)