Closing Address by 2M Desmond Lee at the World Cities Summit Young Leaders Symposium

Jul 8, 2018

First, I would like to thank all our eight speakers from around the world who have illuminated different aspects of urban sustainability and the challenges that we face from our cities. I would like to thank our facilitators, and chiefly our speakers. I do not think there are many symposiums around the world, where we have the privilege of having lord mayors, eminent professionals and city scientists to facilitate discussions such as this. Thank you also for the diverse perspectives that have emerged from the discussions. 

We talked about a whole range of things today, from private developers building whole new urban centers, to informal transport, to using cities as urban labs, and creating sandboxes. We were concerned about urban sustainability and biodiversity conservation in cities. We spoke about innovation, disruption and change. We were interested in the aspect of cultural identity and reasserting the voice of the citizen in the development and growth of our cities. While they are all diverse, in a way they are all interconnected topics centered, around the concept of cities as organic communities of people, rather than urban sprawl – not just brick and mortar, but communities of people.

There were many themes that emerged quite strongly from the discussions. We were very much focused on harnessing data that would elucidate the voice of our people – diverse voices, expectations of people, and the tension between top down planning, even utopic ideas in city planning, versus the ground reality and lived realities of people and the expectation of the ground around them, and the expectation of what the government should be doing for them.

The second theme was about being bold and innovative – experimenting, experimenting in-situ, and experimenting but also accepting failure and its accompanying political risks. 

Third, we were concerned about how we can better harness data and make use of technology to improve the liveability of our spaces. 

What is the value of the past two and a half hours? For many of you who have been with us for the last few sessions of the Young Leaders programme, you would know that the value is not just in the discussions we have here, but in the wide space we have later on, and in between sessions in the World Cities Summit. The wide spaces create opportunities for you to network, and grow your relationships with people from the government, from the private sector, from the intellectual world, and from the people sector. They are all here in this room, and we form a 450 members strong Young Leaders network.
 
You would not have met everybody here. So I encourage you to go outside, over lunch or coffee, to connect over different ways, and get to know what each other is doing. The Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC) here in Singapore would be more than happy to help you connect after today, help you to facilitate if you want to discuss, in Singapore or through Singapore. They would be very happy to facilitate and organise for you. It’s actually a global network with no physical headquarters. We want you all to be able to strengthen ideas, share innovations and failures, be able to connect and do things together, bilaterally and plurilaterally, and to be able to strengthen each of our communities and our urban centers, and make life better for the people that we all serve.

Thank you for spending time, thank you for flying to Singapore. In the days to come, and the years to come, I hope to see greater collaboration as more and more of us exceed the age limit for the Young Leaders, I hope you continue to come for the World Cities Summit, and mentor the next generation of leaders who will emerge, and take our cities in different directions.

Thank you very much.