Endowing The Future

cities should contain civic observatories and laboratories, which would allow a fusion of the ideal and the real, theory and practice, to avoid the risks of these becoming methods only for professionals.

Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair—the externality of stockpiled opportunity.

As Citizens, we must develop a sense of belonging in community, cultivate relationships with one another, help heal each other, and collectively build the world that will cease to make philanthropy necessary.

The aim of all of these was to shift the culture so that citizens felt a shared responsibility for their city, while expanding their sense of what might be possible after a long period of depressed fatalism.

In tandem with this inch-wide starting point, Immy simultaneously established the mile-deep aspect, in the form of the Re Festival. This six-day online ideas festival was held in the first weeks of the pandemic, and saw an array of the world’s most original thinkers and doers invited to share their ideas and insights at the very beginning of CIVIC

It was then we realised it was crucial to build something more long term, a more permanent way to showcase possibility, build, create, prototype and scale solutions as we worked on the pressing challenges facing our city.’