Thomas Ermacora – "The Rize of the Meta-Nomad".

Founder and Creative Director for Etikstudio, Ermacora is a serial creative entrepreneur with a cause and a focus on sustainable urban design. He is currently consultant to Sønderborg Project Zero, heading the Actics Green Cities tool development and serves as Sustainability Expert for the Club of Amsterdam Think Tank. Along with a series of activities in Media and lifestyle as well as Greentech, Thomas curates "positive events/exhibits" with the intent of bringing a “debate with outcomes”. Amongst those he exhibited "dreams on wheels" on cycling cities in the national design centre of Denmark in 2004, which has now become a selected exhibit to prelude the 2009 Copenhagen UN Climate Change Summit. Half Danish, half Italian, grown up in Paris, living in London, 32, he holds a degree in Urbanism from the Sorbonne, a bachelor of International Affairs from Northwestern University and has attended the MIT Start-up program

Are those with the task of making the city sustainable really capable? Our urban planning mindset is archaic with respect to the tasks. Empowering the “ordinary stakeholder”, the citizen, is a key to boosting the process, but so is having a real perspective on what we want to achieve in order to start the engine.

As an actor and witness to the circles of urban design, it seems there is never enough emphasis put on who or what the drivers should be. Drawing inspiration from holistic and humanistic thinking, we will explore three main suggestions :

Clear visions are self-fulfilling. History of great leadership consistently proves that the simplest ideas become the strongest because they are in fact the result of great refinement. The sudden zeitgeist for sustainability has not yet produced unity, or best practice consensus convincing enough. So it seems crucial to define what we want and know what you can in order to have the proper projection and align it with the local potential. This is where you need new players in the urban design/planning scene. Who could they be? We will discuss the roles of the Cook, the Gardner, Director and Midwife.
Redeeming Indulgence is a taboo of our age. Either you have fun to have your last blasts before everything falls apart, or you are focused on doing “the right thing”. We can benefit from new energy and momentum if we manage to get away from fear of losing our world to be our guide into tomorrow… We are observing the rise of the “light dwellers”, or “meta-nomad”, a class between the creative, green and Internet generation. They have the potential of showing the way to a responsible hedonism. The idea is that to create the city environment of the future, we have to create the citizen of the future.
In our consumer driven society, it is of utmost importance we get as many involved as possible because numbers matter. It is insignificant if a select few become a do-gooder elite. We now have the tools to get participation, debate, and automated feedback loops, basically all that is needed to make open platforms which can yield substantial results and draw the essence out the shared wisdom, global and local.

We will cover some examples of what could be clues to giving a new breath to the city as a place we want to live in and that the planet can afford to host, also debating shortly on some real battles ahead : substitution versus Radical innovation, retrofitting versus new, small versus big steps… Hopefully this should create a lot of positive chaos in the audience.