For our very first episode of Promise, we welcome Danai Fadgyas.
Danai is a planner and musician by training, and the founder of CoFutures. Cofutures is a specialist urban planning consultancy focused on making planning easier to understand, and that is the focus of our discussion.
We discuss the breadth of urban planning as a field, public distrust in development and change, Danai's efforts to tackle that, and what the world looks like if it all pans out.
For more on Danai's take about community engagement, check out his video about it here (Video | 7 mins). For a deeper dive into the "how" of engagement and importance of finding the right questions to ask, check out this TEDx talk here (Video | 15 mins).
You can find out more about CoFutures at their website.
To see the content they are creating and to learn more about the basics of urban planning in a visual way, check out their YouTube channel.
Show notes
[00:01:42] - [First question] – Macro issues in urban planning right now
[00:04:34] – The responsibilities of the modern urban planner
[00:05:24] – Media coverage and distrust in development
[00:07:13] – Exploring the breadth of the field as a graduate
[00:08:07] – Learning to be a specialist generalist
[00:10:29] – Working towards one’s own vision versus someone else’s
[00:11:16] – What it takes to branch out on your own
[00:12:02] – CoFutures and its 3 specialist domains
[00:13:15] – The growth opportunity in multimedia content creation
[00:14:12] – Marketing and reaching potential clients the traditional way
[00:15:27] – Using multimedia as a point of differentiation
[00:18:17] – A brief history of community engagement
[00:20:17] – The how and why of community engagement
[00:23:13] – Where and how engagement fails
[00:27:05] – Convincing key stakeholders how and why engagement processes need to change
[00:29:41] – Expectations management on long timeframes
[00:31:11] – Asking the right questions to get the right information
[00:33:11] – The biggest mistakes made in starting CoFutures and founder’s impostor syndrome
[00:36:39] – Hiring for CoFutures and experimenting with the future of work
[00:42:02] – What does the world look like if everything goes right?
[00:43:13] – Danai’s commitment to get there
Episode 1 - Shaping cities more meaningfully with Danai Fadgyas