The festival · 2026 · 17 June
A day of conversations on how cities are made, through lived experience, creativity, and the forces shaping their future.
Most of the residency is worked behind closed doors. Once every two years, in a Singapore chapter, it turns outward for a day, and that day is the festival, where a chapter's work meets the city. This is the record of 2026. Four acts, from morning to night.
Sound Check
Doors, coffee & breakfast
09:00 · Arrival
Doors, coffee & breakfast
Doors opened at nine, coffee, breakfast, and the slow business of finding your people before the day began.
Act I
The Standard
10:00, 10:25 · Film, findings & response
A New Way to Measure the City
Six years of quiet work, opened to the room and pressure-tested by people who measure cities for a living.
10:25, 11:30 · Masterclass, keynote, book launch & dialogue
The Art of Citymaking: A Masterclass with Charles Landry
- Charles Landry, Author, The Creative City
A masterclass with Charles Landry, woven in three movements.
11:30, 12:30 · Presentations & moderated conversation
Habitat, Remade: Regenerative Urbanism × Radical Ruralism
Two practitioners who aren't theorising habitat, they're remaking it on the ground. Neither urban nor rural, their work sits in a third space and quietly rearranges what we expect places to be.
Act II
Improvisation
12:30, 14:00 · Hosted long-table lunch
The 100-Year City: Longevity Table Lunch
Act II began at the table. Guests were seated across hosted long tables and introduced by what they were working on, not their titles. A question card sat at every seat. Midway through, one Singapore builder offered five minutes: one true thing they had observed. The medium was the message: longevity is built through food, conversation and shared responsibility.
14:00, 14:25 · Pecha Kucha
Conscious Urbanism: From Place to Experience
Twenty slides each, twenty seconds a slide, a rapid-fire run at the Experience Improvement District: where it is applied, what it measures, and what it would take to make wellbeing the standard metric of urban success.
14:25, 14:45 · In conversation
A Silent Revolution
Two practices, one quiet insistence: cities change when we slow down enough to sit, listen and write it down. A deliberate breath before the Crescendo.
14:45, 15:00 · Refreshments
Break
A fifteen-minute pause, coffee, conversation and a moment to reset.
Act III
The Crescendo
15:00, 15:35 · Fireside chat
Cities at Scale
Two of the most consequential urban stories of the century, a billion-strong India urbanising at unprecedented pace, and a city-state that rewrote the playbook, in the same room, in the same hour.
15:35, 16:10 · Presentation & moderated conversation
Can Art Reinvent a City?
Twenty years ago Charles Landry gave the world a phrase, the Creative City. In a half-forgotten Sicilian town, a notary and a lawyer took it literally. What followed became one of the most quietly radical experiments in urban regeneration anywhere. The next generation brought the story to Asia for the first time.
16:10, 16:35 · Keynote
What Is a City For?
- Helen Marriage, Anchor, 2026
The residency's quiet question, what is the role of the creator in the life of a city?, answered by the anchor of the 2026 cohort. A keynote on wonder as infrastructure, and on what cities are actually for.
16:35, 16:55 · Moderated conversation
Postcards from the Future
The Games are not the legacy, the city after the Games is. A conversation on 2032 as a citymaking question before a sporting one.
16:55, 17:15 · Fireside chat
The City of Good
On what it takes to build a city of good: the quiet civic architecture of giving, volunteering and belonging that turns a high-performing city into a kinder one.
Act IV
After Hours
17:15, 18:00 · Postcards, drinks & three toasts
Dunbar's Mixer
The afternoon spilled off-stage. Short postcards on what each city was carrying into the decade ahead, framed by Charles Landry on what the rest of the Asia-Pacific might learn. Drinks, toasts and unhurried conversation followed.
18:00, 19:00 · Oxford-style debate · finale
The Debate
- Motion: "The way we measure city success is fundamentally wrong."
- Moderator: Lily Kuo
A live Oxford-style debate. Six debaters took on the motion before a four-person jury, the day's finale.
19:00, 20:00 · Open hour
The Citymakers' Social
The day spilled out of the room for an open, unhurried hour. By the end of it, everyone present was a citymaker.
The festival sat inside a longer week. Return to the 2026 chapter.
It returns with the 2028 Singapore chapter, convened by Leadership for Cities.