Future Forward

Seyi (00:01.846)
Hello, hello, hello Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:03.904)
I'm good Seyi, how you doing?

Seyi (00:05.704)
I am good today. Welcome to another episode of Future Forward.

Reza (00:11.392)
Yeah, we have a very interesting topic today, Seyi a provocative question. Do cities need AI? I can't wait to talk about this. do AI in my day job and I have some strong opinions about it and I'm curious about our discussion around AI in cities. Before we do that, let's tell everyone what Future Forward is about. Future Forward.

Seyi (00:19.456)
Yes.

Reza (00:35.84)
is a conversation that Seyi and I have been having for years, talking about cities, technology, sustainability, the communities within cities. And in each episode, we pick a topic and we talk about the historical context using that topic. And then we talk about what's happening in the present day. And then we provide some strategic foresight for the future. And

All of this is really driven by our curiosity. We're not experts. We are trying to learn about these topics and we hope to engage you in learning with us. And our goal is to get us to think about how we can make cities more sustainable and our communities that live within cities thriving.

Seyi (01:28.682)
Yes, thanks so much for framing that and welcome to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us and to our old listeners. We're super appreciative that you've shown up again. And this topic, do cities need AI? We sort of touched on a few times over the course of what is now 21 episodes. And the idea here being if you let

some altman of open AI tell it AI will make everything better. It will improve cities, will change our lives. And so we thought it would make sense for us to think about both the positives

concerns and these concerns are around privacy, equity and unintended consequences of applying a technology to a complex system like a city. So we'll dive into what that possibly means for the communities that exist in the cities and see where we land with this.

Reza (02:40.665)
Yeah, yeah. So, Seyi I think you're gonna start with the concept of smart cities. And I always laugh whenever we apply a term like smart in front of what already is a, like a city is an incredible system. Why would we want to make it smart? So maybe let's start there.

Seyi (02:50.668)
you

Seyi (03:06.43)
Yes, let's start there. And I share that sentiment of smart cities being slightly oxymoronic sometimes when it's framed. But the idea of smart cities and the reason why that's where we'll start is because the application of AI in cities is really the application of technology and tools to help.

Reza (03:12.565)
You

Seyi (03:34.156)
improve or build or design or plan cities. So the first real push towards making cities smarter comes from 1930, just some of the modernist buildings, Frank Lloyd Wright with Broadacre City in 1935, Le Corbusier's Radiant City in 1930.

Buckminster Fuller's glass structure, Utopia around the same time. And all these were ideals of how we could use digital, whatever digital was at that point, technology to make, build, plan, or manage our cities. Fast forward close to 80, 90 years,

Reza (04:16.344)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (04:31.506)
And this same idealistic application of technology without real regard for the people and the communities that live in these cities was best expressed by Google's sidewalk labs debacle in Toronto, where the idea was to plan, design, and absolutely

Reza (04:50.616)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (04:59.64)
overwhelm in our opinion, the Toronto Quayside with digital technologies, artificial intelligence in the form it was in at that point, to take a portion of the land and improve it and make it the utopia they were promising. Again, idealistic.

utilization of technology and we ended up with a failed project unsurprisingly because the people of the community rose up with a very simple question. Why do we need this? What benefit does this provide for us? And so that's been the application of advanced technologies. AI is the advanced technology of today, but the application of advanced technologies to make a city

smart and hence the tracing of the history of where we are today to those times.

Reza (06:01.34)
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point that throughout time, humans have tried to apply whatever tools they had available to make things better. The examples he gave about Frank Lloyd Wright or Buckminster Fuller or Le Corbusier were using the tools that they had at the time. Now the tools that we have are digital, we have the tool of AI. It's the same thing, AI is not a new concept. Humans have thought about

Seyi (06:12.716)
you

Reza (06:29.622)
what you would call a smart machine since the time of the Greeks where they imagined robots, they imagined things that would do work for humans. AI is finally at the point, or I don't know what to say finally, but it's at a point where it could be applied in ways that humans have imagined. Human imagination is bigger than anything that we know. We can now think about

Seyi (06:55.702)
Yes.

Reza (06:59.114)
AI as a smart machine that can be applied to cities. And so I'm curious about where does it stand today?

Seyi (07:06.385)
Yeah, so if we continue the thread that you just pulled and really good observations about just the simple application of technologies, what this is, just feels like it's a more advanced technology than we've ever experienced, but it's still the thread of smart cities and the smart city that is supposed to

Reza (07:19.533)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (07:32.06)
represent the most advanced of our technology, I'd say is Neom in Saudi Arabia. We've had that conversation on this show, so I won't rehash it. the idea is, again, technological utopia, managing the weather, transportation systems, and everything that makes a city, surveillance and public safety through the use of AI in this confined

smart space. so, Neom is the best example, or maybe the worst, depending on what perspective you take, but the use of AI sort of falls under several buckets and I'll touch on them in cities today. So there's the, and I've already mentioned public safety and surveillance. We can now track and analyze the data that comes from the tracking.

at a level that we've never been able to. I used to live in London and this was 17 years ago or so. And the conversation even then was about how much surveillance existed in the city of London. Facial recognition, image and video capture to track the behavior of residents of the city.

And I pulled up a stat that suggests that London today has anywhere between 600,000 to 900,000 cameras. So some public, some private, but just under a million at the top end cameras in this city to track how people are as they move through the city. It's kind of mind boggling to me.

Reza (09:14.253)
Wow.

Reza (09:29.88)
Yeah, that's a huge number.

Seyi (09:31.788)
It's a huge number. And the image that comes to mind for me is when will we get to this precognition world in the Tom Cruise movie where because we've surveilled people so much, we think we know when someone might or is planning to commit a crime and consequently we arrest them because of that crime. Yeah.

Reza (09:55.735)
Yes.

Four. Yeah.

Seyi (10:00.158)
And this would be the application of AI for predictive stuff, which again,

Absolutely the opposite of public safety and the best description of public surveillance, unfortunately. I'll pause here because I'm sure you have some comments here.

Reza (10:09.687)
Yeah.

Reza (10:18.36)
Yeah, it astounds me that London has that many cameras. I was in London last year and you just don't feel it, but you're saying it now and like, my God, I was constantly watched. as we talk about the future topics in this episode, this is something that we will come back to, but it just seems...

Seyi (10:45.44)
Yeah.

Reza (10:48.448)
We sometimes forget what the purpose of what we're applying this technology for. And clearly we want a safer city for our residents. But how we do that sometimes can be against what we want as a community, a trusted community. Like the Jane Jacobs example that you brought up about, if you build a city in a way where there are eyes on the street, do you need these types of eyes?

Seyi (10:56.832)
Yes.

Seyi (11:06.482)
Absolutely.

Reza (11:17.548)
because these eyes are not there to help. Wouldn't there be good if they were there to help? Like you talked about that bus stop example.

Seyi (11:20.566)
They're not.

Seyi (11:28.276)
Yes. And it's such a good example to bring up to contrast the cold eye of public surveillance and AI analyzing the videos that come from those technological eyes versus the warmth of the eyes in our communities where there's a shared desire for safety and community. And that

Reza (11:42.646)
Yes.

Seyi (11:58.284)
juxtaposition, I almost worry, not almost, I worry that the more we dive down this path of technology being the lens through which we manage some of the things in our cities, the less of the community elements we'll have in it. And I believe that's the case in...

the surveillance space in cities like London, Chicago has a bit of that same technology as well. There are a companies that offer AI for public surveillance and I worry about that in terms of AI as a tool currently used today to manage that element of city life. The next element of city life I'll talk about in action, where AI is in action today is sort of mobility and traffic management. Anytime I'm driving into the office,

Reza (12:31.757)
Yeah.

Seyi (12:55.008)
downtown without fail, there's a, because I tend to get there around the same time, there's a Waymo driving in front of me and it is without fail. The days I have gotten to the office a little bit earlier to grab breakfast by the office with a friend or something, the, I had a park and

while I'm walking to the breakfast place, which is not too far, I can time my watch on when the Wemo will show up. and as you can imagine, that is powered by artificial intelligence. All the data that the car is capturing, the driverless car is capturing in real time is analyzed by super compute essentially.

Reza (13:51.864)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (13:51.956)
And consequently, it actuates the vehicle moving through the city. So while that is a positive, I also wonder, and again, the premise here is that we will reduce traffic accidents and we will improve the traffic management by using driverless cars that are powered by AI. But my...

sort of retort to that is always, why don't we just build more walkable cities? It's kind of a multimodal forms of transportation. And we can use AI for those too, but there's always this, we push and then we almost push to the extreme in some cases, but it's pretty cool. I'll confess, it's pretty cool to be standing there or driving behind a driverless car.

Reza (14:27.488)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Reza (14:32.258)
Yeah.

Reza (14:49.9)
Yeah. Yeah. I think you bring up a really good point. Why are we doing this? Why are we pushing to that limit? My friend, Carolyn, and frequent listener, we were talking about this episode and she said, why aren't we applying this type of technology to better forms of public transportation for all these millions and billions of dollars that we've spent on Waymo and cruise and other types of things? Why isn't that?

Seyi (14:51.014)
That's an application.

Reza (15:18.956)
for public transportation, why can't it solve those problems, which I think is a really good point. The second point that I wanna bring up, which is about Waymo, Ben Thompson, a technology analyst, he writes a newsletter called Stratechry. He was talking about going in a Waymo car when he went to San Francisco last week and...

he had this incredible experience that he was a first time in it. And so you get in the car, the car starts talking to you and telling you about what's gonna happen. And it makes it a really good first time user experience. Like the car is helping you understand what it's doing, how it's doing and how it's paying attention to the road, just so that you feel comfortable and not jarred by this very, probably could be a disconnected experience as opposed to talking to the Uber driver.

Seyi (16:00.3)
Mm.

Seyi (16:06.411)
Yeah.

Seyi (16:13.089)
Yes.

Reza (16:14.888)
and he got out of the car and he took a minute just to feel the emotions he felt. And he felt like he was gonna miss that car because he had had this connection to it because the car was talking to him. And we're just so human. And something talking to us might feel human. And he was struck that it was done in a way where it was humanized, that experience was humanized for him. And...

Seyi (16:20.042)
Hmm.

Reza (16:42.144)
It's an example of how AI can be humanized. It doesn't have to be so disconnected. So how can we do more of that? Yes, it's artificial intelligence. It's not human, but how can it be more human? Like what he experienced of the car talking to him to where he felt the connection. And he predicted that we will form connections with these robots or smart machines.

Seyi (16:46.25)
Hmm.

Seyi (16:56.844)
Mm.

Seyi (17:04.427)
Hmm.

Reza (17:09.898)
just like we do with pets because we have formed some kind of bond. Maybe it's because we don't have that kind of bond with our phone. I would argue sometimes we do. because this machine is communicating with us in a human way, we might form a deeper emotional connection. And I think that's something just to put a pin in and think about how can cities adopt humanizing AI technology, not just

for AI's sake.

Seyi (17:41.272)
Yeah, I, I, thanks for sharing that example. I see where it's coming from, but my mind immediately goes to how we always anthropomorphize everything because we need to feel human or see human-ness in everything. Why don't we just

Reza (17:57.952)
Yes. Yes.

Reza (18:07.874)
Yes, you have everything.

Seyi (18:09.916)
make things easier for the humans that can actually genuinely talk to us.

Reza (18:17.531)
You have such a good point. That's a great retort. I will take that.

Seyi (18:21.894)
It's so fascinating to me, but no, I do see how we, I will ask Siri questions and the response, but I know it's not a human being.

Reza (18:33.59)
Yeah.

Yes, yes, it's true. It's a good reframing. think it's a good, yes, how can we make it easier for the actual humans? Why are we ignoring them? Great point. I'll take it.

Seyi (18:48.588)
Yes, yes, yes, it's, yes, no, I, for sharing the example, because it is a big part of, we frame what lies in the future here.

there will be a requirement for that as well. And then the last sort of present day utilization of AI at scale that I've seen is urban planning and infrastructure design, essentially. There's some great tools for simulating experiences in cities. So transportation, traffic, the design of buildings and infrastructure. We now have

Reza (19:16.952)
Yeah.

Seyi (19:31.58)
advanced technology in the form of AI that can help with generating those future states or those future designs that we can simulate before we then actually implement. So that's a pretty good utilization of AI in my opinion.

Reza (19:47.542)
I would completely agree. It's probably the best one because there's some really great consequences that come out of designing our infrastructure better. Let's cheer on the unsung heroes in our lives that build infrastructure that we rely on that is hidden. Thank you to each and every one of you. I wish for you better tools to design the infrastructure that helps our cities.

Seyi (19:50.176)
Yeah.

Seyi (19:57.386)
Yes.

Seyi (20:05.963)
Yes.

Seyi (20:09.721)
Yes.

Seyi (20:13.566)
Ha ha ha.

Reza (20:17.588)
operate. We forget, like if we think about what happened in Asheville this past week with the incredible storm and the flooding and the utilities that were destroyed by it and how that city that never thought it was in the path of destruction like that, residents were just shocked by a place that they felt safe in, but they said it was gone.

Seyi (20:18.538)
Yes.

Seyi (20:37.206)
Yes.

Reza (20:45.992)
in hours and how better tools to predict those kinds of things or better tools to rebuild would bring those communities back together.

Seyi (20:57.532)
Absolutely. I agree. In the research and just thinking about the solutions, that one best represented the positivity or the positive outcomes we can get from utilizing advanced technologies like AI. And it ties to our next point here, Reza, would you mind sharing the laws that apply in this question of whether cities need AI?

Reza (21:07.384)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (21:20.257)
Yes.

Reza (21:25.514)
Yeah, so from our 21 laws of cities, there are two laws that apply over here for cities and AI. The first one is urban innovation drives progress. Cities are hubs of innovation with larger cities generating disproportionately more patents, startups, and creative output. And this research comes from Florida, Richard Florida, 2002, highlighting the role of the creative class in driving urban innovation and economic growth. I think this is like a really good

reason for cities to apply AI. We often think of corporations within cities that are innovation hubs, but cities themselves, the city of Austin, all those public agencies that help build the infrastructure could use AI and innovation to drive progress and create a more sustainable city through it. I think that one applies really well. The second one,

which we have touched on as well, which is digital inclusion ensures equal opportunities. The equitable access to digital infrastructure and skills is essential for full participation in modern urban life. And this research comes from Karag, Liu and others in 2011 that emphasize the importance of digital inclusion in their work on smart cities. And the consequence of this is that digital exclusion

can exacerbate existing inequalities, limiting access to education, job opportunities, and public services. How true this is, which is, there's always divides in the lives that we lead in cities. And this is the digital divide that can leave communities behind. And how important it is when we think about AI in cities to not leave behind those communities that could

get the greatest benefit for it. And that's why I think the one example around infrastructure, can we have better tools for our unsung heroes that build that infrastructure to know how best to build it and include all the communities that need the best type of technology to make the community thrive.

Seyi (23:41.652)
You know, it's such an apt law for this conversation. So thanks for sharing that. And it sort of ties into some of the ideas we have about what the future of the utilization of AI in cities will look like. And I always have this perspective about

Reza (23:47.148)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (23:56.824)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (24:07.412)
tools and technologies, even as I am a proponent for the use of tools and technologies. And that perspective is a slightly circumspect view on the utilization. And what does that mean? It just means I know I'm a systems thinker and I see unintended consequences as consequences we didn't think about.

Reza (24:34.968)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (24:35.08)
And so a circumspect perspective is suggesting, let us think about as many of the possible benefits and consequences of this technology before we start to just barrel down the path of applying the technology. So you will hear some of these future ideas framed from that perspective. And the first one we've touched on it a few times is the application of AI to improve public services.

Reza (24:55.64)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (25:04.764)
We're seeing some cities already allocating healthcare resources based on predictive AI, depending on where the need might arise. This was actually a use case that we saw during COVID in some of the Asian countries that better managed the pandemic. There was clear predictability in where problems would arise.

Reza (25:13.976)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (25:25.591)
Yeah.

Seyi (25:34.216)
and resources would be galvanized to make sure the outbreak could be managed properly. And I think that is the future of health management in countries or cities that decide to use AI. But it also requires fairness in the utilization, as we just said, to ensure that the responsiveness is not just for certain parts of the city. It should be across the city.

the second one is just the ability to use AI to drive sustainable development, things like waste management in, in cities like Dubai, everyone, that's been to Dubai that I've spoken to, there's justice. It's so clean. say it's so clean. Well, it is because there's a lot of waste management.

Reza (26:28.237)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (26:36.4)
and waste management that is benefiting from the use of predictive AI to determine the best routes for waste collection. Without human intervention and the typical experience we have here in the US, the waste is almost expected and taken away before anyone.

can start to notice it. And then the routes that the transportation systems for carrying the waste, I mean, the waste management systems, the routes they take are the least carbon-emitting routes possible because that's also been factored in and calculated through the use of AI. And then we've talked about the next one, which is mobility and transportation. I think...

There's a lot that can be done with traffic management and the utilization of AI in all forms of transportation, multimodal transport management through the use of AI. Stockholm is experimenting with a lot of these ideas to ensure there's no traffic and everyone gets to where they need to using either the private or the public transportation modes that are available.

And the last one here, again, we've talked about it. It is just this need to simulate and design our future cities with more advanced technologies, machine learning, artificial intelligence to ensure, while cities are organic, there are also some base infrastructure requirements that we can improve in terms of.

how we design it to build sustainable and thriving cities.

Reza (28:32.278)
Yeah, these are great, Shay. In every one of these, you have found examples of the technology helping the community, actually solving problems that are needed. It's not technology for technology's sake, it's really solving the problems that the community needs. But with it comes some challenges.

Seyi (28:49.743)
Cheers.

Reza (28:58.078)
You have identified a few and I have a couple. So I'm curious about using AI and using any tool has consequences. So what are they?

Seyi (29:10.029)
Yeah, I'll breeze through this. Thanks for framing that. Because we sort of touched on a few of what these challenges will be. Privacy and security is a big one. It's just the facial recognition issue through the close to a million cameras in London is just problematic period. And so we need to respect and manage

the surveillance of people. And I think that will be a challenge, especially as we barrel down this path even faster than some of the residents of our cities recognize. Bias and equity in cities is a big one. The thing about technology is that it will accentuate the problems you already have if you do not.

carefully apply the use of the technology. And AI trained on data that suggests certain communities are, quote unquote, criminals, will just continue to inform policies that will treat those communities as criminal. And we're going to train those models.

using data that is already biased to make them be the criminal. So as much as I'm excited about the AI, the bias and inequity issues as a result of the data that's going into it is something I worry about immensely. And that ties strongly to the digital divide as well. You mentioned that earlier, not all committees benefit equally.

Toronto is implementing some uses of AI, but it's only going to the affluent neighborhoods. And so just worsening the divide in that city. And as much as we start to become more dependent on AI, which is the last point, the governance of these AI utilizations and the policies around it will be super challenging because

Seyi (31:29.994)
some of our leaders don't truly understand the technology and consequently they can't provide proper governance over it. So those are the ones that popped in mind for me.

Reza (31:37.025)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's really, those are really good examples. I would say like with the last one about around governance, recently the California state legislature was trying to pass some legislation around AI, which really was a bit misinformed and Governor Newsom vetoed it because it was not thinking about the application of AI, like how the tool will be used, but just the...

Well, can't regulate the tool itself. You should be regulating its misuse. You can't slow down innovation by telling AI companies to these AI infrastructure platform companies to stop making AI. We still need use from it. If humans came up with fire, you would say, okay, no fire. But you would regulate, here's how fire should be used in...

Seyi (32:07.916)
Mm. Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Seyi (32:24.32)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (32:29.163)
Ha ha!

Seyi (32:33.643)
Yeah.

Reza (32:34.036)
not misused. So that's a really big challenge. There's this confoundingness with this new technology and we don't know how to regulate it and govern it. So I think I really appreciate you bringing up the point. My points are very related to yours and it's really this tension around AI needs data because that's the fuel for

you know, it's predictions and it's, you know, it's smartness. And cities have challenges with, you know, having that data, they have old technology, legacy systems, data is fragmented. So it makes it challenging for cities to use AI well. It could lead to issues like, you know, issues with privacy or issues with bias. But the most important part related to that is public resistance and trust, which you brought up as well.

Seyi (33:28.874)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (33:30.384)
is the communities need to trust that these systems are good for them, their use of their data is not going to be misused like that precognition of when a crime was going to be committed in that movie that you talked about. And I face this in my day-to-day job where customers have a lot of excitement about AI and

Seyi (33:39.126)
Yeah.

Reza (34:00.158)
want the value from it, but at the same time, they're very afraid about how their data is going to be used. there's like constant questions that I get from customers of like, where's my data? What is my data being used for? it training your models? you know, how are you training your model? Like, you know, there's this fear around what AI is going to do. They don't want to lose their jobs. They worry about like, will AI take over? Is it actually going to help me? it going to make our...

make us make better, you know, bad decisions, because it's making me make decisions for me. All of this to say is that I think the title of our episode should have been not, do cities need AI? It is, do communities need AI?

Seyi (34:46.082)
That's a good one. That is such a good point because that fundamentally is the question. The technology just masks that. It's what the communities need. Thanks for bringing that up, Reza.

Reza (34:56.673)
Yes.

Yes, yes, yeah. And I know that you were talking about Isaac Asimov and some science fiction and so I think this would be a really good way to sort of wrap up the episode. So tell us more about that.

Seyi (35:15.912)
Yeah. So as, we were preparing for this episode, I.

just kept going back to Isaac Asimov's robot dreams. And it's a collection of his stories from between, I believe, the early 1940s to about 1980 or so. And it was a lot of stories about robots and advanced technology, but underlying it was

Reza (35:39.32)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (35:52.044)
people's desire for belonging, people's desire to achieve and attain their personal ambitions, people's desire for a community that they could feel they were a part of contributing and receiving in equal measure and just this connection. And so,

Reza (35:54.456)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (36:17.834)
Whenever we throw technology in the mix in cities as we're sort of supposing today, I really hope we don't forget that the point is that people come to cities with aspirations to build families if they choose to make friends, attain their best selves through the work they do.

contribute to their society and their communities and belong to a community. Technology mustn't replace that. And I think that I'd recommend that our listeners read. It's a long set of books. One of the stories is I, Robot that most of us know about. But it's such a phenomenal set of stories that speak to the human condition.

Reza (37:03.992)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (37:12.936)
as we try to attain our best selves. And it all boils down to where we are and the technologies that we use to attain our best selves.

Reza (37:21.302)
Yeah, that's fantastic. And I think the way that we'll wrap up is, you know, the call to action here is think about your city and, you know, your public officials work on ensuring that the city prioritizes transparency, fairness, community engagement, because if we do that, then those cities will truly benefit from AI.

and it ensures that technology serves the people rather than the other way around. know, commit to yourself that if you're engaging with your public official and they're thinking of how technology can serve the city, think about how is the technology gonna serve the community more importantly than that.

Seyi (38:10.986)
That's, that's thank you. So true. And I'll say this before we, we get to the mailbag. We haven't defined artificial intelligence or machine learning in the episode. We believe our listeners can go find that out themselves, but you can almost replace artificial intelligence with advanced technology. Cause that's really the crocs here. It's what tool or technologies that we're using and just

Reza (38:23.212)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (38:33.954)
Yeah.

Seyi (38:39.734)
We're speaking about the tool that is the bell of the ball today. And that's really where we're coming from with that.

So you have a mailbag, it's yours.

Reza (38:54.616)
Yeah, my mailbag is courtesy of the New York Times. I still get a physical copy of the newspaper. I think I might be the last person that is still getting a physical newspaper. in the issue on Tuesday, there was an article about

Seyi (39:08.704)
The only person I know, which is awesome. Yes.

Reza (39:20.28)
public art. And we talked about this in our last episode, the future of art in cities. And I spent a lot of time talking about public art and here like a couple of excerpts that I think sort of emphasize the point of how public art can be beneficial to cities. So they interviewed an artist, Emily Eisenhart, and she's actually done some public art in Austin. And it says, Emily Eisenhart, who has produced murals in San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, New York, and her hometown, Austin.

said developers had become her patron of the arts. So remember we talked about patrons and how artists need patrons. And so this is a way for artists to participate in cities and public art and have a sustainable life. It goes on to, and she says, the canvas just happens to be the side of the building about the art.

Seyi (39:53.44)
Hmm. We did. We did.

Seyi (40:14.963)
Fascinating.

Reza (40:15.576)
And it goes on to say, growing interest in public art for private projects is altering the face of city centers across the country. The presence of art in real estate development drives traffic and engagement, provides an amenity for office employees and increases sales for retailers, says Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown, an international real estate firm and creator of the rotating art program that includes the display in industry city. There was also one other quote here that I thought was really helpful, a little bit more data.

A recent study by the University of Cincinnati found foot traffic in areas of the city featuring murals and sculptures increased three times when compared with Cincinnati neighborhoods without art displays. Specifically in areas with commercial amenities such as cafes and restaurants, foot traffic is 43 % higher in locations with murals than in those without.

Seyi (40:57.514)
Wow.

Seyi (41:08.65)
That is fantastic.

Reza (41:10.488)
So that's like two threads there, which is public art can be a patron, cities can be a patron through public art and that it drives value for our cities in ways that this research has found.

Seyi (41:25.896)
Yeah, which ties to the law about the economic vitality of cities that comes from the participation of the citizens and in this case, the artists that put the work out and the people who come to view it. That's such a good, thanks for pulling that thread and keeping that issue of the New York Times to share with us Reza.

Reza (41:30.706)
Yes. Yes.

Reza (41:50.24)
Yeah, welcome. So Shay, tell us about what's next. We have an exciting announcement to share.

Seyi (41:57.672)
We do, we do. So for our regular listeners, this is episode 21. Both of us can't even believe it, but this is episode 21 of Future Forward and we're calling it the last episode of season one. Thanks so much for joining us on what has been such an amazing journey of curiosity. And we will be taking a break.

Reza (42:03.724)
Whoo.

Seyi (42:26.54)
for a few weeks, a few months, we'll let you know. But in that period, what we're offering is that the Future Forward website is up, futureforward.fm, you can find it. And you can go back and listen to all the episodes in one place. We hope you do. While we'll be working on episodes for the second season, we'll bring on experts who will dive deeper into some of the topics we've covered and we'll cover new topics as well.

We are super appreciative of the time you've spent with us for the first 21 episodes. And Reza and I will be taking the time to work on the book, which is coming as a result of the time we spent bringing these episodes to you. And more on that when the next season starts. But we just want to say thank you. And I'll let you wrap it up, Reza.

Reza (43:10.187)
Yes.

Reza (43:22.903)
Yes.

Reza (43:26.25)
Yeah, take a minute to like and subscribe, rate and review. This is how others find us. It really does help. And as we always say, share this episode with someone that you love, someone that you care about. Every week we find more listeners coming to us and listening. So appreciate everyone that's sharing it. You know, we have had such a blast. I...

I'm always just astounded by the fun I have on every episode. And I can't wait for season two because it's going to be a little different. We're actually going to talk to experts and learn with you as you listen from those experts. We have a few lined up, very excited about it. So please keep listening and just be patient as we work on the launch of our next season. Thank you.

Seyi (43:59.66)
Yes.

Seyi (44:07.852)
Yes.

Seyi (44:13.195)
Yes.

Seyi (44:20.896)
Thank you.