TRANSFORMING KNOWLEDGE INTO ACTION Virtual discussion on the potential gaps

Cities are the challenge of the 21st century, evolving and increasing rapidly the range of urgencies and emergencies. Most of the population in the world allocates in urban environments overlapping crisis such as covid19 worldwide outbreak. These extraordinary emergencies give us awareness about vulnerabilities and strengths of our living environment and society. However, beyond the emergent crisis, cities are the major expression of complexity containing many issues related to urgencies such as inequality, accessibility to basic services, marginalization, gender discrimination in city-making, water issues worldwide, among many others. On that note, and going in parallel to emergencies and urgencies, we could highlight the demands from the city. This usually composes of urban agendas and development goals that cities aim for. These compromise the understanding of spatial challenges such as urban development, mobility transitions, infrastructural accessibility, and many others. Therefore, we get the regular topics of daily challenges that every city confronts. Then we add the urgencies defining vulnerability levels. And last but not least, we can aggregate the layer of emergencies what comes to disrupt and modify priorities radically. But the question of this session is not about what are those matters and their consequences, but more in the search to see who are the key actors and what role do they play on understanding, tackling and acting to challenges, emergencies and urgencies in cities? Planners, designers, developers, researcher, and citizens themselves have such a thick aggregation of challenges (daily + urgencies + emergencies + agendas) that knowledge and expertise among themselves get lost. This decelerates the action capacity of those and makes difficult for institutions to commit to the global agendas. Researchers look for answer to support city-makers, and designers struggle in a private market to aim and keep the ethics for a better good in their proposals. How to connect all these dots? How could we become smarter and more resilient in our field of action to facilitate productive knowledge exchange among diverse actors? This session will be about combining the key stakeholders in every step: multilateral institutions, funding opportunities, researchers, city making, activists, developers/private market, designers, so on. This list will compose an interesting panel of workshop leaders. The format will be based on first understanding the agendas/ambitions of every group separately (group tables – 15 min). Then the representative of every group will summarize results (10 min), and then the debate will be officially open. In parallel to the discussion, the facilitators of the workshop will make sure to generate a road map of Challenges and Opportunities to transform Knowledge into Action. As wrap up and result of the session, we hope to achieve a set of actions and collaboration with each representative of the table in order to promote next and future steps.