We are honoured to have historian Ben Wilson as our first Keynote guest. Ben is the author of several acclaimed books, including Metropolis which was released in 2020 and Urban Jungle which was published in 2023. 

In Part I of this global adventure spanning 5,000 years of urbanisation, Ben reveals:

• How cities rewire humans biologically, culturally and socially both individually and collectively
• Why the permanence of human settlement in cities catalyses innovation
• The innate duality of cities as places of opportunity and hardship, brute and beauty, enchantment and horror

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What are the Keynotes? These are the episodes where we zoom out from our city-to-city voyage to meet global expert voices from a range of different disciplinary vantage points (e.g. from history, to theology, to genetics, to archaeology, to design) to understand the place of cities in their work. We want to know how they would approach and investigate the relationship between cities and human experience and evolution. 

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Bass Vibes - Rollin at 5 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100462

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Sound design by Dainius Kacinskas.