One + May 2011 - (Page 59)

policies,” the Rio event was themed “The Right to the City: Bridging the Urban Divide.” “It’s important to reiterate that the event is facilitated by the region and sponsored nationally rather than just a city project, and there have been very good relations between the Ministry of Cities, the State Governor, the city mayor and our U.N. ofﬁces based here in Rio,” Martinez said. “While other cities did ask to host the event and were prepared to do so, given the layered political involvement, it’s a complex operation to actually make it happen, and Rio was in Latin-America’s pole position to facilitate this.” This political involvement in the event is genuinely signiﬁcant in offering a snapshot of the kind of political will required to make the greater changes to urban areas advocated via the forum itself. This political momentum was something the organizers could use as a platform from which to launch the goals of the event. “The date of the forum was decided on in collaboration with our political partners, taking into account election dates and any other important political events,” Martinez said. “From this basis we all agreed that we needed to ﬁnd the best possible venue for the forum and not the usual conference center that is located beyond the city periphery. We wanted a convention on cities and people to be able to see the problems of the city rather than avoid them.” Such a committed decision for the venue to be an expression of the event presented the challenge of ﬁnding the right location to fulﬁll these goals, one that was in the end quite easily solved. “The old port buildings offered the ideal solution for us,” Martinez said. “This is where the city of Rio began and most of it has since fallen into desuetude and dereliction, with a city strategy now in place for its redevelopment. If we could make this work as the conference venue, it would showcase how collective political will can deliver tangible outcomes, which is the crux of the forum. We visited building No. 1—still used for shipping-related activities—and another building that was being refurbished. We realized that there was a lot of work to be done to the buildings to make them ﬁt for our needs, but once we saw the spaces, it was beyond question that we would host it there.” Settling on this location to connect intrinsically with the event, an architectural competition was launched to de- sign and furnish the warehouses, ﬁnancially assisted federally as well as by the mayor. The eventual winner utilized four warehouses to hold the forum’s broad program, which included dialogue sessions, training events, business caucus sessions, networking events and restricted access roundtables for dignitaries and heads of state. Integral to the event space were two warehouses—comprising almost 50,000 square feet—given over to exhibition areas for nations to present innovative solutions to dealing with urban growth challenges. Addressing delegates at the opening ceremony, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, “We are proud of the redevelopment that is occurring in Rio de Janeiro, and the city can be seen as the image of the new Brazil.” He went on to encourage attendees to “not only visit our tourist attractions but also the favelas and witness what is going on and the positive changes that are occurring.” This suggestion was taken up well beyond the expectations of the event organizers. “We weren’t really prepared for the demands for visiting the municipal projects,” said Claudio Acioly, UNHABITAT’s director of housing policy and host city liaison for the event. “At mpiweb.org 59 http://www.mpiweb.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of One + May 2011

One + May 2011
Contents
Energy of Many
Impressions
Meeting Design Goes Mobile
Picking Brains
Agenda
Ask the Experts
Thoughts+Leaders
Overheard
Art of Travel
Web Watch
Radical Co-creation
Engagement + Innovation = Wunderbar
Top Spots
Connections
Irrelevant
The Business of Being Social
Safety in Numbers
Ads, Sponsors and Patrons
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
It’s Getting Better All the Time
Blame It on Rio
Ride Free
Learning How the Brain Learns
Just Face It
Becoming Mindful with Your Meetings
Group Think
The Mesh Meeting
Your Community
Making a Difference
Until We Meet Again

One + May 2011