TEDxLeeds 2009 provided a platform for iconoclastic thought leadership, challenging orthodoxies and exploring unfamiliar territory, laying the groundwork for optimism and change.

This yea'rs theme for both TED and TEDGlobal was What the World Needs Now.

Our team has chosen to build on this and its prior thought leadership, and seek to move inspiration into motivated action.

On 10th November, TEDxLeeds 2010 will be an exploration of What Leeds Needs Now.

Speaker photos by Ian Forrester; Poster image by Mark Ramsey.

The city is at a crossroads – deep social divisions and cuts in public services, coupled with a sophisticated infrastructure, media industry and an emerging netroots class provides a thrilling backdrop for “rebooting the city”. Indeed, the notion of cities as “places” is being displaced by cities as “organisms, mindsets and platforms” for solutions in democracy, civics, climate change and sustainability.

To paraphrase Kevin Kelly, cities are “technological artifacts – the largest technology we make; with an impact out of proportion to the number of humans living in them”. TEDxLeeds2010 will bring together local and global thought leaders to speak on “innovating a city”; an audience of technologists, politicians, civic and cultural figures, interspersed with screenings of TEDTalks focused on “cities past and future”.

Taking place during the Leeds Digital Festival at Holbeck’s newly constructed The Mint, TEDxLeeds 2010 will be located at the physical and emotional fracture between old and new Leeds.

As cities are increasingly displacing nations as global power centers, demands for transparency drive open data movements across the planet and populations are increasingly digitally entangled and connected; the opportunity for innovating civic institutions and rebooting citizenship itself is too irresistible to overlook.

Leeds has to prepare itself for what Richard Florida calls The Great Reset and TEDxLeeds 2010 will be a concentrated exercise in beginning this process.

Session 1: Connecting Cities…

• Introduction - Imran Ali & Emma Cheshire

• Megan Smith - Embedding Narrative

• Julian Tait - Open Data, The City and the New Federation

• Susan Williamson - For whom do we build, design, make?

• Usman Haque - Extreme Connectivity

Session 2: Cities As Platforms

• Stuart Childs - 60 Seconds

• Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino - Deep City

• Matt Edgar - The Makers Of Leeds

• Rashik Parmar - Creating a Smarter Planet… City by City

• Ideas for Cities

• IBM’s Smarter Cities

• NYC Media Lab

• NYC Big Apps

• We Will All Play Cities Together Like An Instrumental Jam

• The Choice Of Cities

• The City Is A Battlesuit for Surviving The Future

• The Street As A Platform

• Participatory Chinatown

• Redefining The Neighbourhood

• The High Line

• Forget Shanghai, Twin Liverpool With Detroit

• FutureEverything: The City Experiment

• MIT’s Smart Cities and Center for Future Civic Media

• Could self-aware cities be the first forms of artificial intelligence?