What we hope to say with our new podcast on urban solutions, with Dao Nguyen and Joshua Vargas
Joshua Vargas:
Welcome to the first episode of URBANovation, a podcast on innovative ideas for emerging cities in Asia.
URBANovation is about new ways of designing, building, and growing cities to create a better urban future for all of us.
In this episode, we will make the case for a new podcast on innovative solutions for the rapidly urbanizing cities in East and Southeast Asia.
We will also give a preview of the diversity of perspectives and insights you can expect from our guests, who are urban practitioners, researchers, and community leaders from all over the world.
This is URBANovation.
[opening music]
Joshua Vargas:
You are listening to URBANovation. I’m Joshua Vargas. I’m an urbanist from the Philippines, and I conduct research on smart city technology and policy. I also co-founded the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia, and I am delighted to present URBANovation with my co-founder, Dao Nguyen.
Dao Nguyen:
My name is Dao, a young urban professional from Vietnam.
URBANovation is a process of finding new ways of doing urbanism, new ways of designing, building, governing and co-creating cities through outlying innovative, creative and cutting-edge methods.
Joshua Vargas:
It can be difficult to define urban innovation right, Dao, because urban innovation can come in many different forms and can be done in many, many different ways.
It can be in the form of large infrastructure projects that leverage new technologies and nature-based solutions, such as sponge parks and green buildings. It can also take the shape of interventions in smaller scales, like building retrofits that reduce energy consumption.
It can also be less tangible things, like policies and platforms that enable citizens to participate in decision-making, or even programs that make it easier for young people to use public space for events that bring communities together.
All of these things are examples of innovations that enable us and inspire us to build and live in our cities in new ways, enabling positive futures for our environments and communities.
And I think I really understood the kind of urgency and potential impact of urban innovation when I think about how different cities manage issues of flooding. And this hits particularly close to home for me as a Filipino.
Coming from the Philippines, it seemed really hard to build and govern our cities in a way that responds to the kinds of environmental and social issues that keep on recurring over and over again. For example, Manila is wrecked by a typhoon, well, pretty much every year, to be honest. And once in a while, well, more and more frequently, the damage can be particularly intense, that there will be massive media campaigns to raise funds for victims. There will be calls for change in the court of public opinion. But it seemed difficult to see change actually happen in terms of improving our drainage infrastructure. And there’s so much fighting going on in the political arena, people pointing fingers. Every single election, you will hear people talking about, well, why didn’t this get done? Why didn’t that get done? And then nothing will still have happened at the end of the day. Sometimes it does feel like these issues are simply never going to get solved.
And then I came to Singapore on a scholarship, and I wanted to learn some lessons about how they manage things like flooding. Now that’s not to say that Singapore is perfect or that they have figured everything out, but there’s so much interesting stuff going on there that you simply have to take a look at.
Case in point, I visited Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. That park was designed by Atelier Dreiseitl, this landscape architecture practice that was headed at the time by Herbert Dreiseitl. In Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, there used to be in the past a concretized canal. And this would flood every once in a while due to intense rains. It wasn’t very effective actually in stopping the flooding in this area. I mean, it’s concrete, it doesn’t really absorb water. And that’s not really good, because surrounding this canal is a high density residential community where many Singaporeans lived.
And then this park came around. What was very interesting, they actually removed the concrete channel. They removed the canal that was supposed to solve these issues. They replaced it with a naturally sloping park that restores the local ecosystem. So instead of kind of like constraining the water, forcing it to go somewhere, it actually absorbs the water, encourages it to flood the park itself, be absorbed by the plants, and encourage the natural flow of the water. So it’s soil, it’s plants, and then they used that to also create a really nice landscape that during dry times, people can go out and play and enjoy. And that was a relatively early example of nature-based solutions in the region, and you know, it actually worked very well. And Singapore has continued replicating this approach, and Herbert Dreiseitl is now a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, teaching people to sort of think through water, to design wet water.
But the awareness of these kinds of solutions, I think, still hasn’t really entered everyday conversation in the Philippines. And I think it was learning about Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park that I realized that’s what it means to be innovative, to change how we approach problems fundamentally, to create sustainable solutions.
Dao Nguyen:
Yeah, I think I agree with you. The same thing happened in Vietnam, like in the Philippines, floods, also natural disasters in general. It’s a really, really urgent issue for all the countries and cities in Southeast Asia to tackle and also have been to Singapore for so many times. And every time I come to Singapore, I’m really amazed by the fact that they can adopt so many urban nature-based solutions. And hopefully in Vietnam, we can also massively adopt urban nature-based solutions as well.
Joshua Vargas:
Now, the reason why we are talking about different examples of urban innovation is to show that there are many ways to make a change in how people build, work, and live in Southeast Asian cities. This is part of why Dao and I worked together to form the Youth Network, the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia. Even though we came from very different backgrounds, we recognize the urgency of adapting our systems, our practices, our ways of living. Whether you are working in architecture, in policy, or even as a member of your community, all of us have a role to play to make Southeast Asian cities more sustainable, more lovable, and more resilient to the challenges coming our way. And it is crucial to think about how everyone can work together and help each other to contribute to solutions at different scales and across different backgrounds. The impacts of urban issues are uneven, and we cannot solve them alone, especially not with the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and risks between people and even between cities.
Dao Nguyen:
No, I completely agree with you that economic opportunities in Southeast Asia are not evenly distributed. It’s not only between cities in more developed countries compared to cities in less developed countries, but also between the ‘higher-tier’ cities with ‘lower-tier’ cities.
There’s something that my former organization, the United Nations, called the urbanization paradox, where cities have many concentrated services, amenities, opportunities, yet not everyone in the same city have the same access to these things. And the growing-up and also massive development of Asian cities is a really, really important moment for humanity. And that’s why we do need more awareness of power of innovation in addressing so many challenges faced by Southeast Asia.
OK, but regarding this topic, I have a question for you, Josh. Why do we need to raise awareness?
Joshua Vargas:
I think that many of the issues you face in Southeast Asian cities, even the kind of bread and butter political issues that cost up living, are at their heart really urban issues. And by urban issues, I mean issues that have to do with how space, resources and power are distributed among people. And earlier I mentioned that there are much different ways of tackling these problems. Nature-based solutions, better public transit systems, predictive demand modeling, all these kinds of new things may not be silver bullet, but they can provide some way to rethink the way that things supposedly have always worked in our cities.
Dao Nguyen:
Yeah, that’s very true. You know, in Vietnam, in the northern part of Vietnam, a few months ago, where I come from, we just faced the worst flood in the last 65 years, with several consequences regarding the human, also physical, destruction. So everyone in my country have never imagined that it would happen to the northern Vietnam, because normally the flood and the storm only come to the central part of Vietnam, and they are more prepared for that. So we do hope and wish that we were more prepared for that. But it’s still really, really hard for us, because we have limited resources as a developing country. But more importantly, I think that we have low awareness among policymakers and experts about how we can think more innovatively and out of the box to deal with the problem from innovative angle or innovative solutions.
Joshua Vargas:
Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of the inertia, a lot of the unwillingness to really change is about the perception that, “oh, that country solved it. Well, developed countries are able to solve these issues because they have money, because they have advanced technologies, they have all the smart city stuff, blah, blah.”
But to be really honest, even planting mangroves or doing participatory modes of budgeting and decision making, those are things that don’t require a lot of hard infrastructure, but already have major implications on how cities are structured, on how people can have a say in the way cities are run.
And I think that being aware of those things would enable people to imagine different futures for their cities and not just be like, it’s because we’re not in Europe that we don’t have walkable cities or bikeable cities or something like that.
Sure, not all of those things are going to translate well, but there are different solutions that can work in our context. We need to have more open conversations about how we can solve these problems, given our context, our resources, our institutions and cultures, those conversations are important.
Well, another question I think we considered when we decided to host this podcast was really, why a podcast? Why did we choose to use a podcast to start this conversation, to communicate these kinds of things?
Dao Nguyen:
I think we talk a lot about how we can raise awareness among young people, and also a wider audience as well. And then I think at some point, we do agree that podcast is something that we really, really want to do.
Joshua Vargas:
Well, I listen to podcasts sometimes, but I wasn’t sure how common it was. So I went to check if the numbers were true. And if you look at the numbers, right, almost half of millennials in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, listen to at least an hour of podcasts each day. That was a pretty shocking and exciting number for me. And we realized this is a great way to not just spread ideas, but also to get people on board, to join the conversation, and to have a space where our guests, who are very diverse members of the urban community, including researchers, practitioners, community leaders, can easily join in, just to have a casual conversation about these things, and to better understand how these ideas can impact their everyday lives.
Dao Nguyen:
That’s why when we opened the application for URBANovation, we received so many applications from people not only in Southeast Asia, but from all other parts of the world as well.
Joshua Vargas:
Yes, and I wanted to acknowledge the members of our great podcast team. In addition to Dao and myself, we have Tim Henares, Xie Zongxu, Dünya Gürses, Ng Sze Xuan, Yusril Nurhidayat, and John Warren Tamor.
Dao Nguyen:
The URBANovation podcast is made possible by the support of Bai Xian Asia Institute by creating intercultural opportunities for young people in Asia to learn from and engage with one another.
Bai Xian aims to bring a new generation of leaders who embrace diversity and are committed to promoting peace, regional cooperation and harmonies in Asia and beyond.
So here, I want to introduce with you guys, our audience, a congratulatory message from Angela, a member of Bai Xian Communication and Development Committee. Angela, here you go.
Angela Cheung:
Congratulations, URBANovation. You launched the podcast. You did it!
I’m Angela from Bai Xian’s Communications and Development Committee, and I’m so excited. I can’t wait to hear ideas and get a vision of how cities might look in Asia and beyond in the future. We have to change the way urban areas are planned and built. So this is a huge podcast. It’s super important. Wishing you all the best, URBANovation.
Dao Nguyen:
Thank you, Angela, for your sweet message. We do hope that we can live up to your expectations.
Joshua Vargas:
Yeah, certainly. I mean, Bai Xian has been an incredible partner, not just giving us the resources, but also the mentorship and really a shared mission.
Dao Nguyen:
This actually reminds me of how Josh and I met and what our shared vision is.We met sometime in early 2023 through LinkedIn, actually.So that’s why we utilize the power of technological and innovation solutions.I come from a more policy-oriented background because I work for the government and also the nation, while Josh came from a more academic background.And then we see one city issue from different, very different angles.And we realized that in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian cities, our cities have many unique characteristics, but also we have so, so many shared challenges.So that’s why we decided to form the organization, and also the podcast is so as well, based on the value of inclusive, diverse, empowering, impact, and interdisciplinary.This also reflects the things that you can expect from our podcast.So Josh, what can we expect from our podcast?
Joshua Vargas:
The first thing you can expect is that it’s going to be intensely multicultural, and that’s one of our linking values to Bai Xian. Really, we have to look at case studies across East and Southeast Asia, not just from abroad, to see how we tackle these solutions in our own context, given the resources and opportunities we have on the ground. And we can see differences and similarities between these case studies, and how different things can be adapted to fit unique circumstances. And we also want to bridge generations, how we can combine the ingenuity and energy of young people, and the very valuable experiences of older people, who have faced these challenges for a long time.
Dao Nguyen:
The two aspects that he has mentioned, actually, will allow us to achieve our third goal, which is to be cutting edge, because we talk about innovation.
And last but not least, we hope to encourage young people like us to think out of the box, to think how you can deliver and also initiate, experiment on innovative solutions in your own community.
Joshua Vargas:
And how we plan to deliver that to you really, is to bring in guests who have done this kind of work in different contexts, from different disciplines and different backgrounds.
We wanted to get guests from different fields, including academic research, architecture, engineering, but also from social engagement, nonprofits, public and private sector and community groups.
And we wanted to show that it is possible to change how cities are built and governed at different scales, from large scale to small scale, from bottom-up initiatives to top-down innovation.
Dao Nguyen:
More importantly, at YUSEA (Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia), we have members from 15 countries, so that’s why we hope that we can produce a write-up for each episode in different languages. For example, Josh and I are Vietnamese and Filipino, so we talk in English, so these are the three languages that we can produce.
But we also have team members coming from Singapore, Indonesia, Myanmar, and also other Southeast Asian countries as well, that will allow us to produce a summary of each episode in different languages.
Last but not least, we do hope to generate policy recommendation from our podcast content and insights. We actually advocate our policy recommendation and solution at the event, world major event, related to urban development. For example, I’m going to COP29 very soon to advocate and promote YUSEA with a larger audience of experts and young people working in the nexus of innovation, urban, and climate. And we do hope to promote the insights that we got from our podcast to people who are interested in Southeast Asian urbanism.
Joshua Vargas:
Yeah, and those policy recommendations are a very exciting way really, for us to give back to the urban community. We are also going to hopefully identify what are some ways we can make cities and countries in the region more conducive for urban innovation, so that people can be empowered to participate in the process of reshaping our cities to meet the challenges of the future.
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. We are grateful for your time and attention, and we look forward to bringing you even more insightful and entertaining episodes.
Dao Nguyen:
Don’t forget to check out our various social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Joshua Vargas:
Stay connected, and thank you for being a part of our podcast community.
[closing music]
Dao Nguyen:
URBANovation is hosted by the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia, or YUESA. To learn more about us, please visit our website, yusea.org. URBANovation is made possible with the support of the Bai Xian Institute 2024 Project Award.
Hosts: Dao Nguyen, Joshua Vargas
Post-production: John Warren Tamor, Joshua Vargas
Music: Joshua Vargas
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