A lot is going to be happening in the Paris region...

Eight more days until the opening of Futur en Seine…and the whirlwind of the last few months is drawing towards its nerve-tingling climax.

From the moment I heard about Futur en Seine, I found the concept inspirational…but the challenge daunting. A creative, popular festival of the digital city, happening for days from the early morning until deep into the night, across the streets of Paris and the Ile de France, including some of the world’s most prestigious cultural venues and bringing together top level visionaries, thinkers, politicians, advisors, planners, activists, designers and creatives in general with “grass-roots” participation – and all free of charge! That has to be a creative, logistical, and financial challenge, not to mention communication and time factors.

Anyway, a few months down the line, we’re more or less ready, and the international program is coming together. The International festival starts with World Information City, and there’s an impressive line-up – Saskia Sassen, Bruno Latour and a formidable groups of speakers.

After a full week of colourful international events, “The Digital City in the Next Five Years” will draw the international proceedings to an end. The concept is to integrate the new ideas from the whole preceding week, draw in local and international views and best practice, brainstorm towards collaborative values and visions, and actually design and “build” those visions on the next day. We have excellent and enthusiastic international participants with strong visions on the digital city of the future…and a design team with lots of clever methodologies, tools, and bags of industrial scrap, who are going to help us shape the future.

It’s a public holiday in France today and beautiful Spring weather. Just a couple of hundred metres away, at the Place de la Bastille, street artists are performing, opera fans are queuing for tickets for tonight’s performance of Tosca, waiters are weaving their way through pavement tables and chairs with studied elegance…all unaware that, in the office next to me, a group of people are excitedly and loudly planning the imminent construction of the futuristic WikiPlaza on that same Place de la Bastille… A lot is going to be happening and changing in the Paris in the next few weeks. It’s all connected with Futur en Seine. We’ll keep you posted….