World City Day: October 31, 2025

Screen and street, square and home, mirage and destination.

Historically, the city is the place of opportunities and disadvantages, of welcome and competition, of knowledge and development, of contemplation, care, and disorientation. Life in the contemporary city flows through all of these places: amidst overpasses and ring roads, ports, airports, and stations, among neighbourhood streets, alleys, and tree-lined avenues, along seas, lakes, and rivers, inside cinemas and theatres, university classrooms and research centres, between hospitals, malls, and workshops, museums, galleries, churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Between slowness and acceleration slips real life and symbolic life, individual contemplation and social sharing, intimate rooms and public discourse spaces. On that limes (boundary) rests the nervous and venous system that innervates it, made up of physical, digital, and psychic infrastructures, and in the lives of people, its collective heart beats.

The contemporary city is a laboratory for thought, progress, and planning, a stratification of gestures, actions, and processes that occur simultaneously in the interconnected public space. Given its centrality in society, World Cities Day celebrates this every year on October 31st. Established by the United Nations General Assembly with resolution 68/239, the initiative promotes the international community's interest in global urbanization and cooperation among countries, contributing to sustainable urban development worldwide. The objective is to raise public awareness, promote cooperation, and contribute to global efforts to build equitable, prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive cities capable of offering a better quality of life to people and communities.

Equality, access to services and new opportunities, involvement, and mobilization, even amidst cultural, anthropological, and social diversities, are indispensable prerequisites for the development of evolved and emancipated forms of active citizenship. An authentically sustainable vision of ecosystem development.

The 2025 edition of the Day is dedicated to smart cities for people. This starts with the awareness that the transformative power of digital technologies is redesigning life on a planetary level, offering opportunities that are in many ways unique with respect to how cities and human settlements are designed, planned, managed, and governed. In an era characterized by migration and epochal transitions toward a full and structural digitalization, cities are also technological hubs, data centres, and centres for problem-solving. Smart cities in the deepest sense of the definition—intelligent cities for people and the quality of relationships. Devices of neo-civilization for the creation of useful platforms and infrastructures, capable of sharing and socializing good practices, experiences, and strategies focused on common global needs and desires through networking.

Urgent issues are at the centre of the Agenda, such as the housing emergency, inequalities, the access to and role of technology and innovation, and international cooperation across sectors and forms of stakeholder engagement for managing a society in metamorphosis.

This is a matter of great complexity and scope that requires understanding, new skills, and forms of governance for urban economies based on "competitive cities". Among these, the modernization of buildings and the forms and techniques of construction are of essential importance—starting with intelligent materials, intrinsically sustainable projects, optimized use of resources, and waste reduction—with a softness perspective as a view toward the future and a way of conceiving the city, its artifacts, and energy efficiency.

It is a different sensitivity of innovative urbanization on a technical and symbolic level. It is the vision of more liveable cities, a shared thought, today a desire of the younger generations, a longing that influences life choices and projects. The well-being of public and private space, human comfort, is the original inspiration for architectural concepts, master plans, and the industrial production related to the design of objects and things. It is a value system that has become a trend, combining memory and foresight, accumulated knowledge—often spanning millennia—and applied research. This thus guides architectural research on forms and materials, and the recovery of tradition as a repository of knowledge and construction techniques.

The idea of guiding many transversal experiments is lightness as a device, as respect, reversibility, circularity of functions, and sustainability of the process in the realization of complex projects. Expo 2020 Dubai characterized itself in this sense as an authentic outpost of cutting-edge experimentation (clip Marc). That experience, which showed the world the risks and opportunities of climate change, accumulated a unique stock of technical, design, and cultural knowledge regarding the liveability of environments. These environments include the most extreme scenarios, but also those of cities stressed by sudden, high-impact climatic events.

The many experiences of i-Mesh—realized in different locations, applications, and environmental contexts—show how climate changes represent valuable design opportunities. Opportunities for new creative dialogues, references, memories, and iconographies of patterns, which act simultaneously as functional and structural architectural facades, and as a recognizable and representative sign, cultural identity, and decor.

If demographics are to orient the modernization of geography and the course of History, it is estimated that by 2050 the urbanization rate could reach almost 70%, mainly in emerging countries. It will be the genuinely ecological, organic, and sustainable architectural project that will be asked to interpret a new responsibility. To conceive public and private spaces that are truly inclusive, consistent with the desires and needs of communities, and respectful of the ecosystem and its now scarce resources. Thus, the city renews its multiple identity and the foresight of its matrices, a screen of meanings and cultures that inhabit communities in motion. Screens turned onto the future of the world.