As a cornerstone initiative of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, we are proposing a new format for presenting and elaborating thinking on what urban governance does, when it succeed and fails, and how it can be re-organized to meet the challenges of the 21st century. We put academics on the cutting edge of global urban scholarship face-to-face with established innovative practitioners—architects, activists, policy makers, and artists.

Through a series of rigorous yet accessible public dialogues they will grapple with the intellectual and everyday implications of their theories and practices to produce visionary but grounded research and intervention strategies for the future of city life.

Each debate will be preceded by a small panel of academics and practitioners presenting papers that speak to the same key issues. Building on the long-standing Oxford tradition of public debate, we hope to encourage productive engagement between intellectuals and practitioners that is too often missing from discussions of the city.