Lunch Sessions #3: Designing with Care: Towards a More Human City

For too long, development has been driven by narrow metrics—GDP, land value, return on investment—overlooking what truly matters: belonging, cultural vitality, ecological balance, and well-being. This session asks a critical question: what if we measured success by the quality of life cities create?

Lia Ghilardi argues that culture is not a luxury but the essential infrastructure of resilience. She calls for new, place-based metrics that capture intangible value—identity, trust, creativity—and guide more regenerative approaches to urban development.

Johannes Tovatt complements this view, framing urban design as “an act of love.” Drawing on his work with Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern, he highlights the need to balance technical precision with lived experience, using both qualitative and quantitative insights to shape meaningful, adaptable places.

Together, they challenge conventional thinking and propose a shift toward more human, inclusive, and holistic ways of measuring and making cities.

Host: Elisavet Papageorgiou, Intercult

Date:
20 April, 14:00 CET

Registration link:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/aowXtZkqQaGvqx-dFbH42g

About the speakers:
Lia Ghilardi: Lia Ghilardi is a creative polymath and urban sociologist, internationally recognised for her pioneering work in cultural urban development. For over 25 years, she has worked with civic leaders, architects, developers, and cultural organisations worldwide, delivering tailored place DNA strategies that drive imaginative, integrated solutions to contemporary placemaking challenges. She writes and blogs passionately about cities, human development, and regenerative growth, exploring how culture shapes places and their evolution. To this end, she has developed a unique toolkit for mapping the cultural and urban DNA of communities.

Johannes Tovatt: 
Johannes Tovatt is an architect and urban planner based in Stockholm. He began his career in the office of late Ralph Erskine in the mid-1980s and became partner in Erskine Tovatt Architects in the late 1990s. In 2019, Tovatt Architects & Planners merged with Sweco Architects.
Johannes has participated in many cross-border projects within a wide spectrum of the profession, spanning across urban space to rural landscape, policies to design-tools, academia to experience-based.
As practitioner and as lead architect in tangible projects across Europe, his focus lies in illustrating and communicating a shared vision, giving shape and content to social and spatial challenges of our time.

"Turning the Tide" project is co-funded by the European Union