David Waggonner is the president of Waggonner & Ball, an award-winning, internationally active architectural design and planning practice located in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is also the initiator of Dutch Dialogues, an intercultural, interdisciplinary and intergenerational exchange between Dutch engineering and design professionals and their American counterparts focused on water-based urban design. The Dutch Dialogues conferences in the years after Hurricane Katrina articulated a new vision of New Orleans as a city living with – rather than against – water. Building on the Dutch Dialogues, David leads a team of local and international experts in the development of the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. The regional strategy addresses sustainable storm water management at all scales, from drainage system networks to individual lots, and includes ideas for supplemental green infrastructure systems based on hydrologic characteristics of the landscape. The team’s ultimate goal is to develop a model of sustainable delta urbanism that embraces water to improve safety, resiliency and quality of life, as well as create new economic and development opportunities.

Tony Fry is Professor of Design Futures, Griffith University, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane. Tony‘s research interest span Design Philosophy, Design Futures and Sustainment, Resettlement Theory, Learning in the Third Epoch of the University, and Intercultural Understanding. He is an author of ten books, an award winning designer and design educator. He is currently completing a commission on a book on ‘the future of cities in the age of climate change’; two essays in a book on ‘globalism and border thinking’; and major essays for a book on ‘design and the question of history’–all to be published in 2014. Tony has worked and taught internationally, most recently in Timor-Leste, the USA, and India, with emergent projects in Greece and Egypt.

Keynote - An Agenda of Transformation: Tony will argue that the extant politics, philosophy and practices of design cannot get us to a ‘future with a future’, and that in this unfolding age of global unsettlement they have to be remade. Framed by this situation, the question becomes: what do designer and architects do when confronted with the 'defuturing' consequences of humanity’s anthropocentric fabrication of ‘a world within the world’? Rather than deal with this question in the abstract it be will be first brought to ‘thinking the future of cities in time, unsettlement and a changing climate. Thereafter, issues of the transformation of learning, methods and practice will be presented both in the context of questions raised and as contribution to on going discussion within the conference.