Gaus has contributed an essay to the new TED Book, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities. In the essay, he writes about the need for better local food sources in cities and the exciting potential of aquaponics.

Here, we ask him a few questions. 

So, what is aquaponics and why is it good for cities?

Aquaponics is the combination of commercial fish rearing (aquaculture) and cultivation of plants in water (hydroponics). Aquaponics does not require extensive land use or fertile soil to grow plants. This makes it particularly attractive for urban agriculture, where both space and fertile soil are limited. 

You launched your company with the idea that it was time for aquaponics to grow up. What does that mean? 

Growing up means becoming a competitive force in the way food is grown in the city.

Aquaponics and its application in urban agriculture is a relatively new phenomenon. The technology and its commercial scale are still in an early stage of development. In order to provide a meaningful contribution toward food security and global awareness on urban resilience, we need to drive solutions that are robust and scalable.

Why is it so important to find large-scale urban food solutions?

In order to meet the global demand for food by 2050, The Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations estimates that food production needs to double. While access to new arable land can only increase this by 5 percent — and agricultural intensification and efficiencies are peaking — new technologies and solutions are required to help solve the problem.

Urban agriculture has the potential to transform city-dwellers from “suckers” of natural resources to better-balanced consumers and producers — with local food production and greater resilience. This makes a lot of sense for both the planet and the people; it would have a big impact on the way cities are becoming more self-sustainable.

How do you envision aquaponics taking off in the future?

We are getting a lot of requests from all over the world for our solution. Our goal is to provide the tools, services and the brand for urban farming in the city. I think we need both a bottom-up as well as a top-down approach to achieve scale. Of course, community-based initiatives are important, but enterprise-level activities as well as public and governmental support are also required. Why shouldn’t a large supermarket chain or a large public hospital grow on its own rooftops? We see market-based initiatives or “urban farmers” as true entrepreneurs in their cities. The eco-net of financing, technical support and distribution networks needs to be created as well.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. A subscription costs $4.99 a month, and is an all-you-can-read buffet.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas — that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools.

Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, an anthology that suggests bold ideas for how we can create thriving cities. Born out of The City 2.0 TED Prize and produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the book features essays from 12 authors, tackling topics ranging from transportation to food to public art.

Yesterday, we heard from City 2.0 essayist Diana Lind on why cities should be highway-free. Today, we asked Emily Badger to tell us more about her vision of sharing within big cities.

In your essay, you suggest that a culture of sharing has arisen in cities because of limitations of physical space. What’s created this culture?

All over the world, the populations of cities are swelling. This is the acceleration of a long-running transition as societies everywhere become less rural and more urban. So the question then becomes: Where do we put all of these people? And how will they live together? Ideally, we need cities to grow in population without expanding at an equal rate in geographic size. We need urbanization without sprawl. And so this means we need to try to accommodate more people within the footprint of existing cities. That means more people living in apartments instead of detached homes. That means using a car-share instead of individually owning cars. That means using public parks instead of private backyards — all simply because there just won’t be enough space in crowded cities for everyone to individually own all of these things.

Is there also an economic reality causing all this sharing?

A lot of people learned during the recession that it was financially unsustainable to have a 4,000-square-foot house and two or three cars. The “sharing economy” sounds like a nice idea for altruistic people willing to give rides in their cars to strangers. But sharing is also fundamentally a way for people to cover car payments or monthly rent bills. I suspect there are a lot of people on Airbnb who wouldn’t be able to afford their homes if they couldn’t make some money each month renting out a spare bedroom.

Sharing isn’t a new idea. Tell us a little about the history of urban sharing and how we drifted away from it.

We have always shared a lot of things, especially in cities. We share books at the library. We share transportation in a subway car. We share washing machines at a laundromat. Cities in many ways are historically a kind of shared commons. But, particularly in the U.S., we started to move away from that mentality after World War II — and a lot of the rest of the world, especially the developing world, has followed our lead. A lot of people moved out of cities for a more spacious, suburban lifestyle that simply didn’t require us to share assets in the same way. Culturally, we came to prize large private homes over apartments, multiple cars over public transit, and personal appliances over laundries. Now that demographic trends are shifting back into cities, though, this story is starting to change.

What are some of the downsides of sharing?

I don’t want to sound like sharing is awesome in every way! Obviously, we give up some comfort and convenience when we don’t individually own things, and there’s a tradeoff there. I live in an apartment, and sometimes I have to listen to my neighbors through our shared walls and ceilings. If you do Zipcar or have a bike-share membership, it is entirely possible that there may not be a car or a bike waiting for you exactly when and where you need it on short notice. Sharing always implies some kind of risk: that you may not be able to get what you need, that you may not like the person you’re dealing with, that someone may damage your power tool while they’re borrowing it. But for a whole variety of reasons — including financial, environmental and physical-space considerations — we know that more and more people are opting to take this risk with a lot of things no one thought anyone would share 20 years ago.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There is a new TED Books anthology that seeks to answer some of the key questions about how to develop thriving cities — tackling everything from issues of sustainability to infrastructure to the happiness of urban dwellers. Born out of The City 2.0, a broad initiative for citizen-powered change that began with the 2012 TED Prize, this collection of essays offers potential answers to the question: How can we ensure that our cities are sustainable, efficient, beautiful and invigorating? Produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, the 12 authors featured in this book offer fascinating ideas, from transportation to food to public art.

Over the next three days, we’ll hear from three City 2.0 essay authors. Today, we sat down with Diana Lind, the editor-in-chief and executive director of Next City, to discuss her essay that envisions cities without highways.

Why do highways have a bad effect on cities?

While highways connect cities that are hundreds of miles apart and allow us to move people and goods across this vast country, many highways were built at the height of suburban development. They are not designed to bring people into cities so much as to allow people to drive past them. As a result, these highways often bisect neighborhoods, cut cities off from their waterfronts and obstruct the natural development that occurs along boulevards and streets. The land beside or under urban highways is often underdeveloped, creating no-go zones that are bad for the city’s economy, safety and appearance. Highways carry loud, polluting cars, and research has shown links between road pollution and asthma. The impervious highway surface creates stormwater runoff and heat-island effects, which are bad for a city’s resilience in climate change. And unlike other kinds of property, highways don’t generate tax revenue, preventing dozens of acres from being productively used. Simply put: highways are a blight on livable cities.

I don’t think we should keep investing in highways. In this era of climate change, downtown revitalization and population density, they can no longer be the solution. As cities see their highways become structurally obsolete, it’s a perfect time to start thinking about how to connect cities through other modes of infrastructure.

What are some of the alternatives to highways?

Any plan to replace a highway needs to account for the cars that will be displaced. Ideally, you replace a highway with more transit options so people can take a bus or train instead of a car. In New York, when the city decided not to replace the West Side Highway, it cleverly took federal highway funds and used them towards improving transit. In San Francisco, a former highway was replaced with a trolley line. The footprint of the highway itself might become a boulevard, property for new development, a park or a bike lane. On a larger scale, our national network of highways should be replaced with a better rail network that allows people the option of taking a train between cities rather than having to choose between driving or flying.

You say in your essay that more walkable neighborhoods contribute to lower foreclosure rates. Why would that be?

It’s plain math. Imagine a couple that has to pay for two cars in addition to a mortgage; they’re less likely to be able to handle their monthly bills. Each car costs the average driver nearly $9,000 a year. Compare that with a monthly MetroCard pass in New York City — it’s less than $1,250 a year, and that’s as expensive as public transit gets. If you can bike or walk to take care of your daily needs, life gets even cheaper. The money saved on not owning a car actually helps keep people in their homes.

You also say that there’s a connection between highways and obesity. Share more on that!

It’s really a connection between obesity and driving. Researchers have found that driving and obesity have a shocking 99 percent correlation. The more you drive, the more likely you are to be obese, because you have less time to walk for daily errands and otherwise be active.

What have been some of the benefits of replacing highways in New York and San Francisco?

There have been many. Removing the highways has increased area property values, significantly reduced car traffic along these thoroughfares and reconnected both cities to their waterfronts. Local gems such as San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Hudson River Park in New York are just two examples of how improving the area instead of improving highways has resulted in deeper investments in the city’s assets.

City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

The City 2.0 is an online forum that showcase stories and projects for urban innovation, and also doled out 10 grants for thinkers with great ideas for cities throughout 2012. Here, meet 8 of the winners and hear their fascinating ideas »

Last month, TED launched our redesigned City 2.0 website, a storytelling platform for city dwellers to share stories, videos and innovations related to urban transformation. Citizen-powered and story-driven, the City 2.0 site highlights what motivates people to take action and work together to shape the cities of our future.

The City 2.0 site also features remarkable stories from the 10 City 2.0 award winners, who are improving their cities by turning world-changing ideas into sustainable solutions and collaborative action. From Kampala to Melbourne, City 2.0 grantees are investing their energy, passion and resources towards making a difference in areas like education, safety, health, food and public space.

Watch these eight videos, released this week at TED2013 and TEDActive 2013, featuring remarkable City 2.0 award-winners from across the globe and learn how ordinary citizens are sparking extraordinary change:

Crowdsourcing the Quiet
As city populations expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for denizens to find places to retreat and relax in silence. Jason Sweeney and his team are working to “crowdsource the quiet” through their Stereopublic project, using web and smartphone-based technology to help people geo-locate quiet spaces in urban environments.

Designing Chicago
Designing Chicago leverages public participation and design to make citywide navigation better. The ultimate goal is that the app will take transit planning to the next level, incorporating functionality that people can use in a responsive, holistic way. Need to pick up a cup of coffee on the way to a meeting? Work that into your transit plan. Forgot the bus might be crowded because of the baseball game? The app will remind you of that, too. Need to plan elevator and escalator routes because you’re stuck with a big stroller? No problem.

Hollaback!
Emily May and Hollaback! are putting technology to work in the movement to end street harassment. Street harassment may be considered a social and cultural norm, but May is using crowd-source technology and social media to change the way we think about this insidious form of gender-based violence. Emily May wants you to Hollaback!

Lost in Lahore
A trio of impassioned mapmakers and technologists — Asim Fayaz, Omer Sheikh and Khurram Siddiqi — are going to use the $10,000 from their City 2.0 Award to become superheroes for people who are desperate and lost in Lahore. They are taking Allama Iqbal Town, one of the most densely populated localities in Lahore, and using it as a demonstration, of sorts. The signs they erect will follow international standards and have road names in Urdu and English. In addition to installing the new signage, they will also engage a team of paid experts and passionate volunteers to maintain the signs for a trial period of three months, documenting the time and effort required.

Mapping Sanitation
Faisal Chohan, a Senior TED Fellow and TEDxIslamabad organizer, will continue his mapping work with a related mission: Improving sanitation in order to prevent the spread of cholera, a bacterial infection in the small intestine, primarily caused by drinking water or eating food that has been contaminated by the feces of an infected person. The rapid dehydration and electrolyte imbalance that results from cholera can lead to death if left untreated.

Recycled Amusement
An artist and community organizer, Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire had an imaginative idea for how to engage and empower the children of his home country: play. Tusingwire became the first 2012 City 2.0 Award recipient at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, where he pitched his plan to turn thousands of plastic water bottles into an amusement park where kids growing up in the slums can play and learn.

Re-imagining the Commons
Recognizing the irreplaceable power of the local gathering space, Next American City, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit directed by Diana Lind, is living its mission by turning its headquarters into a vibrant local learning laboratory, art gallery and hot spot for boundary-crossing conversation.

WikiHouse, a House and Home for the 99%
Inspired by a desire to “create something that would allow the 99% to make cities for the 99%,” designers Alastair Parvin and Nick Ierodiaconou aimed to explore practical applications of their philosophical commitment to a more democratized design movement. They created a blueprint allowing everyday people to build their own homes using open-sourced designs and locally sourced materials. Since the project’s inception, five prototypes have been assembled.

Inspired by the City 2.0 award winners’ stories? Share your stories and inspirations on www.thecity2.org and download The Atlantic Cities and TED Books’ original ebook, City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There, produced in partnership with The Atlantic Cities, celebrates 12 promising, provocative responses to this challenge — in realms ranging from transportation to food to art. It asks: How can we transform cities to be sustainable, efficient, beautiful and invigorating? And practically speaking, how do we get from here to there? While this book doesn’t claim to have all the answers, it begins to form the right questions with bold essays from 10 authors including: Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City; Kent Larson, of the MIT Media Lab, who gave the TED Talk “Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city“; Diana Lind, the executive director of Next City; and Emily Badger and John Metcalfe, writers for The Atlantic Cities.

The City 2.0 is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone, and get a subscription with a new TED Book every two weeks.

In the next 30 years, two-thirds of our planet’s population will live in cities. Have you ever tried to envision the cities of the future?

Cities are enlivened by people, and people enable change. So today, we are launching our redesigned website TheCity2.org, a gathering place for all urban denizens to share stories, videos, ideas and innovations related to urban transformation.

Citizen-powered and story-driven, the City 2.0 site will showcase community driven, user-generated stories about what moves hearts and minds to take action to improve the way we share the planet. The new site features stories from some of our TEDxCity2.0 participants and City 2.0 prizewinners who received grants of $10,000 each to support their impactful work in areas like transportation, education, health, public space, safety and food.

The 10 prizewinners’ remarkable stories include grantee Emily May’s use of crowd-sourcing and social media to end street harassment, TED Fellow Gabriella Gomez-Mont’s desire to fight a health crisis in Mexico City by launching a citywide dance competition, and the Norwegian firm TYIN tegnestue Architects’ plan to build a community center in partnership with the residents of Bangkok’s largest slum.

Most importantly, the new TheCity2.org needs your story so we can learn from each other to make our urban spaces more vibrant, inclusive, and just. Please submit a story or inspiration from your city at TheCity2.org » 

We are excited about how your passions and projects will help us reimagine the cities of our present and future together. This is your opportunity to contribute to a global community of city dwellers, urban entrepreneurs, organizers, dreamers and doers.

The new City 2.0 website was born from a groundbreaking TED Prize winning idea, focused on sharing concepts, designs, and resources to spark urban transformation worldwide.

Mexico City is home to nearly 9 million people. The 8th largest city economy in the world, Mexico City is bursting with energy, vibrancy and color. But at the same time, it is also facing a health crisis. Diabetes has crept up to become the leading cause of preventable death in Mexico — with about 90 percent of cases stemming from obesity. Experts warn that if the prevalence of this disease continues to rise, it could overwhelm Mexico’s health system.

TED Senior Fellow Gabriella Gómez-Mont has a fascinating idea: could dancing be part of the solution?

Mexico City is known for dance — from couples well-versed in salsa and cumbia to the city’s dance halls where young people sweat under laser lights. Gómez-Mont wondered if this spirit could be harnessed to promote health. She asks, “What if we could turn a whole megalopolis into one gargantuan dance floor, and promote an active lifestyle while having fun and taping into the playful, social and happily competitive side of the city?”

In collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of experts — including Pablo Landa, Clora Romo, Constanza Gómez-Mont & Taxidermie  — Gómez-Mont is launching a citywide dance competition. The vision? For the whole city to become a dance floor.

Gómez-Mont’s idea is to bridge virtual and physical space. While neighborhoods and communities will be encouraged to host in-person dancing events, their events can be submitted for awards with the help of a new website, as well as through Gómez-Mont’s independent culture lab Tóxico and Laboratorio para la Ciudad, a creative urban think-tank that she co-founded. People will vote on winners over social media, where they can also connect with other communities up on their feet and shaking it.

“I am intrigued by the idea that cities should not only house the human body, but also provoke the human imagination,” says Gómez-Mont. “This for me is the essence of City 2.0.”

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health and public space. Gabriella Gómez-Mont has been given the final grant.

To read all about the winners, head to the City 2.0 website.

Photo: Stefan Ruiz

Tell us about your City 2.0 project, Saaf Pindi. What problem does it seek to address, and how will this project work?

Lack of proper sewerage infrastructure and clean water results in water-borne diseases like cholera, that has become the second biggest killer of children in South Asia. More than half the Indian population defecated in the open in 2008. In Pakistan, only 18% of the population has access to the proper sewerage infrastructure. Governments do not spend money in improving sanitation, nor there is pressure from citizenry to improve this situation. In Pakistan, for example only .037% of the budget is spent on improving sanitation.

Urban infrastructure maps are the essential basis for any coherent infrastructure planning. Data and mapping is key in building, maintaining, upgrading and rebuilding the cities of today and future. At a time when Google and Apple are going to launch 3D maps for better navigation, more than half of the world lacks proper sanitation infrastructure. The worst part is that such an important issue is not highlighted in the online mapping space, with a few limited exceptions. Spotlighting these issues through online maps and open data is one way to work towards possible solutions.

The Saaf Pindi project is mapping the poor sewerage infrastructure in Rawalpindi, the fourth largest city in Pakistan, with a population of 5 million. Our maps will will show the on-the-ground situation through online maps, make the data open, and track progress and government spending on every street of the city. We are focusing on mapping open sanitation pathways and points where untreated sanitation waste is dumped into natural water channels, such as rivers and canals. Our aim is to improve the situation by involving the local community, and holding the government accountable by tracking progress. One base mapping is done, we’ll add layers to the map to review improvements, budget allocations and maintenance of sanitation facilities with the help of community involvement. Additional layers will map instances of waterborne diseases reported in hospitals, to show the relationship between sanitation and disease.

We’ve spent the last few months designing the project and doing on-ground mapping. We divided the city into eight parts and have completed mapping of one area. We’re now working on bringing our first on-ground maps online and building a visualization to show the poor sanitation situation. In the next stages, we plan to integrate citizen reporting into the platform. I don’t know what shape it will ultimately take — but our vision is to solve this problem in Pakistan and then scale it all over the world.

How did Pakreport start? What was its impact, and what has it evolved into today?

Pakreport — a crowdsourced disaster response platform implemented in response to the 2010 floods in Pakistan — would actually not have been created if it hadn’t been for the TED fellowship. I stumbled on TED.com from the Webby awards website, applied for the fellowship program, and became one of the selected Fellows in the first Fellows class in 2009. This gave me opportunity to meet, interact with and get inspiration from world leaders. The work of the other Fellows, in particular, inspired me a lot. It gave me courage to get things done that were hard to even conceive of before.

At the end of July 2010, we faced massive floods in Pakistan, which affected 20 million people. I set up the Pakreport website based on the Ushahidi platform. [Ushahidi allows users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile, and is the brainchild of Fellows Juliana Rotich and Erik Hersman]. Within hours, I had built up a team of more than 20 people from all over the world, most of whom had experience in deploying Ushahidi in Haiti after the earthquake.

Our first implementation was to provide real-time reports during floods in Pakistan, with time and location context from the information gathered through mobiles and other ICT tools. Pakistan has 61% mobile teledensity, and mobiles phones are important tools for connecting and communicating with people on ground, especially in disaster situations. The team at  Pakreport set up a short SMS code, 3441, that was made available on four of the five mobile companies in Pakistan. It was a shared short code, so the “FL” tag needed to be appended before the message. We publicised the short code through the media — mainly radio — and relief agencies, with the message “what you see about floods.” The volunteer team working everywhere in the world used a crowdsourcing platform (CrowdFlower set up this plugin for us) to categorize the messages and, if geographic details were contained in the message, mark their location of origin on a map. We also mapped more than 300 villages that had never been mapped, and made all the data open. Our primary stakeholders were relief and first-responder agencies.

The Pakreport team worked more than 20 hours from more than seven time zones during the time of flooding. One team built documentation and training materials for for newly recruited volunteers. One team managed all technology infrastructure from USA. One team did volunteer training through Skype. One team managed all the media coverage. One team helped craft next steps on daily basis. I was running on the ground and coordinated all the team members from various time zones in real time.

Once we fell into love with mapping, we extended the platform to map and visualize hidden information and data. For example, when the election campaign started in Pakistan early this year we did a DoWeVote map to highlight low voter turnout. We also took data available on power generation and drew a power-generation capacity map of Pakistan by plotting each unit with its capacity. After a few hurdles, now this map is available to the public and provides everyone a clear picture of the power-generation capacity of Pakistan.

Pakreport.org has already set the foundation for Open Data in Pakistan. I believe that opening up government data is solution for fighting corruption, improving efficiency and accelerating innovation. My vision for Pakreport is to make it a platform for open and hidden data.

You were on the front lines of online entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Tell us about your path to becoming a young innovator with a social conscience.

I was a sensitive, introverted child. I grew up in the cantonment areas of Bahawalpur and Gujranwala, Pakistan, because my father was in the Pakistani army. I used to listen to the troubling news in the evenings on TV, and would think a lot about solving problems for others who lived thousand of miles away. These characteristics matured, and I grew up to have a problem-solving personality!

I always wanted to achieve something extraordinary in my life. I was curious about learning new things, more than my school could accommodate. I studied in the public school system in Pakistan, and there was no concept of skipping or advancing classes. Sometimes, my teachers allowed me to sit in in the higher grades for few days, but it was only temporary. My only other option was to learn through books, that were hard for me to understand in most cases. I studied accounting after college, but my main interest became technology, so I did my masters in computer science and began working in software development.

While I was working in the tech sector in Pakistan, a group of us started thinking about starting an online business. Thus we were forming one of the first young-entrepreneur-led tech companies in Pakistan. For our first product, we decided to build a jobs website to bring online recruitment model to Pakistan. We built the first version of the website in my living room at night after office hours and on weekends. I contributed to this first version, and then we scaled the product later.

We bootstrapped and launched BrightSpyre in August, 2002, with recruitment campaigns for our first few customers. Broadband internet was launched in Pakistan at the same time. However, 1.3 million users have access to internet through dial-up. We worked with customers all over Pakistan and outside Pakistan, automating their recruitment processes. At the same time, we provided a platform to job seekers to connect with opportunities quickly, along with providing awareness about career opportunities.

What was the response?

The initial feedback we got for our idea was that only the IT industry would ever adopt an online recruitment model, but eventually it became clear that online recruitment alleviated the pain of traditional hiring methods across industries. So HR departments and organizations with large-scale hiring needs became early adopters of online recruitment in Pakistan. We organized job fairs, startup and technology promotion events, trainings  and competitions for young people in Pakistan, mostly at universities. We’ve helped more than 10,000 candidates find jobs, and to date, we have reached a talent pool of more than 1 million users in Pakistan. Despite people’s doubts, we persisted in believing in online recruitment model, and it paid off — it has now became a reality. But a lot needs to be done to build the Internet ecosystem in Pakistan, as has been done in the telecom sector.

Meanwhile, we worked on building our tech company, Cogilent, and promoting technology, and this is what we plan to continue doing. We want to create a large, lean company based on the Silicon Valley enterprise model in Pakistan. I believe that internet is the engine for distribution of opportunities, and any work or job can be distributed. This is why we launched ework.pk: we are trying to create work opportunities for people in Pakistan using existing and new models to make it possible to get any work done by anyone from anywhere in Pakistan – linking opportunities with skilled workers.

So far, Cogilent has been a success. One of our founders won the Shell young entrepreneur of the year award in 2004, and we were one of the finalists in MIT Business Acceleration Plan Pakistan chapter. We got global recognition through TED, and this led us to compete at global levels.

What are your biggest concerns for Pakistan, and how do these concerns inform your work?

Actually, Pakistan and other developing countries have huge potential to grow. It’s estimated that there are about 104 million Pakistanis below the age of 30, and if we give them the right opportunities, this can lead to a better world. But at the same time, there are many depressing and disturbing challenges. My work is all about taking these challenges and creating solutions to these problems using technology.

My biggest concern for Pakistan — and this generally stands true for most developing nations — is the limited access to opportunity coupled with issues that are taking too long to solve. By limited opportunities, I mean for quality education, employment and work. To solve these issues in Pakistan, we have to look at solving these issues outside our boundaries — and computers and mobiles have provided us the required reach and ability. The only barriers that exist in this approach are legal and tax-related. For example, in Pakistan, you cannot buy certain books on Amazon. You cannot listen to songs. You cannot access university lectures on iTunes. Many cite the example of no PayPal in certain countries, because the state banks are unable to understand how online payment models work. When I fly to the US and log in to the same service, I am same person with the same identity, but just sitting at a different location, from which I can access all these resources. What if these barriers started disappearing, as they have for quality education by MOOC — massive open online courses such as Udacity and Coursera?

Secondly, it has taken too long for these countries to solve basic problems like improved sanitation, garbage collection, clean water. We are now using the Pakreport platform to highlight these issues.

Finally, some things that are challenges in developed countries are far worse in developing countries. Public transportation, for example, is at its worst along with public health care systems. Just to give you an example, waterborne diseases are the second biggest cause of death in South Asia. Water treatment technologies have existed for decades now. As a global community, we need to figure out a way to spread the benefits of these technologies at the last mile.

The Klong Toey Community Lantern — a community space in the oldest and largest of Bangkok’s slums — was built very quickly. Not quite as quickly as shown in this three-minute timelapse video, but construction for the project took just three weeks thanks to the help of the community.

But while construction went fast, Norwegian architects Yashar Hanstad and Andreas Gjertsen — of the firm TYIN tegnestue Architects – took six months to design the space. They conducted interviews with Klong Toey residents and held public workshops to find out exactly what the 140,000 person community — which struggles with rampant unemployment, drug use and substandard housing — needed. The goal was to create a safe oasis for community members of all ages to play and congregate.

The centerpiece of the Community Lantern is a soccer field, with bright lighting, that can double as a basketball area. Around it is an open structure with informal rooms for groups to hang out in and hold their own events. The walls are climbable and include hanging swings, for easy game watching.

“The area struggles with drugs and crime amongst other challenges, and we hope this project can be a little contribution that can lead to something positive,” says Hanstad.

Hanstad and Gjertsen have been named the latest winner of The City 2.0 award for the Community Lantern, and for similar projects they’ve launched in underdeveloped areas of Uganda, Sumatra and Norway.

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health, public space and food. Hanstad and Gjertsen have been given the ninth of the grants.

To suggest a project for the final City 2.0 awards nominate it through The City 2.0 website.

Too many people know the situation — you’re walking down the street, enjoying a cup of coffee and minding your own business, when a string of words curls through the air and smacks you in the face. Sometimes it’s lewd language that feels so upsetting; sometimes the words could be perceived as a compliment in another context, but the fact that they were uttered by a stranger feels like an affront.

Street harassment never sat well with Emily May. But in 2005, she was encouraged by a woman who took a photo of a man who was masturbating in a subway car and leering at her. The image quickly went viral, leading to the man’s arrest. Seeing how the tables could be turned on a harasser, May co-founded Hollaback!, a blog dedicated to photos and stories of street harassment.

“We wanted to take the focus off of the woman and onto the harasser,” explains May. “When you’re being harassed the lens is on you. We want to turn it back around and put it onto them.”

In 2010, Hollaback! released an iPhone and Android app that allows users to mark the locations where they were harassed on a Google map, as well as to share the story. The app not only allows girls, women, and members of the LGBTQ community to flip power dynamics, it also collects data on street harassment in a way never done before. The success of the app forced New York City to take note, and it has since been linked up with the city’s 311 information line. Hollaback! hopes to form similar partnerships in cities around the world.

Hollaback!, and May as its executive director, have been named the latest winner of The City 2.0 award. Want to hear more about the organization? Coincidentally, May will be speaking at TEDxWomen today, December 1, curated by The Paley Center for Media. May will be speaking during session four, “The Mirror.” Watch the livestream of the session at 2pm EST >>

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health, public space and food. So far, eight of the grants have been given out.

To suggest a project for one of the final two City 2.0 awards, nominate it through The City 2.0 website.