New Museum & SESC to Present IDEAS CITY: Sao Paulo, 10/25-27

IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the health of urban centers. Founded by the New Museum in 2011 with a core group of partners, IDEAS CITY is a major collaborative initiative converging hundreds of arts, education, and civic organizations. It is held every other year in New York alongside annual Global Conferences taking place in international cities. The second IDEAS CITY Global Conference will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, from October 25-27, 2013, and is organized in partnership with SESC São Paulo.

IDEAS CITY: São Paulo will kick off with a keynote address by Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, celebrated Brazilian essayist, educator, critic and publisher, who will address the current cultural state of Brazil. The conference continues with a day of panels and conversations led by an international roster of thought leaders, artists, and innovators, as well as workshops with regional practitioners. Key speakers include Adam Greenfield, Managing Director of Urbanscale, Jac Leirner, Brazilian conceptual artist, Ronaldo Lemos, Head of Creative Commons Brazil and Director of the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro, Charles Renfro, Partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Yancey Strickler, Cofounder of Kickstarter, and Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression at Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others.

The Conference expands the conversation of Untapped Capital, explored at the first international Conference in Istanbul in 2012 and during the Festival in New York in May 2013, with participants focused on under-leveraged opportunities in our cities. The topic of Untapped Capital provides a launching point from which alternative thinking in regards to new methodologies, solutions, and goals can be developed.

Over half the world's population will live in cities by 2050, bringing increased opportunities to citizens but also major problems that require solutions. The creative community is an untapped source of enormously powerful capital, especially in its potential to foster greater innovation in other fields and stimulate economic development. The IDEAS CITY initiative rewrites the role of a contemporary art institution and is an unprecedented step in expanding the New Museum's mission and its potential as an international community leader to draw awareness to the creative population as agents for change.

"The IDEAS CITY Global Conferences are acting as a seismograph to channel sentiments, movements, trends, and networks," said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum and Founder of IDEAS CITY. "The Conferences draw on the power of gathering minds and voices that wouldn't normally come together around a table. The success of the program is in peer engagement and sourcing ideas to bring into practice."

"What is it like to be in a famous country yet live in an untapped city? According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, São Paulo turned him into a more intelligent person," said Danilo Santos de Miranda, Regional Director, SESC São Paulo. "When people visit São Paulo for the first time, they face a number of paradoxes: The best and the worst, the ugliest and the most beautiful coexist. This convening reveals a little of the elastic society we all live in. Riots have become a way of talking and listening, and Occupy Movements are now a part of the routine in many cities. Some countries are questioning how and why they are being investigated by other countries. The internet spreads news without censorship and official broadcasts no longer rule the most important opinions. The New Museum and SESC invite citizens to think about complex cities in a faster, more superficial, smaller, more optimistic, and definitely more intelligent world."

IDEAS CITY: São Paulo will be held at SESC Pompeia, a center for culture, sports, education, and leisure housed in a spectacular building developed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi in 1977. The Conference is free and open to the public. Advance tickets are not required. The Conference will also be livestreamed. For more information, visit ideas-city.org.