David Munn is Head of information and communication technology for the Greater London Authority and a proponent of using open source technology and opening up data to citizens. Recently he participated in the “Open Data and the General Agenda” session of Moscow Urban Forum.

David Barrie is a British urban designer, CEO of David Barrie & Associates which focuses on urban regeneration projects. Recently he participated in “New Life of Microrayons” session of Moscow Urban Forum. Below he speaks about community building in terms of market economy and shows ways to provoke people to act independently of central government for their own good.

Jan Gehl, founder of GEHL ARCHITECTS, participant of Moscow Urban Forum plenary session “Moscow: Looking into the Future”, talks about common challenges for global cities and major factors of their international success.

Putting an end to recent flurries of gossip in the architecture world, it was finally confirmed on Tuesday that Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will curate the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, The Guardian reports.

Alper Çuğun is member of the board of Hack the Government foundation where he helped to shape Open Data policy in the Netherlands. He participated in Moscow Urban Forum as a speaker of Open Data and the General Agenda session. In his interview he talks about the future of city management and how to make a local initiative into a successful project.

— The authorities’ activity in Russia is traditionally closed to the citizens. How can we break this tradition? What are the methods of work with such clumsy structures as city administration?

— The method we used with our city administration — and believe it or not they were probably as clumsy as yours — is to ignore them and just do the things that we felt were necessary. It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. We started out as a voluntary and very much fringe initiative without clear goals or outcomes but with a clear idea of an ideal future. This approach of ‘whoever comes is the right people’ created a broad network of interested actors who took the core ideals of a better and more open government and ran with them into all kind of directions. From there on we continued tirelessly to talk with whoever would listen and kept pushing and advocating for this change to be implemented in and outside of government. Here and there we reaped some small successes which snowballed into larger successes and finally we managed to organize a couple of all out events (like Apps for Amsterdam) that put this cause on the map for once and for all. So with any civic tradition: start with what works for you and build from there and at some point you will have created a new reality where it will be in the best interest of any administration to get on board of.

Simon Anholt is an independent policy advisor from UK, author of the best-selling book “Brand America”, speaker of the Moscow Urban Forum opening plenary session “The Individual’s Place in the City and Global Economy”. “Strelka” asked him about national branding and the image of Moscow him prior to his arrival in Moscow. Below is the full version of the interview, which was posted in short to the Forum’s social networks.