Cities of the Future — Keynote by Ladeja Godina Košir
At the prestigious Cities of Tomorrow – Reimagining Urban Infrastructure conference, held on 4 November 2025 as part of Paris InfraWeek, Ladeja Godina Košir, Founder and Executive Director of Circular Change and Co-Chair of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ECESP), delivered the keynote address.
Her speech brought the voice of circular transformation to the infrastructure community, highlighting how circular thinking, diplomacy, and transition brokers can help bridge silos between infrastructure, policy, and people.
“Shaping the cities of the future isn’t about building more — it’s about connecting better. The true passion behind our work is creating cities we want to live in, not escape from”
The event gathered global leaders and thinkers to explore how cities can balance rapid urbanization, sustainability, and livability. As former EU Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius reminded participants, by 2050, half of today’s infrastructure still needs to be built — a challenge that demands long-term collaboration across political cycles, mandates, and sectors.
Key takeaways from the discussions:
Stop silo thinking – connect infrastructure, digitalisation, nature, and communities.
Think far, not big – build adaptive cities that serve life, not just growth.
Quality of life matters – infrastructure is the backstage of cities; money builds it, but humanity sustains it.
We need less – and that’s liberation, not limitation.
Ladeja Godina Košir also underlined that building the cities of the future will require a new kind of leadership — the role of transition brokers who connect policies, partners, and people to drive systemic change. This was also the central theme of our LinkedIn newsletter “Transition Brokers – The Missing Link for Cities of Tomorrow,” published just before the Paris conference,
