The next TNOC Festival will be in 2024 and preparation is underway! Dates are currently TBD.

TNOC Festivals in 2021 and 2022 were entirely virtual. Our TNOC Summit in 2019 was in-person. TNOC Festival 2024 will be both: an in-person event (city TBD) followed by a two-week virtual festival. We call this formal “serial hybrid”.

Topia is an innovative spatial gathering platform. When you enter Topia, you will be transported into an online festival space with many attendees – faces and names on video cameras, just as you would if you walked into a conference venue surrounded by many people. Many of them you will not know. Don’t be shy! Take advantage of the experience to be among people from around the world who are just as passionate about the future of our cities as you are.

Bring your voice, your work, and your enthusiasm to engage and participate at the Festival!

TNOC Festival is the world’s first and only cities festival that is truly global and transdisciplinary where we explore between and through traditional boundaries to think, imagine and seed ideas for building cities that are better for nature and all people.

This is not a traditional talk at you conference. The Festival is experimental and hyper-interactive where the majority of our sessions are participatory in nature.

Yes. English is the common language of the festival, but sessions can be proposed in any language. We try our best to support each language translation request for sessions, but we cannot guarantee translation for every session. You’ll be notified of my translation offered for sessions as we review session submissions in December. Plenaries will have presentations in several languages, and live translations in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, and (in some events) Mandarin will be offered

TNOC Festival welcomes all ways of knowing and modes of action, and our program emphasizes interaction and dialogue.

Yes, much of the event is crowd sourced.

Art is embedded throughout TNOC Festival.

TNOC Festival strives to foster inclusivity and lower barriers to participation for all attendees around the world. The festival offers multiple affordable registration categories to achieve this. We accept requests for free entry, but we ask each attendee to please pay to attend the festival as this helps us cover real costs of putting the event together.

Despite our international reach, The Nature of Cities is a small not-for-profit charity that doesn’t carry the financial capacity to pay festival speakers. We really value your time and and we appreciate your generous contribution to the Festival. The Nature of Cities is a Commons. All of our content and programming is free and open and doesn’t sit behind a pay wall. The Festival helps us support that important mission year round.

Paying for festival registration helps the Nature of Cities keep all the programming and content in our organization free and open source for everyone to benefit from. We have curated an online magazine with over 900 contributors from around the world and resisted integrating advertising and pay per view or membership-based content. We believe that knowledge is a Commons. There should be as few barriers as possible to accessing it so that we can achieve the kinds of just, equitable, sustainable and resilient cities we dream about. Paying for festival registration helps us continue to create and produce in a common space.

We will announce registration dates for TNOC Festival 2023. Join the festival newsletter for festival news and updates, including registration announcements.

The program will be available after the festival, date TBD.

No, previous events were TNOC Festivals in 2021 and 2022 (entirely virtual) and our in-person TNOC Summit in 2019 in Paris.

The list of key partners is continually growing. Visit our homepage to check our our sponsors and partners.

We want attendees to be inspired by the TNOC Festival to create more collaborative green cities. The connections made during the event can be a foundation for new partnerships. The lessons of the Festival can also continue to live and be available on this site

A wide variety of elected officials (former, current, and future) have contributed to TNOC. It is early in the TNOC festival planning process, but we expect various elected official as guests.

We expect approximately 3,000 participants from around the world, from many ways of knowing and modes of action. Our previous event (in 2021) attracted 2,200.

TNOC is a collective of over 900 contributors from around the world, from architects to scientists to designers, from practitioners to planners to entrepreneurs, artists, and activists. In fact, many of the Festival’s participants will be from this diverse pool.

Visit us at thenatureofcities.com .

We are The Nature of Cities (TNOC), and the word “of” modifies Nature to mean the character of cities, which we view through a green and blue lens. Our Festival logo was designed by Frida Larios. It conveys a sense of human connection among us as we steward nature and community in cities. The seeds depicted in the logo are shared ideas both dispersed and gathered. Hands are common in Mayan symbology and can mean both to throw or scatter and to receive. In many traditions, the open hand signifies greeting, welcome, and openness.