Mexico City was selected as the host city for 2018 World Design Capital. 「World Design Organization web meeting」was held at Mexico time, 23rd in the Mexico City Government office. Mayor of Taichung City, Chia-lung Lin was invited to attend the meeting. Mayor Lin shared the management experiences of Taichung on renovations of Luchuan Canal and Liuchuan Canal with the other countries in the meeting. He said, there would be a position of “Chief designer” proposed in Taichung to make more professional experts and citizens to get involved in the design and management of the city. The policy obtained highly recognized by the Chairwoman of World Design Organization, Luisa Bocchietto.

Mexico City was selected by the World Design Organization to conduct the event of 2018 World Design Capital. The in-charge institute「Design Week Mexico」 has initiated the「World Design Organization web meeting」 to invite all the representatives of the cities where had the event of World Design Capital before to share the management experiences with the others.

Mayor Lin was invited by World Design Organization (WDO) and Mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Angel Mancera, to join in the round table discussion meeting with the other cities like Helsinki, Finland, Cape Town, South Africa, Taipei, Taiwan, Mexico City, Lille, France, Madrid, Spain, Torino, Italy, and Curitiba, Brazil etc. They shared many experiences of changing the city by design in depth and signed the「Joint declaration of city design」 together to support the role of design on the social economics and cultural development of the city.

When Mayor Lin was invited to share the experiences of Taichung, he indicated Taichung has become the second largest city of Taiwan and recommended by CNN to be a good city for residence. It’s a city with plenty of traditional cultures and new elements of cultures so it’s a cultural city with comprehensive development.

Mayor Lin took the renovations of Luchuan Canal and Liuchuan Canal as the example of old town rebuilt to share with the other countries. He played the video of「Heartbeat of Taichung」shooter by Po-Lin Chi, the ex-director, to show the beauty of Taichung to the audience and introduced the vision of design with green concepts for「Shuinan Smart Town」 to the international friends there.

Mayor Lin further invited the attendees to visit Taichung to participate in 2018 Taichung World Flora Expo and feel how Taichung values the design in addition to the determination of environmental conservation. Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, Rafael Greca, and many other attendees were showing high interests in Taichung.

Mayor Lin emphasized, Taichung is absolutely confident to introduce design to the city management; and the City Government will create a role of “Chief Designer” to make more professional experts and citizens to get involved in the design and management of the city.

Chairwoman of World Design Organization, Luisa Bocchietto said in her speech, she was happy to know there would be a position of “Chief Designer” proposed in Taichung City Government and recognized the ambition of Taichung on city design. She’s also impressed by the great efforts of Taipei City Government and Taiwan creativity center on the management of World Design Capital.

The host of the web meeting was the founder of「Design Week Mexico」, Emilio Cabrero, she said, the city values the design would make the city better, even more, it would change the quality of life.

2018 World Design Capital in Mexico City had taken the rebuilding of city parks as the example to change the city. The representative of Mexico City, Director of Environment Agency, Ing. Tanya Muller said, there were many abandoned or poor maintained public space and parks in Mexico; those places usually become the dead ends of public order. However, the citizens can embrace the renovated parks again after a series of designs to change and social involvement.

Besides, Secretary General, Jin-mao Huang has led the team of the City Government to visit「City Laboratory」of Mexico, it is the first established city lab in North America with the collaborations by lots of experts from everywhere. They firstly decided the topics and found out the solutions by the power of public and private sectors. Then the policies would be implemented through experiments and evaluated by the results of implementation. At the last, the feasible policies would be executed by the government to implement under cross-department collaborations. Secretary General Huang mentioned, the spirit of shared platform would be expected to apply to introduce the design concepts into the city administrations to establish the right policies needed by the citizens.