Creative bureaucracy, an oxymoron? | Karl-Filip Coenegrachts | TEDxGhent

We are in the midst of a dramatic transformation and a business as usual approach will not get us to where we need to be. The Creative Bureaucracy Movement believes good public administrations have a substantial role to play to make places and modern society work in this transition. Good government matters! Bureaucracy is not everything, yet little can happen without bureaucracy and it needs to be revalued for what it is good at – especially promoting and protecting the public interest and the common good. Karl-Filip Coenegrachts is Master of .Laws, specialized in European Law (Ghent University, 1996). He served as Chief Strategy Officer of the City of Ghent in Belgium between 2004 and 2018. In that capacity he was responsible for the citys long-term strategy including the implementation of horizontal policies, smart city strategy, data and information management, policy participation, international relations and European funding programmes. He was one of the founders of Digipolis, the public intermunicipal IT-company of the cities of Antwerp of Ghent in Belgium and served as expert of the Board of Directors between 2003 and 2018. Representing the City of Ghent he was member of the Executive Committee of EUROCITIES, the largest European cities network, from 2009 to 2018 and Chair of the ExCom in 2017 and 2018. Building upon his experience he founded the Cities of People partnership in 2018, to further develop and implement an alternative people centered model for future cities. In 2019 he successfully organised the first edition of the Brussels Creative Bureaucracy Festival. He is the Belgian ambassador of the International Creative Bureaucracy Movement and serves as advisor for the annual Berlin Creative Bureaucracy Festival. He is frequently asked to deliver talks and keynotes on smart cities, open governance and new democracy, creative bureaucracy, digital sovereignty and urban commons. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx