A Conversation about Power, Voice, Cities and Community
Voices, power and re-imagining cities in conversation with Einass Bakhiet and Kalpana Arias
Voices, power and re-imagining cities in conversation with Einass Bakhiet and Kalpana Arias
What does it take to be heard in a world built on hierarchy and “business as usual”?
In the Blue Earth Studio at this year’s Summit, Will Hayler sat down with two people who aren’t waiting for permission to be part of the solution. Einass Bakhiet and Kalpana Arias are too highly intelligent and thought-provoking people with voices that need to be heard.
What follows is a conversation about power, voice, cities and community. A discussion about what happens when you stop knocking on closed doors and start redesigning the room altogether.
Listen to the conversation on Spotify
Watch on Youtube
Making space where none exists
For Kalpana, being heard has never been straightforward. As a young woman from a minority background working in technology, Kalpana describes having to carve out her own space.
A quote that guides her approach is from the legendary gardener Ron Finley:
“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Rather than waiting for invitations, Kalpana talks about turning up anyway, making the conversation human, playful and grounded in everyday life. Starting not with policy decks or theory, but with simple, natural conversations that connect people to their daily actions and their shared environments.
It’s activism without permission. And it works.
Challenging “business as usual”
Einass Bakhiet brings a different angle, shaped by her experience inside the insurance industry. For her, “business as usual” is shorthand for a deeply extractive system, one that takes from the planet until it can take no more, leaving both people and ecosystems to suffer with consequences.
Einass is clear: business itself isn’t the enemy.
Business is powerful because it knows how to solve problems. In a world that is defined by complexity, scale and urgency, problem-solvers are held in the highest regard. What spaces like Blue Earth do, she argues, is make visible a different reality, one where money, innovation and entrepreneurship are tools for regeneration rather than extraction.
Another world isn’t just possible. It’s already being built.
From regeneration to reciprocity
As the conversation deepened, the language shifted from regeneration to something even more fundamental: reciprocity.
You can’t regenerate systems without changing how power and resources flow through them. Kalpana likens it to a mycelial network, interconnected, adaptive, non-hierarchical. No one loses; everyone is resourced differently.
This is where siloed thinking breaks down. Industries, communities and sectors can’t operate in isolation if we want life-giving systems to survive. Challenging entrenched power structures is uncomfortable, she admits, but that discomfort is the threshold to something new.
And crucially, it can only be crossed together.
Cities as living systems
Nowhere is this more tangible than in our cities.
For Kalpana, urban greening isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s a practical entry point into systems change. You might not be able to rewrite national policy overnight, but you can transform your street. You can tend an empty tree pit. You can start a community garden on forgotten land.
London offers hope. As the world’s first National Park City, it’s already 51% green space, but only half of that is truly accessible. The challenge now is turning citizens from passive consumers into active ecological participants.
Urban food growing, community gardens and shared green spaces don’t just reconnect people to nature. They reconnect people to each other.
Bridging worlds that don’t usually meet
Einass talks about where her work feels most effective: within her own communities. When climate narratives intersect with lived experience, from Sudan to Southeast London, they resonate in ways abstract statistics never can.
Kalpana’s focus is on intersections too: where technology meets nature, where gamers meet gardeners, where digital tools pull new audiences into biodiversity and urban growing. Glitch, her pocket gardening tool, is designed to do exactly that, using tech to scale nature-based solutions beyond traditional circles.
Different worlds, finally speaking to one another.
Why this conversation matters
As Will reflects at the close, the easiest response to the challenges we face is to pass on the opportunity to be part of the solution. When we see problems as opportunities, and to bring them into spaces where business, community and creativity collide. Unexpected outcomes start to happen.
When business and society work together, politics has to act. Otherwise, the system fails.
It's time to stop waiting for permission to be part of the solution.
Blue Earth will always make space for the people who challenge the status quo, to connect people, and to remind us that building a fairer, more regenerative future isn’t about saving the world, it’s about redesigning how we live within it.
And that work starts exactly where you are.