Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
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The Austin Convention Center was demolished last year. A $1.6 billion replacement is under construction. It won't open until 2029. Which meant that when SXSW 2026 arrived — the festival's 40th edition — its home of three decades was gone.

What happened next is worth understanding carefully, because it looks like a problem that turned into a lesson, and those are rarer than they appear.

SXSW distributed itself across the city. Three clubhouses replaced the convention center — one each for Innovation, Film, and Music. Sessions moved into hotels, theaters, rooftop bars, parking lots converted for the week. The festival's footprint didn't shrink; it expanded, in every direction at once, into neighborhoods that hadn't been part of the SXSW experience before. The city absorbed what the building could no longer hold.

The result was something that attendees described, with some surprise, as more intimate than previous editions — not smaller, but more present. You weren't moving between rooms in a single building. You were moving through Austin. The city was the conference hall.

SXSW generated an estimated $377 million for the local Austin economy over seven days — spread across more neighborhoods, more businesses, and more of the city than any previous edition had reached. Peter Lewis, SXSW's chief commercial officer, put it plainly: the loss of the convention center became "a chance to rethink how SXSW works."

The harder question — the one that the festival's leadership is quietly sitting with — is what happens when the new convention center opens in 2029. Whether the lesson of 2026 survives the building's return. Whether a city that discovered it could be its own venue will choose to go back inside.

(Sources: The Drum, Texas Monthly, Meetings Skift — March 2026)

New York — New York didn't need to lose a convention center to figure this out. The city has always been the original Town MICE model — its hotels, restaurants, galleries, rooftops, and street-level culture have functioned as distributed conference infrastructure for decades. When the UN General Assembly arrives, when Fashion Week takes over, when the Tribeca Film Festival spreads across Lower Manhattan — no single building contains any of it. The city is the venue. Austin just rediscovered what New York has always known. The difference is that New York built this organically over a century. Austin built it in a week, out of necessity. The lesson for every other city: you don't need to wait for the building to fall down.

Seoul — Seoul is about to demonstrate something related at a completely different scale. BTS's Gwanghwamun concert this Saturday will bring 260,000 people into central Seoul for a free public event that uses the entire district — not a stadium — as its stage. SXSW and BTS are running the same experiment by different means: the city as venue. Seoul's version has the advantage of cultural gravity that SXSW is still trying to recover. What Austin has that Seoul doesn't is the template for how to make the operational logistics of a city-scale event sustainable year after year.

Medellín — Medellín's innovation district around Ruta N is a dense, walkable cluster of startups, accelerators, corporate innovation labs, and university research centers. It has never been used as a distributed conference venue in the way Austin has just modeled. Startco 2026 arrives in April — Latin America's largest startup auction. The question Medellín's event organizers should be asking right now: what would it look like to let the city's innovation neighborhoods become the venue, rather than a single pavilion?

Dubai — Dubai's event economy is almost entirely built around purpose-built mega-venues: convention centers, indoor arenas, purpose-constructed festival spaces. The SXSW model is its near-opposite — a festival that uses the city's existing hospitality and commercial infrastructure as its stage. As Dubai matures from a city that people visit for events to a city that people live in, the question of how events connect visitors to neighborhoods — not just to venues — will matter more. The $377 million distributed across Austin's neighborhoods is a data point that Dubai's event planners should take seriously.

Amman — Amman doesn't have a convention center problem. It has the opposite: insufficient dedicated event infrastructure for the conferences and gatherings it wants to attract. The SXSW decentralized model is therefore directly applicable in a way it isn't for most cities: Amman's compact, walkable downtown, its Roman Amphitheater, its creative neighborhoods around Rainbow Street, its cluster of boutique hotels and cultural venues — all of this is already a distributed event infrastructure waiting to be activated. The model fits the constraint. The question is who decides to use it.

Tel Aviv — Tel Aviv's startup and tech event scene is energetic but geographically concentrated — the port, the Peres Center, a handful of recurring venues in the city's northern district. A distributed model — using Florentin's creative spaces, Rothschild Boulevard's startup offices, the outdoor venues along the seafront — could produce something more genuinely representative of the city than any single conference center. SXSW 2026 is the proof of concept. The blueprint is available. The only missing ingredient is the decision to use it.

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Where Will the Olds Live When Everything Changes? We're All Getting There.

The New City For The Olds.

We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

→ Visit Sim Eternal City Project

Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

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