The city of the future
People are flocking to cities. Even with over 50% of people in urban areas today, growth projections estimate that more than two-thirds of the world will follow suit by 2050. The wave of new residents will create inevitable complications in managing affordable housing supply, reducing carbon emissions, providing clean water, and offering accessible and efficient urban transportation networks.
We aren’t innovating fast enough to keep up. Population growth and resource consumption are dramatically outpacing technological innovation, and impacts can be seen all over the world. Take San Francisco: the city’s influx of top-tier professional talent and its inability and unwillingness to efficiently produce affordable housing or alter zoning laws in favor of multi-family development have caused a surge in housing prices so dramatical that the average teacher spends 64% of their monthly income on rent alone; or, again, in Australia, where hunters are decimating populations of wild camels just to decrease competition for the country’s limited water supply.
Source: https://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/
This raises the question:
How do you improve housing affordability and citizen health, reduce negative environmental impact, and ensure safety and security for all?
Some suggest the solution is a wealth tax. Others point to stricter regulations on things like rent, transportation networks, and energy consumption. While either option may be valid, the most significant impact may actually come from a less traditional solution: public-private partnerships.
Healthier cities are forged when the public and private sectors work together. Widespread innovation is made easier when the municipalities and companies combine resources and facilitate the deployment of public tech. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed innovation in entertainment, payments, and eCommerce, so why not in cities?
For tech, the focus should be on connectivity. The few cities at the forefront of this next industrial revolution have already begun exploring how to best serve their citizens with apps, devices, and services that change the way they live, work, and move. The City of Madrid, for example, recently launched its mobile app MaaS (mobility-as-a-service) Madrid. It connects citizens with multi-modal transportation providers in a single tool. Built for both Android and iOS, the app combines information — timetables, maps, fares, traffic data — from public transportation, ride shares, bike shares, taxis, and scooters, and concentrates the data all in one place. The software not only saves people from searching through individual apps to find the best mode of transportation, but it also indirectly cuts carbon emissions, promotes healthy competition between vendors, and allows for a more enriching citizen experience.
MaaS Madrid
Similar platforms harness Internet of Things (IoT) devices to gather data needed to effectively manage physical, economic, and environmental assets. These systems are being employed in various ways, from energy resource management — making sure your home’s electricity and heating use the minimum amount of energy necessary — to traffic management, where IoT sensors optimize traffic lights and increase safety among vehicles. They’ll soon be ubiquitous. And provided that most incentivize healthier, cost-reducing habits, they’ll pave the way to a more connected future with higher standards of living.
It’s time to build. To achieve any progress, we need open innovation in every aspect of civic life, from urban infrastructure to climate change, all fueled by government support. Along the way, errors will be made, companies will fail, and change may be slow, but so long as we continue to iterate, the future will undoubtedly be better, brighter, and more resilient. Remember: the city of the future is the one that is well-designed today.
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Special thanks to Ali Dunn and Tammy McLeod for helping me articulate my ideas.