IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring how cities will impact the future of humanity

Preparing for the changes ahead

Identifying risks to cities in the years ahead

Navigating urban innovation trends

With the vast majority of people destined to live in cities by the middle of the 21st century, the future of humans is inextricably interwoven with the future of cities. Every aspect of life will be shaped by the urban world — that includes living conditions, health, safety, work and careers, and recreation.

People have shaped cities, and, in turn, cities have shaped people. People will become what they design and build. They will enjoy or suffer the consequences of their city decisions. No doubt continuing the trend of the past few hundred years, cities will evolve and be molded by human needs and desires as well as by innovation, cultures, and the changing environment.

In this chapter, I explore ten ways that cities will define the human future. Of course, it’s not an exhaustive list; my idea here is to concentrate on areas that are echoed throughout this book and are characteristic of current smart city trends. I cover major areas such as digitalization, sustainability, data, diversity, transportation, and healthcare. I’m confident that many of the projections I make will come to pass. I’m equally confident that I’ll get many things wrong. After all, there’s no proven way to predict the future with absolute accuracy. The only things that humans can ever predict is that things will change and that they’ll often be surprised by what happens. The best that humans can do is use the knowledge they have today, explore and leverage their understanding of events and trends of the past, and make a good guess at where everyone is headed in the future. It’s an important thing to do.

Most People Will Live, Work, and Play Their Entire Lives in Cities

It is estimated by the United Nations that, around the year 2008, the world changed from being majority rural to majority urban. As recently as the 1950s, only 30 percent of the world lived in cities. From 2008 onward, cities have been growing rapidly, and rural areas have continued to see population decline. The United Nations maintains that around 3 million people move into cities every week. At this rate, within a couple of decades, including natural population growth, the urban population could grow by 3 billion.

Assuming that this trend continues, it’s a fair assumption that the future of humanity will belong to cities. This future is a profoundly different world from the entire history as homo sapiens to date. Within a few decades, most humans will know a life only in an urban context. The countryside will be somewhere that you visit, not a place where you live. Life will continue in rural areas, and some people will move from cities to be part of that life. But those will be a minority.

Rural parts of the world will still be vitally important for agriculture, tourism, for those that live there, preserving culture and habitat, and more. Humanity’s destiny in an urban future should not come at the price of rural heritage and value. In fact, it should increase the importance of the natural world because of its importance to a sustainable urban ecosystem.

By 2050, an urban future for 70 percent of humans will mean that the way they work, play, and live will all reflect this reality. Unless they mess it up, smarter cities have the potential to provide more career opportunities, better education and healthcare, and a safer and more prosperous environment. Of course, as you look out from today, there are many unknowns that humans will need to understand and confront, such as the impact of climate change, automation, and other natural and manmade threats. Our human responses to each will also define and shape our life in cities. Remember that cities have already shaped human behavior and destiny — they’ll just become a lot more important and complex in the years ahead.

Recognizing that the future is urban should reinforce the urgency to prepare and act in building smarter cities for not only communities today but also all communities to come.

The Increasing Demands of Sustainability Will Shape Human Behavior

Sustainability is generally defined as the manner in which humans can meet their needs today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability is typically evaluated by way of the dimensions of people, profit, and planet. Stated another way, each dimension equates to social, economic, and environment factors. Being sustainable and having sustainable development doesn’t mean curtailing progress. In fact, humans have to maintain sustainability while innovating and increasing the quality of life for communities.

Each sustainable dimension of people, profit, and planet requires continual behavioral changes as the world moves forward. As the increasingly dominant infrastructure of human life, cities may have the greatest levers to influence these three areas.

With the people (social) dimension, I am referring to the degree that cities support areas such as equality, inclusion, health, and happiness. With profit (economics), I’m referring to areas such as living wages, low-impact supply chains, and job opportunities. Finally, the planet (environmental) aspect may be the most familiar to you. This term refers to areas such as reducing carbon emissions, improving waste and resource management, and eliminating toxins in the air, water, plants, and soil.

The nature of dynamic city operations and activities drives changes in people, profit, and planet. Cities are responsible for 80 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — as well as 70 percent of carbon emissions. Intuitively, with more of humanity now living in urban areas, the challenges of equality, inclusion, and other critical, people-centered concerns continue to dominate city development. Cities have always defined how people behave, including which lifestyle options are available and adopted, the management of consumption and waste, and economic decisions that impact opportunities and safety nets.

Without a doubt, the dimensions of sustainability — people, profit, and planet — will be further defined by the world’s developing cities and, in turn, human behavior.

City Interactions Will Increasingly Be Digital

The third industrial revolution began in the 1950s. During this time, the world saw the emergence of electronics and computers. Consistent with a revolution, the world has never been the same since. And, by the way, its impact is still to be felt in many parts of the world. For example, the Internet is still unavailable to 40 percent of the world (although this number is improving rapidly). Wait until that 40 percent catches up with everyone else!

The world is also in a third wave of the Internet, and you can anticipate many more waves to come. The third wave includes the Internet as a platform for facilitation, such as ride-hailing (Uber, for example) and for connecting devices in an Internet of Things (being able to see who’s at the front door using an Internet-connected device and a remote camera, for example).

The most visible aspect of the third industrial revolution for many people has been the move from analog to digital services. You’ve seen digitalization change the way people interact, consume, and deliver services in every industry. It started with websites, and now smartphones, smartwatches, and smart assistants are some of the ways everyone experiences digital.

As the third decade of the 21st century begins, almost 80 percent of organizations are engaging in some form of digital transformation. They’re either undergoing a process of digitalization of their analog services, or they’re completely reinventing their businesses using the tools of the digital world.

As you can imagine, cities are also at various stages of a digital transformation. Some are considering the work ahead, and others are well into their efforts. Digital transformations are often considered a subset of a smart city strategy.

Just like the private sector, the public sector is embracing digital to enable better community experiences, lower costs through automation, add more value by integrating services, and meet the growing expectations of constituents.

Though city governments will need to offer a variety of channels for their communities to interact for some time to come — after all, you can’t assume that everyone has a computer or smartphone or even knows how to use them — they will increasingly build and support digital experiences. Already, many services can be accessed via a website, and lots of cities are beginning to offer apps on smartphones. For example, the city of Dubai offers the Dubai Now app, which supports 85 services directly on a smartphone, at

www.smartdubai.ae/apps-services/details/dubai-now

Given the global momentum and all the benefits arising from digitalization, it is clear that, over time, the way you interact with your local city government will be progressively more digital.

City Data Will Drive Community Decision-Making

Data has been called “the oil of the 21st century.” That’s because data has tremendous value for an organization. For example, with the right tools and expertise, a business can use data to target the marketing of its product or service at only individuals who have a high likelihood of becoming buyers. Data can help companies make informed decisions that range from optimizing fuel usage on aircraft to determining where to build a retail presence for maximum market reach. Data runs the digital economy — an economy that’s gradually proving its dominance.

Fortunately, data is the one element that most cities have in abundance. Though urban data has largely been a product of city activities, particularly as information technology has played a bigger role in city operations, it hasn’t historically been used in a derivative role. By this, I mean that cities haven’t been leveraging data for uses beyond its primary purpose. For example, a city may collect and store data on issues reported, such as vandalism or abandoned trash. But might it not be valuable to analyze the data and use it to determine behavioral trends, their origins, and potential solutions? (For more on how urban data is being used to solve problems and create new solutions, see Chapter 7.)

A breakthrough with city data began around 15 years ago, when cities started making their data sets freely available online. Communities could, for the first time, perform all sorts of actions on this data, called open data, including analysis, repurposing, application development, and more. Open data, and data in general, is the core of smart city work. (I cover open data in more detail in Chapter 9.)

Today, data finally plays a more important role in cities. As cities bring on the right talent and acquire the tools, they are leveraging the value of data for all types of benefits. This includes decision-making at city hall and decision-making in the community. And although they’re playing catch-up, cities are also putting more effort into securing the data and protecting privacy. City stakeholders are recognizing the value of this rich asset. Cities have finally discovered the new oil.

People Will Have Expanded Opportunities to Co-Create and Collaborate on Urban Solutions

It wasn’t that long ago that communities had to rely entirely on their local governments to provide city services. The assumption was that people paid taxes and the municipality in return had the responsibility to provide solutions. Yes, this is still generally the arrangement and expectation. However, it has become clear that the scale and complexity of many contemporary urban environments means that government-provided services are often a delicate balancing act of priority management. In other words, there’s only a limited amount of money, talent, and time at city hall to deliver against all the needs of a community. These constraints create enormous frustration, by both constituents and city staff who just want to do the right thing.

Fortunately, public-private partnerships (PPPs) that bring together talent and resources from both sectors are often used to tackle issues and create more capacity. PPPs are widely adopted today, and barely a large project is not approached in this way.

In addition, technology is enabling more nongovernmental players to participate in creating and delivering urban services. It can answer an important question: If a local government can’t prioritize a solution to be created and delivered, can another entity step up and do it?

Today, private enterprise and community members are participating in the delivery of urban services in a variety of ways. In addition to collaborating via PPPs, these private stakeholders can use entrepreneurship, technology, and open data to create all manner of services. City halls all over the world are embracing private engagement in solution building and encouraging collaboration from across city departments with outside partners. City management, recognizing their own limitations and also the benefits of leveraging private participation, are encouraging co-creation and collaboration. Urban innovation is becoming a team sport. In many instances today, getting urban solutions created and deployed won’t rely solely on the frustration of waiting for a local government to prioritize and deliver the need, and I expect this collaborative approach to become even more common.

Crime May Be Reduced Significantly

It may seem implausible that, in many cities around the world, and particularly in the United States, crime has dropped and continues to decline. A hyperconnected world where people are consuming news in higher volume by way of more media channels than ever before may give you the impression that cities are more dangerous and violent than in the past. The data just doesn’t support it. In fact, overall, the world is more peaceful, and more people than ever live in safer environments. In western Europe in the 1300s, there were around 70 murders for every 100,000 people. Today, it’s 1.

Certainly, there’s much work still to do. Far too many people continue to be the victims of urban crime, and the benefits that many cities are experiencing in reduced lawbreaking isn’t evenly distributed.

Though humans have had a fairly violent past, to say the least, beginning around the 1990s, many cities began to see sharp declines in many types of crime, some with drops as big as 50 percent. The phenomenon was most pronounced in the United States, which had seen increasing violent urban crime from the 1950s through the end of the 1980s. But other violent cities around the world saw decreases as well. São Paulo, Brazil, once one of the world's most dangerous cities, saw crime dramatically drop beginning around 1999. Between 1990 and 2015, homicides declined in Europe by 56 percent and in Asia by 38 percent. Something changed, and cities began to get safer.

Safer cities also resulted in urban renewal. Abandoned and run-down areas began to be transformed into livable, prosperous areas. Schoolkids no longer consumed by the fear of crime could focus more on learning. The drop in urban crime has had, and continues to have, many positive outcomes.

So, what happened? The reasons that cities are becoming safer isn’t yet well understood, though plenty of research has been conducted and conclusions formed. Explanations range from aging populations, better law enforcement and innovation, reduced male unemployment, local community mobilization, more cultural diversity, and improved economic conditions.

Having a clear understanding of the reasons for the sharp decline in crime would be important for other cities because they would be able to adopt the successful efforts of others.

When cities are safe, people are freer. This freedom enables more innovation, better education, cleaner and healthier environments, and greater prosperity. Unless an unanticipated change occurs, all signals suggest that smarter cities will be even safer in the future. I think everyone can agree that this is a good thing and an important enabler of an improved quality of life.

More Diversity Will Show Up in What Humans Do and How They Work

The nature of work has changed radically over several hundred years. Before the mid-1700s, most people worked off the land or ran small businesses. With the advent of the first industrial revolution, factories emerged that attracted labor from rural areas into urban areas. This immigration from the countryside was the catalyst for many towns to grow into cities.

In the 1800s, the second industrial revolution saw a massive expansion of factories and city work. It offered people predictable labor, increased incomes, and the possibility of a better quality of life (though conditions remained poor for too many people for a long period). The labor union movement expanded greatly in the 19th and 20th centuries, which helped to improve city-and-factory working conditions.

During the third industrial revolution, which began around the 1950s, electronics and computers provided new tools, opportunities, and careers. Computers significantly increased productivity and changed the way millions of workers performed their work.

Now, in the 21st century, the world is entering a fourth industrial revolution, and work is evolving again. In addition, as the main source of global economic power and the location where most people now live, cities today have proven themselves to be inextricably linked to work.

Most striking is the variety of ways in which work is changing. For example, historically most people have worked for an organization, but now greater numbers are working as freelancers. In particular, the United States has seen a major shift in this direction. More than 53 million individuals — 34 percent of the American workforce — now work independently. Many of the jobs are part of the sharing economy that primarily serves the urban environment, such as ride hailing, deliveries, and household services.

Another influence on the evolution of work is the impact of automation and artificial intelligence. A recent study suggested that by 2030, up to 800 million global workers could be displaced by robotics. That’s 20 percent of the world’s workforce. Some argue that automation may be a boon to workers, augmenting their work rather than replacing it. In fact, some research maintains that new technologies may create more meaningful and higher-paying opportunities.

As a driver of economic progress, smarter cities will need to support and incentivize new opportunities and businesses, reduce barriers to entrepreneurship, provision workforce retooling and education options, and deploy programs to unlock talent. They’ll also need to support less-skilled workers, the most likely group to be negatively impacted by new technologies and the increasing demand for highly skilled staff and the creative class. Smarter cities can also create and support an ecosystem of innovation that embraces change and progress rather than fights it.

Cities that ignore these employment shifts and don’t take action run the risk of growing inequality, unemployment and all that comes with it, and economic decline.

But the intersection of the future of cities and that of people’s changing work will have many upsides. Notably, more workers will have flexibility in where and how they work. This means more time in their city homes or at coffee shops and co-working spaces. This increased freedom will continue to produce new urban support services, such as on-demand dog walking services, and recreational options, such as new food experiences, for workers who have more control over their time.

Cities and their communities have the opportunity to participate in defining the future of work. For example, this will involve choices around policy and education. Done right, cities have the possibility of continued and increasing prosperity, and urban workers will have many more options to consider when it comes to employment, including where and how they work.

The Way People and Goods Move Will Continue to Evolve

One of the most visible ways that cities are changing in front of your eyes is the number of new forms of transportation that are suddenly shuttling around people and goods. The roads and sidewalks of the urban world were already replete with a variety of transportation modes. From motorized tuk-tuks to pulled rickshaws, from horses to rollerblades, and from convertibles to light rail, humans have found a multitude of ways to get around. Culture, cost, and geography in each city play a big role in shaping the options offered.

It seems that we’re far from done. Automobiles, now dominating the city landscape, are themselves in a period of change. Increased interest in sustainability is literally driving the growth of electric-powered vehicles. Still a niche, but rapidly expanding, electric cars may dominate in the second half of the 21st century. Hydrogen as a fuel is also gaining interest and buyers, but it’s too early to know whether it will have long-term traction. The emergence of self-driving vehicles or fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) is gathering speed, and all car manufacturers are betting on a vast AV future.

It would be too narrow to consider AVs only from the perspective of self-driving. They have the potential to change everything, from reduced congestion and accidents to insurance disruption and reinvented city design. (I discuss AVs in more detail in Chapter 8.)

The other area of mobility that has seen remarkable growth is in personal transportation. These are devices built primarily for one person. Though bicycles have long been popular, use continues to increase in many cities around the world with the introduction of bikes available for rental in free-standing racks or just parked alone on the sidewalk. Gaining particular popularity is the e-bike — a bicycle with a small motor that helps with propulsion and ease at climbing hills. Other personal transportation includes an eclectic mix of scooters (and e-scooters), electric unicycles, the Segway, self-balancing wheels, hoverboards, hovercycles, monowheel scooters, and electric mopeds. I have no doubt that by the time this book goes to print, even more will be on the market.

Cities where adoption is high for these contraptions, such as San Francisco, are making for a colorful streetscape. It’s also creating safety hazards that range from collisions with larger motorized vehicles to people tripping over abandoned devices on the sidewalk. In some cities, rental bikes being thrown into canals or hung in trees and other odd places have become forms of vandalism and creativity, respectively.

With multiple modes of transportation available, people have many ways of getting from one place to another. It means that a trip might involve a variety of modalities. Using an app to optimize a trip so that, for example, the lowest carbon footprint is utilized is now possible. It might mean walking a certain distance, and then pedaling an e-bike, and then riding light rail, and, finally, taking a short walk. These apps consider mobility as a service, or MaaS. This may mean that the app determines a cost for the entire trip and distributes the funds to the various modalities used. The world’s urban environments are optimized for MaaS, and adoption of this approach appears to be gaining popularity in cities across the world. For MaaS to function in a city, it’s almost certain that both the public and private sectors have to partner to optimize it. The data gleaned from MaaS is also helping all partners develop better solutions and is informing city leaders about transportation patterns and needs.

The most fundamental form of transport is walking. That's why communities are demanding that their cities plan for, develop, and promote walk-friendly neighborhoods and for their urban cores to be more accessible, convenient, and safe for walking. Walking is good for one's health, the environment, and the economy. The notion of a walk score has gained popularity as a way to measure the degree that neighborhoods have good walkability. (For more information on walk scores, check out www.walkscore.com.)

The emergence of cars in the past century created vast planetary change, both in physical appearance and in enabling new human enterprise. But, as the century came to a close, it became clear that cars have created many challenges, including congestion, accidents, high transport costs, damage to the environment, and an often ugly urban and suburban architecture. Continuing to manufacture and deploy more cars in volume to global urban centers is unsustainable. In the 21st century, these mounting challenges have created a momentum for mobility innovation.

From automobiles to public transport and personal mobility, you can expect transportation to evolve rapidly in the decades ahead. These changes will modify the very shape of the world’s cities as well as our own human behavior, just as it has for the past few hundred years.

The Delivery of Healthcare Will Be Transformed

In Chapter 11, I discuss the global movement to enable healthy cities. Healthy cities are about incorporating health considerations into urban development and management. It’s a concept unsurprisingly endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and organizations such as the Alliance for Healthy Cities. The main principles include creating a health-supportive environment, improving quality of life, providing basic sanitation, and making access to healthcare available. These principles have obvious intersections with smart city goals, because they require innovation and technology at a community scale.

Similar to almost all city efforts, there is a role in community healthcare for the government and a role for other stakeholders, such as the private sector. In some cities, the provision of healthcare services is a core responsibility, though in others the city plays a supporting role. Many government healthcare systems around the world are run by region, county, state, or nation. In addition, the private sector is a major provider in many societies.

Healthcare systems are deeply integrated into every economy and they are expensive and complex to run. Modern medicine is often a miracle, but it comes with a hefty price tag. It’s not just the pure monetary aspect, but the necessary overhead of infrastructure, services, supplies, talent, and systems that are required to make it function. It’s also quite evident that most healthcare systems are designed to support communities that are operating at a steady state each day. In the event of a major incident, a nature disaster, or even a disease epidemic or pandemic, many systems can quickly fail under the duress of the demands being placed on it.

Together with a number of recent scientific and medical breakthroughs, improved use of healthcare data, and a willing entrepreneurial spirit, a new era of healthcare innovation has begun. In addition, a greater awareness of personal responsibility in health outcomes and a multigenerational desire to make better lifestyle choices to avoid disease and extend life are also contributing to the growth in healthcare solutions.

Health networks are intertwined with urban systems. For example, city hospital systems rely on elaborate communications systems, public safety personnel and services, transport infrastructure that includes municipal vehicles, and city policies and regulations. As health networks evolve, so do the supporting urban systems, and vice versa.

Two developments in particular are driving changes in how healthcare is being considered and delivered in cities. The first is telemedicine — the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients using telecommunications technology. This transformation brings many benefits that include lower cost, more convenience, greater timeliness, increased access to more resources (because distance is no longer a limitation, a patient can access specialists in distant locations, in other words), and the ability to serve more people. But it also means a higher degree of reliance on good urban telecommunications. It might also force the consolidation of facilities, resulting in some medical facilities closing down or downsizing in certain communities.

The second change comes in the form of behavioral shifts. Communities are becoming much more engaged in the care of their physical and mental needs. People are demanding clean air and water. They want to live in a state of peace and not have to worry about their safety. Urban noise pollution is acknowledged as a stressor, and more emphasis is being placed on reducing and eliminating it. Community members are educating themselves and adopting a wide range of new activities, such as outdoor activities that range from walking, jogging, yoga, tai chi, parkour, and cycling to finding quiet places to meditate within the urban environment. Various forms of outdoor mindfulness are being practiced — this is a therapeutic technique for inducing an improved mental state by focusing awareness on the present moment while acknowledging and accepting thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Clean air and low noise are some of the conducive environmental qualities that lend themselves toward successful mindfulness.

In the years ahead, every city will want to be a healthy city. The public and private sectors will innovate in completely new ways that take advantage of medical breakthroughs and the changing behavior of the communities they serve. A few decades from now, the way city healthcare is delivered and consumed may be barely recognizable.

Everything Will Be Delivered

In 1965, while an undergraduate at Yale University, Frederick Smith wrote a term paper proposing a system designed for faster delivery by moving packages by air at night, when airports weren’t congested. After he graduated, Frederick pursued his idea and started operations in 1973. By July 1975, he had a popular and profitable business. It was called Federal Express. Later, the name was shortened to what everyone knows today as FedEx.

For the past few decades, urban delivery services have continued to rapidly evolve and innovate. Being able to send a letter or package across the world and have it delivered in two days was magical. But, in a society bent on faster gratification and hypercompetition, two days would quickly become unacceptable. Soon, overnight delivery arrived, and that was quickly followed by same-day delivery. Today, some products can be delivered in a city within two hours. This immediacy is changing the nature of consumption. No longer limited to time-sensitive or business-related items for commercial entities, everyone can now order a dozen eggs or a ream of copier paper and have them hand-delivered to their front door.

In just the past few years, residential deliveries have surged. Consumers are spending more time buying online instead of visiting physical stores. Purchasing behaviors are quickly changing. Malls and retail stores are in decline and being displaced by consumers acquiring smaller amounts of products in greater frequency online. Food delivery in particular has exploded, creating an entire economy around services that pick up and deliver. The data is inconclusive as to whether the greater numbers of delivery trips are being offset by fewer people traveling to stores and restaurants. With stay-at-home orders during the Covid-19 pandemic, urban delivery services, and in particular those for restaurant food, have exploded. While this period may represent an outlier spike, if the broader growth trends continue, in the long run there should be less personal traffic on the roads. We’ll see.

Online ordering in the digital realm is driving a stunning boom in the physical world of delivery. City streets and neighborhoods are full of trucks (7 percent of traffic in US cities), motorcycles, bicycles, and even ride-hailing services dropping off high volumes of products purchased from web browsers and smartphone apps. Many city arteries are choked daily with double- and triple-parked delivery trucks. Curbside areas once exclusive to residents are being blocked. Bus lanes are being congested by truck drop-offs. These delivery vehicles have created a city congestion nightmare as they deliver tens of billions of packages in cities per year. Some experimentation in off-hour delivery shows some promise of alleviating congestion, but it’s not a panacea.

All these new vehicles are causing an increase in environmental damage as well, from carbon emissions, energy use, and infrastructure wear-and-tear. Vast volumes of packaging materials are being used, creating greater waste management needs. With deliveries incentivized for speed, more traffic accidents are occurring as drivers take greater risks. Online purchasing is also damaging local economies as fewer shoppers patronize local stores.

New forms of city delivery, in the shape of both ground and airborne drones, are in the late stages of experimentation. It’s looking increasingly likely that autonomous drones will make routine deliveries by ground and by descending from the air. New city regulations will be required in order to manage this new type of traffic. Cities will need to be prepared for a backlash from the noise they create and the inevitable accidents that occur.

Conscious of the increase in package volume and the attendant congestion and complexity of delivery, companies are exploring the use of collection centers. In this model, the delivery is made to lockers in a central area in a neighborhood and consumers are notified when items are ready for collection. Physical stores are also being used as collection points. Malls that are turning into ghost towns may find a second life as delivery-and-collection centers.

Assuming that current trends continue, delivery services will constitute a larger amount of urban traffic. In the years ahead, smart cities will need to decide how to handle the environmental harm, the congestion, the noise and chaos, the impact to local business, and other problems caused by these trends. Sure, the consumer will benefit from convenience, but a consensus will be needed to arrive at the price the community is willing to pay.