Although cities today occupy only 2 percent of the world’s land, they are home to 55 percent of the world’s population, they account for more than 70 percent of the world’s economic activity, they consume 75 percent of natural resources and 85 percent of global energy, and they produce 50 percent of total global waste and about 70 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions (UNEP 2009; UN Habitat 2012). Most existing cities are forecasted to expand in area and population size in the near future when, in addition, many new cities will also be built. These and other changes will alter the city’s defining characteristics, from the utilization of natural resources to the construction and operation of physical infrastructures to the systems of administration and provision of services. Likewise, technological advances with the potential to generate new opportunities and promote alternative ways of performing daily tasks will tremendously influence people’s way of life.
Insofar as these phenomena will affect urban reality, novel design schemes, in which city livability is allotted top priority, are needed for urban areas and municipal services. Such schemes have the potential to yield resilient cities and vibrant communities by intelligently coordinating the city design process in terms of the city’s resources, infrastructure, and administrative needs. The extent to which these novel ideas will have the desired outcome, however, will depend in part on whether the city’s various stakeholders use resources, technologies, and services not only for their own benefit, but also for the sake of the greater good of the community. Moreover, because goods ownership and technology should be exploited as tools for achieving resilient communities rather than as targets that people strive to attain (as in the goods-dominant logic), social values will have to be the driving force behind city development and management efforts, including everything from the strategies devised during planning to the actions taken to realize a particular city planning goal. From the perspective of sustainability, the main question becomes, will the cities of the future be ecocentric (i.e., an ethical stance that defines ecological issues as the top priority in all decisions) or anthropocentric (i.e., an ethical standpoint that views humans as the central or most important element in the universe)?
The United Nations Conference in 2016 on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) that took place in Quito, Ecuador, proposed a new urban agenda (United Nations 2016). In it the United Nations presented its shared vision of cities of the future, according to which “all inhabitants without discrimination of any kind are able to inhabit and produce just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient, and sustainable cities.” Also included in that vision are equal rights and opportunities, adequate housing, equal access of all people to public goods, civic participation and engagement, gender equality, accessible urban mobility, disaster management and resilience, environmental sustainability, and high productivity, competitiveness, and innovation by promoting full and productive employment and decent work for all. To address these challenges, new models and paradigms of city design, development, and management were recently proposed.
New Municipal Models
Until not too long ago, cities were allowed to grow more or less spontaneously, almost by accident. Although they were usually logically situated—for example, near an extractable resource, on important trade and transport routes, or in an easily defended area such as a hill or an island—their establishment and growth, unguided and unencumbered by clear notions of urban planning, were seemingly ex nihilo.
From its beginnings, urban planning was always bound to utility, and as the field of urban planning matured, added to that utility were the provision of housing, the storage of food and goods, and military defense, which together eventually yielded greater security for city residents. Over time, city design also began to emphasize public convenience, and later, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the focus of urban planning was on businesses. As industrial cities were not only centers of production but were also densely populated, they were rife with dangers to human health and safety. These and other drawbacks of the industrial city, in turn, played important roles in driving the shift to modern urban planning paradigms that focus on more people-friendly design, on diversity, and on community livability as higher-priority objectives than business and industrial interests. Lastly, the need to find more efficient ways to use physical and nonphysical resources also yielded new urban planning concepts.
Indeed, the development of urban planning methodologies is an ongoing and dynamic process that must be adapted to two distinctly different types of city development. Besides the anticipated rapid expansion of existing cities in developed countries, more than 80 percent of the cities that will exist in developing countries by 2065 have yet to be built. As such, the principles upon which these unbuilt cities are eventually designed will likely be radically different than, and hopefully improve upon, those that guided the creation of existing cities (Angel 2012).
Regardless of which model(s) a given city uses to guide its development, the city landscape will undoubtedly change in the future as new materials and technologies are realized that will enable city architects to build higher buildings, faster means of transportation, and novel infrastructures. But in addition to identifying new resources that can be used instead of conventional resources to offset the pressure on the latter, people will also have to devise ways to use resources differently. One way that this can be achieved and that has already been successfully applied in several cities is the coupling of urbanism with agriculture by creating gardens, and even entire farms, on the roofs and walls of city buildings. Likewise, issues of resource use in urban planning have been addressed by several new models for city development that have been offered in recent years, among them the models of the compact city (Neuman 2005) and the temporary city (Bishop and Williams 2012).
The compact city envisions settlements with high residential density that practice mixed uses of land and buildings or infrastructures. In so doing, the city promotes not only reductions in resource utilization and in the emission of pollution, it also facilitates the cultivation of an active community life. These goals can be realized first and foremost both by cutting the amounts of infrastructures that need to be built in the city and by using city infrastructures more efficiently. For instance, the compact city is designed to provide fast, accessible, and simple mobility, from walking and cycling to public transportation. It is also founded on assigning varied uses to city areas, such that residential, retail, and commercial interests are combined in the same areas instead of dividing the city space into zones specific to different uses, thus eliminating the need for long-distance journeys to accomplish daily activities (Foord 2010).
Another new municipal development model, the temporary city refers to the opportunistic and ostensibly temporary occupation of vacant and abandoned spaces in existing cities in what has become to be known as the “pop-up” or “meanwhile” phenomenon (Bishop and Williams 2012). These ventures take advantage of the wide variety of dormant municipal spaces (e.g., residential neighborhoods, business districts) plaguing many of today’s cities. The visible aftermath of severe downturns in the economic viability of a city, abandoned spaces impose heavy economic and social burdens on cities as long as they remain unused. In the temporary city framework, however, vacant spaces are used for temporary projects and activities, from pop-up shops or stores (i.e., short-time sales spaces) and farmer markets situated along the city’s main transportation arteries to temporary housing created from shipping containers. All of these activities effectively repurpose the functions of different city facilities but at a fraction of what those facilities cost their original owners or occupants. Before it was recognized as a viable model for city development, this paradigm was unofficially implemented in various cities beginning in the 1960s, when, to survive in the city, groups of financially constrained artists and activists began squatting illegally in abandoned city areas. Many of today’s city planners, architects, and developers, however, now embrace the temporary city as part of a viable new urban model and as an approach that is consistent with the model of sustainability.
Other new municipal models extend beyond the planning and building themes to include, for example, new governance systems. Case in point is the model of the charter city that, adopted by Hong Kong, comprises a city governed by a country other than that within whose borders it exists. The charter city concept can also be applied to a city that chooses to adopt a constitution and system of governance that differ markedly from those of its home country (Frederickson, Curtis, and Logan 2001).
Regardless of which model is used in city planning, cities themselves and the nature of life in cities constantly effect social change that, in turn, influences human behavior at the individual and community levels. Without a doubt, cities of the future will function differently. Though anticipated developments such as office and factory workflow automation will boost productivity, they will also markedly change the labor market, displacing people as certain professions disappear but also creating opportunities for the unemployed as new jobs emerge. Furthermore, from transportation to education, many of the fundamental services of cities will be forever altered, which will necessitate that people change their lifestyles. But will the cities of the future give priority to public good over private interests? The notion of a people-oriented or people-friendly city refers today to an accessible city, where physical but also social mobility is possible for all. At its most basic level, however, the people-friendly concept can be easily adapted to a range of applications in the city realm, from easily accessible municipal services to the right to live in a healthy city.
Finally, another important characteristic of future cites will be the sharing of tangible and intangible values as well as of public and private spaces. These sharing activities are also expected to change the balance between tangible and intangible provision and to create new social values and interactions.
Everything Is Service
The revolutionary service-dominant logic (SDL) paradigm proposed by Vargo and Lush (2004) envisions everything in a given space (e.g., city, community, neighborhood) as essentially a service. In other words, in the service-dominant framework, all tangible and intangible values are created via the production and delivery of services. As such, the exchange of goods and physical resources should be seen as part of the provision of intangible rather than tangible values. Additionally, the SDL dictates that services are jointly created by both the provider and the customer, both of whom are responsible (to varying degrees, depending on the type of service) for the provision of the physical and nonphysical resources needed to cocreate the value. Spohrer et al. (2007) argued that the complexity of services, which include myriad disciplines and stakeholders in the field and whose survival depends on innovation, requires that their study, development, and implementation be organized and systematic (i.e., service science). Extending the notion of value in the frame of sustainable service, Wolfson et al. (2010, 2015) claimed that every service is composed of core-value, or the essence of the service, and super-value, which refers to supported and complementary values. Moreover, their model of sustainable service assigns the roles of provider and customer to either current or future generations and even to technologies or devices. In addition, they claimed that consumers must not only actively participate in the production and delivery of the service, thus transforming into customers, they should also return value to the value pool in their role as providers (Wolfson 2016). In general, therefore, these different frameworks strive to generate more advanced values in a process that encompasses the relevant stakeholders and different subvalues as well as the progression of the value in the value hierarchy, from data to wisdom.
Moving from GDL to SDL (i.e., from solutions that are based on the production and delivery of physical resources and tangible values to those based on the provision of nonphysical resources and intangible values) is by no doubt one of the main changes that human society faces today, and a big step toward sustainability. It requires new perspective and attitude regarding value production and delivery, in which instead of food purchase and consumption, satiety or pleasure will be provided; instead of buying clothing or other fashion items, body covering and protection will be offered; and the purchase of electricity or fuel will be replaced by room temperature supply (i.e., cooling or heating). This initiative not only shifts the focus from physical to nonphysical resources and thus allows more efficient and effective use of natural resources, it also obliges the cocreation of values, thus leading to more responsible provision and to commitment of all stakeholders, direct and indirect. In this respect, the shareconomy that accounts for the sharing of resources, assets, goods, and services and is based on replacement of ownership by access adds intangible values such as knowledge and skills to tangible values to yield more effective and higher-level value. Further, ICTs and virtual-reality technologies will clearly also play an important role in the shift from GDL to SDL. They will open new channels to online, real-time, and long-distance services that make unnecessary the need to spend natural resources to perform tasks and that replace physical resources with nonphysical resources, such as downloading music instead of buying a CD or ordering a flight ticket without going to the travel agency. At last, virtual-reality technologies will also allow ownership and materialism to be replaced by feelings and experiences—for instance, having a sense of feeling without really touching things, or smelling or tasting food without actually eating.
Services in Future Cities
Though the city itself can be defined in terms of a whole or holistic service, it is in fact a space of services. As such, future city services should be redesigned with respect to the production, delivery, and use of municipal services and the roles played by, as well as the interaction between, all stakeholders. In addition, this redesign process should also account for, and indeed promote, the generation of new services and the need to coordinate and match different city services in terms of their logistics, target population segment, and value.
The anticipated, unavoidable growth in the number and sizes of cities in the near future will likely magnify the problems and challenges that they will face. Although urbanization and city living engender many benefits, from organizing people’s lives and enabling the cultivation of rich social and economic networks to the centralization of services, they also typically augment pollution and poverty. To ameliorate their negative effects, therefore, future cities will have to address a range of challenges, from resource shortages to water and food security to climate change to compliance with new technologies to the acceptance and support of new social orders. Moreover, they will be confronted with new ways of living, from how we work, move, buy, and meet, to how we produce and deliver services such as education and health care. Cities will thus have to be flexible and able to quickly adapt to changes and propose new channels to fulfill their goals. But in this respect, future cities will also have to themselves dictate different ways of living as part of their core- and super-values.
From the perspectives of service and sustainability, the value cocreation process should result in higher value and rely on fewer resources. In pursuit of this goal, city services should focus on five main hubs: (1) solution-oriented services, (2) wise services, (3) shared services, (4) human-centered services, and (5) sustainable services.
Solution-oriented services—The cities of today provide services mainly according to the value in-exchange model, which is actually better suited to the provision of goods. Though city infrastructures such as roads or traffic lights and utility supplies such as water or electricity focus mainly on the provision of physical resources, they are delivered via services. Even in the case of self-services, which are provided through the value in-use model and which require higher cocreation levels and greater investments of resources, effort, and knowledge by the customer, such as payments for different city services (e.g., municipal rate, parking toll), the design and development of these services are still attributed mainly to city authorities. On the other hand, by altering the conceptualization of city services, the city or any authorized provider within the city can supply a journey rather than transport facilities or temperature instead of fuel and heating or cooling devices (i.e., solution-based instead of problem-based services). Solution-based or result-oriented services focus on solutions rather than on problems, and both the provider and the customer agree on an outcome or a solution and on the respective parts both play in its provision. Solution-based services, therefore, usually require higher levels of cocreation, where the consumer is an active customer who can also become and function as a provider.
Wise services—The bulk of direct municipal services (i.e., services where citizens or other stakeholders connect with the city authorities) are situated in the lower levels of the value hierarchy that supply data or information (Ackoff 1989), such as about garbage collection schedules or the parking options available in the city. Yet the city also produces higher knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom values that today are mainly provided to the customer indirectly. For example, the city’s master plan affects all its citizens, regardless of whether they were directly involved in its production and delivery. Enhancing value either by increasing the level of value cocreation with the customer (e.g., resident or business) or by allowing every stakeholder in the city to be part of the provision will yield smart services in greater numbers. In addition, the application of a broad and future-oriented perspective of services that considers the mutual relations of each with other services as well as the integration of services will also increase their value. Stated simply, the emphasis in the frame of wise services should be on the generation of quality values and not only on the quantity of services.
Shared services—As the shareconomy gains in prominence, increasingly greater numbers of services will be produced and delivered by sharing data, information, and knowledge in open codes. An open-code or open-source model is based on the collaboration of values, where every customer and provider shares the value and nobody owns it. This type of peer production was introduced in the field of software development and use—for example, open-code software such as Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation suite (Blender 2017)—where developers and organizations spread around the globe share code toward their joint aim to develop a program (Lerner and Tirole 2002). Today the same concept is applied in many other fields, from information-sharing platforms such as Wikipedia and the open-source research field in solar energy (Pearce, Babasola, and Andrews 2012) to open-code governance (Citron 2008). Open-source services are those that allow everyone to be a customer and provider and to produce or use the service simultaneously. A highly successful example of an open-source service is Waze, the largest community-based traffic and navigation application today. In the city arena, shared services will not only be generated top-down, from the municipality to the citizens, they will also be created in bottom-up fashion, from the citizen to the city authorities, or produced and delivered by different stakeholders in the city in an open system.
Human-centered services—User-centered design seeks to foresee how users are likely to use a product in terms of goods or services. Human-centered design refers to a more precise, tailor-made design to suit the specific needs and skills of the person for whom it was designed rather than aiming to fulfill the general needs of “the average person.” This design paradigm strives to integrate the social and cognitive sciences with technology (Cooley 2000). So-called socio-technical design models are implemented in many sectors, from community design and architectural design to industrial design, and they aim to increase the efficiency and productivity of the product while improving the user’s experience. In addition, a socio-technical approach is exploited in efforts invested in the integration of computing systems and human activities (i.e., human-centered computing) (Jaimes, Sebe, and Gatica-Perez 2006). Recently, Maglio, Kwan, and Spohrer (2015) argued that because service necessarily involves coordinated action among people and technologies, human-centered services yield higher value and thus better service. Another type of human-centered services is personalized services, which are more specialized services that target customer preferences rather than just customer needs. Personalized services, therefore, focus on wants (and not just on needs) and on habits and culture, which are not easy to change, rather than on the creation of higher value. As such, personalized services are not necessarily more effective or more efficient.
Sustainable services—To successfully confront the huge challenges forecasted for future cities, every service that is produced and delivered in the city, either by the authorities or by citizens, businesses, or tourists, must be imbued with sustainability. One step toward the achievement of this goal is adopting the notion of circular services, which are based both on the rational use of physical and nonphysical resources in each value provision and on the integration and synchronization of different services that will eventually be performed in concert. Finally, to truly yield higher value, sustainable services also require that social and environmental values and technologies be matched more efficiently.
Role of Education
Education is a central means with which to equip people with knowledge, ways of thinking and behaving, and confidence not only to fortify their lives, but also to support and implement change in the community and in society as a whole. As such, the education system is one of the main routes to combine theory with action, making it a principal driver of innovation and entrepreneurship. Thus, higher education programs in the fields of service, sustainability, and sustainable services, in general, and those that focus on sustainable municipal services in particular, should be delivered with the goal of supporting the required and anticipated societal shift from GDL to SDL in future city services. However, current education systems, from schools to universities, are run using outdated principles and methods, and therefore they cannot cope with the many technological, social, and cultural changes undergone by human society in just the last half century. In efforts to address the shortcomings of current education systems, therefore, alternative education and learning systems based on novel ideas, from pedagogical approaches to learning environments, are currently under experimental investigation.
If we consider the goal of imbuing everything that the city has to offer with sustainability, education, in the broad sense of the word, has a crucial part to play. The major changes required in our ways of thinking and behavior to realize sustainable development cannot be achieved with technological means, political regulations, or financial instruments alone. As was already noted by the proposition of Agenda 21 [(i.e., the United Nations action plan for sustainable development offered at the Earth Summit held in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (United Nations 1992)], education is an essential tool for achieving sustainable development. In that task, education needs to combine knowledge, skills, and values to address the environmental and social challenges of the coming decades. UNESCO stated that education for sustainable development should be based on integrating key sustainable development issues into teaching and learning. This may include, for example, instruction about climate change, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity, and poverty reduction and sustainable consumption. It also requires participatory teaching and learning methods that motivate and empower learners to change their behaviors and take action for sustainable development. Education for sustainable development consequently promotes competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way (UNESCO 2013).
In addition, education should also offer revolutionary perspectives about our way of living and our place in the world. This also applies to the city’s activities and conduct, where education should affect sustainability in four major areas: (1) philosophy—moving from an anthropocentric or egocentric to an ecocentric perspective and from the attainment of personal benefits to the realization of better quality of life for everybody; (2) implementation—provide the tools and methods needed to practically apply sustainability theory and implement it in daily life; (3) decision making—strive for more efficient and effective decisions at the individual, municipal, and community levels; and (4) quality of life—improve the social, economic, and environmental well-being of all stakeholders.
Although service-sector activities have constituted an important subject of research for many years, most of it was focused on marketing or management in terms of the economic aspects of services. Yet as the service sector is much broader and multidisciplinary, it should be defined as a science (i.e., service science) whose study involves the integration of numerous disciplines, such as economics, marketing, computer science, and the cognitive sciences in a format similar to that offered by IBM (IBM Almaden Services Research 2006; Spohrer et al. 2007; Maglio and Spohrer 2007; Maglio, Kieliszewski, and Spohrer 2010). Though a relative newcomer in the academic world, this scientific discipline is offered by several universities that have programs in service science or in the widespread service science, management, and engineering. Graduates of these programs are already working in a variety of industries, from computer companies to firms that specialize in the provision of services—for example, law and insurance firms. Indeed, with the increased awareness of the importance and complexity of service systems and networks and in light of the prominent place that SDL is expected to occupy in future markets and societies as well as in city operations, service philosophers, scientists, and engineers and other service experts will fulfill important roles in the design, development, and management of processes.