What will the city of the future look like? Who will manage it and how? Where are the opportunities for urban sustainability and where are the threats? By 2050, 70% of the world population will be urban. Governments and city councils will have to act (not just react), if they want to be on the save side. Leading companies and institutions recently met in Madrid to discuss the challenges for urban futures. Spanish economic newspaper Expansión reports on the conference's outcome and reactions: "Governments must commit themselves to a change in cities, making them more intelligent and improving relationships between the citizens and city leaders". Cities of tomorrow need to be lively and interconnected places, smart and sustainable, or so goes the received opinion.

Currently, cities are badly organized, remarks Francisco Mangado, a leading Spanish architect and professor at Yale University. Sometimes these errors are due to the architects not applying common sense. A more frequent problem, however, is that cities are not planned to improve the lives of their citizens, but subject to speculation and politics. Consequently, he argues that instead of trying to build "smart" cities, we must speak of good cities, as the term intelligence is highly associated with and reduced to technological advances. For Mangado this can be problematic, because "although technological advances certainly mean progress, we must not forget that cities have a human, social and political reality apart from the physical one". The Favelas of the Venezuelan capital Caracas, for example, cannot be solved with artificial intelligence alone but require a socio-economic approach, the Spanish architect highlights.

Speaking with Francisco Mangado, technology can help change some shortcomings, but on its own it won't do the trick. "The most important decisions that will change the fate and future of cities will always be political", he remarks. Despite his rather critical stance, Mangado is optimistic about the future. Ultimately, success or failure of developing urban infrastructure will depend on the maturity level of each society. As a consequence, Mangado predicts that Western cities will mainly suffer from structural problems, which are much easier to fix than those issues faced by cities in developing countries.

Intelligent administration

Another aspect related to creating sustainable cities is the interaction between citizens and public administrations. Joan Batlle, director of Innovation and International Projects of Barcelona City Council, stresses "the citizen's role has changed dramatically, having become a key factor in the transformation of cities (...)". He sees citizen involvement as crucial and the key to the challenge of population concentration. What seems essential, thus, is that every city needs a clear roadmap to become more intelligent.

Solutions

Conference participants agree to several key steps that will help cities to plan for continuous improvement of their systems and quality of life in general. Cities should commence by developing a long- and short-term roadmap, prioritizing a selection of systems that have maximum impact. City leaders should then optimize those services and operations and at the same time explore new opportunities for growth and optimization. Those steps might seem basic. However, the development of an urban strategy is arguable the single most complex and at the same time the most important prerequisite for becoming an intelligent city. Policymakers must understand the functioning of their city well and know where they are making progress by providing intelligence to their systems.

Finally, to achieve fundamental changes, governments have to analyze where to invest their money. Each city must carefully study its strengths and expose the weaknesses. Only then can leaders address the most urgent action to be taken in their respective locality.

Read the original article (in Spanish)

More information about: sustainable cities

By Florian Kaefer, writing about sustainability, CSR and climate change.

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Picture credit: nasa images