Metaverse: a Game Changer for Cities?

While Digitalization has produced a System Shift no less impactful than a full-scale industrial revolution in the past few decades, it has triggered several new technological advances that produce new shifts that may prove as impactful as the initial stages of the world going digital in itself. The emergence of the Metaverse is one of those children. It has all of the potential to redefine how we communicate, plan, learn, befriend, decide or, indeed, entertain in the near future. For cities and city leadership the big question looms: how do we effectively embrace this fresh dimension in which our cities get expressed and its citizens express themselves?

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Before I continue, let’s ensure we are on the same page as to what we mean by the Metaverse. In the way it is being discussed by most of us, we do not mean the Facebook take on it (while Facebook can be considered one out of many contributors). Many have made efforts to create new names such as ‘the Multiverse’, or ‘Citiverse’ – and so on. When we talk Metaverse within the context of our cities, we tend to mean all the instruments that allow for a virtualization of our physical and social worlds – especially those we associate with urban environments. It means engaging in advanced digital twinning. It means 3D environments in which we interact and use the technology not solely as an add-on to optimize the physical world but as a means to achieve a genuinely new manifestation of human conduct and urban expression.

The virtualization of the world around us is no longer the gadget that has been talked about for years. It may very well prove the platform and language in which current and future urbanites will end up expressing themselves, in order to learn, participate, interact and become part of decision-making processes. And while past leaps in digitalization have produced new divides and often expanded old ones, the metaverse holds the promise of inclusion. For if you can game, you can participate. If you can game, you can become part of decision-making processes. If you can game, you can build. Cities that get this first will prove leading in the years and decades to come, just like cities that moved first on broadband twenty years ago have systematically benefitted from that exercise in pioneering - even today.

Building a metaverse for our cities is rich with potential and opportunities. It may allow for higher degrees of inclusion and interaction. It may allow for a better relationship between local public sector and citizens. Advanced digital twins may allow for virtualized circular economy market places for raw materials and half products used in our built environments. It can allow for both an optimized as well as new source of insights for emergency services. It may allow for very different ways of bringing education to all. And if a part of town is going through an urban regeneration exercise, citizen engagement no longer requires the ‘data- push’ and technical language that come with abstract 2D planning documents sitting in dusty government archives before being printed or pushed to you as a PDF. It can now be planned, envisioned and decided upon by all, by walking through it in the metaverse. Theoretically, one can be an illiterate and yet fully participate in such an exercise. That is novel. That turns the metaverse into something resembling a language.

Building the metaverse in the best and most inclusive way possible is not something that will happen by default. It requires that we learn from the mistakes we have collectively made in the past 30 years of digitalization. It requires a good handle on what drives interoperability on a data level, a governance level, on a procurement level and on a social level. It require us to think through what it means to forge ‘The Public Square’ within the metaverse realm. Because in our physical world we take shared public spaces for granted: that square in Barcelona where children play, the elderly sit on benches, that grand park in Arizona – and so on. Do we wish to hop from the territory of one tech company to another or do we seek to moderate the influence of Big Tech and secure our virtual public square? And from an investment perspective, how much should be government investment, how much should be private sector driven, and how do these two come together? And last but not least, how we accelerate the process of harvesting the true ‘Net New’ that the Metaverse holds as a promise, rather than using it as a mere substitute for the physical world? A brave school in Rotterdam decided to build its own metaverse environment in response to the degrading experience of teaching through standard video platforms during the COVID years, the idea being: we should use technology to enhance and expand human capacity, creativity and togetherness – not degrade it. Taken all together, the above is a tall order. But it can be done, and the time for honest and in-depth exchanges are now.

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Join BABLE and Urban Innovators Global at Metaverse centric events soon:

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- Urban Innovation Leadership Forum, with the leadership of Istanbul, Rotterdam and
Tampere comparing notes on their Metaverse chapters – June 4, Rotterdam
(organized by BABLE in collaboration with Urban Innovators Global) - LINK

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- IMAGINE – Tampere, Finland, June 11-12 - LINK

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