Towards a Shared Agenda for the Future of our Cities

Looking back at decades of work in the urban innovation space, I have engaged with many cities, communities and their leadership. One thing I discovered is that, no matter how much communities may differ in terms of culture, socio-economic conditions or political systems, when it comes to what we wish or hope our communities to be, we are all remarkably similar. Cities that are liveable. Equitable. Sustainable. Social. If climate allows, even walkable. On the destination we roughly agree. On how to get there, we are much less sure. And the ground under our cities is moving faster than we can plan for.

Take a step back. Following years of digitalization, our cities are increasingly experienced and expressed in three dimensions: the built environment, the socio-economic and the digital, with these dimensions influencing each other in equal measure. The transformation we are looking at represents nothing less than a paradigm shift that slowly pulled those three together. It helps to be precise about language here. I used the word digitalization. Digitization is translating something from an analogue format into a digital one. Digitalization goes much further. It reaches into the core processes and fabric of our organizations and of social and economic life, complete with new services, new values and new types of jobs.

This paradigm shift has not yet been completed, and we are still collectively processing the past decade of transformation it triggered. But there is no time to pause: AI, together with the digital technologies around it, is a fresh paradigm shift in its own right. It is producing a radical system shift on top of the previous one. It unsettles how our institutions work, redefines what we mean by human value, and brings new rules, norms and values with it. It reframes value itself.

So the question for everyone who designs, builds, governs, finances or lives in cities is this: how do we prepare for, and deliberately shape, a good urban transformation, one in which the analogue and the digital have converged in our cities, communities, neighborhoods and campuses in ways we consider human-centric, desirable, ethical and, in every sense of the word, sustainable?

Getting this system shift right requires holding firm to ten commitments. I offer them not as a checklist but as a shared agenda.

First: Call it what it is. A system shift. When you are living through a system shift, the lessons of the past become a much weaker guide to the future, and a poor tool for managing the transition. The playbooks we inherited were written for a different world. That is uncomfortable. It is also freeing. It means we have to think again, and together.

Second: Frame purpose, and design for it. In 1939, at the New York World's Fair, General Motors showed the world its vision of the city of tomorrow, organized around the car. Much of it got built. We are still living with the results. The lesson is not to copy the designs of the past. State your purpose, your moonshot and your executable goals upfront. Dare to have moonshots. Design your innovation journey around them. Talk to your stakeholders and your citizens. And move from spatial planning to neighborhood and city design. The moonshot may entail a very different starting point for urban design than those of the past century, which focused mainly on cars and mobility. Health, well-being, resilience: you choose. In doing so, we are also creating new types of jobs and new types of leadership. I am thinking, among others, of the rise of the City Designer. Spatial planners, architects, master planners, technologists and design thinkers now too often work in isolation. The City Designer brings their crafts together, not just as a multidisciplinary exercise but as an interdisciplinary one. And that may require entire teams going back to school (see commitment number eight).

And before any of it: start with diagnosis, not with solutions. Every city needs to know where it truly stands. That means its real capacity for leadership, governance, skills, data, engagement, security and delivery, not its place in the rankings.

Third: Invest in invisible infrastructures before visible ones. A new platform without data governance is immobilized capital. A funded project without an operating model is an unrecognized future cost. Digitalization without human competences is the automation of chaos. Commence with people. Go where they are. Citizen engagement does not equal assessments or research focusing on a neighborhood or community. Engagement must be real engagement. Understand the physical, social and digital needs, expectations and desires in the city, community or neighborhood before you start anything else.

Fourth: Build a shared language. Shared definitions, shared values, shared purpose. Too many conversations about urban innovation sound like someone ordering in a restaurant: "Two UN Sustainable Development Goals, please, some open data on ice, and a side of MIMs and BIMs," fully incomprehensible to the waiter in charge. Jargon is not strategy. And be honest with the people you engage. Design thinking and citizen engagement only work if you are prepared to act on what you harvest. Competence generates trust. Empty participation destroys it.

Fifth: Avoid innovation in isolation. Drive convergence. Public sector meets private sector meets citizens. Digital meets analogue. Digital meets digital: AI, the Internet of Things, digital twinning and extended reality working as one. Two examples from the country where I was born, the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, an AI-powered digital twin now models mobility scenarios and gives insight into urban complexity in six minutes instead of six months of research. That is not a gadget. Rotterdam's Open Urban Platform allows for a game-engine-powered walk-through of streets and individual houses, observing them in varying flooding scenarios. It enables not only an exchange between specialists; it also triggers a conversation with citizens, homeowners and stakeholders in the neighborhood. This is not a gadget either. Such tools change how quickly a city can think, respond, anticipate and, if needed, build back better.

Sixth: Steer convergence with a data governance strategy that reflects your values. In the world of urban data, two models dominate. In one, private platforms own the digital infrastructure. In the other, government does. Rotterdam (as have many other European cities) chose a third path: an open urban platform in which interoperability is king, and it carried that choice all the way through design, development and management into its data strategy. The point is not that every city should copy Rotterdam. The point is that every city should choose its model consciously. Otherwise, someone else will choose for it.

Seventh: Practice foresight. Scenario thinking, reverse engineering, moonshot thinking, design thinking. Imagine positive and negative futures for your communities five to ten years out. Then try this exercise. Imagine the hack of the century hits your city or region tomorrow. What would you do? More importantly, since you know it will very likely happen one day, what should you be doing now to prepare, prevent or mitigate?

Eighth: Educate. Your organizations, your teams, yourself. Move from single-disciplinary to multidisciplinary to truly interdisciplinary. Data analytics for the public sector. Design thinking for the public sector. AI for the public sector. Procurement for innovation. Ecosystem management. Leadership in innovation. Effective citizen engagement. The history and future of urban innovation. In Oman, Thunderbird School of Global Management designed and delivered a multi-year executive education program for the Sultanate's government. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and its partners committed to it: urban innovation and next-generation spatial planning, three cohorts in four years, mostly on site, enriched by learning missions to other cities across the world. That is what serious capacity building looks like. It is structured, sustained and tied to real goals.

Ninth: Measure success in terms of well-being, not technology adoption. The number of sensors installed or apps launched tells us nothing about whether life has improved for the people who live in our neighborhoods or cities. Well-being, meaning the concrete quality of life of residents, is the final measure of every public investment. In social housing, for instance, that is not an abstraction. It is the whole point. And that is what the new City Designer must keep in sight for the city at large.

Tenth, and perhaps most urgent: Lead across generations. Bring the younger generation into decision-making now. Not into workshops. Not into mentoring sessions where they watch leaders at work. Into real boardrooms. Onto sites where things happen. Into the rooms where decisions are actually made. The young will inherit our cities, our digital infrastructure and our choices. They will live by them, prosper by them, or suffer from them. The pace of transformation means we no longer have the luxury of the traditional handover from one generation to the next. We must deliberately bring older and younger generations together in leadership and build, together, a green, digital and equitable deal for our cities.

The future will not wait for us to be ready. But it can be shaped, if we agree on the agenda.

Bas Boorsma
Professor of Practice, Urban Innovation, Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University
Co-Chair of the United Nations' United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) Working Group on Digital Development Goals for Cities
Founder & Partner, Urban Innovators Global
Senior Advisor and Former CDO to the City of Rotterdam
Former Digitalization Leader at Cisco
Author of A New Digital Deal

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