The world’s most ‘future-ready’ cities

Out of 200 global cities, Tokyo has been named the most ‘future-ready’, followed by Hangzhou, Helsinki, Tallinn and Taipei.

Durham, Aberdeen, Sapporo, Boulder and Madrid round out the top ten.

The analysis was carried out by research firm ThoughtLab in partnership with consultancy Hatch Urban Solutions.

The research comes as cities try to recover from the shock of COVID-19.

The report states: “The pandemic was a defining moment for cities – it heightened citizens’ expectations for change in many areas and spurred lasting shifts in their behaviours. It also triggered disruptions that amplified existing challenges and created new ones for urban leaders.”

The researchers defined a future-ready city as one that is “smart, sustainable, inclusive, prosperous and resilient, with the ability to meet the evolving needs of citizens and businesses”.

The benchmarked cities vary by location, size and level of economic development. The ranking is based on self-reported data from cities, as well as data from secondary sources to give an overall score. Cities were asked about their progress in areas including digital transformation, data-driven decision-making, building trust and transparency, attracting talent, and collaboration.

Lou Celi, CEO of ThoughtLab, told Cities Today: “Those cities found in our research to be the most future-ready are not necessarily the same ones seen on typical smart city lists.

“Cities need to become future-ready to meet the fast-changing expectations of citizens for more digital, inclusive and sustainable urban environments that can accommodate tectonic shifts in how city-dwellers will live, work, shop and travel.”

He added: “Every city out of the 200 that we benchmarked has a formal future-ready plan. But our research shows that today the cities that are most future-ready have five things in common: they extract more value from data, build broader ecosystems of partners, nurture citizen engagement and trust, proactively protect data security and privacy, and invest more in technology.”

In total, 44 cities were defined as future-ready as their score was in the top 25 percentile, with the others progressing or developing.

What residents say

The study also surveyed 2,000 residents across 20 cities. It found that cities and citizens were in agreement that climate change is the biggest challenge over the next five years. Residents and city governments also ranked affordable housing and reducing homelessness as high priority. However, there were some areas where their views weren’t aligned, such as the importance of addressing traffic congestion, income inequality, infrastructure and trust.

Celi said: “Both urban leaders and citizens believe that climate change is the largest single challenge that cities face over the next five years. Nonetheless, cities are allocating less of their technology budgets to the environment than to most other domains.”

According to the study, citizens expect to shop more online. Accordingly, they anticipate using digital payments and delivery services more. Just over a quarter plan to use public transportation more but a similar amount believe they will use it less.

Investment

The top investment priorities for cities are digital payment systems, public information services, digital infrastructure, public health services, and education.

In terms of technology, cities see the following as most important for their future: automation, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and data analytics. Other important tools are mobile and cloud technologies, biometrics, drones and digital twins.

Cities said major challenges in implementing ‘future-ready’ plans include finding the right suppliers and partners, unclear roadmaps and return on investment, political complexity, skills shortages and the speed of technological change.