Urbanization

Urbanize

Today, urban areas in technologically advanced countries operate as the living labs of societal change, innovation and progress in action. Due to their condensed nature, densely populated areas are at the forefront in the use of digital technologies that can extract, exchange, and evaluate data at unprecedented volumes, speeds and scopes. Fueled by this, the ‘Urban spatial organisation’, i.e. the physical and organisational outcome of the process of producing, governing and using urban space, is in flux. Consequently the ways of urban living, working, and relaxing as well as organizing city affairs are changing rapidly.

Challenges

The city of the future adheres to the principles of sustainability, safety and resource effciency and uses instruments to align multiple purposes. It is smart and digitally twinned - facilitating planning, evaluation, maintenance and the continuous advancement of its built environment, urban logistics, its microclimate, and climate neutral building stock. It is internally modular and decentralized thereby translating the advantages of rural lucidity into an urban environment while retaining the convenient usage of and short distances to essential goods and services ("Kiezkultur", 15min Stadt, 24/7 availability). It is globally interconnected providing a digital infrastructure that facilitates telecommuting and exchange yet provides close and connected workforce reservoirs to attract businesses. It is also progressively responsive to the needs of a growingly mobile population implementing a digital feedback culture to improve user experience of public services and physical spaces (AR-enhanced Information Kiosks, Hybrid Natural-Digital Urban Systems).

Resilience

Future Urbanity comprises a set of resilience-creating modal splits: A healthy mixture of services, manufacturing and (vertical) farming sector, which will bring about new earning opportunities (vertical farmers, urban farming management as additional task for facility management). Affordable housing will be realized with the intensive yet qualitatively extensive use of space (micro housing, Co-living). A mixture of public and private transportation that adheres to the principles of sustainbility and efficiency (Local mobility hubs, MaaS). Closeby work opportunities are combined with appealing third places dedicated for informal exchange and well-being. Urban development projects are supported by automatic predictions and spatial simulations to provide evidence based design optimization suggestions which facilitate substantive public deliberations about adopting or discarding urban innovations (Co-Creation).

A city build upon data

The collection of data allows furthermore for concomitant research. For example, research on movement data, e.g. collected anonymously via mobile phones, can recognize universal patterns that describe the attractiveness of an urban area, provide insights into how people organize their lives on the basis of the existing urban infrastructure, or how they shape the physical layout of a city through their collective decisions. Movement patterns describe not only how much or little a public space is used, but facilitate prediction where there is a need for improvement: where recreational areas or restaurants can add value, where public transport should be improved or where minimally invasive interventions enable successful ptotection of public health and pandemic control. Concomitant research in Colabs or real labs also improves decision-making processes. Integrating and merging positions, experiences and knowledge of multiple involved groups in a joint effort to advance knowledge substantially holds the additional social benefit of creating ownership and easing implementation once desicions are made.

Instant improvement

The most important facilitating trend to the aforementioned developments is the growing digitalization that permeates all areas of life leading to changes in the behaviour and preferences of individuals, groups and firms. The application of digital technologies and methods deepens our knowledge about the built environment and the ways in which stakeholders organise the built environment, changes the spatial behaviour and preferences of individuals, groups and firms and presents new multilevel challenges in planning and managing urban areas as well as pressures to adapt for urban governance. Highly important multidisciplinary research spanning from architecture, planning, informatics, sociology, management, transport, and policy is concerned with the interplay of digital transformation and urban spatial organisation and the production of systems knowledge and transformation knowledge. A digital and fully connected city is however susceptible to (limited) cyber attacks.

Urban Trends

Micromobility

Micromobility is a multibillion-dollar industry that encompasses a range of lightweight vehicles such as bicycles, e-scooters, and mopeds. Around the globe, the micromobility industry faced dramatic declines in ridership and revenue due to the COVID-19 crisis. Next to lockdown measures, which resulted in fewer leisure and commuting activities, and hygiene regulations that led to shutdowns of companies, passenger-kilometers traveled plummeted by 50 to 60 percent. It can be expected that micromobility-service providers will be hamstringed by these measures in the foreseeable future, which will accelerate industry-consolidation moves to increase profitability, and making use of scale-efficiency improvements (e.g. buying larger volumes of vehicles, processing more payment transactions, and capturing greater back-office scale effects). Nevertheless, micromobility has tremendous business potentials in the medium and long term especially in densely populated urban areas. By 2030, micromobility could be a $300 billion to $500 billion market by 2030, with growth rates of 5 to 10 percent in passenger kilometers.

Consumer behavior is shifting rapidly (consumer use cases shifting toward runs to the pharmacy and food pick up trips). Also, according to a McKinsey consumer survey consumer survey, the use of micromobility in the next normal might increase by 9 percent for private micromobility and by 12 percent for shared micromobility compared to precrisis levels. A greater appreciation of sustainable and noise-reducing transportation modes will also contribute to the attractiveness of micromobile traffic options. Ridership preferences by age will likely remain static but while the risk of infection becomes a top concern, health and sanitary issues such as disinfection of equipment, physical distancing from previous and next users as well as user health checks will gain importance. Concerning mobility patterns, the average trip distances is likely to increase, since people will use micromobility solutions more often when commuting as an alternative to public transportation leading to a higher revenue per trip for providers. As individual mobility is perceived to be safer, private purchases of e-scooters are likely to increase as well.

These individual trends are supported by local policies, which are likely to shift towards greater support for micromobility. Urban centers such as Milan, Brussels, Paris, Seattle, and Montreal have announced the creation of new dedicated lanes or conversion of streets into bike lanes. Cities may also reduce their permit fees to support micromobility to curb private car usage, which is also likely to benefit from people’s efforts to practice physical distancing to prevent transmission of COVID-19. The establishment purchasing premiums for bicycles, e-scooters, and mopeds at the national level could be further accompanied by de-incentivizing measures at the local level such as instituting higher parking fees, taxes, and tolls for cars.

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