City Profiles: Spotlight on urban strategies for the future

To provide urban leaders with a complete action plan for meeting the challenges ahead, ThoughtLab collaborated with a global coalition of business, government, and academic leaders to conduct a comprehensive benchmarking survey of 200 cities and 2,000 citizens across six world regions: Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and North America.

The resulting study, Building a Future-Ready City, shows the importance for cities to have clear visions for the post-pandemic world and action plans for meetings the new needs and expectations of citizens. Leaders should have digital transformation roadmaps for leveraging the latest technologies and data analytics across urban domains. They should take concrete steps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) around people, planet, and prosperity. And they should build on government, business, and academic partnerships as well as capitalize on new business and funding models.

This report showcases how 16 cities—across regions, sizes, and levels of economic development—are planning ahead to achieve their long-term goals.