e-Book: Building a Future Ready City

Social, economic, and environmental disruptions, heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, are radically altering the expectations and behaviors of citizens, requiring urban leaders around the world to develop action plans to become future-ready.

ThoughtLab, a leading global research firm, has joined forces with a broad coalition of business, government, and academic leaders to provide city leaders with a blueprint for future success. Titled Building a Future-Ready City, the newly released study findings show what it means to be future-ready, and what cities need to do to get there. The study was sponsored by Axis Communications, Cognizant, Dassault Systèmes, Dell, Deloitte, GM, Intel, JLL Technologies, Kearney, NTT, and Visa.

To analyze how cities are future-proofing their urban environments, ThoughtLab, together with Hatch Urban Solutions, a global engineering company, conducted a worldwide benchmarking study of 200 cities—representing 5% of the world population. In addition, ThoughtLab and Hatch surveyed 2,000 citizens in 20 worldwide cities to assess the alignment between city strategies and citizen expectations. To gain qualitative insights, ThoughtLab interviewed city leaders about their plans and held meetings with a global cadre of urban experts

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 “Cities are facing greater upheaval today than at any time since we began conducting urban research. Our goal is to provide cities with an evidence-based roadmap to address rapidly changing citizen expectations and behaviors, along with in-depth benchmarking analysis to enable them to measure where they are in future-readiness against others,” said Lou Celi, the CEO of ThoughtLab and the director of the research program.