eBook: From Future Vision to Urban Reality

Cities are facing demanding and profound environmental, social and technological changes, and to address these they must be ready to adapt and transform. In an all-important, new report from ThoughtLab, a leading global research firm, the route that cities are making towards becoming future-ready has been analysed in-depth.

With support from sponsors Axis Communications, Deloitte, FTI Consulting, GM, Intel, Itron, ServiceNow, and Wireside Communications, ThoughtLab’s innovative project delves into what progress a diverse set of 250 cities, in 78 countries, have made across their future-ready plans in five urban domains:

• Environment and sustainability
• Urban infrastructure
• Mobility and transportation
• Safety, security and resilience
• Citizen living, health and trust

The new report builds on research conducted in mid-2022 by ThoughtLab, a pioneering study of 200 cities and analysed their progression so far, learning how cities were preparing to adjust to the greater needs of citizens alongside the pandemic.

At that time, cities proved to be on track in either developing or planning to become more sustainable, resilient, inclusive and digitally enabled. Whilst the planning process showed promising visions, the path to achieving these seemed less clear. Bringing these to fruition and achieving the economic, sustainability and social goals set out by cities is one that is imperative in following-up on.

In this 2024 study, you can learn from interviews conducted by ThoughtLab with 15 city leaders and the results of three advisory board meetings held with government, corporate and academic leaders within the city space.