Cities

How people and goods get around our cities is undergoing considerable change. As new mobility options are introduced, cities and communities are trying to lower emissions, improve safety and increase affordability and accessibility of transport networks. Cities, mobility partners, and communities are taking a systems perspective to rethink the movement of people and goods. Developed by the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Mobility, the Guidelines for City Mobility: Steering towards collaboration reflect shared goals for liveable and just transport networks and cities. This document provides eight practical guidelines – from data-sharing to multimodal integration – that help establish, develop and strengthen partnerships between cities and mobility partners. These guidelines are intended to serve as a blueprint for collaborations, including existing, new and future partnerships. Each guideline is intended to complement the operating authority of cities with the creativity and innovation of the private sector. It is our hope that cities and mobility partners around the world will deploy these guidelines in their work. We invite cities and mobility partners to confirm the guidelines that resonate for their context, adapt them as necessary and apply them consistently with all stakeholders.

Climate change is projected to produce more intense and frequent extreme weather events, multiple weather disturbances, along with broader climatological effects, such as sea level rise. These are almost certain to have significant direct and indirect social, economic, political, and security implications during the next 20 years. These effects will be especially pronounced as populations continue to concentrate in climate-vulnerable locales such as coastal areas, water-stressed regions, and ever-growing cities. These effects are likely to pose significant national security challenges for the United States over the next two decades, though models forecast the most dramatic effects further into the future.

Cities matter to the UK’s future. They are already concentrations of population and employment, and will be home to much of the country’s future population and economic growth. Cities are centres of commercial, cultural, institutional, and socia life. In short, they are both central to the shaping and delivery of national policy objectives, and the locations where broad social, environmental and economic changes play out in practice.
UK cities are highly diverse, each with a distinctive history and its own set of relationships with its neighbours and with central government.
This Foresight project has developed a broad evidence base and consulted local actors to understand challenges and opportunities from those most experienced in the issues affecting UK cities. The single theme which runs throughout this work is providing the best possible evidence for national and city level decision-makers.

We live in a world which is becoming increasingly urban, where more and more people are moving to cities. Over 54 per cent of people across the globe were living in urban areas in 2014 (UN DESA, 2014).1 The current urban population of 3.9 billion is expected to grow in the next few decades to some 6.4 billion by 2050 (ibid.). It is estimated that three million people around the world are moving to cities every week (UN-Habitat, 2009). Migration is driving much of the increase in urbanization, making cities much more diverse places in which to live.
Nearly one in five of the world foreign-born population resides in established global gateway cities (Çağlar, 2014). In many of these cities such as Sydney, London and New York, migrants represent over a third of the population and, in some cities such as Brussels and Dubai, migrants account for more than half of the population.

Today, we are at the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and biotechnology, to name just a few, are all building on and amplifying one another. This will lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen. Smart systems—homes, factories, farms, grids or cities—will help tackle problems ranging from supply chain management to climate change. The rise of the sharing economy will allow people to monetize everything from their empty house to their car.
While the impending change holds great promise, the patterns of consumption, production and employment created by it also pose major challenges requiring proactive adaptation by corporations, governments and individuals. Concurrent to the technological revolution are a set of broader socio-economic, geopolitical and demographic drivers of change, each interacting in multiple directions and intensifying one another. As entire industries adjust, most occupations are undergoing a fundamental transformation. While some jobs are threatened by redundancy and others grow rapidly, existing jobs are also going through a change in the skill sets required to do them. The debate on these transformations is often polarized between those who foresee limitless new opportunities and those that foresee massive dislocation of jobs. In fact, the reality is highly specific to the industry, region and occupation in question as well as the ability of various stakeholders to manage change.
The Future of Jobs Report is a first step in becoming specific about the changes at hand. It taps into the knowledge of those who are best placed to observe the dynamics of workforces—Chief Human Resources and Strategy Officers—by asking them what the current shifts mean, specifically for employment, skills and recruitment across industries and geographies. In particular, we have introduced a new measure—skills stability—to quantify the degree of skills disruption within an occupation, a job family or an entire industry. We have also been able to provide an outlook on the gender dynamics of the changes underway, a key element in understanding how the benefits and burdens of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be distributed.

Nature-based solutions simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits by bringing more nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes. This report presents the main findings of the Horizon 2020 Expert Group on ‘Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities’.

Global urban populations are growing rapidly – and with them, city transport volumes. Urban transport energy consumption is expected to double by 2050, despite ongoing vehicle technology and fuel-economy improvements. Annual global urban transport emissions are expected to more than double to nearly 1 billion annual tonnes of CO2 eq. by 2025. 90% of this growth in urban transport emissions is expected to come from private motorised travel.

The effects of growing travel demand and increasing shifts to private motorisation are leading to escalating roadway congestion that costs billions of dollars in wasted fuel and time. Moreover, motorised vehicle traffic has significant adverse effects on health, contributing substantially to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases from outdoor air pollution, and deteriorated safety in cities, leading to more than 1.3 million deaths per year from traffic accidents. Urgent policy attention to improve the energy efficiency of urban transport systems is thus needed not only for energy security reasons, but also to mitigate the negative climate, noise, air pollution, congestion and economic impacts of rising urban transport volumes and energy consumption.

This policy pathway highlights the holistic transport energy efficiency, city planning and traffic management approaches local and national leaders in Belgrade, New York City, Seoul and more than 30 other cities across Asia, Europe and the Americas are aggressively pursuing. Drawing on these “real-life” case studies, this pathway offers national and local decision makers concrete steps on how to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate key urban transport system policies in order to improve not only energy security, but also quality of life.

This paper sets out 5 different visions for water management in future cities, and explores the research and innovation challenges to achieve them.

As strategic territories for the future of countries and continents, cities and urban or rurban regions appear to be in the front line as areas of tension and as agents of intervention concerning the major challenges facing the planet. Our so-called "welfare" societies in Europe cannot escape these global processes. Initially, this report will attempt to establish a diagnosis of urban realities in Europe by exposing certain methodological difficulties and issues. In part two, it will address the theme of integrated strategies for the sustainable development of territories and ways of regulating them within cities and rurban regions. The third part will cover the role of the European Union and Member States in building the urban field. Finally, it will discuss the perspectives opened by the Europe 2020 strategy for cities and rurban regions, as well as some proposals.