11 October 2018
WEF Paper Highlights Importance, Examples of City Agility Across Sectors
UN Photo/Kibae Park
story highlights

The World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization explores the concept of agility in cities.

To be agile, cities must be able to harness the opportunities and challenges posed by technological advances through features such as multi-functional buildings, efficient rezoning policies and transport systems that are optimized by real-time information.

The paper provides guidelines and metrics for three levels: physical components, digital elements and environmental factors.

19 September 2018: A white paper titled, ‘Agile Cities: Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization explores the concept of agility as it relates to cities.

The paper highlights the importance of agility in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which the authors describe as a merging of “the biological, physical and digital worlds” through innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G internet. The foreword notes that to be agile cities must be able to harness the opportunities and challenges posed by these technological advances. An agile city, the paper explains, features multi-functional buildings, efficient rezoning policies, transport systems that are optimized by real-time information, and an energy network that maximizes renewable energy use, among other characteristics.

Land use is the underlying element that allows most of the other phenomena to unfold.

The paper unpacks cities’ agility in the building, land, energy, mobility, information technology (IT), security, education and governance sectors. It provides a framework and metrics for evaluating agility, which can be aggregated into an “agility index.” For each sector, the paper focuses attention on and provide guidelines and metrics for three “levels” at which cities have experimented with innovation:

  • physical components, such as infrastructure;
  • digital elements, such as technologies to better understand trends and needs; and
  • environmental factors, which include the mitigation of cities’ impacts through both the physical and digital spheres.

Within each sector, WEF offers city case studies to demonstrate how lessons can be transferred and adapted to other urban contexts. Agile buildings, the paper notes, are not only “carbon-neutral, energy positive, technically sophisticated, and support a diverse mix of uses and activities,” but also follow the concept of “total building performance” in accordance with six key performance indicators (KPIs): “carbon reduction, energy independence, occupant health, integration with urban infrastructure, real-time performance monitoring and system interoperability.”

A blog post on Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Place notes the centrality of land use to city agility, with WEF’s Carlos Ratti highlighting that land use is “the underlying element that allows most of the other phenomena” such as automation and economic transformation to unfold.

The white paper is the third in a series curated by WEF’s Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization. It builds on a paper titled, ‘Data Driven Cities: 20 Stories of Innovation,’ which reviews how cities can use data in areas of people, economy, governance, infrastructure and environment. [Publication: Agile Cities: Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution] [Publication Landing Page] [Place Blog Post]

related posts