Digital cities: future differentiating strategies Volume 1
Future differentiating strategies is the first part of our series on digital cities.
With mankind facing a growing number of challenges that are unprecedented in nature and scale, digital cities are where we should look for the strategies to pre-empt risks, the remedial solutions to restore equilibrium, and the path for better future outcomes.
Many industries are already deploying digital twins as a means to identify risks, simulate processes and plan ahead. Even so, the potential to apply the concept to cities is still largely untapped. Facing new scenarios where there are no existing playbooks, the ability that technology gives us to collect data and replicate physical objects, can be further flexed to help extrapolate, anticipate and strategize more comprehensively. A digital replica fueled by data can become an extremely powerful analytical tool. A holistic approach to data enables the whole to be far greater than the sum of the parts, providing city leaders with vital information to make better decisions for how the future built and natural environment should sustain communities, and how communities should sustain them in return.
As the data available to be mined continues to expand, and technologies become more diverse, the journey towards digital transformation becomes ever more worthwhile, and simultaneously ever more complex. Data democratization gives more participants an entry ticket to information. However, data collaboration will be the real game-changer that will propel the quantum leap from the current state where data coexists, to the future state where data is consistently and comprehensively connected in a digital ecosystem that offers new perspectives, and supports a holistic approach to innovation and the development of solutions. Counterbalancing the weight of daunting challenges such as accelerating urbanization, climate change and viral pandemics, is the encouragement that the data already exists that can reveal to us the problems we must prepare for, and the solutions to them. What is needed to enable it, is human collaboration on intelligence, best practices and new ideas.
Many industries are already deploying digital twins as a means to identify risks, simulate processes and plan ahead. Even so, the potential to apply the concept to cities is still largely untapped.
In the same spirit of collaboration, key experts who have played a significant role in the development of four emblematic and diverse digital city strategies in Europe, North America and Asia, share the big idea that underpinned their work. The case studies of Helsinki, UK, Toronto and Singapore each offer a distinct approach to the deployment of People, Process, and Technology, the vital components to catalyze the disruption necessary for transformation, and to be strategically integrated into the Digital Ecosystem — an orchestrated and interconnected realm in which society, environment, economy and technology share data to respond and adapt to fast-evolving scenarios — with the ultimate goal of creating an accessible, sustainable and resilient world for current and future generations.
Download the report to explore the following:
- What makes a digital city?
- Why we need to dream of electric unicorns
- The tales of four future differentiating city strategies
- Helsinki 3D+: Developing a dream over three decades
- UK: The Gemini Principles
- Toronto: The parallel approach
- Singapore: Smart Nation
- Understanding the new language of the digital city
- Digital ecosystem: Driving the next evolution