How cities are realising that they need to compete for you

Something very interesting is happening in numerous cities around the world. It used to be a case that a city pretty much resembles another city with the exception of a local geography and landmarks. But during my traveling (bus and train mostly) I am seeing more and more cities transitioning from providing services to citizens to turning their cities into a competitive advantage against other cities.?

Cities like Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg and Barcelona aren't just improving service delivery but completely re-designing their cities to turn them into pedestrian and cycle first and cars second cities and turn many streets that were previously only for cars into green zones and in the process make the city much more liveable and attractive. This is great news from a climate perspective but there is a fundamentally far more interesting thing happening and in my view it has major implications for the future of cities.?

Just as companies often compete for talent with funky offices or amazing locations we are not far from the day that talent will start moving to where quality of life is highest, and not just in terms of earning power but in terms of air quality, nature, noise, ability of kids to walk or cycle to school, local little coffee bars etc.?

My wife and I - as digital nomads - have the luxury of being able to live just about anywhere and it is fascinating how many cities we would never even consider (e.g London, Frankfurt, Milan, Zurich, Berlin, Tel Aviv, etc) simply because they are cars first cities with pedestrians confined to relatively small footzones or narrow cycling lanes. That doesn't mean the cities aren't interesting to visit or don't have amazing opportunities. But in a world where medium to high skilled labour can move relatively easy the city's attractiveness and quality of life will play a major part in a person or family's decision to move. And this doesn't just apply to big cities: small towns and villages will also experience this (though at different degrees.. a case in point is the Swiss village of St Moritz where I spend a big chunk of my childhood... after 40 years it still is a cars first pedestrians second town).?

This will happen increasingly in Africa too once citizens can move freely between countries (can't wait for that day!). We see signs of this with the case of the city of Cape Town and how they are attracting more and more South Africans to move there.

This will also have huge implications for a city's income as wealth moves accordingly, leaving those less economically empowered behind in a city that has fewer economic opportunities. Tourism too will shift to the 'nicer' cities (though I suspect this might take longer).

Couple this trend also with the increasing case that home ownership is very often a sub-par investment when compared with renting (am talking about total ownership costs and the myths around "being wealthy on paper") and you will have cities that will increasingly have to constantly keep improving the quality of life of their residents. This is great news.?

Of course people don't just drop their lives and move to another city overnight (school, friends, family, etc) but anecdotal evidence from our travels suggests this is slowly starting to happen faster than people realise.

The good news for cities is that a more liveable city is actually from numerous aspects a far easier (and in some ways cheaper) city to run. Managing a wel coordinated public transportation hybrid (buses, trams, e-scooters, electric taxies, etc) is far easier than managing millions of uncoordinated independent owner run vehicles.

That doesn't mean there isn't space for cars in this utopian world! Even we use cars from time to time to reach destinations which are really out of the way, but to give you an example, when we were in Como recently we rented a car from the city's electric vehicle offering (EUR 7 per hour or EUR 33 per day, the whole process done via an app and bluetooth to open the car doors). Painless.?

And for the elderly? A city packed with pedestrian and cycle first streets is ideal for electric chairs and elderly enabled vehicles. Plus you could easily allow for a small fleet of 2 seater electric taxi services.

Couple this with an trend towards e-governments and you will have a winning formula (if you want to get a sense of what a city thinks of the time value of its citizens just look at how much you can do online in the city... if they are wholly virtual you can be pretty sure they have leadership that understands that having citizens take time off from work to visit the local city offices is an enormous tax on productivity and quality of life).?

I am very excited at this trend as it not just accellerates also the efforts to tackle climate change but it also is based on healthy competition and not just nice to haves. The cities that embrace this sooner will probably be the winners in the long run, especially in a world where population growth is slowing down.

The future is exciting.