at some point in time two years ago we
reached a global tipping point for the
first time more than 50% of the global
population lives in cities cities our
era destiny they promised wealth and
opportunity and in this cities 70
percent of the global GDP is being
generated so there are real motors of
civilization but of course cities are of
different types and forms you know
thirty percent of the people living in
the cities live in the mega cities you
know the cities with over ten million
inhabitants the large mega cities well
you may think you're wonderful jean-guy
London New York great cities well you're
wrong
think of Dhaka who knows what Dhaka is
okay think of Lahore Chiang then well
think of Lagos so we will have more than
hundred such cities emerging between now
and 2030 this is stress in the city
quite a stress in the city and actually
when we are confronted with a major
challenge we normally thought in the
past that urbanization and civilization
are connected actually the great influx
into the cities was because of the
promise of civilization but to these
cities live up to the promise according
to the UN more than 1 billion people
live in the slums of the mega cities of
the South more than 1 billion people and
actually that is a growing number and
it's creasing at the geometric rate so
it's the
largest migration in history this
enormous migration is accompanied by a
disconnection of urbanization and
civilization it's increasingly
disconnected and this is what we
experienced we experienced more and more
this disconnection so one of the major
challenges we have and one of the major
missions is to reconnect civilization
and urbanization and make sure that the
promise of the city is being fulfilled
now of all the challenges that cities
are confronted with you know we usually
know the typical ones you know I mean
clearly unemployment pollution
inadequate infrastructure skyrocketing
rents we know a lot about it also here
you know in Germany poverty financing
economic development these are the
mentions of 522 public and private
stakeholders from the largest 25 mega
cities in the world this is what they
mentioned as being critical issues but
the number one issue they mention all of
them is transportation transportation
sounds I mean we saw that we can solve
transportation in very creative way but
transportation has a lot of collateral
damage if it doesn't work and it leads
to health issues and it leads to a lack
of economic development
so reconnecting urbanization and
civilization requires a solution to the
increasing transportation problem that
we are encountering and if we don't
solve it we will have an increase in
people you know getting ill because of
pollution we will have an increase in
infrastructure breakdown and we will
have a problematic economic development
take the city where I was born I was
born in Rome it's a 3.6 million city and
you know eternal is probably the best
of the commuting time more than the city
type it takes forever to get from A to B
and that is not only the problem that
people might be not on time the problem
is the loss in GDP so it's according to
a calculation is 3 to 5 percent of GDP
that cities are losing because of the
low in the city mobility because people
are stuck in traffic and people have the
collateral effect of that I came back
from Jakarta yesterday Jakarta is an
interesting city it's an ink rolling the
increasing mega city do you know what
the peak time travel speed is in Jakarta
it's four point six kilometers per hour
I mean you can just walk you know just
this speed the problem is you better do
not walk outside the car because you
encounter major problems because of the
pollution because of all the problems
that are connected to the very bad
environment that pollution is creating
so transportation is a major problem and
reconnecting it is a challenge so we
looked at it as part of a
multi-stakeholder effort together with
the World Economic Forum and we looked
at how technology can help us tackle
this challenge and of course you know
there are different technologies in
great shapes and forms that you can use
and one way of solving the
transportation is what we see here in
the example of real this is a control
tower of Rio where you can steer the
traffic flows and make sure that you
decongest
certain parts of the city this is a
great solution it requires a very strong
data infrastructure it requires a lot of
technology and it requires quite high
costs of operation and it takes time
implement great solution but it's not a
solution which works in every part of
the world
and it is a high budget solution so we
looked around and tried to find low
budget solutions solutions where cities
try to solve the problem of congestion
on a shoestring and we found some really
interesting example Curitiba the city in
piranhas is the fantastic example of
great Urban Development the mayor Jaime
Lerner developed together with the team
of really young and enthusiastic
architects a solution which is low-tech
but feels high-tech you will say oh my
god this is a bus yes it's a bus it
looks like a bus but it feels like a
metro system and why you see those tubes
next to the bus it is a system to embark
and disembark from the buses it has a
system where you can automatically pay a
flat fare to travel around the city and
by introducing this much cooler system I
would say you know a overland subway I
don't know if we can call it an overland
subway people found it a really cool
thing you know sometimes you need to
package also low-tech in a high-tech way
and then it gets acceptance and actually
the interesting thing is that in
Curitiba they achieved enormous rates of
use of public transportation
and the result was very clear and
tangible 30 percent less private trends
but less transport overall less
congestion in a time where the
population tripled so simple solution
but creative solution so how did this
team do it
it's interesting see how they did it
it's bold and fast that is what the name
of the game so Jaime Lerner said you
need to outsmart your bureaucracy if you
introduce this type of solutions and
actually another thing is creativity
comes when you take a zero out of your
budget ideally two zeros and so this is
a very good solution for cities which
don't have a high budget and it was
applied in 84 cities around the world
from Bogota to Los Angeles well of
course this is not a solution that is
based on big data so we looked around
and saw other new solutions also budget
solutions that we can find and we find
them in West Africa in Abidjan in the
Cote d'Ivoire Ivory Coast here we find a
combination of big data small money
great solutions picked on crowd
intelligence how does it work the mobile
operator orange released data of five
million cell phone users and if you
think of your smart phone no think of a
simple cell phone which doesn't have
much functionality and this data were
cleaned and cleared so that you could
not recognize the user so it's clean
data and they asked teams as part of a
challenge data for development to
develop novel solutions based on this
data so a team from IBM decided to look
at the data and see if they could
optimize the traffic flows in Abidjan
and you see on the Left
upper left side the current setup of the
traffic routes in Abidjan on the right
hand side this is the simulation of how
people travel around
based on the cell phone data so what
what you do is basically that they every
user is like a sensor and they measure
the movements so they have the
inner-city movements and they saw that
there were a couple of mismatches so
they developed 56 different optimization
possibilities and they chose one one was
to introduce two new traffic routes and
prolong one and based on that they
reduced the traffic by 10% they'd
reduced the travel time by 10% and they
connected that outskirts of Abidjan so
this is a nice example of using data in
a novel way to develop new solutions now
do you think that we could do it here in
Berlin we need to get over our data
hysteria to solve some of the pressing
issues that we are confronted with and
the really challenging thing is to
overcome those obstacles to optimization
we learn a lot of things you know out of
these examples that actually embracing
technology to solve the pressing
problems of transportation is possible
but you need to go about it in a novel
way with new approaches with creativity
with openness for new solution and with
use of data you need to involve the
population you need to make the citizen
your co-developers you need to make sure
that really everybody is testing around
and playing around with this so there
are lots of learnings that we can apply
to every city in the world not to those
who have budget constraints so this
there is a way to solving this and one
interesting thing is trying to make sure
that we use that with the new means of
transportation we
have a lot of new things coming up you
know on Sunday for the first time on the
Hockenheimring there was a self-driving
vehicle driving without a pilot at
racing speed I'm not saying that that is
the solution for the inner-city mobility
I hope not
no but it shows that the technology is
there but what do we do with this
technology if we don't have the means to
applying it if we don't have the
philosophy around it to make sure that
we apply it we know about the drones
everybody speaking about this but we
need to make sure that we have a model
of usage of drones if we oppose every
experiment we will never get there so we
need to do that and also we need to
utilize technology in a new way this is
a picture from a project of the a the UN
block-by-block habitat project what is
it who of you knows minecraft minecraft'
is used by hundred million users it's a
game but it's being used for city
planning in this case for village
planning and as we talk there is a new
minecraft challenge which has been
studied by the UN to optimize the city
planning the village planning in the
Solomon Islands so this is a tool it's a
gaming tool which allows also young
citizens to participate and experiment
around and these are the new approaches
fresh approaches to solving the problem
of inner-city mobility some cities
really mean it seriously and couple of
weeks ago I had the pleasure to discuss
with the Singapore development board
about a simple issue they told me
Antonella we want to dream the city of
the future please help us dream it and
put it into action
and they really mean it so number one
what is the city of the future what is
the dream of the city of the future
number one they are thinking of devoting
a whole part of the city to
experimentation secondly they want to
abolish roads as we know them cars as we
know them they want to introduce the
robot Texas self-driving Texas so
individualized mass transport for
everybody and they want to do some
ancillary changes decentralizing
services so that there is less commuting
time and also they want to introduce
green areas so that people connect so
these are all ideas to make Singapore
not just the biggest financial center
but to make it a livable city a
competitive City for many so if we want
to realize the dream of the city of the
future we need to have new approaches to
urban planning number one sharing being
the new owning we're speaking about the
share economy but sharing becomes more
and more important this will allow us to
contribute infrastructure joint
infrastructure to everybody secondly
pioneering is a new planning you need to
experiment experiment experiment and try
out and then correct thirdly gaming is
the new drawing try to include all the
citizens in a gainful way in a playful
way to develop new approaches and crowd
intelligence is the new steering very
soon we all will have smartwatches which
will tell us which type of
transportations brings us to the
destination in the best way in the most
efficient way and with lowest carbon
footprint so we can self-regulate
ourselves and finally social
entrepreneurship is the new investing we
cannot continue to invest in
infrastructure in a centralized way we
need to have much more participative
mass
in investment and if we do that we can
reconnect urbanization and civilization
and we can live up to the promise
so don't let us just dream about the
city of the future let's put it into
action today thank you