A panel with Paula Chowles (Wired), Andrew Bolwell (Chief Disruptor, HP Inc), Alex Rosson, (Shinola Audio), and Joshua Kaufman (Wisome VC)
In 1950, 30% of the population was living in urban areas; today it's 54%, and by 2050 it'll be 66%. Should we or even can we put the breaks on urbanization?
1.6 million people move to cities every day. They use up less than 3% of the world's land mass, but 60-70% of it's energy. It does not look as though urbanization will stop.
How should cities navigate public/private infrastructure? The growth rate of cities and their infrastructure far outstrips the ability of the private sector to provide it; we'll need to re-envision infrastructure. Building roads, bridges, and parking are expensive and time consuming projects and usually provide very little return on investment. Plus, in some areas the task is too expensive to even consider: by the end of the century 40% of the earth's population will be African, and the infrastructure problems there are the most challenging.
Cities will need to return to more traditional social based infrastructure solutions: public transportation, reduction of cars in cities (can be done using taxation) to be able to reclaim parking space, and instead of roads building more bicycle lanes and escalators. Bicycles are great social equalizers, and escalators are a very cost-efficient transportation method.
There is also a need to increase city's diversity of business and employment - single-industry cities can suffer immensely when the one industry fails (Las Vegas, Detroit)
Violence in cities - technology can help alleviate some of these issues as well. Some US cities have deployed systems to triangulate the sound of gunshots for faster response times. Additional research has shown that the way violence patterns spread is similar to the way contagion spreads, and the same type of containment of disease can be applied to containing violence.
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