By 2070, cities and urban centres across the world could function as living systems—anticipating human needs, adapting in real time and quietly shaping daily life around the people they serve. Neighbourhoods may be mirrored through digital twins that model urban activity as it happens, public spaces could respond to human behaviour, and transport and education systems may be partly managed by artificial intelligence. Climate-resilient megacities could even include mobile districts on floating platforms or urban centres powered entirely by fusion and renewable energy.
This is the future sketched out in a new report launched by the World Governments Summit (WGS) in partnership with global consultancy Arthur D. Little (ADL). Titled Urban Futures and Changing Demographics: Transforming Cities of the Future Through Customer-Centricity, the report argues that cities of the future will succeed not by adding more technology, but by putting citizens at the heart of every urban system.
Leaders must act now
To move from vision to reality, the report says city leaders must act now. Cities and urban centres around the world must adopt a more personalised, customer-centric approach, argues the report. That includes setting a clear urban purpose, ensuring digital inclusion in access to services, and building flexible data platforms capable of supporting emerging technologies such as edge AI and digital twins. It also calls for new ways to measure urban success—tracking well-being and quality of life rather than service usage alone.
Equally critical, the report notes, is trust. Cities must establish transparent governance frameworks, enable controlled experimentation through sandboxes and pilot zones, and give citizens greater visibility and control over how their data and AI-driven decisions are used. Sustainability and resilience, it adds, must be embedded at every level to ensure that the cities of 2070 are not only advanced, but liveable and human-centred.
Urban areas are home to over half of the world’s population, but urban growth has resulted in an overall drop in liveability. A customer-centric city addresses this imbalance. It provides a personalised, sustainable, and engaging experience that combines digital technologies, sustainability, and user-centric approaches that involve citizens in planning and decision-making.
According to the report, customer-centricity involves a long-term approach to technology that is proactive rather than reactive, and that delivers personalisation at scale. The report specifies five areas that demonstrate how customer-centric smart cities will evolve:
1. Cities personalised at the individual level: The use of AI and predictive analytics, and physical infrastructure that can transform and adapt in real-time, will deliver a more individual experience.
2. Neuro-responsive environments: Manual and fragmented interaction with cities will be replaced by more intuitive, low-effort neuro-responsive approaches that ultimately eliminate user effort.
3. Bio-integrated infrastructure: Traditional urban infrastructure is normally inflexible and static. Starting with proactive maintenance, city infrastructure will transform into a more autonomous, and living environment that evolves to meet changing, real-time needs.
4. Autonomous civic services: Over time, there will be a shift towards increasing automation of public services through AI, while ensuring that humans remain in the loop to provide control and citizen trust.
5. Climate-adaptive smart cities: According to C40 Cities, 570 coastal cities could be vulnerable to flooding by 2050. Alongside efforts to reduce climate change, cities will adapt their infrastructure and operations to guarantee public safety and liveability.
To turn these long-term visualisations to reality, smart city decision-makers need to focus on setting out a clear vision of what their city stands for; ensuring citizen inclusion by offering a variety of digitally inclusive ways to access services; underpinning technology infrastructure with data platforms that allow future layers (edge AI, digital twins) to be added seamlessly; investing in methods to gather data on well-being, rather than just service usage; putting formal frameworks in place for new smart city service models to be tried through sandboxes, governed experiments, and pilot zones; developing trust-building mechanisms through transparency dashboards, public reporting, citizen data control, and oversight of AI decision systems; and embedding sustainability and resilience at every touchpoint.
Samir Imran, Partner Travel Transportation and Hospitality, at Arthur D. Little, Middle East, says: “Smart cities succeed when technology serves people, not the other way around. By putting citizens at the centre of digital innovation, cities can create liveable, sustainable, and competitive environments.” - TradeArabia News Service
