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Building a Future-Ready City

Building a Future-Ready City
Sponsor Portal

An actionable roadmap for building cities back smarter, greener, and aligned with changing citizen needs

The pandemic is accelerating the need for urban transformation, creating extraordinary opportunities for your company. As urban leaders think beyond the pandemic, they will require your support for their plans to rebuild their cities to meet the shifting expectations of citizens, stimulate economic recovery, and ensure future resiliency, security, and sustainability.  

To provide urban leaders with an actionable roadmap for building back their cities in these unprecedented times, ThoughtLab, in conjunction with Hatch, is launching its fourth multi-client urban research program, Building a Future-Ready City. This program brings together top city government, business, and academic leaders to examine the most effective investments and solutions for meeting the social, environment, and economic imperatives of operating in a radically different, post-pandemic world.  

The pandemic has forever changed the expectations and behaviors of citizens and businesses, requiring cities to build back smarter, safer, and greener—with the agility and built environment to address shifting needs and future disruptions. The most successful metro areas will be those that have concrete blueprints for morphing into future-ready, carbon-neutral cities, drawing on innovative technologies, new sources of financing, and public-private partnerships. Our ground-breaking research program will provide cities with the evidence-based roadmap they need to address the challenges they face. 

Our goal is to provide urban leaders with an evidence-based roadmap for becoming a future-ready city—one that is fully sustainable, resilient, secure, and fit for purpose in a post-pandemic world.

Join our Committee

Our research team will survey 200 cities and 2,000 citizens around the world

We will analyze and compare the best practices, investment plans, digital strategies, and performance results of 200 worldwide cities striving to become more sustainable, resilient, and future ready. To enable us to benchmark urban areas with similar characteristics, we will gather survey and statistical data on cities that are diverse by location, population size, income level, density, economic development, and other critical factors.  In addition, to assess the alignment between government plans and citizen needs, we will survey 2,000 citizens and gather additional citizen data directly from cities to assess changing living, working, and traveling behaviors, as well as shifting service requirements and levels of trust.  ​

This rigorous research methodology will allow us to provide action plans tailored to different types of cities geared to evolving citizen needs, attitudes, and behaviors. 

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Our mixed methods research approach​

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ThoughtLab is building a coalition of urban experts across cities, government, businesses, academics, and associations. Building a Future-Ready City will provide urban service providers and consultants with valuable market intelligence on the main areas of investment for cities as they emerge from the pandemic. Our research will enable companies to design successful go-to-market plans aligned to the needs of a diverse set of cities around the world.   

Join our coalition as a sponsor to build a successful thought leadership and client engagement program that leverages valuable content and unique smart city benchmarking data and analysis. Join as an advisor to provide insight and gain access to valuable project research. 

Join Our Committee

Sponsors and partners

Sponsors

Axis
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Advisors

City Leaders

Academic Experts

Media & Association Partners

Bayan Konirbayev​
Chief Digital Officer                              Almaty City, Kazakhstan

Miquel Rodriguez Planas​
Commissioner                                Barcelona City Council​

Dr. Peter Pirnejad​
City Manager, Los Altos Hills, CA​

Chris Castro​
Director of Sustainability and Resilience, Orlando, FL
​

Clay Pearson​
City Manager, Pearland, TX

Emily Yates ​
Chief Innovation Officer, SEPTA

Darron Taylor​
Operational Lead, City of Ottawa​

Gianluca Galletto​
Managing Director, Technology & Innovation Partnerships ​
New York Housing Authority (Personal Capacity)
​

Oyvind Tanum​
Head of Smart City              Trondheim, Norway 

Aram Chaparyan​
City Manager, Torrance, CA

Danny Santana​
Assistant City Manager, Torrance, CA

Borg Tham​
Deputy Director, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Singapore

Jamie Cudden​
Smart City Program Manager, Dublin

Peter Nöu ​
Smart City Pilots & Partnerships​
Uppsala, Sweden

Jayant Kohale​
Business Advisor​
Mumbai

Julia Thompson
Smart Cities Data & Planning Consultant​, London

In Dong Cho
Metropolitan Government First Vice Mayor​, Seoul, South Korea

Edson Gomez
CIO, Bucaramanga, Colombia

Gia Biagi
Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transporation

Nicole Raimundo
CIO,  Cary City, NC

Mike Grigsby
Director Innovation and Technology Sioux Falls, SD

Jennifer Sanders
Executive Director                               
Dallas Innovation Alliance

Bill Cashmore
Deputy Mayor                               
Auckland

Sharmila Muhkerjee
Executive VP, Planning and Development, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Austin, TX

Benjamin Branham
Chief Communications Officer      Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Bob Leek
Smart Mobility, Parking Enterprise & Mobility Services, Clark County, NV

Karen Lightman​
Executive Director​
Metro21: Smart Cities Institute,​
Carnegie Mellon University

Joan E. Ricart​
Professor                                                 IESE Business School

Eugenie Birch​
Professor, The Penn Institute for Urban Research

Kyung-Hwan Kim​
Professor of Economics Sogang University​

Frank Zerunyan​
Professor, University of Southern California, Sol Price School of Public Policy​

Prof. Greg Clark​
CBE FAcSS, Group Advisor, Future Cities & New Industries, HSBC​

Henry Liu
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan; M-City

Jian Liu
Professor of Urban Planning & Design, Tsinghua University Tianjin, China

Dr. Yu Qi
Associate Professor                      Nankai University; Tianjin, China

John Rome
Deputy CIO for Partnerships, Cloud Innovation Center, Arizona State University

Ryan Hendrix
General Manager, Cloud Innovation Center, Arizona State University

Diana Bowman
Co-Director, Center for Smart Cities and Regions, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University

Fengyu Li​
VP of the Institute of Urban Design and Innovation at CAFA, China

Prof. Maosheng Lai ​
Peking University of China

Dr. Sanjay Modak                         Assistant Professor Graduate Programs and Research Department​
RIT of Dubai

Philip Bane​
Managing Director                           Smart Cities Council​

Chris Cooke​
Chief Executive Officer                  Smart Cities World​

Kari Eik​
Secretary General,​ United Cities

Tony Silva​
General Manager, Public Sector Edelman​

Yi Wang​
Head of Global Development Program, Anbound​

Ulrich Ahle​
Chief Executive Officer                  Fiware​

Chungha Cha​
Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer,​ Reimagining Cities LLC

Nicolas Buchoud ​​
Founding Principal            Renaissance Urbaine

Sameh Naguib Whaba​​
Global Director, Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice, World Bank​

Jim Haskins​​
Director of Community Engagement Open Sustainability Collaborative

Jeff Merritt​
Head of Urban Transformation  World Economic Forum 

Michelle James​
Vice President, Strategic Industry Programs, CTIA
 

Anita Chen​
Deputy Secretary General                   GO SMART
 

Pablo Marmissolle Daugerre​
Chief of Staff, United Cities and Local Governments
 

About the Program

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ThoughtLab will work with sponsors to provide cities with an evidence-based roadmap for becoming a future-ready city and leader in climate action. Drawing on insights from our global analysis and best practices of leading cities, we will create a complete action plan that urban leaders can use to benchmark their strategies for building a future-ready 4.0 city.

Download the Program Prospectus

Preliminary Program Timeline

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Latest Insights

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Cities on the front line in the Russia-Ukraine crisis

By Louis Celi, CEO, ThoughtLab  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights a depressing fact about cities and war: cities often take the brunt of attacks and bear the greatest financial and human cost. Two-thirds of Ukraine’s population of 44 million people lived in cities before the conflict began. Millions of them have fled their homes, and hundreds have been killed. The cost to Ukrainian civilian property and infrastructure already surpasses $100 billion.  

Read More

Relevant Thought Leadership Work

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Understanding city challenges that inform marketing communications

Lou Celi, discusses his firm’s ground-breaking research into how cities around the world are rethinking their plans for today’s riskier, digital-first world.

Listen on Demand

Building a Future Ready City is the fourth program in a series of ground-breaking multi-client studies ThoughtLab has produced on smart cities trends.

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Smart City Solutions for a Riskier World

ThoughtLab, in collaboration with a global coalition of business, government, and academic leaders has aimed at providing city decision-makers with an evidence-based roadmap to building the smart city of the future.

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Building a Hyperconnected City

ThoughtLab gathered benchmarking data from 100 cities, conducted in-depth interviews with city leaders, and drew on valuable input from a cross industry coalition of leading firms and research organizations. This study provides an in-depth evidence-based roadmap that cities can use to become vibrant, hyperconnected urban centers of the future.

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This report showcases how 10 cities across regions, population sizes, and economic maturity are achieving the SDGs. It spotlights challenges and provides valuable insights for their peers.

Download the Case Studies
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Smarter Cities 2025

ThoughtLab teamed up with a coalition of organizations with urban and technology expertise to conduct ground-breaking research into the impact of smart city solutions on urban performance. Our research identified 10 smart city pillars that work together to drive benefits to local stakeholders.

Contact Us

For more information on how you can join our coalition as an advisory board member or a sponsor for Building a Future-Ready City, contact us today.

Lou_Celi

Lou Celi
Chief Executive Officer
ThoughtLab
917.459.4614
louceli@thoughtlabgroup.com

Rutizer, Barry white background

Barry Rutizer
Corporate Director
ThoughtLab
917.251.4190
barryrutizer@thoughtlabgroup.com

Michael-Geach1

Michael Geach
Director of Business Development
ThoughtLab

646.334.7022
michaelgeach@thoughtlabgroup.com

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