Nearly 70% of the world’s population will live in cities by the middle of the century. But around 75% of the infrastructure that will exist in 2050 hasn’t yet been built.
A significant challenge is to design cities that people will want to live in, run businesses in and employ people in. Infrastructure matters but alone it is not enough. These new cities will need brands that capture people’s imaginations in the way the world’s best existing cities do. They need to be places people feel proud to belong to.
As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day – neither were Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Beijing…. Their identities emerged over centuries through layers of architecture, rituals, commerce, migration, language and storytelling. Their brands were not designed in a boardroom. But what happens when you are asked to create a city brand before the city itself exists?
