After having advised more than 300 cities, 50 national governments, and bodies such as the OECD, Brookings Institution, the World Bank and the Urban Land Institute on strategies for city development and investment. What would you say are the key trends currently shaping urban development? What are the most promising areas for urban investment today?

Humankind has been making cities for almost 10,000 years. A massive acceleration is in train in this period, the 100th century of urbanisation. We will achieve peak humanity and peak urbanisation in the same decade of 2090 to 2100, or a little sooner. By 2100 almost 10 billion people will live in more than 10,000 larger cities. We are on a great human anthropological trek. We are an urbanising species, building a planet of cities. We don’t know how to do it, so we have to invent it.  After 2100, or a little sooner, Human population will decline. We need to be ready.

This century of the city is also the century of climate crisis, exponential technologies, geo-political conflicts, extremes of inequality, and great uncertainty. It needs leadership.

It requires intentional capital, proactive place management, and reinvention. There are substantial investment opportunities in cities across the whole world; in infrastructure, utilities, housing, venues, commercial space, and in transport, technology, and science, all underpinned by place strategies that promote resilience, innovation, and inclusion.  Real Estate is the fabric of cities. There are massive investment opportunities over the next 75 years, and they require foresight about the 150 years that will follow.

Specifically for Spain, what are the unique challenges and opportunities for urban development in Spanish cities? And how do they differ between major cities like Madrid or Barcelona, and smaller or mid-sized cities? Are there any specific urban projects in Spain that you find particularly innovative or inspiring?

Spanish Cities were heroes in the 1990s. They rapidly transitioned out of the post-war era to re-position themselves as open, welcoming, and eager for international engagement. This has led to substantial population growth and larger and more prosperous economies. It was very successful in Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla and Madrid.

But too little attention was paid to the likely consequences of this openness and the growth it brought, or the risks of relying too much on tourism & hospitality as a driver of jobs and incomes. Spanish cities have the endowments to be great hubs of business, finance, innovation, culture, creativity, discovery, medicine, and knowledge, but they must do two things proactively: 1) build metropolitan expansion in each city with mass transport and much more and diverse housing that better accommodates growth, and 2) reverse the dependency mass tourism that has built up in the airlines, hotels, and retail sectors.

There are many exciting initiatives in these cities, they need a 25 year effort to fully reorientate their economies. This must be done in a metropolitan setting where new transport and housing can increase the capacity of the main cities to serve much larger populations without over-crowding or unaffordable housing. These metropolitan cities need to have multiple centres that are attractive places to live and to visit, and can also host a wider range of jobs to reduce inequality.

There is a lot of debate on how to promote equality on cities, the risks of gentrification, and the need to preserve of cultural and historical heritage, how do you believe cities balance this with the need for growth and development? How can cities ensure that investments benefit all residents and not just a select few, fostering inclusivity and diversity in their communities?

Inequality is clear in the incomes that people receive and in the costs and opportunities they face. Their options are now too narrow. Spanish cities need a wider range of jobs that pay good wages from a diverse range of sectors. They also need a wider range of homes.   

We can preserve and enjoy historic centres if we have metropolitan cities with more diverse destinations and much larger and diverse housing supply offering different life style choices. To accommodate the growth they are attracting Spanish cities need to become big metropolitan cities. 100 years of history show us this conclusively.

In this regard, what do you believe are the primary factors contributing to the housing affordability crisis in Spain? From your perspective, do you think this situation is unique to Spain, or do similar challenges exist in other countries and cities? How does Spain’s housing situation compare with that of other European countries or global cities? Do you know of some successful strategies or best practices from other countries that could be applied to address Spain’s housing challenge?

The challenge in Spanish Cities is not very different to other countries where population and visitors are growing. But the lack of a long-term approach that should have started in Spain in the 1980s when Spanish Cities started to re-position. This lack of a long term approach is now costing Spanish significantly. Spanish cities are crowding too much activity into spaces that are too small. The main mistake is rely on the ‘market’ to solve the problem.

Housing is not just a commodity or tradeable asset. It is also an amenity and a right. The core strategy should be to build more housing overall, diversify the types and tenures of housing, increase public investment in various forms of affordable housing, and zone for mixed income neighborhoods and districts across larger metropolitan areas with multiple centres.

Regarding technology, what role will it play in the future of urban planning? What are the most impactful technological innovations currently being implemented in urban planning? What defines “smart city”, and how are Spanish cities incorporating smart technologies into their urban infrastructure?

The key technologies for our next 30 years are Cloud/Quantum Computing, Digital Platforms, AI, Bio-Tech, Carbon Sequestration, and Geo-Engineering. They will play key roles in in our environment, economies, societies, and cities.  For cities two major consequences occur:

• Digitization enables us to optimize urban systems, making all the utilities, real estate, transport, energy, and services more efficient. I expect digital twins to become major source of new initiatives.
• The commercialization of both new technologies and new platforms will happen in our cities. This will enable new innovation eco-systems to grow, diversifying our jobs base, and it will also cluster new firms and jobs in specific urban location.  

More widely, the growth of digital usage in the pandemic has led into a beneficial clarification, a sorting effect. Cities should do the tings that are best don in places, and not the things that can be routinely done on line. Cities should also optimize the use of digital platform in how they make paces work. Our cities will need in future to focus on the things that require rich urban environments: Habitat, Innovation, and Experience

We are well beyond ‘smart cities’, which have proved to be a shallow idea.  We are moving towards exponential, autonomous, and generative cities.

Climate change is affecting all cities around the world, but specially for Spanish ones, it has had a strong impact as they are getting are getting hotter, drier and more flammable. What are the most critical steps cities need to take to become sustainable? What strategies can cities use to reduce their carbon footprint?

Cities are struggling with urban heat, water shortages, and vulnerability to climate uncertainty. Our cities need to move towards being more clean, compact, and connected as they become more metropolitan.

The core systems of cities such as energy, utilities, waste, water, transport, land use and property, logistics, and a wide range of citizen services, make our daily lives work. These systems have evolved and accelerated rapidly during 2 centuries of intensive fossil fuel usage.

 Now, in our time, we must innovate these systems into new forms of sustainable energy so that we reduce global warming, clean our cities, and start to protect our precious biodiversity.

Cities are the means to reverse climate change. Our planet is finite whilst our cities are elastic. Cities are dynamic concentrations of people, jobs, infrastructures and consumption, all of which emit carbon. At the same time, cities are the most obvious victims of rising temperatures and sea levels. It’s also in cities where we can experiment with innovations in addressing climate change, shifting to new modalities and changing citizen behaviour.

Finally, how do you envision the future of cites in the next 20-30 years? How can cities prepare for and adapt to not only the challenges of climate change, but also the changing needs of society and lifestyle?

We have exciting and challenging 5 decades ahead. We are at the beginning of a cycle of great reform and reinvention.  A new ‘social contract’ will emerge.

The social contract is the tacit agreement about what is necessary for the collective endeavour of a free society to meet the needs and protect the wellbeing of its citizens. At the level of a city the social contract involves important balances between prosperity and shared opportunities and amenities. It requires an equation that works between the incomes people can earn and the costs of living within the city. It includes basic agreements about fairness, justice, security, safety, and personal freedoms. Cities that thrive provide such a social contract, and they when the social contract has become distorted or undermined.    

The rights of businesses to produce, trade, invest, employ, sell and enjoy the profits of doing so is subject to the new social contract. Broadly speaking, businesses must do more good than harm, and they must not damage the carefully crafted matrix of rights and responsibilities that society fosters. This is what gives business its license to operate.  The ‘license to operate’ is a general permission given by a society at the collective level, that is overseen by regulations and rules (some of them written). It is the ‘subsidiary clauses’ of the social contract.

The COVID pandemic revealed massive social inequalities in our cities, in health, housing, incomes, amenities, access to nature, and more than anything else, choice. The established social contract has been challenged by the revealed immiseration of the people through unaffordable housing, insecure jobs, unfair treatment, unbreathable air, and other sharp disparities. The contract can be cancelled and the license to operate can be revoked.

Reinvented Cities must build a different social contract to the model that went before. Our new ‘social contract’ post-pandemic is about a fresh settlement on the role of cities and how they should innovate and work.