Why Urban Tech?
Homelessness, gentrification, diminishing affordable housing, curbing taxi drivers’ ability to make a decent living, fostering gig workers terrible working conditions. It seems that there isn’t single urbanism related modern tragedy that technology wasn’t blamed for.
Yet, technology isn’t always the villain. Think, for example, about the sexy couple of Health-Tech, where technology is often considered — rightfully so — as fostering a crucial life saving human advancement. Or, on Fintech, a space that allows millions of people to invest their capital smartly and curb some of the world’s government’s welfare expenditures. For what reason, Urban Tech — a sector of innovation that encompasses products that aim to solve pressing problems involving urbanization — suffers from a poor reputation.
Contrary to the common belief, I think that technology can save cities.
However, achieving even minor progress can be challenging: due to the number of regulations, conflicting stakeholders’ interests, project’s scale, scarcity of land, and limited profit margins.
Barring in mind that two-thirds of the world population will move into cities in the next decade, it seems that finding solutions to urbanization pressing issues is crucial for humankind’s wellbeing.
My past professional experience, working in the space of smart public transportation, has taught me that minor, even insignificant changes taken face value, can create an enormous improvement in people’s lives. For example, I was part of a project that helped optimize scheduling for public buses routes, saving not only valuable governmental funds (that in turn can be invested elsewhere), but rather shortening people’s daily notorious commute.
The importance of technologically driven solutions in the urban space stems from the fact it’s a numbers game: The scales of influence are significant, and in constant growth as more people than ever are living within cities and will continue migrating to cities in the foreseeable future. More importantly, cities are dynamic living entities that administrated by the slow dated and inefficient public sector, always a leg behind in adopting the technology. This is not to say that techies alone should run the city, but rather that policymakers and urban planners have to work hand in hand with technology educated individuals to come up with original solutions to pressing problems.
So why real estate?
It is the real estate that makes a city: driving its expansion and determining its character. Although technological changes were made in the real estate space, they were focused primarily on improving efficiencies of the existing processes, failing to help the majority of residents. My vision is to improve the existing systems and reimagine entirely new ones that address the growing demand for more affordable, flexible and community-centered living environments. Using an innovative approach and implementing data-driven solutions, we can create an ecosystem that will help city dwellers to gain control over their property, and in turn, to shape the city they live in.
It is time to harness technology’s might to facilitate our most basic needs — home and communities. To do so, I’ve decided to pivot myself more than 5,000 miles and enter this one of a kind program at @Cornell Tech. This campus, positioned in the heart of one of the greatest cities on the planet, is the place that will provide me as well as for my teammates the tools, space, and the network needed to hopefully make this vision come to life.
