How Asian Cities, Companies and Individuals Can Work Together to Create Cities of Tomorrow

By John Larsen, Vice President of Ford Smart Mobility Global Operations

Home to 60 percent of the world’s population, Asia is growing faster than its current infrastructure can support, resulting in severe traffic jams and congestion problems. Like others, we at Ford recognize that massive changes are coming to the way people and goods move within cities and we are working with local governments, companies and citizens on finding solutions to solve these challenges.

Today, 55 percent of the world’s population is concentrated in urban areas, producing 70 percent of global GDP. According to the United Nations, by 2020, nearly 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. Nowhere in the world will this phenomenon be felt more acutely than in Asia Pacific, which is currently home to 17 mega-cities of more than 10 million people and is expected to grow to 22 by 2030.

However, in many parts of Asia, the problems are already starting to reach a tipping point. In the Philippines, it is estimated that traffic congestion in Metro Manila costs the country nearly $57 million per day in lost potential income. Similarly in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, if the number of vehicles on the road continues to increase at its current pace it is predicted that traffic will effectively paralyze much of the city.

This is why we at Ford are so focused on helping to build the City of Tomorrow. We want to help solve many of these issues. And following our conversation last month in San Francisco, we convene another today in New Delhi that touches on transportation woes facing Asia.

Fortunately, with the coming convergence of big data, renewable energy, the rise of a sharing economy and unprecedented levels of connectivity, these problems might soon be more manageable. Governments, companies and individuals are embracing new roles as change agents and working together to address these problems and start to build Asia’s next generation of “smart cities.”

There is more disruption happening now than at any time since horses were replaced by cars as the main form of transportation in the early part of the 20th century. According to the global consulting firm KPMG, 80 percent of auto executives expect the connectivity trend will be disruptive for their business and 83 percent anticipate major disruptions to their business models within the next five years.

At the same time, cities are faced with the challenge of transporting people and goods more efficiently and affordably with a minimal carbon footprint. This has created opportunities for companies like Ford to explore new ideas in smart mobility while expanding their business models to embrace these disruptive technologies.

Asia is unique, both because of how fast infrastructure is developing, and the fact that many economies wanting to be at the forefront of technologies. There are many smart city initiatives and a lot of infrastructure that has already been built to make cities operate more efficiently.

The cities finding the most success in their smart city initiatives are those that have shown an openness to collaborate with private enterprises and involve their citizens in the policy development process.

Leading in this area is Singapore, which recently launched a City of Tomorrow research and development program to find innovative solutions to urban problems and ultimately build a smarter, more sustainable city. The hope is to use the city as a proving ground for new smart transportation solutions which can then be adopted by other cities in Asia and around the world.

Another city at the forefront of the smart city movement is the South Korean capital Seoul, which has a 2030 development plan that will involve its citizens in every step of the strategic planning process as it aims to become one of the smartest, most sustainable cities in the region.

At an individual level, we should embrace change and be open to new solutions. In doing so, we don’t necessarily need to sacrifice our own comfort, but we may discover something really exciting that helps make our life much better.

This post contains excerpts from an article that first appeared in The Hindu Business Line.