Post-Pandemic Places: An innovator’s guide
“Cities will come through this crisis, as they have in the past. Whether they are better or worse places to be is still, in large part, up to us.” — Prof Max Nathan, The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL
The onset of coronavirus and the drastic, mitigating measures that it has necessitated globally have brought a dire set of challenges for businesses, governments and citizens. While only time will tell the extent of the impact, the spread of COVID-19 shuttered businesses across the globe and continues to threaten many more.
Greater even than the economic cost, has been the human cost.
That being said, the economic impact has not been universally negative: while sectors that depend on in-person, close contact activities such as education, hospitality, construction and non-essential retail have been badly affected, ‘stay-at-home’ sectors, comprising essential retail, at-home entertainment and virtual communication, have enjoyed an uptick in demand.
COVID-19 has been an accelerant of innovation
Despite its devastating impact on people’s lives and businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic represents an inflection point for connected places and will provide significant opportunities for innovative businesses and place leaders.
Through its hugely disruptive influence, the pandemic has forced the rapid invention of new approaches to the way we interact, live, work and travel — and signals further new opportunities over the medium to long-term.
The pandemic has shown that many barriers to innovation are molehills masquerading as mountains
The urgent need to contain COVID-19 and its impact on individuals and businesses has dispelled myths and dismantled barriers to innovation. This is evident from the rapid development and adoption of several innovative, risk-mitigating solutions across the globe.
Data sharing between organisations, historically seen as a key barrier to innovation, accelerated. For instance, London boroughs established a new data sharing agreement in less than a week to enable collaborative support to children dependent on free school meals. Similarly, commercial transport organisations, which historically avoided sharing data because of commercial confidentiality, have now set such concerns aside to provide the data that is now being used every day to understand COVID-19’s impact on mobility.
Rather than rehearsing arguments against innovative solutions, organisations worldwide developed radical risk-mitigating technologies and local place leaders swiftly found new ways to deliver services to citizens. Even historically innovation averse sectors like the built environment sector embraced and scaled digital business solutions within weeks:
- Drones are being trialled to deliver essential supplies to hospitals in Isle of Wight, to sanitise less accessible areas in India and deliver parcels to isolated communities in China;
- Innovative mobile applications (such as “GoCoronaGo” to “Sampark-o-Meter” in India) have been developed for contact tracing, estimating risk of encountering an infected person, and for tracking quarantine violations;
- Chinese police are using ‘smart helmets’ to identify anyone with high fever within a five-meter radius;
- 3D-printed devices have been developed to help people avoid touching door handles and buttons;
- Process automation has been integrated by local councils to improve the delivery of their services such as the distribution of school meal vouchers.
Having seen what can be accomplished — and at what pace — it will be much harder in future for naysayers to raise the traditional arguments against doing things differently.
COVID-19 has made us adopt news ways of doing things — some of these will outlast the pandemic.
COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the way we live, work, play, learn, buy and consume things. Some of these new ways will last only as long as the pandemic does. Others however, will likely become ingrained in our lifestyles, either out of habit after months of lockdown and social distancing, or by positive choice. How to satisfy these post-pandemic behaviours and habits will continue to be a focus for many firms as lockdown continues to ease and restart begins on earnest.
Businesses with existing propositions well-suited for a post-COVID era are particularly optimistic: 72% of companies surveyed by Connected Places Catapult believe the current situation to be an opportunity for their business.
The pandemic has given us a glimpse of the future we could achieve if emissions targets were reached.
Since the beginning of the lockdown, the UK’s daily carbon dioxide emissions have decreased by 36%. Globally, daily emissions decreased by as much as 17% during the lockdown’s peak in April, compared to daily average in 2019.
This taste of life in cleaner and quieter environments has led many to advocate for a ‘green recovery’, with stimulus investments and support for ailing sectors linked to efforts to realise net zero targets. As the Economist observed in May:
“Getting economies back on their feet is a circumstance tailor-made for investment in climate-friendly infrastructure that boosts growth and creates new jobs.”
Place leaders are likewise clear on the opportunity to tie economic recovery to environmental improvements. The Global Mayors Covid-19 Recovery Task Force has put tackling air pollution and climate degradation high on the list to achieve a climate-friendly economic recovery from the pandemic.
And the public agree: two-thirds of Britons believe Climate Change to be as serious as COVID-19 and say they want it prioritised in recovery (Ipsos MORI, 2020). The market opportunity for ‘green recovery’ solutions is therefore significant and businesses with solutions which will help places realise both objectives will be well placed to benefit from the increased public and political interest.
Navigating the new normal
From data-driven tools which drive agility and transparency in planning and development, to escooters and apps which help you get about smoothly, ‘smart buildings’ which respond to the needs of occupiers, or drones and delivery robots which take cars off the roads, connected places innovations enable smarter, more user-friendly, more resource efficient, more responsive services and user experiences. They are central to releasing the productivity of towns and cities, and to accelerating the transition to net zero. They are also central to meeting the many new and emerging needs of post-pandemic places — starting with managing the risk (and fear) of contagion, through to longer term transformations.
The chapters in this Innovation Brief highlight how connected places businesses have already risen to the challenge of COVID-19 and explore some of the market opportunities that the pandemic has created or accelerated. These opportunities have been selected based on:
- Relevance to the connected places market — Opportunities that deliver greater mobility and access, promote smarter use of land, make buildings more energy efficient, improve decision making, foster new public spaces and points of human interaction;
- Market Value — Opportunities that are expected to have a sizeable market value by 2025;
- Green Potential — Opportunities that will help UK realise its net zero and decarbonisation targets; and
- Impact Longevity — Opportunities that go beyond addressing short-term challenges and are expected to stay relevant even after the pandemic is over.
To aid navigation, we have grouped the opportunities we have identified into six distinct but interconnected domains:
- Decision making and institutions: The processes and structures that determine how decisions are made by place leaders and their partners, from the strategic to the tactical, and the institutional capabilities which enable effective place leadership.
- Mobility: The services and infrastructure by which people and goods move around a place, as well as to and from it.
- Built environment: Real estate, asset management and all their related activities and services.
- Public space: What happens on the streets and in shared spaces, as well as the public and private services that support their effective functioning.
- Wellbeing: The layer of services and systems that enable citizens to do, and be, well in the places where they live and work, includes health and social care, community services and environmental factors.
- Critical infrastructure: The underlying assets and services — such as water, waste, power, digital connectivity — that ensures everything else works properly.
Journey with us into this new landscape
At Connected Places Catapult, we harness UK innovation to help create connected places for a more productive and greener future. We see huge potential for such innovations to help places not just survive COVID-19 but thrive in the short, medium and longer term. We will be releasing new chapters and related content over the coming weeks.
To learn more about the opportunities outlined in this report, sign up for July’s Third Thursday and if anything in this Innovation Brief sparks your imagination, get in touch with us at info@cp.catapult.org.uk to take the conversation forward.
