Why I joined Urban Us: A Sustainable Future for Cities
Amidst the chaos of a global pandemic, I joined the investment team at Urban Us. Urban Us supports startups at the intersection of cities and climate change. COVID-19 has raised many relevant questions for us: Will people flee high-density urban environments? Could recovery plans push back climate action? How will commutes change?
Looking Back, Looking Forward
In line with much of the global public, over the last decade I have developed an urgency around environmental collapse, especially as it relates to the need for significant shifts in our industrial landscape and its interdependencies with a just and equitable society. I believe the way we live in cities and the resilience of urban infrastructure is an increasingly important lever for these changes. I’m energized by the focus of the Urban Us thesis to improve urban life through areas of impact that range from infrastructure, industry, and the built environment, to transportation, mobility, and public health.
While I formally joined the investing team two months ago, Urban Us has been a steadfast network of support and learning throughout my career. When I first connected with Shaun and Stonly in 2014, I was a Venture for America Fellow investing in early-stage hardware startups and building a new type of community with the Downtown Project. Later, while apprenticing with the partners at First Round Capital, I attended the Smart City Conference, an amazing Urban Us event in Miami back in 2015. They brought together an international group of urban innovation leaders for conversations about autonomous vehicles, govtech, and to demo electric micromobility way before their time. I thought they had something really special and have stayed part of the Urban Us network through the active Slack community and attending events in both San Francisco and New York ever since.
While Urban Us was growing an impressive portfolio of over 70 companies, I spent the past five years working with industrial and enterprise startups bringing products from idea to market as an early employee and consultant. My focus has been on go-to-market strategies and using stakeholder research to build customer-driven product roadmaps and design business models that amplify the value of the technology. I also had the pleasure of investing with Village Global as a Network Leader focused on IoT/Hardware companies. I am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had working with the teams at Filament, Instrumental, Computable, Compology, Prologis Ventures, Formdwell, First Resonance, and Symbio Robotics.
In 2018, when I first started consulting, I worked with the Urban Us team on a research project interviewing investment leaders on their ESG goals. From this research, we wrote the Urbantech Investor Playbook. Truthfully, I was not anticipating getting back into investing full-time, but the offer to work with this team again and support their portfolio was an obvious fit. Joining the investment team is a continuation of my interest in startups and technology pushing for systemic change.
Forecasting during the pandemic
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been impressed by how our team sprung into action to provide support and how our portfolio founders have responded courageously with quick decisions. Even more, I’ve been comforted by our community’s impulse to share lessons and resources to navigate the new environment. We put together a guide for startups and have been working on an After-COVID Playbook, surfacing ideas for the new landscape.
To augment these direct efforts, I have been taking a futures-thinking and foresight approach to consider the impact of the pandemic on industries and, in turn, how cities and urban life will change. I have been exploring how to effectively forecast and tell stories about climate change in a lot of ways through my art practice and side projects. This process has included creating an immersive scavenger hunt on the future of cities for the attendees of Summit LA last year. This spring, I was helping curate an exhibit, ‘The Future Emergent’ inviting artists to display visions for a sustainable future at Dream Farm Commons, a small independent gallery in Oakland. Ironically this exhibition has been delayed due to the virus, but working on it deepened my appreciation for radical imagination and collective visioning as a tool for approaching the unknown. I also launched the Sustainable Industries Initiative, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the big questions posed to our future industries.
Now with Urban Us, I’ve been applying these methods to create forecasts to help guide our team and partners through the coming months. These forecasts give a vision for a range of industries on a 3-month to 3-year timeline based on research on historical patterns, anticipated regulations, and observations of the initial economic response and externalities of COVID-19 outbreaks. I also considered the industry context going into the pandemic and other future-focused reports about the pandemic.
During times of disruption, data-driven trends analysis has limited effectiveness because the situation is new, and there isn’t historical data to indicate what will happen next. I leveraged methods inspired by best-in-class forecasters like Institute for the Future to create these scenarios. Their purpose is to push the boundaries of our thinking so we are prepared for the full scope of possibilities that might emerge in the near future.
These images show the process: first distilling signals from a range of sources, sorting them into industries, writing industry forecasts based on these impacts, and then mapping the forecasts on cities and urban life. If you are interested in reading the full industry forecasts, you can find them here.
Urban Life after Covid-19
Here are some of the takeaways from the forecasts on how cities and urban life will change in the coming years. I hope they spark some imagination for you.
Built Environment & Energy Infrastructure
Urban spaces will be less oriented towards business activity, daytime retail, and commutes and more designed for open public spaces and residential convenience.
Investment will increase in energy resilience at all scales of urban properties from apartment buildings and single-family to commercial real estate and urban manufacturing. This will likely include capacity planning and flexible budgets based on ramped up or ramped down usage, as well as the installation of microgrids, batteries, wind, and solar.
Return to construction will emphasize resiliency and optimization for existing building and infrastructure projects, including climate retrofits and upgrades for safety standards. Pending political shifts, government stimulus for job creation, and new infrastructure projects may spark investments in clean energy projects in certain regions.
Food, Waste, & Water
Big fast-casual chains will take the places of cafe culture and boutique restaurants, though the habits of take-out and delivery will continue to grow in popularity. There will be additional use of robotic systems and ghost kitchens in the preparation and delivery of food.
There will be an increased usage and opportunity for subscription-based delivery of CSA boxes, local food distributors, and an invisible infrastructure for managing food logistics, including waste.
GovTech & Civic Tech Solutions
As businesses adapt to support remote working and internet-based engagement where possible, government agencies on the federal, regional, and local levels will invest in infrastructure, data privacy, and security to expand the channels for interacting with citizens.
The adoption of software tools will enable enhanced digital services offerings and web-based citizen interactions. These new tools will be structured for cities with “as a service” contracts rather than heavy capital expenditures. City leaders will develop adjunct processes and workarounds to navigate the challenges of pre-allocated budgets and procurement cycles.
Public Health, Safety & Resilience
After extreme losses from the pandemic, products around risk planning and disruption insurance will emerge as a new spending category for all types of organizations and governments. Underwriters for insurance will be modeling pandemic cycles and climate change scenarios for assets and populations with more data and rigor.
We will see the increased availability and use of telehealth as well as options for at-home visits and care outside of hospitals. Public health measures will be enforced and presented more deliberately in shared spaces. Transit and public infrastructure will ramp up testing, sanitization, and cleaning spend to accommodate new regulations and suggestions for public health.
Industry, Mobility, & Workforce Development
New semi-automated robotics systems and technology will be deployed in production and assembly lines, as well as in warehousing and logistics operations to limit worker density, human touch, and risk of disruption. There is a surge in spending on prevention and reporting on worker health and safety across industries.
There will be a surge in personal vehicle ownership — including EVs, bikes, and scooters — and continued investment in electric car options. Public transit will continue to be the prolific option for a large base of urban dwellers, with adapted behaviors around density avoidance and commute timings.
An increase in privately owned personal vehicle purchasing due to distrust of shared infrastructure will require ample and efficient charging infrastructure. City roads and parking lots will be repurposed to accommodate more micro-mobility solutions and spaced out shopping, pickup, and delivery habits.
Distribution & Logistics
As many retail outlets lose business and shut down brick-and-mortar, the remaining will ensure optionality with e-commerce and delivery infrastructure. New connections between distribution networks will emerge supporting full-stack transactions with autonomous trucking for long haul, major new short haul routes, and diversity of on-demand solutions for last-mile and hyper-local delivery.
There will be many experiments in the growing opportunity for new packaging for commercial food products and local delivery that reflects sustainable materials, compostability or reusability, and hygiene in its materials.
Retail employment will transition from on-demand driving (Uber/Lyft) to logistics roles and short haul trucking and on-demand local delivery. There will be an increase in software-aided and semi-autonomous systems to support logistics tracking and low-touch delivery.
Thanks to Shaun Abrahamson, Stonly Baptiste, Liz Sisson, Mark Paris, Zeev Krieger, Taylor Rowe, Mollie McArdle, Julia Kaplan, and Jeremy Kirshbaum for providing feedback on this piece.
