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WIRED CONSULTING | FORDTo build trust in transformation and to create
the cities we need for the future, it’s crucial to work
together to pool resources and share expertise.
“We have a vision that we call the City of
Tomorrow,” explains Sarah-Jayne Williams, Smart
Mobility Director at Ford’s European arm. “The
details of how that plays out is what we want to
explore.” Ford’s City of Tomorrow symposium
provides a platform to lead the path to the future.
Ford’s series of events, which visited Valencia on
November 5, Cologne on November 28 and London
on December 6, brought together designers, city
planners, policy makers, investors, future mobility
experts and everyday citizens to rethink the city.
“The vision Henry Ford had 100 years ago was,
if you provided people with freedom of movement,
it’d drive the future of progress,” says Williams.
“That model is no longer sustainable.” We can’t
each drive a car individually, bringing cities to a halt.
“The way we plan cities is surprisingly outdated,”
adds Mills. “When planning departments talk about
digital technology, they mean they use PDFs and
receive emails. Internet-era planning departments
should be about data and intelligent analysis.” Ford
is leading the way with helping ensure data-drivenHyperloop connections will seamlessly link megacities‘ Google knows more about
our high streets than our urban
planning departments do’- Euan Mills, Future Cities Catapult
decisions make our cities smoother experiences.
The company tracked one million kilometres of
vehicle and driver behaviour – enough to drive
around the Earth 20 times – in and around London.
The 500 million data points revealed likely hotspots
for accidents – information that can help city
planners pre-emptively tackle problems.
City planning should involve key stakeholders- the citizens. “There’s the assumption that this
needs to be provided by big firms,” says Schwanen.
“But you can have more grassroots-driven,
bottom-up organisations that allow decentralised
and informal sharing of ideas to trickle up.”
Whether developing liveable cities in Valencia,
or transforming the last mile in Cologne, Ford are
looking at the problems and bottlenecks in urban
mobility, and how the solutions can benefit us all.
These are issues that town planners call “wicked
problems”, a concept from the 1960s. “It’s where
the way you define the problem can set you on a
trajectory to address it,” says Schwanen.
Which is why Ford’s City of Tomorrow symposium
is so crucial: by bringing together the best minds
from disparate backgrounds, it’s possible to
redefine the problems, to build collaboration
between private and public enterprise, and to
help educate and involve the public at grassroots.
Just as the free flow of a city relies on hundreds
of seamless interactions, so developing those
connections between the key players in the future
mobility of the world’s cities is vital. “Doing things
in a particular way, you get a narrow way of thinking
about what is possible,” says Schwanen. Until now.
Rail and trams will be key to liberating cities of traffic