New Urban Concepts to Drive Smart Cities Infrastructure Investments to US$375 Billion in 2030

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New urban visions and technologies to transform cities into humanized, sustainable, equitable, and resilient environments
11 Nov 2021

While there seems to be little doubt that global urbanization will continue unabated, it is equally clear that current concepts of urban living and infrastructure are neither sustainable nor scalable from an environmental impact, resilience, cost, and humanized living perspective. The status quo of polluted, hazardous, and gridlocked cities is beginning to change. According to global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, investments in urban infrastructure aimed at implementing new visions for cities will reach US$375 billion by 2030 as cities invest in brownfield and greenfield projects.

“The very concept of cities will change profoundly and structurally,” states Dominique Bonte, VP End Markets and Verticals at ABI Research. In 2021, eye-catching urban visions such as The Line and Telosa were announced, proposing fundamentally new infrastructure templates for city living based on green, pedestrianized, and 20-minute neighborhoods served by on-demand mobility, retail, healthcare, and delivery robots, while banning traditional transportation, energy, and utilities layers to underground levels. “While many of these new city visions may never see the light of day, they do offer a glimpse into a more humanized, sustainable, and resilient urban future, much of which will be realized by gradually retrofitting and/or upgrading existing urban infrastructure in the next decades,” Bonte says.

Drivers behind urban innovation are numerous but both the digitalization of lifestyles, accelerated by Covid-19, and the increasingly pressing need to address climate change are powerful engines for metropolitan transformation. Additional agents of change include the call for more equity and inclusiveness, scalable economic development, and more affordable living.

While the most visible aspects of this urban revolution are linked to physical assets, ranging from more distributed city footprints to green infrastructure, adaptable urban spaces and modular roads and buildings, the invisible digital layers and related processes are equally important. They are provided by urban innovators like Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs and Dassault Systèmes developing and integrating connected sensors, software management platforms, digital twins, blockchain, electrification, and process automation. These transformative solutions enable preventive and remote maintenance practices, automated emergency response and traffic management, and will ultimately realize the autonomous city of the future.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Future Urbanization Concepts application analysis report. This report is part of the company’s Smart Cities and Smart Spaces research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights. Based on extensive primary interviews, Application Analysis reports present in-depth analysis on key market trends and factors for a specific application, which could focus on an individual market or geography.

About ABI Research

ABI Research is a global technology intelligence firm uniquely positioned at the intersection of technology solution providers and end-market companies. We serve as the bridge that seamlessly connects these two segments by providing exclusive research and expert guidance to drive successful technology implementations and deliver strategies proven to attract and retain customers.

ABI Research 是一家全球性的技术情报公司,拥有得天独厚的优势,充当终端市场公司和技术解决方案提供商之间的桥梁,通过提供独家研究和专业性指导,推动成功的技术实施和提供经证明可吸引和留住客户的战略,无缝连接这两大主体。

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