ABSTRACT
The urgent press to meet 2030 climate goals will see an increasingly accelerated rejection of business-as-usual investment and development choices, with a continual series of disruptors emerging to create economic tipping points. Predicting even the near future is becoming an impossibility, and yet finding ways to drive progress whilst having to abandon traditional planning and management processes is imperative. In an age of immediately accessible information, where society has moved away from the “command and control”, top-down decision-making methods of the past towards “suggest and select”, citizen-led processes, a race is on. Those cities that transition their approaches fastest, most flexibly, and holistically will not only become the most resilient to the coming turmoil, but will also be able to provide globally desirable living opportunities that attract the best talent, the highest-quality labour supply, and generate more investment, thereby re-inventing themselves atop of a new global order characterised by the “city” rather than the “nation’. Can cities direct the transformation process by adopting flexible and adaptable bottom-up techniques, driven through stakeholder engagement and participation around a solid vision?
