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Megan Wright

If you were in charge of your city, what one thing would you do to improve life for you and future generations?

Wright

Today’s cities are undergoing unprecedented change. They need new voices to tackle the most complex urban issues.

And yet people are often overlooked in the planning and functioning of their cities.

I’m Megan Wright, Senior Editor at FT Longitude, and in this audio feature, we’re going to explore how city leaders – faced with infinite demands and finite budgets – are seeking to improve city resilience, engage their citizens and deliver better outcomes for all.

First, we’re going to look at equity, and why increasing opportunity and reducing vulnerability improves outcomes for both cities and their citizens.

Michael Fassnacht

My name is Michael Fassnacht. I'm the CEO of World Business Chicago, which is the economic development arm of the great city of Chicago. And at night, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for the City of Chicago.

Wright

And Chicago is an important case study in terms of equity, or rather historically, a lack of it …

Fassnacht

Chicago is, on its best day, an unbelievably diverse city, on its worst day, one of the most segregated cities in the world. And it’s not by accident. It was really policies, racial structure, systematic economic inequality that have created like a north side who is very prosperous where we have an unemployment rate of 2%. In some of our neighborhoods in the southwest side, where we have sometimes an unemployment of 25% with little access to public transportation, healthcare options, healthy food options. So a lot of the work I think that the last couple mayors have really focused on is how can we create really one city?

Wright

EY research reveals that affordable housing and livable neighborhoods are most important to citizens and need to be prioritized, not just in Chicago but around the world.

EY Global Strategy and Operations Leader for Government and Public Sector, and host of the City Citizen podcast, Meghan Mills, explains…

Meghan Mills

Housing is certainly a big issue, and we're seeing not only in the US but around the world coming out of the pandemic, and for various reasons, more and more people becoming unhoused or very vulnerable to become unhoused.

From the citizen pulse survey that we did across those 12 major cities, only 40% of respondents agree that housing in their city was affordable, and 54% believed that there were sufficient work opportunities for all citizens in their area.

Wright

In Chicago, work is underway to revitalize the city and ensure equitable access to opportunities for all citizens. Here’s Michael Fassnacht again.

Fassnacht

I think, distributing the economic opportunities across a wider range of geographic areas. I think there is an opportunity to do more decentralized workplaces. I think the offices of the future will not be one HQ but much more like kind of one center of energy culture. It's more like a hub and more opportunities where all neighborhoods can profit from because more people will spend more time in all the neighborhoods outside the urban core and spend money there as well.

I like to focus on two key areas of how we can build more social cohesion to build, ultimately, a more inclusive, better Chicago. First, I think every business leader in Chicago and Chicagoland has to be as well a civic leader. You cannot just say, oh, I'm just focused on my corporate stakeholders, and that is it.

One example is probably like on the corporate side, you discover financial services who have the HQ in the suburban areas, but they all thought as well, what can we do now post a murder of George Floyd to create social cohesion? And they had two very big projects. One created a customer care center on the south side in the Chatham neighborhood, which created almost a thousand jobs in a primarily black neighborhood. And there was a lot of skeptics saying, can they really do it? And now it's the highest performing customer care center in the North American network of Discover.

Wright

There is growing recognition of the importance of engaging citizens in the development process. And yet, people are often overlooked in the planning of cities. Decisions are made about them, rather than for them ⏤ let alone with them. Here’s the EY organization’s Meghan Mills, again …

Mills

When it comes to social equity within cities, it really is so important that the voice of the citizen is included in the decisions that are being made. And that's not only people who may have been included in conversations previously, perhaps wealthier people or taxpayers, but the voices of the most vulnerable and really meeting people where they're at in their communities, understanding what's most important to them, and understanding the processes and the ways in which they gain access to services in the cities, how they are accessing housing, education, and just moving around the city. Transport is a big issue, mobility. And I would say when it comes to social equity, the biggest challenge is how do you engage?

A lot of cities have moved in the direction of engaging citizens in the decision-making by running competitions or using different data and different insight from academia, from the private sector, from community groups, from not-for-profits, really to take a look at the information that's there. Not just listening tours into different neighborhoods, but also using technology for people who have access to apps and technology to gain information about what's top of mind for them.

Wright

EY City Pulse survey also showed that when asked how much they feel their city’s leadership listens to individual needs and concerns, almost a quarter of participants answered, ‘slightly or not at all’. And just 13% of citizens said their needs and concerns were completely listened to.

The question of true engagement is on the mind of Mark Atherton, Director of Environment for Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

Mark Atherton

I think there are always ways that we can improve in engaging with our citizens using digital technology. One of the things that we're quite good at, I think, is engaging, using social media. So the GMCA has its own channels. We have interactive websites that people can give views on and comment on some of the things that we're doing. We engage directly with panels of people. So we have four or five different engagement groups to try and reach those more difficult to reach people if you like, or people who don't engage with us on a regular basis.

I think the advent of social media has in some ways helped us. But if you're not careful, you can think that you're engaging with lots of people, but really just engaging with a small number.

Wright

Meghan Mills has some insight on what the difficult to reach demographics might be…

Mills

In addition to this Citizen Pulse survey, we completed a piece of research called the Connected Citizen, which takes into account different types of persons that will be resident in any particular City. And you'll always have digital natives who are very comfortable using QR codes, using applications to provide their data and information to the government to make decisions about the programs that are most important to them. But you'll also have people who are perhaps a bit more vulnerable, people who do not have access to technology and perhaps people who don't trust the government to give them all of their information, or don't understand how that data would be used.

And so a big issue around the engagement of the citizen is around accountability, clear communication as well around the programs. What is this program? How will it benefit people? And then coming back around while the program is being rolled out, and then certainly further along in that program, to show how that has actually impacted and enhanced hopefully the quality of life of the citizens in that area. Right, because when you're making bold decisions, the more honest you can be with your constituents, the more you'll gain trust in your decision-making and get them on board with future programs when you're looking to roll out other initiatives.

Wright

It’s clear that data has a huge role to play. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority has been collecting data from the bottom up to get a much more accurate picture of what life is like for the citizens of Greater Manchester…here’s Mark Atherton again.

Atherton

So there's a number of research projects that we undertook to give us the data. One was that we undertook almost like a whole stock analysis of the 1.1 million homes there are in Greater Manchester. And try to understand what the energy efficiency of those homes were using existing data sets, but then using the information that we knew about the type of makeup of buildings in greater Manchester, being able to extrapolate that.

Now, that's one example of where we've used data then to then try and map out how much we need to save in energy or how much is possible to save in energy from individual buildings. And we’re one of the first city regions to adopt what we've called local air energy planning with energy systems catapult. And what this basically does is from almost the street by street level, up to the grid level, we've mapped out what the investment required and the type of technology change, infrastructure change is required to get us to 2038.

So we understand what energy efficiency needs to look like in our homes, in our buildings. We need to understand what electrification of heat and electrification of transport, what impact will that have on the grid? Working directly with the distribution network operator and all of that data comes together in these local energy plans, which allows us probably for the first time to say this is the way forward.

Wright

As part of their quest to make urban centers more sustainable, city leaders and planners are reassessing their approach to development. The goal? More nature, better quality of life and cities that can withstand the effects of climate change.

It’s something Michael Fassnacht says the city of Chicago is keenly aware of …

Fassnacht

If we look at the tree coverage by neighborhood, there is a huge disparity between like the north and south side. So roughly I think you have 60% less tree coverage in some of the southern neighborhoods and western neighborhoods versus the north side. That is just a very, sounds like a small thing, but it's a meaningful thing because we know there's a cost of correlation between tree coverage and temperature, and health of residents.

Wright

Meghan Mills agrees city leaders must be smart, innovative and bold when it comes to addressing climate change.

Mills

Many cities are built as ports, in areas that will flood and sea levels will continue to rise. We also have cities in deserts and in areas where they will continue to have heat events, whether it's fires or just cities where there's not enough green space will end up becoming heat deserts, which then will impact not just quality of life, but will impact the citizen's health in that area if you don't have more trees or the pavement is hot, right?

Wright

When planning with sustainability in mind, it’s not just health and housing which could be improved for a city’s growing number of citizens …

Mills

And with that comes economic development opportunities, comes job creation opportunities. And so that's another way it's tied in with equity and inclusion. If the public sector and the private sector work together using data to understand the jobs of the future, perhaps in green tech or in renewable energy. How many jobs need to be created? How many jobs do businesses need to fill? You could use that data and then the private sector and public sector could work together to think about vocational programs, upskilling and reskilling the workforce and creating jobs, which then, you know, bring more people into the economy. It also ties back with affordability, and making these cities vibrant places where people are seeing job opportunities and opportunities to also spend their money socializing and enjoying the urban areas.

Wright

Engagement is hugely important, but what other roles do data and technology play in better understanding the behaviors and needs of citizens? Here’s Meghan again.

Mills

Again, I think cities don't always have access to data, but by partnering with academia and the private sector, using that data to think about what are the needs of the people living there, whether it's

how do you conduct data analytics to understand what housing is available? The socioeconomic status of people. What would people be able to afford as far as purchasing property or renting?

What we saw a lot during the pandemic was a realization that not every home had access to wifi, and not every student had access to a tablet. Right. And so how can you use household data to understand the needs of the people living there, and then make decisions of how to fund programs that, in this instance of education, you could bridge that digital divide so that when everyone was either working or going to school at home during a global pandemic, you could quickly make decisions using data about people who were vulnerable and just didn't have access and would've been left further behind if the data hadn't been used in the right way.

There's also data that can be used when it comes to the climate crisis. A lot of cities tend to be in areas where there's potential for flooding and cities can use demographic data to understand the impact of if they were to build more resilient infrastructure in certain neighborhoods, what would the economic impact be of those decisions?

Wright

Mark hopes that by approaching sustainability through citizen engagement, digital technology and data, Manchester can ensure a more just and fair transition for all its people … Not just in the future, but here and now, today!

Atherton

So for example, we run a program called Green Homes Grant, a local authority delivery, which was government funding, but focused very much on those people who were in fuel poverty. And using the data that we've collected through the exercise I explained earlier - you can’t identify someone in a particular property because we don’t have that level of detail, it doesn’t go house by house, so it’s not invasive. But what it does is give us areas of search and it says, well, in those areas, you're more likely to find people who are eligible for that program.

Now, obviously that means that the program is more likely to be successful because it means that you are engaging directly with people who are likely to benefit. And in that particular instance, it means you are supporting those people who perhaps need it the most.

Another program that we run that's called Your Homes Better, it's aimed at people who are able to pay or not eligible for other government grants, and for example, might be interested in moving toward an air source heat pump if their current boiler is at the end of its life. And it helps us to identify where those people might be and therefore make offers available to them.

Wright

While there are undoubtedly many challenges ahead when it comes to creating sustainable cities, EY City Pulse survey reveals that 68% of citizens believe environmental initiatives in their city are designed for the benefit of all people.

Mills

Going back to that piece around equity, many times, poorer neighborhoods or neighborhoods where vulnerable people are living, there are environmental justice issues, where there may be waste management or water issues in those areas that create unsafe infrastructure, dirty water, not potable water for people. And many times those neighborhoods are food deserts and heat deserts as well. And so hopefully that 68% will go up even higher. But it is nice to see that, you know, a majority of people do think that those green spaces and sustainability programs are being designed for all people.

Wright

Around the world, city leaders, planning experts and government officials are taking different approaches to reimagine urban centers. And yet the end goal is the same: a concerted effort to level up their cities for all citizens.

Equity and true community engagement are paving the way for an evolution in the design of sustainable cities. Preparing citizens and their leaders for the next wave of change ⏤ whatever that may be.

This audio feature is part of the EY organization’s “Sustainable Cities” research program. It is produced by FT Longitude in collaboration with the EY organization. Thank you for listening.

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