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The former – and, hopefully, soon to be again - European Parliament Urban Intergroup hosted the launch of the report The Future of Cities, Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward on Wednesday October 16.  The full document and Executive Summary have been produced as a “Science for Policy” report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) within the European Commission.

Conceived in many ways as the successor to the 2011 Cities of Tomorrow report, the new multi-authored publication (the citation runs to eight lines), completed in April this year also had input from numerous other Directorate Generals, from the Committee of the Regions and from the CEMR and Eurocities networks. The key stated aim of the report is to raise open questions and steer discussions on the future of cities “within the science and policymaker communities”. In that sense, its authors described it as very much the beginning as oppose to the culmination of a process.

The report sets out eight key challenges for cities:

• Affordable housing
• Mobility
• Provision of services
• Ageing
• Urban health
• Social segregation
• Environmental footprint
• Climate action

It goes on to posit six possible “perspectives, towards solutions”:

• Space and the city
• Tech and the city
• Cities as innovation hubs
• The citizen’s city
• Urban governance
• The resilient city

The report concludes with a series of eight “main messages”, the full report also including a section on related research and policy questions “still to be addressed”

The report and accompanying text can be downloaded in full and in Executive Summary form at:

https://urban.jrc.ec.europa.eu/thefutureofcities