With many of the world’s employees working remotely for the past 14 months and managing their daily needs digitally instead of physically visiting stores, city planners and government authorities have had the opportunity to question what the cities of the future should look like.
Dubai early on adopted a focus on developing a smart and sustainable city. Its experience with the coronavirus pandemic last year has only accelerated this, agreed the panellists who were speaking at the AB Future of Work Forum earlier on Wednesday.
“The panel this morning talked about how happy or productive employees equals profitable companies and if you take that up to a macro-civic or national level, it’s exactly the same thing,” said Joe Hepworth, Middle East Director for the Connected Places Catapult.
“All of these initiatives to make the Dubai a happier place is not just PR and noise, it’s actually what it’s about because happy citizens will stay here, thrive, invest and be productive… Technology might be an enabler and be a part of it but that’s just about carrying on this policy that that’s been remarkably successful,” he continued.
Dubai has recently announced a number of initiatives to attract talent to the city, including the remote working visa and the Golden visa (10-year residency) for engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs among others. It has also been steadily shifting into being a smart city in the sense of digitalising government-related procedures and paperwork. All of these steps are having a positive impact in attracting more people to come live in Dubai which has many benefits for the city, agreed the panellists.
“Dubai clustered the city by sectors, in a way that didn’t create sectors and destinations purely for work but also for living. One of the biggest advantages I see for this is the economic distribution of wealth,” said Omar Al Majali, Project Manager, Smart Dubai.
Omar Al Majali, Project Manager of Smart Dubai says post-Covid smart economies must embrace digitalisation. Smart economies add value productively and efficiently, and pre-Covid, digitalisation was happening, but only on the front end. pic.twitter.com/8GFXiNOtnN
— ArabianBusiness.com (@ArabianBusiness) April 28, 2021
“When you build central destinations for work, what you’re doing is you’re driving employment spending and economic activity around those centres. When you have that centre, you are going to create residential demand around it and all of a sudden you’re going to see interest from real estate developers who want to come and set up in around these destinations of work,” he continued.
Al Majali said: “What that does is that it doubles out the market prices of real estate in the city because you’re increasing real estate supply so now you’ve got economic activity and now none of that real estate resale market prices in the city.”
A lot of situations we cannot imagine right now will be the norm in the future, including being fully present in different places at the same time, said Dr Patrick Noack Executive Director: Future, Foresight and Imagination, at the Dubai Future Foundation. But such a future does not come without risks.
As the future of work shifts, individuals won’t just be using smart city concepts – we’ll be firmly plugged into smart cities, says Dr. Patrick Noack, Executive Director: Future, Foresight and Imagination, at the Dubai Future Foundation pic.twitter.com/Yc0lJeBnaG
— ArabianBusiness.com (@ArabianBusiness) April 28, 2021
“One of the big things that we need to think about now is the extent to which we are integrated in data, who owns the data and ultimately who owns us as a consequence,” said Noack.
“There’s a lot of antitrust suits going on in Europe and around the world because of the concentration of power and data is in very few hands. It’s going to be very difficult to wrestle that that data, that freedom and knowledge, back, and if we’re not careful about how are we going to configure the data flows and how we going to regulate, it’s going to be a nightmare waiting to happen,” he continued.
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