9: Cities: Death, Rebirth, & Reinvention

As today’s ecosystemic structure changes rapidly, what is the economic value of cities and how can it become different in the future? The idea of cities being powerful engines of innovation is a relatively new one, with a more distributed ecosystem of cities being attractive and potentially good for the economy to distribute the additional benefits of growth.

In this Ecosystemic Futures episode, co-hosts Vikram Shyam and Dyan Finkhousen sit down with futurist Tom Cheesewright, to discuss how technology is reshaping the structure of the city, why cities can work, and how they are being reinvented, along with whose responsibility is it to shape this behavior.

Episode Highlights:

“In terms of the metaverse in the digital piece, I'm a strong believer and I think we can see evidence of this from the pandemic and actually even before that. The more digitally connected we are, the greater the hunger we have for things that are physical and real and visceral, whether that is human relationships, whether that is great food, whether that is the great outdoors.”

“The macro pressures that we're facing and the need to respond to them are very well understood now by a lot of different stakeholders. And so they are shifting the horizon on which they're focused and they are taking what you might historically have seen as more certainly responsible, if not altruistic decisions about what those plans should look like.” 

Guest: Tom Cheesewright, Applied Futurist

Co-hosts:

Vikram Shyam, Futurist, NASA Glenn Research Center

Series host: Dyan Finkhousen, Founder & CEO of Shoshin Works