Work has always shaped our cities; the world’s great population hubs have provided pools of talent, suppliers and customers for business, and the towers of commerce still define skylines from Manhattan to Malaysia. But when work changes, how must our cities?
“Fundamentally the cost of distance — the cost of moving goods and people — sits at the foundation of so much of what we do. Cities were invented to solve that problem,” says Karen Harris, managing director of consultancy Bain & Company’s macro trends group. Yet as she and her colleagues Austin Kimson and Andrew Schwedel wrote in a 2016 report, technologies from robotics and 3D printing to autonomous vehicles are eroding the cost of moving people, goods and information, accelerating change in the “monuments to spatial economics” we know as cities.
Ms Harris argues that urban centres from Paris to San Francisco will always appeal to a group of “rich people and single people and empty nesters” who can afford them. Yet the fact that the middle-class bedrock of a city’s workforce now has other options raises the question of whether cities can retain their competitive advantage as hubs for work.
Forecasts suggest the world’s big cities will not, in fact, lack labour. In the latest update to its World Urbanisation Prospects report, the UN predicted that the percentage of the global population living in urban areas — which rose from 30 per cent in 1950 to 55 per cent now — will hit 69 per cent by 2050.
“What’s happened in every revolution is a massive structural change in employment, but we don’t have less employment,” says Mike Sutcliff, group chief executive of Accenture Digital, a consultancy.
Yet even the UN’s headline prediction hints at the challenges cities face, from infrastructure and social services for growing populations of future workers to integrating immigrants with minimal social friction. Dig deeper and the scale of upheaval becomes more apparent.
The biggest changes in the urban vs rural divide will not be in the economies that are most familiar to the largest employers, such as Japan and Germany, but in fast-developing countries like India, China and Nigeria that these organisations are learning to navigate.
As they contemplate this prospect, business and civic leaders know that their existing workers, from cashiers to consultants, face their own disruptions. The advance of automation and artificial intelligence means as many as a third of all workers in the US may need to change occupations and acquire new skills by 2030, according to a new report for the US Council on Foreign Relations.
If that is not to leave millions behind, increasing inequality, local governments will need explicit policies for training their workers, “creating better jobs and career paths for Americans”, the report’s authors concluded.
If most of the jobs of the future will require more than a secondary school education, this is a challenge that city leaders can start working on now, according to Josh Lowe, who writes on the future of work for Apolitical, an online platform for sharing insights among policymakers and public servants around the world.
“There are some things I think we know city leaders can be doing or areas they can be looking at to start preparing their populations,” says Mr Lowe. “The first would be around skills and training, particularly around adult skills in the middle of their careers.”
Mr Lowe notes that cities are not only competing to attract big employers such as Amazon and Apple, with the prestige and tax revenues their big tech campuses offer. He says there is also a trend towards trying to lure businesses that can provide “middle-skill jobs” from healthcare to plumbing.
The Dallas Federal Reserve has been among those to recommend better “middle skills” training in cities to close the skills gap, and Muriel Pénicaud, Emmanuel Macron’s labour minister, is overhauling France’s €32bn-a-year vocational training scheme to give every worker €5,000 to spend on courses of their choice over their careers.
From Munich to Boston, Apolitical has also tracked city-backed retraining programmes targeted at women and minorities, groups which many studies predict will be hardest hit by automation.
While Mr Sutcliff has seen Accenture’s large corporate clients make similar investments in training, the growth of the gig economy may require that cities — rather than employers — help workforces navigate this transition.
As Ms Pénicaud put it, “a global battle for skills has been launched”. The opportunity for the cities that win that battle will be to reinvent themselves in a way that tempts even the mobile middle classes to stay. “The very technologies we talk about that are potentially eliminating jobs in some sectors . . . create opportunities for many businesses,” says Ms Harris at Bain. As craft breweries pop up in former manufacturing hubs, “there is something lovely about that cultural renewal”, she adds.
Source： Financial Times