What can cities do to ensure progress and prosperity for all?
This article is part of the series — Colaba Edit.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for and process of digitalisation and industrial automation. This will see a drastic change in the labour market — by 2025, 43 percent of the firms surveyed in the report are expected to cut their labour demand, while 41 percent will seek workers with specific digital skills. The International Labour Organisation portends that 400 million jobs will disappear compared to the fourth quarter of 2019. New schools of thought on city and economic resilience rely on urban digitalisation. But despite being accelerated, the global movement toward urban digitalisation remains slow. Many emerging cities remain unprepared in terms of technology governance, policies, human capital and financing.
One of the biggest takeaways amid the pandemic situation is the battle between good technologies, good human nature and negative politics on the progress of humankind. What can cities do to ensure progress and prosperity for all?
Hong Kong has seen severe social instability in recent years and, over the past 20 years or so, governance in the region has been impacted by swings in public opinion and unclear and unaligned political entrepreneurship, with filibusters happening in the Legislative Council on different policy making procedures. COVID-19 presented Hong Kong with a window of policy opportunity to review governance, realign commercial interests and restore public confidence.
The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO), which is responsible for formulating information technology (IT) strategies for the region, launched the Smart Government Innovation Lab in June 2019, a new public-private platform to directly connect government departments with IT firms. The lab invites innovative solutions and products to address different city management challenges in Hong Kong, and serves as a sandbox for proof-of-concept and technology piloting in the policy and regulatory environment before going to the public market. Initiatives are being tested and recruited such as smart property visualisation management system for monitoring green energy usage and floor occupancy; and using data harvesting and analytical services for automated surveillance of food incidents and preliminary screening of local availability of the affected food products in Hong Kong. It facilitates relevant government departments to formulate effective procurement and implementation arrangements, including a new policy framework to support and legitimise the building of digital infrastructure for better society.
In November 2020, the OGCIO also launched the ‘iAM Smart’ (internet access by mobile in as smart way) mobile app as a one-stop personalised digital services platform, protected by the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance. The iAM Smart app allows access to public utilities and services, including digital signing with legal legitimacy and form filling, to those with a Hong Kong digital identity card and aged 11 or above. The app has proved especially helpful to senior citizens in Hong Kong in accessing public facilities amid the pandemic.
What lessons can other cities learn from Hong Kong? Governance turmoil appears to be on the rise in many cities around the world. While COVID-19 has signaled a shift towards greater urban digitalisation and the adoption of a new normal, governments must adopt a bottom-up approach of transparent policy vision and administrative entrepreneurship to co-construct universal and common prosperities for all.
Well-developed city-states and cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Shenzhen are seeking a common socio-economic prosperity-driven governance framework with emerging cities in Asia. While initiatives like public-private-people partnerships are gaining ground, political willpower is key to sustain the drive towards shared prosperity beyond economic interest and borders.
Ahead of the World Economic Forum’s Special Annual Meeting, to be held in May in Singapore, the idea of the ‘great reset’ is gaining traction and is being widely debated. In June 2019, the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance (GSCA) was established to bring together local and national governments, the private sector and citizens to adhere to a set of principles for the ethical use of smart city technologies. Cities will be provided with access to a set of smart city policies and a group of digital economy and smart city policy experts from the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the World Economic Forum to transform the way they monitor and source technologies for adoption into their smart city plans. An actionable agenda is set forth within the Future City Summit (a regional curation in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia and an institutional partner of the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance) — and among its 35 member cities — to connect to the GSCA and to drive urban digital governance with the next 100 cities in developing Asia, such as Denpasar, Bandung, Hue, Binh Duong, and others (determined by a group of smart cities, including the ASEAN Smart Cities Network) with populations of 500,000 or more. Further, second and third-tier cities in emerging Asia such as Bandung (Indonesia), West Nusa Tenggara (Indonesia), Bali (Indonesia) and Hue (Vietnam), will be provided access to the global network and technology partnership. From local governance to policy implementation and project execution, such collective efforts will empower the idea of “great reset” especially in the domains of public health, finance and education sectors.
Beyond these multilateral efforts, stronger political will is needed to establish better societies in the emerging cities. Greater collaboration among the city administrators, policymakers, technologists and other leaders in the private sectors will drive the effort to secure shared prosperity.
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