Urban Futures: Five Signals of Change
Cities are key hubs and drivers of the future. But what do we need to be aware of? Here are five important signals of change across each STEEP parameter about the future of cities.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
A signal is only worth capturing if you come back to it. Most scans are published and never revisited, which makes them commentary and not intelligence. These five were scanned in late 2023, one for each STEEP dimension. Each is scored below against what has happened since, along with what we are watching now.
45% of the world's 8,2 billion people live in cities today, and 58% live in cities plus dense towns. By 2050 that becomes 48% and 61%. City dwellers rise three percentage points over 25 years. Urbanisation is real, but it is slower and more town-shaped than was expected previously.
Social
Liveability and the affordability crisis
The signal in 2023. Cities topping the liveability rankings were simultaneously becoming unaffordable to the people who make them work. Zurich was the example.
Three years on. The overlap has tightened. The EIU's 2026 Global Liveability Index is led by Copenhagen, Vienna, Melbourne, Sydney and Zurich. On cost of living, the six most expensive cities in the world are all Swiss, with Zurich first and Geneva second. The same two cities sit in the liveability top six.
The evidence base has also improved substantially. UN-Habitat's World Cities Report 2026, published at the World Urban Forum in May, is devoted entirely to housing and puts 3,4 billion people, more than one in three globally, in inadequate housing, up from 2,8 billion in 2023. The global house price to income ratio moved from 9,3 to 11,2 between 2010 and 2023, against an affordability benchmark of 3,0. Forty-four per cent of renters face unaffordable housing costs. The report's conclusion is blunt: expanding supply alone will not deliver affordability.
Two live experiments are now producing data. Barcelona has had rent controls since 2024 and is phasing out roughly 10.000 tourist apartment licences by November 2028, upheld by Spain's Constitutional Court in March 2025. Registered rents in the first quarter of 2026 were 4,6% up year on year but still below the pre-control level, and new rental contracts ran about 28% below the historical average for that quarter, roughly 3.200 fewer households housed. Prices held for about a year, then resumed rising while supply rationed.
Zurich voted in June 2026 and rejected all three housing initiatives put to it, including a public housing authority and post-renovation rent caps, approving instead two government counter-proposals setting supply goals without state development. Seven in every ten thousand apartments in the city are vacant.
Verdict: Developed. This has gone from an observed paradox to the dominant urban policy question, with the first real outcome data on interventions.
Question for the futures. If neither supply expansion nor rent control resolves affordability on its own, what combination does, and which cities are willing to test it?
Technology
Advanced Air Mobility
The signal in 2023. The FAA's recognition of Alef Aeronautics was framed as a milestone for flying cars in cities.
Three years on. The first thing to correct is what the FAA actually issued. It was a Special Airworthiness Certificate in the experimental category, granted in June 2023 to a prototype. In the FAA's own words, it allows the aircraft "to be used for limited purposes, including exhibition, research and development." The agency added that this was not the first aircraft of its kind to receive one. It is not a type certificate, not a production certificate, and it permits no sale, passenger carriage or commercial operation. Alef's own press release described the company as "the first car certified to fly", and most coverage followed that framing rather than the FAA's.
Three years later Alef has delivered nothing. Hand-built production reportedly began in late 2025 with deliveries promised by the end of 2026. The company has raised around 44 million dollars and claims 3.500 pre-orders on deposits of 150 dollars, opening a retail crowdfunding round in 2026. The road version targets low-speed vehicle classification, capped at 25 mph.
The wider sector has deflated harder. Volocopter filed for insolvency in December 2024 after raising more than 500 million euros, and its assets went to Diamond Aircraft for around 10 million. Lilium ceased operations in February 2025 having burned roughly 1,5 billion euros, with about a thousand people laid off. The eVTOL flights planned for the Paris Olympics were scrapped in August 2024. As of late 2026, no Western eVTOL company has carried a paying passenger.
Two things did advance. Regulation moved: the FAA's powered-lift final rule in October 2024 created an entirely new civil aircraft category, the first in decades, and a 2025 pilot programme has Beta and Joby flying under special agreement. And in China, EHang and Hefei Hey Airlines received the first air operator certificates for pilotless passenger eVTOL operations in March 2025.
Verdict: Deflated, with the regulation as the exception. Roughly three billion euros of European investment produced no commercial passenger service. The signal that mattered turned out to be the rulemaking, not the aircraft.
Question for the futures. If the regulatory frame is now in place and the capital has been destroyed, who builds the aircraft, and does the first real urban air mobility market end up being Chinese?
Economy
Cities as Drivers of Growth
The signal in 2023. UN-Habitat framing cities as central to economic recovery, with SDG 11 as the measure.
Three years on. SDG 11 is not on track, and the detail matters more than the headline.
The UN's 2026 reporting has 1,13 billion people in slums and informal settlements, a figure that has improved in relative terms and worsened in absolute ones since 2015, and is projected to reach 1,2 billion by 2030 without policy change. Access to public transport rose to 60,4% of the sampled urban population, though 78% of that provision is low-capacity bus. Urban air quality improved to 2020 and then stalled at around 26 micrograms per cubic metre of PM2,5, roughly seven times the WHO guideline, in developed and least developed regions alike.
Two findings stand out. Public open space rose only from 16,6% to 17,0% of urban land against a recommended 30 to 45%, and the share of people with convenient access to it actually fell, from 48,9% to 45,6%. And urban land consumption accelerated to 2,3% a year between 2020 and 2025, up from 1,4% in the preceding five years, while urban population growth slowed to 0,9%. Cities are sprawling faster while growing more slowly
The clear success is disaster mortality, down 65%, with 72% of countries now holding national disaster risk reduction strategies.
Verdict: Stalled. The agenda has institutional weight and the outcomes are not moving. The data gap at city and neighbourhood level, which UN-Habitat keeps flagging, is part of why.
Question for the futures. Cities are sprawling faster than they are growing. What is driving the decoupling, and which cities have reversed it?
Environment
Climate-positive Concrete
The signal in 2023. Partanna's brine-and-slag concrete, co-founded by Rick Fox, as an emblem of climate-positive construction materials.
Three years on. The exemplar has stalled and the field around it has split.
Partanna raised around 27 million dollars and signed a heads of agreement with the Bahamian government in January 2024 covering 30 pilot homes, a 25 million dollar plant at Arawak Cay and more than a hundred local jobs. Reporting from May 2026 describes the site as a largely inactive plot holding one model home and 75.000 concrete blocks, with no residential homes built, and former staff alleging the company chose not to build despite adequate financing. The company says it is waiting on government land and infrastructure. Its carbon-negative claim was reported as verified by Verra in late 2024, though we have not been able to examine the methodology or boundaries of that verification.
The technology elsewhere has arrived though. Heidelberg Materials opened the world's first industrial-scale carbon capture facility at a cement plant at Brevik in Norway in June 2025, capturing around 400.000 tonnes of CO2 a year, roughly half the plant's emissions, with storage through Northern Lights. Its captured-carbon cement began commercial deliveries in October 2025. Ecocem announced its first commercial production unit at Dunkirk, 300.000 tonnes a year at around 70% lower CO2 than the European cement average, operational in the second half of 2026.
United States policy went the other way. The Department of Energy terminated four major cement awards in May 2025, including up to 189 million dollars for Brimstone, 87 million for Sublime Systems, 500 million for National Cement and up to 500 million for Heidelberg's Indiana carbon capture project, with a second and larger wave of cancellations in October 2025. Sublime Systems paused construction of its Massachusetts plant and cut 10% of its workforce in December 2025.
One correction on the emissions figures. Cement process emissions are around 3,8% of global fossil CO2, or 1,9% once the carbonation sink is counted; the widely quoted 7 to 8% includes fuel combustion as well. And the claim that cement CO2 will double by 2050 has no authoritative source behind it. The IEA's roadmap models a 24% cut by 2050, and near-zero cement capacity slated for 2030 has grown 30% to around 35 million tonnes, which is real progress and still behind the pace its net zero scenario requires. Production costs remain 75 to 150% above conventional cement.
Verdict: Mixed. The technology developed, the American policy environment collapsed, and the specific company we focused on stalled. That is a useful reminder that a signal about a technology and a signal about a company are different things.
Question for the futures. With near-zero cement still costing up to two and a half times conventional, what closes the gap: procurement mandates, carbon pricing, or someone finding a cheaper chemistry?
Politics
Cities’ Powerplay with Nation-States
The signal in 2023. Cities stepping onto the global stage and challenging the primacy of nation-states, with C40 as the example.
Three years on. Cities have gained standing and lost ground on power, which are two different things.
Standing. COP30 in Belém in November 2025 was the strongest institutional showing cities have had. A Local Leaders Forum statement was endorsed by more than 14.000 cities, towns and regions and handed to the UN Secretary-General. The first Plan to Accelerate Solutions on multilevel governance was agreed, aligning national commitments with local delivery. Mayors committed to annual deliverables in place of decadal pledges. CHAMP, the coalition on multilevel partnerships, is now co-chaired by Brazil and Germany.
Power. Cities need roughly 4,5 trillion dollars a year for climate action and receive about a fifth of it. C40's own assessment has member cities roughly 9% off the pathway to halving collective emissions by 2030, and we could find no more recent independent verification than that. C40 now counts around 94 leading cities and four inactive ones, Vancouver among them.
And in the United States, the direction of travel has been about cities defending what they already have. The federal government withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January 2025, effective a year later. The US Climate Alliance of 24 states and territories, representing more than half the US economy, committed to the Paris goals independently, and Climate Mayors spans around 350 bipartisan members. But the live fight through 2026 has been over federal funding threats to sanctuary cities, where courts have repeatedly protected municipal autonomy as a defensive residual, the right to decline, rather than as an affirmative power to govern.
Benjamin Barber's If Mayors Ruled the World, published in 2013, is the origin of this framing. The most useful critique remains Peter Engelke's argument from the same year: interstate systems supply security, trade protection and commons governance that no city can provide, and the productive question is how cities operate as partners inside that system instead of replacements for it. COP30's multilevel governance framing is close to that answer institutionalised.
Verdict: Developed in standing, weakened as a thesis. Cities got a seat at the table but doesn’t hold considerably more power for now.
Question for the futures. With an 80% climate finance gap, what would have to change for cities to gain fiscal capacity that matches their responsibilities?
Read our full article about whether majors will rule the world.
Three signals we would scan now
AI data centres competing with cities for power, land and water. This is the strongest new urban signal by some distance. In the first three months of 2026, projects worth 130 billion dollars were blocked or delayed, matching the total for the whole of 2025. A Gallup poll in March 2026 found 70% of Americans opposed to new data centre construction in their neighbourhood. Port Washington, Wisconsin passed the first local referendum limiting construction in April 2026; New York's legislature passed a one-year moratorium in June.
The cost transmission is measurable: PJM capacity prices went from 28,92 dollars per megawatt-day in 2024/25 to 329,17 in 2026/27, with analysis attributing 63% of one year's increase to data centres and around 9,3 billion dollars in additional ratepayer cost. It reframes the smart city story entirely, from cities adopting AI to cities as the physical cost centre of it.
Urban heat as an operational health emergency. The WHO reported in July 2026 that nearly 10.000 people died of extreme heat across five European countries in the summer of 2026, with more than 200.000 heat deaths across the European region in four years and heat mortality up 30% over two decades. The framing has moved from climate adaptation to health system operations, with cities as the delivery unit through cooling infrastructure, shade, water access and pre-season hospital resilience.
Water scarcity at capital city scale. In November 2025 Iran's president publicly warned that without rain Tehran faced rationing and the possible evacuation of an eighteen million person city, with three of five supply dams near critical levels and parts of the city subsiding up to 30 centimetres a year. Relocating or partially abandoning a capital has entered mainstream policy discussion, which is the actual signal.
What this exercise shows
Of five signals, one developed as expected, one stalled, one deflated badly, one split between technology and policy, and one changed shape. That is roughly the hit rate a scan should expect, and the value is in knowing which is which.
The pattern worth noting: the two signals that moved fastest were the ones about institutions and money, and not the ones about technology. Flying cars were the most exciting item on the 2023 list and have delivered the least. Housing affordability was the least novel and has become the defining urban question of the decade.
Originally published in 2024. Revised, and all five signals scored, in September 2026.
Sources
UN DESA, World Urbanization Prospects 2025, which supersedes the 2018 revision
UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2026 (May 2026) and SDG 11 Global Report 2026
UN Statistics Division, SDG Extended Report 2026, Goal 11
Economist Intelligence Unit, Global Liveability Index 2026
FAA statement on Alef Aeronautics' Special Airworthiness Certificate (June 2023), and the FAA powered-lift final rule (October 2024)
Heidelberg Materials, Brevik carbon capture facility (June 2025); Ecocem, Dunkirk ACT unit (January 2025); IEA, Breakthrough Agenda Report 2025, cement and concrete
The Tribune (Bahamas) on Partanna (May 2026)
C40 Cities membership update (May 2026); Global Covenant of Mayors on COP30 outcomes
Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World, Yale University Press (2013)
IEEFA on PJM capacity prices and data centres; Brookings on the data centre backlash
WHO on European heat mortality (July 2026)
