Machines are increasingly taking over jobs in both large and small cities, but it is the latter that have the greatest area of impact, according to a recent study by the MIT Media Lab. Diversification can create new jobs in smaller cities.
Citizens of such cities with small populations leave their homes in search of a better quality of life, services and jobs. Automation is more intense in small towns due to the characteristics of jobs such as "service tasks, factories and agriculture, which are susceptible to automation" according to Media Lab researcher and professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid Esteban Moro.
Instead, big cities bring together the most skilled workers to use technology. "Mathematicians, chemists, data scientists and software developers are the professions that will suffer least from automation," explains Moro.
Despite the massive digital offer of big cities, infrastructure and social services are limited, as are space and housing. By 2050, almost 70% of the world's population (around 6.3 billion) will live in cities, i.e. a new rural exodus is looming. This will be accompanied by an increase in economic and social contrasts and a worsening of service and waste management.
Given these predictions, experts are promoting the use of technology and data to try to reduce mobility and housing problems, as by 2025 the world will have 37 megacities (with more than 10 million inhabitants). "Cities need to be better organised, and that is now easier thanks to all the existing information," adds IESE Business School researcher Carlos Carrasco.
For public transport planning, we can analyse how the population moves, define where to put more services and at what times they should be more frequent," says Carrasco. In addition, pollution can be reduced thanks to autonomous vehicles, which Brack says will reduce the need for private car ownership and parking problems, and the use of renewable energy, the cost of which is falling steadily.
When it comes to urban planning, the physical growth of a city is conditioned by its geography. "Theoretically, there is no limit to the size of cities. However, in practice, the growth of most urban centres is linked to their inability to manage their size", Explain McKinsey & Co partners Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes. For example, Hong Kong (China), one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is 85% surrounded by water, and its possibilities for expansion involve creating artificial islands or extending the coastline, as suggested by urban planners from the MAP Office in Hong Kong and the Network Architecture Lab of Columbia University in New York (USA). A solution for a specific case that is far from being generalisable.
Small but specialised cities
Smaller cities, meanwhile, face the challenge of transforming themselves so as not to lose their population, and they can attack on several fronts. "There are a number of worker competencies that are difficult to automate: soft skills, such as working in groups and helping people. The task for small cities is for people to acquire these skills so that in the future they are not quickly replaced by an artificial intelligence system or a robot," says Moro.
On the other hand, "there are also small cities that have specialised in very high-value sectors, such as the mining or energy industry". So another solution would be the creation of investment clusters, in which small cities join together and create a larger nucleus where specific business models are developed. This is the case of the Research Triangle Parkin North Carolina (USA), where "three cities have specialised in biomedicine and have made agreements with universities and companies to create a kind of industrial centre," explains Moro.
But even though a cluster of companies, such as the specialising in aeronautics at El Prat (Spain), can help small cities, it can also make them dependent on the sector to which they belong. "If it collapses, the impact is much greater than if you have a diversified industry, which is what happens in big cities," says Carrasco. For this reason, he advises following new trends and pivoting specialisation according to how the global economy is moving. He also calls for collaboration rather than competition: "Small cities have to look for synergies with the big city. This will give them a better chance of survival.
The optimal solution to this system of equations about the challenges of small and large cities, if there is one, is far from unique. Perhaps the best idea to solve it is to train an artificial intelligence and ask a robot.
Source: MIT
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