The City Summit
Thursday, 05/14
The Future of Cities Summit
The Future of Cities Summit harnesses human and AI co-evolution to advance REACH – a community’s capacity to deliver services, infrastructure, safety, opportunity, and responsive governance to all residents across geography and circumstance.
REACH is measured across five dimensions:
Reliability
infrastructure and services perform consistently under normalcy and stress
Economy
durable opportunity, fiscal capacity, business and wealth formation, employment
Access
full coverage across urban, suburban, and rural areas, with reduced barriers
Coordination
aligned operations across departments, agencies, and jurisdictions
Health
public and environmental health, safety, emergency capability, resident wellbeing
The Cities Summit is designed to assess and deliver REACH outcomes across neighbourhood systems, community systems, and regional systems, supported by two capability domains:
Civic systems, infrastructure, and operations
CITY
Human experience, connection, and civic life
SOUL
10 - 11 AM | Establishing Shared Context
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Top 100 Cities challenges overview: fiscal constraints, workforce shortages, aging infrastructure, climate volatility, safety, housing, and economic transition
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Why legacy models (siloed departments and data, reactive compliance) can no longer keep up
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The structural shift to intelligent, prevention-first civic systems with AI as a coordination layer for continuous sensing, real-time orchestration, predictive risk identification, and scenario modeling
11 - 12 PM | Luminary Deep Dive
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Intelligent communities in practice: What it looks like when mobility, energy, safety, housing, broadband, health access, and economic pathways operate as integrated systems
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Planning shifts in city decisions that are path-dependent (decades-long consequences)
1 - 2 PM | Neighborhood Scale: Cities as Adaptive Systems
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Improving daily lived experience: safety, housing stability, environment, food access, connectivity
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Coordinated support for youth, families, and elders across fragmented services
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Participatory tools that balance development, heritage preservation, and climate resilience
2 - 3 PM | Community Scale: Civic Operations as Coordinated Service Orchestration
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Orchestrating municipal services with limited staff and budgets through shared platforms
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Economic opportunity systems linking skills, employers, and regional pathways
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Data-driven scenario planning for housing, infrastructure, and capital investments
3 - 4 PM | Regional Scale: Cities as Platforms for Long-range Infrastructure and Prosperity
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Rural-urban coordination across infrastructure, workforce, health, and supply chains
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Regional intelligence for long-range planning in climate resilience, housing, and economic alignment
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Interoperable systems that respect local autonomy and democratic oversight
4:15 - 5 PM | Infrastructure & Deployment
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AI platforms enabling neighborhood design, citywide service orchestration, and regional coordination (IBM, Microsoft, Google)
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Cloud computing, data, and governance supporting city-scale applications (hybrid municipal clouds)
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Institutional deployment pathways through platform-based experimentation and validation
5 - 6 PM | Synthesis of All Parallel Tracks
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Spotlights from Implementation Labs (municipal and regional pilots), Inflection Labs (scale platform-based civic systems), and Luminary Labs (accelerate individual-led high-impact initiatives), to inform what cities, utilities, regions, and builders should do next.
6 - 7 PM | Networking and Reception