From the monthly archives:

July 2015

How Sao Paolo uses Value Capture to Raise Billions for Infrastructure

July 29, 2015

The infrastructure in many cities lags behind the population’s needs. This is a major challenge for city governments in both emerging, high-growth places and industrialised nations with low growth and less public funding to replace aging public spaces and utilities. The on-going rebalancing of global economic power has led to unprecedented investment plans in infrastructure […]

Read the full article →

The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies

July 28, 2015

The universe is made of energy, matter and information, but information is what makes the universe interesting. Without information the universe would be an amorphous soup. It would lack the shapes, structures, aperiodic orders, and fractal arrangements that give the universe both its beauty and its complexity. Yet information is rare. It hides in pockets […]

Read the full article →

Multimodal Transport and Railway Systems- Europabanan and Götalandsbanan

July 24, 2015

High Speed Rails in Sweden This article is about two new high speed rail project in Sweden, Europabanan and Götalandsbanan. Sweden is located in northern Europe, and is not just one of Europe’s largest countries measured by size, but also the largest market in the Nordic region. In the region, which in total is made […]

Read the full article →

Joan Clos Message on how to Build Better Cities

July 21, 2015

Last week, McKinsey and UN Habitat published an essay by Joan Clos, on how we can build better cities. In the essay he points out that in the economic history of humanity, urbanization has always been an accelerator of growth and development, and we are now in the process of massive urbanization. Already 55 per […]

Read the full article →

The Global Minotaur

July 20, 2015

“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.” ― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, 2011 Two weeks ago, on July 6th, the Greek finance […]

Read the full article →

The Power of the Informal Economy

July 19, 2015

Robert Neuwirth’s presentation at The Future of Places III conference which we published two weeks ago was very popular with the readers of this blog, so here is Neuwirth’s Ted Talk from 2012 with more thoughts about the power of the informal economy. For those of us who have visited, the mere mention of Lagos, […]

Read the full article →

The Future of Financial Services

July 18, 2015

The World Economic Forum have issued a new report on the Future of Financial Services. The report is very well written, and well aligned with projects we have done at Bearing for SWIFT and also new research on fintech clusters. For decades, banks, insurance companies and other asset managers have employed the same relatively static, […]

Read the full article →

Innovative Sustainable Re-Development – High Line

July 17, 2015

This case study is about the High Line, a unique, elevated linear park that was created on top of and abandoned rail line on Manhattan, in New York. It has been on an elevated section of a disused New York Central Railroad section called the West Side Line. In the early days of public transport, […]

Read the full article →

Freiburg im Breisgau. Sustainable living model

July 16, 2015

Freiburg im Breisgau. Sustainable living model The City of Freiburg is often called Germany’s "ecological capital" and has been recognized internationally as one of the world’s most livable, sustainable and child-friendly cities. As a national example of sustainable urban planning, ideas developed in Freiburg have been used in countries around the world. What makes this […]

Read the full article →

Decision on the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI)

July 15, 2015

In November 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker presented an investment plan for Europe, to boost investments by using public funds to gain confidence and investments from private sector investors. The plan aimed to address the dramatic fall in investment affecting Europe since the beginning of the great recession, which has been a significant brake on growth and […]

Read the full article →

Endgame for Nokia Mobiles

July 14, 2015

“This is the end, beautiful friend This is the end, my only friend, the end Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I’ll never look into your eyes, again” – Jim Morrison – The Doors, 1967 The above quote may seem far fetched, but […]

Read the full article →

Ken Singer on Opportunity Identification

July 13, 2015

Ken Singer is the Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology and the University of California in Berkeley. He gave an interesting speech on how to identify potentially disruptive opportunities at the European Innovation Academy in Nice, France last Tuesday. The presentation was published on SlideShare and I embed it here below. In […]

Read the full article →

Summer Reading List – Inspired by Greece

July 12, 2015

One of my first acts when I wake up in the morning is to check the latest with BBC news on my iPhone. As most mornings this summer, I woke up with headline news about the Greek debt crises. Not surprisingly, the European Union´s finance ministers could not agree on a new Greek bailout last […]

Read the full article →

Towards The City We Need

July 11, 2015

In the Future of Places III conference last week, there was a set of speeches about the World Urban Campaign and the road towards Habitat III, which I would like to share. The World Urban Campaign is the advocacy and partnership platform for cities in the twenty first century. Its goal is to place the […]

Read the full article →

Innovative Sustainable Re-development – Hudson Yards

July 10, 2015

With this article, we publish a case study on the Hudson Yards redevelopment project in New York, an innovative transformation project in which the harbour area is being transformed into a pedestrian-friendly, vibrant, transit-oriented mixed-use district. Hudson Yards is the area of Manhattan, which is bordered by West 43rd and 43nd Streets, 8th and 7th […]

Read the full article →

Visionary Approach to Transport Ecosystem

July 9, 2015

Transport innovation is no more about improved design and functionality. It is about an integrated and visionary long-term approach to the development of transport and infrastructure. In this article I will present some of the main on-going trends. Our world is changing in an unbelievably fast pace. Urbanisation and the growing population of cities and […]

Read the full article →

Guy Verhofstadt Plenary Speech on Greece

July 8, 2015

We often write about the European Union on this blog, as we work with development and assessment of EU projects. Being a non-aligned consultancy we have not commented on Greece yet, however being proponents of responsible place management, we need to share the video below from a speech in the European Parliament today. It really […]

Read the full article →

Brian Dalgetty on the Internet of Things–From Hype to Insight

July 8, 2015

Brian Dalgetty is CMO for Internet of Things at IBM, and he gave a presentation yesterday at the European Innovation Academy titled “The Internet of Things – From Hype to Insight”. Mr Dalgetty is a veteran at IBM with 25 years of corporate experience and his main point was how insights from sensors and from […]

Read the full article →

Zlarin – The Croatian Coral Centre Project

July 7, 2015

“Coral reefs represent some of the world’s most spectacular beauty spots, but they are also the foundation of marine life: without them many of the sea’s most exquisite species will not survive.” – Sheherazade Goldsmith, English environmental activist and author Zlarin is a small island of the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, almost in the very […]

Read the full article →

European Innovation Academy 2015

July 6, 2015

“No program has been more impactful on our students than the EIA Summer Abroad… We have transformed the career paths of some of Berkeley’s best undergraduates and EIA has quickly become one of the cornerstones of Berkeley’s venerable entrepreneurship pedagogy.” – Ken Singer, MD of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley This […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries