From Smart to Meta Cities

In the words of the former President of the United States Barak Obama, no good crisis should be laid to waste as an opportunity for change. Should we judge present times on the basis of the deepness and extent of crisis we are all now living in, it would look like we do have now a great opportunity for change—in the way we work, live, across most geopolitical blocks and in the context of urban areas and global cities that are now looking like as “too crowded” to ensure “social distancing,” and too interconnected, across geographical zones and value chains, to easily make up for any potential supply chain disruption led, for example, by the force of nature, a global war, or a simple pandemic. Since the start of the planning and writing of this book, lots of things have changed, for the author and for the world we all live in—with expected falls in the GDP of the European Countries and of the United States expected in the high double digit, and negative growth at global level as well, with a deep recession and with an uncertain shape and behavior (as “V,” “U,” or “L”) to follow. COVID-19-led health and humanitarian crisis has in fact brutally reminded us of the extreme fragility of our world—that we had been taking for granted with its secular trends of international of commerce and finance, for its interconnectedness and specialization based on free-trade principles and as a “just in time,” lean-managed with no slack attached, super-efficient and integrated global market for goods and services. A simple virus has shaken all that and accelerated the recognition of our, far from assured, sustainability, as humankind led set of civilizations. Pandemic has been taking us quite unexpectedly and wholly unprepared and is forcing entire countries and their main cities to rethink their future ways in likely radical different ways.