(Featuring Parag Kahnna, Founder, FutureMap)
The Great Lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic heightened fears that city living—and cities in general—might become a thing of the past. But a close look at the data tells a different story.
https://www.afire.org/podcast/citywins202208/
The global response to the pandemic contributed to a still-unprecedented era of transition and change. Anyone watching migration patterns the past two years likely saw these changes happening in real time. Now more than two years past the initial onset of the pandemic, as COVID fears slowly fade into the rear view mirror, populations have shifted and markets have transformed, but despite negative prognostications about urbanism in 2020, one thing has remained unchanged: people always return to cities. Even as some cities fall out of popularity, others rise to replace them.
In this episode of the AFIRE Podcast with Gunnar Branson, Parag Khanna, founder of FutureMap (an AI software that uses vast amounts of migration data to predict human movements up to the year 2040), discusses how cities will always be the center of our shared future—and what this means for investors, building users, and communities.
In other words: the city always wins.