More than half of the global population lives in urban areas. As a result of the rapid growth in the rate of urbanization, cities face huge challenges in meeting the housing, infrastructure, transport and energy needs of their urban populations, and urgently require new ideas and methods to solve these issues.

The purpose of urban transformation and sustainable development must be to enable people and nature to flourish together for generations.

This requires a shift in focus from merely creating the built environment to improving the outcomes enabled by it – the city must be outcomes-driven for people and place. Urban systems must come together to help deliver those outcomes because cities are served by complex systems of interconnected assets and networks. They are a “system of systems”.

The key challenges of our generation are also systemic: achieving net zero, climate resilience and the circular economy are systems-level challenges that demand systems-based solutions. Therefore, our cities need systems-based policies, strategies and tools that enable us to understand and manage the urban transformation to achieve its purpose.