 Welcome to this Davos Agenda Impact Session on Rebuilding Cities for a Post-Covid Future. My name is Katherine Bell, and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Quartz, a global business media company with a mission to make business better. During this session, we'll focus on the path forward for cities after this pandemic, which has not only highlighted shortcomings in public health preparedness, but across a variety of issues, including social equity, inclusive economic growth, and sustainability. So the first portion of this session will be a 30-minute panel discussion that viewers from all around the world can watch on the forum's website. And then after that, we'll have another half-hour discussion that will be more detailed among registered forum members and partners. So I'd like to welcome and introduce our panelists. First, we have Joao Doria, who is the Governor of the State of São Paulo in Brazil. We have Juan Jose Pocotero, who is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of VQA in Venezuela, which is a company that does, a tech company that does smart city work. We have Christian Ulbrich, who is the Global Chief Executive Officer and President of JLL, the real estate company. And finally, we have Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is the Mayor of Atlanta here in the United States. So first, I'd like to go to you, Governor Doria. I'd like to hear about some of the major lessons that you've learned from the crisis, from the government perspective, and what you're thinking about in terms of how we should be planning and running cities going forward. Governor, thank you so much. I'd like to say the same welcome to Keisha, the Mayor Bottoms, to Juan Jose Pocotero and Christian Ulbrich. That's a pleasure to be together with you in this conference. Catherine, the State of Sao Paulo believes that cities must be empowered to follow their vocation and adapt to their textures, while also driving a central coordination from the state government that supports resource optimization and promotes inclusiveness. This was highlighted during COVID pandemic down here. The state implemented the Sao Paulo plan, a science-based model for crisis management, which analyzes many KPI's, cases evolution hospital capacity, defines crucially level and its respective restriction roles for each region of the state of Sao Paulo. It also granted mayors with the authority to increase restriction if they consider necessary. This allowed for a personalized city management that respect different features, while also ensuring a content and evolution of the pandemic. It also enabled a comprehensive view for the state government, which relocated resources accordingly. At a past COVID era, we should be spreading this approach even further, for example, on the economic front. We have made 14 hubs of economic development, which accounts for plus than 540 cities in the state of Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo is a very industrial state in Brazil and the most powerful state in the Brazilian economy. And each encompasses a small group of cities which account for the largest concentration of that sector. And over the past four months, we'll had plus than 100 meetings with more than 100, 500 representatives with the hubs, represented by city members, companies, associations, technological institutes, and others. Here on them, on their most prominent struggles and address their specific needs. This policy is effective in the actions implemented by the state of Sao Paulo will be direct result of the collaboration from those who need it most additionally. I have to say that empowers local leaders through coordination, as one agent alone may have difficulty to raise awareness to a specific economic issue. But many, I say, but many of them together along with other interest parties will be able to strongly voice their concerns and prioritize their demands. The pandemic has also provoked us into acceleration technology, adoption at all levels. We have faced decades worth technology revolution in less than a year and should absorb these learnings to involve even further in the world past COVID. At city level, we observe how real time data management and telemedicine have been fundamental pillars. This raises awareness to the importance of smart cities initiatives, leading the state government to reinforce and launch several actions on the topic. On one hand, city leaders are being empowered with the autonomy to implement the solution that better fits their needs and with the support of the state's Institute of Technological Research, which offers free advising service for cities to request assistance on identifying available solutions for their issues and implementing the technology. On the other hand, the state is also directly financing projects at city level and systemic efficiency, congestion management system, smart security cameras, et cetera. I have given examples of economy and technology of how we are empowering cities while action through coordination and support to ensure this is true for all fields. We have established a secretariat of regional development which focuses only on the partnership between the state government and cities. Through this team, we are able to understand that the specific needs from each region, each city at the city level, we can promote an exchange of best practices and destinates resources to the best use of the population who needs it most. Up until today, Brazil lost 270,000 lives per COVID and it is clear that those most vulnerable were the most harmed by the disease. We believe the approach, I just described it, to be the best one to promote the development of each city in Sao Paulo, in the region, individually, but also and the most importantly, to thrive on agendas of long-term prosperity, such as fighting inequalities and promoting innovation and science is a result of our investment in science. That I am glad to share that we started vaccination in Brazil at the state of Sao Paulo. Just nine days ago and have at this moment already vaccinated over 160,000 people in the state and nearly 700,000 in the country. Why we can't help to regret for our lost ones. We are also hopeful through the vaccine. Soon enough, these and other initiatives for the future of our cities will be further reinforced and COVID will be left behind us. Thank you very much. Thank you, Governor Doria. I'd like to turn to you now, Christian, and talk about how the pandemic has changed the way many of us work, those of us who work in offices and can work from home that many of us have been able to do that. And so obviously that has made huge changes in the centers of many large cities, especially. And I'd love to hear from your perspective thinking about commercial real estate and residential real estate. How do you see that playing out over the long term? What about those changes are here to stay? And how do we need to think differently about the built environment of our cities going forward? Thanks, Katharine. Thank you for having me. There has been some speculation whether COVID will drive urbanization into the reverse. And so let me take that off the table right away. The reality we have a strong belief at JLL is that we will continue to live at an age of urbanization. The inherent cultural and broader entertainment attractions of cities, the economic opportunities, the social connections and not least healthcare infrastructure will ensure that it will prevail. But there will be pressures to move to a low carbon economy and build a more equitable society. And that will intensify in requiring fast-track routes to creating green infrastructure and embracing the circular economy and developing really importantly affordable housing. The future of offices will obviously be determined by a complex range of competing factors on the appetite of remote working requirements to reduce occupational density, the changing space usage and design adoption of technology and evolving urban geography and commuting patterns. Hybrid work is expected to become the new normal. We did a survey in 2020 and 70% of employees are in favor of it. So work from home will evolve towards work from anywhere, but at the same time, 74% of the respondents said that they still want to go to an office. So overall we expect remote work to increase by about one day a week, which will mean that roughly two to two and a half days people wanna work from elsewhere than the office, which if we do a back of the envelope estimate will create about a 10 to 15% reduction in office requirement due to the working, but largely counterbalanced by de-densification and also new job growth, especially from 2022 onwards. The high quality offices will actually see that positive demand. Therefore the ones mainly losing out are grade B and grade C space, which offer them potential conversion to other users, which will help obviously to cover the need for more residential space. We believe that companies who will embrace the physical office will actually outperform and they will succeed in attracting best talent over the long term. The future of office will respond to the demands for flexibility, 33% of corporates expect to increase their use of flex space and co-working, and that is from a recent survey just from December, so a couple of weeks ago. The collaboration in human experience will be an important factor. Health and wellness, by the way, health and wellness is one of the clearest legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic, because it will have such a big attention going forward. Lastly, technology and sustainability. You were also asking about kind of the residential piece, which is driven by the living preferences of people and the rapid rise in home working will obviously see new approaches to apartment design, accommodating comfortable and productive home workspaces that do not intrude into bedrooms and sitting rooms. As much as we sometimes enjoy seeing all of that, that's not how you can continue to work professionally. But the living preferences also include local nurseries and schools, reliable high capacity internet connectivity. 57% of employees prioritize commuting less and working and living locally and consciously. This is, by the way, also expressed in the rising interest in the 15-minute city concept, which we probably all have read about. The future of the core cities, the CPDs, will need to be reimagined to reflect their changing role in that urban ecosystem, a transformation that may extend over more than one cycle. Offices will remain with beating hearts of the central business districts, but they will reflect the changing functions of urban core space will need to be agile and flexible enabling hybrid users. This will require reading by city governments over their planning and zoning regimes. Urban cores will also increasingly pivot to being places of collaboration, creative energy and in-person social and business interaction. We will see much more mixed use developments that appeals to urban living and inclusiveness will be an essential ingredient of successful re-imagined urban core. So let me quickly close on city governments. Crucially effective city governments will require much greater collaboration between all city stakeholders to make cities future fit. Increasingly, city governments will need to view real estate developers, investors and occupiers as city shaping partners that can help to achieve goals. The real estate industry should be seen as an eager partner in meeting the challenges of creating a climate aware economy and a more equitable society. Thank you. Thank you. So now I'd like to turn to you Juan Jose and talk about technology. So we've already seen that technologies played a role in fighting the COVID-19 in cities and it will play a critical role in the recovery. And I'd love to hear from you how you see this as an opportunity to implement new technologies that will not only help us prevent a situation like COVID from happening again but also address some of those preexisting conditions in cities that have been major problems. Well, like Catherine, thank you for having me and being part of this conversation with such a great panel. Definitely I think COVID-19 was a wake up call for everyone. Not only on adopting technologies as part of our intrinsic future or as a means and not as the ends towards which we increase the capacity of humans on making better decisions and anticipating or mitigating the vulnerabilities that we have especially in an increasing urbanized growth. What I do think that COVID-19 brought to us right now is that we kind of pinpointed and identified the lack of tools that we currently have across the world that could level the playing field between the small and medium sized cities and maybe larger cities that have kind of more resources to attend or to mitigate the effect of such a pandemic that in the future it could be not in the health side of urban livability but rather on other parts of urban services that we will become critical to enhance and to improve in the near future. So I think the first wake up call that we got was the importance of seeing the interdependent relationship of cities across the world to address this and that's where technology comes in as a way to reduce the cost and leapfrog in terms of opportunities so that most cities across the world and I'll give everyone listening to us a number. When we talk about local governments we have 557,000 local governments around the world. Out of those, most are in the emerging world and more than 80% of them are corresponding to cities that have less than 500,000 people in their populations. And what we've seen is that this pandemic has hit parties on these vulnerable and let's say that cities that have a lack of infrastructure in order to reduce the effect of these type of situations when coming into play. So I think technology is gonna place us from now on an important role in terms of leapfrogging those opportunities in two main ways. One is to provide better data in order to make better decisions and evolve the process of decision making across local governments in the world. And what I mean with this and I'll give everyone an example. We've seen it in for example, one guy in Peru, a small city in Peru where pandemic hit very hard. People that did not have access to basic needs was left out of work and out of access to basic resources such as food and rapidly the local government had to come in with a logistical effort to provide food for those vulnerable individuals that now were closed back in home in order to prevent them from getting the disease. And the truth is that that city was not prepared for that before this pandemic. But thanks to technology, they were able to collect real time data on where those communities were, where those families were, what were the conditions in terms of their daily lives and how much do they need it and what type of food they needed according to their household needs in the near future and prepare a plan for that very fast thanks to the ability of having mobile networks and access to mobile apps in order to gather that data and kind of track that process. That means that a city with a lack of resources was able to attend over 1,500 households in less than two weeks and provide food very, very fast to people that need it. Without data, that would have been impossible. And then there's the other side of this of what technology does and we see it in El Salvador where we work with the Vice Ministry of Transportation where when COVID-19 hit, there was a lack of logistical infrastructure in order to move first responders to the most extreme parts of the country. And it was thanks to the possibility of gathering also data but also monitoring the infrastructure in real time and optimizing through artificial intelligence the use of those resources and infrastructure that they were able to cover with less than few units that they had available at the time to move first responders across the country and serve those communities in need due to COVID. So I think with these examples, what I'm trying to say is technology is a great opportunity now or provides a great opportunity that, as I said to level the playing field across cities in the world and with that reduce the effect that these type of vulnerabilities will have. And I think it comes down to three main aspects that technology solves for cities. One is that it breaks the silos of information and data that data that is available, but most of the time we don't have the right tools to not only capture it, but to process it. Also the ability to collaborate in the digital world in order to have physical action come in faster between agencies. I mean, local governments in cities do have the problem of strong high level bureaucracies that it's tough to collaborate. And last but not least, the capacity to manage an infrastructure that is very limited and how to maximize its use in terms of solving the needs of the most vulnerable people around the world. Thank you. Those were great examples. And I'm hearing those two topics of data and collaboration come up over and over again. So Mayor Bottoms, in many ways, the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequities. And so minority communities were disproportionately affected by both the health crisis and the economic crisis in many parts of the world. And also the systemic racism in the way that cities have been designed and run has become even more evident. So again, we need to look at this as an opportunity not just to solve the problems that COVID has brought up, but to use this as a moment to solve prior existing problems. So I'd love to hear from you about how we should be thinking about making sure that as we recover that systemic injustices are addressed and that we're prioritizing social equity. And I know you've done a lot of this work in Atlanta already. Well, thank you, Catherine. It's an honor to join all of the panelists today. And so much of it has been touched on. We often talk about cities being resilient, but we often use it as a buzzword and we don't think of it in the context of what happens when there is an event that has to be a sustained response to that event. It's often been said that we face over the summer and throughout 2020, twin pandemics, the pandemic related to COVID-19 and the pandemic of systemic racism. And what we saw come to bear in facing COVID-19 is so many other challenges that are a byproduct of systemic racism have resulted in black and brown communities not just across Atlanta and across our state but across the globe really being impacted in a disproportionate way. What we've seen in Atlanta as it relates to COVID-19 is that when people are infected with COVID-19, those living in congregate living settings often have many more family members impacted. African Americans are dying at a disproportionately higher rate because of the underlying health conditions, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, obesity, and many of these are even more prevalent in the South. But additionally, what we've seen is this social response to the pandemic. Many cities across America, including Atlanta, are experiencing an uptick in crime. And it's what a fellow mayor described as our next pandemic, the mental health response to COVID-19 because people are out of work, they're watching family members suffer and die. And there is a response that's often not a positive response is playing out in terms of violence in our communities. And so it is what we've seen in 2020 is that our response as city leaders and in the private sector can't just be a response to the moment, but it really has to be a sustained thoughtful response to where we are with racism, where we are with COVID and what it means for our recovery. Well, our resilience has been tested. And thankfully from an economic standpoint, we have been able to sustain that as a city and as an entity because we had a very healthy reserve. We were able to quickly navigate, move many of our employees into food delivery employees, delivering food to children who often only receive their meals when they are in school, delivering meals to our seniors. We were able to pay hazard pay, one of the first cities to be able to do that $500 a month, not just for our public safety personnel, but for our sanitation workers, who again, riding in trucks with one another, riding on the back of trucks, picking up trash, understanding that they were doing this during COVID. And so it was very helpful to be prepared from an economic standpoint. But again, the work continues as it relates to the social justice movement in Atlanta. We had already begun and it heated the challenge from President Obama to look at our use of force policies in our city. We had begun that work and thought that we had a little more time to be more deliberate on that work. But of course, with the incidents over the summer, it really has reminded us of the sense of urgency as our native son, Dr. Keene described as a fierce urgency of now to make sure that not only are we responding to challenges when they're challenges with interactions with our police officers, but also that we are proactively creating relationships and policies that will stop many of these deadly encounters from happening. And then just lastly, the biggest lesson I've learned as a leader over the year is this reminder to be prepared for the unexpected. As a city leader, we often don't think of cities as needing to respond to something like a pandemic. We often are able to look to our federal government to assist when we have challenges like we've had with the protests over the summer, but with a lack of national coordination and leadership, it made an incumbent upon local leaders to be prepared and be able to respond. And that's a lesson that I will take, even with the take out of this period of time, even with the transition in the national administration is that although it may not technically be our responsibility and our expectation, we have to be prepared for the unexpected and be able to care for our communities accordingly, not expecting that we may get assistance from our national government, but to be prepared to see about our communities as needed.