Institute For The Future

Innovation in the Urban Wilderness

I've spent much of the week working with IFTF colleague Andrea Saveri on a forthcoming memo for Technology Horizons subscribers that looks into the remarkable potential for innovation that exists in the world's exploding urban squatter communities. These are people and communities that have all but been written off by the global economy, yet they are pioneering new ways of survival in some of the harshest living conditions ever recorded. And there are a lot of them - currently about 1 billion people worldwide live in urban slums and squatter communities, most of them in the developing world.

 

Our take on this story is that two big trends IFTF has been tracking for several years - the spread of new cooperative business models, and the diffusion of lightweight infrastructure technologies - are fusing together in these extreme environments to generate enormous opportunities for innovation. Innovation that is desperately needed to relieve suffering, but may also provide valuable new ideas to the developed world about products, practices, and ways of organizing communities.

 

Stay tuned for the memo, Innovation in the Urban Wilderness: Lightweight Infrastructure Meets Cooperative Strategy