If city leaders across the country learned anything from the past year, it's the value of resilience.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed cracks in infrastructure, posed mobility challenges, and revealed a digital divide. The places that have fared the best are the ones that have been investing in the future, specifically in areas like digital transformation, manufacturing, sustainability, infrastructure, and innovation.
"I don't think we talk about resilience enough," Diana Bowman, co-director of the Center for Smart Cities and Regions at Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society, told Insider. "Resilience talks about our capacity to respond in a quick way to address whatever those external challenges are."
While investing in technology and infrastructure is key for cities of the future, Bowman said that resilience also depends on strong partnerships across the public, private, and local university sectors.
"One of the things that we've seen in this last 12-month period is if you take your eye off the ball at any single one of these, then your ability to have a fully engaged school system, fully engaged workforce is really challenged, and everybody suffers as a consequence of that," she said. For example, the influx of people working and learning from home revealed a lack of access to high-speed internet in some places.
Cities of all sizes should be thinking about building a better tomorrow through investment and policy, or risk getting left behind.
The need for cities to innovate and be more sustainable is coming, whether they're prepared or not, Zachary Schafer, CEO and executive director of United for Infrastructure, a nonprofit working to modernize and repair the country's infrastructure, told Insider. "It's better to be developing frameworks early to understand how to deploy them, how to use them, how to benefit from them, and how to talk to residents about these technologies."
Several US cities are already leading the way. Here's a look at 10 places making big strides when it comes to innovation.
The cities are listed in no particular order.