From old world to new vision

Sam Hamdan

• Last Updated: January 10. 2009 8:30AM UAE / January 10. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Political, cultural and business leaders and innovators from around the world will gather in Abu Dhabi next week to address pressing questions that only a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable: which cities will be the future global capitals – and what can individual communities do to stake their claim to a key role in tomorrow’s world?

Until only recently the global status quo seemed immutable, but the economic upheavals of the past few months have demonstrated that in today’s international economic and cultural landscape nothing can be taken for granted.

The traditional ways of the great capitals of the past have been found wanting. Those slow to adapt, too encumbered by the practices and traditions of the past, are in danger of following the dinosaurs. For those ready to embrace evolution, however, the future beckons as a land of opportunity.

It was not by chance that Global Leadership Team chose Abu Dhabi as the venue for its Future Capitals World Summit, which runs at the city’s Intercontinental Hotel next week from Tuesday to Thursday.

As a leadership organisation we stage events, such as last year’s World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Dubai, for the purpose of bringing new ideas to emerging markets. We are very interested in promoting and empowering innovation, particularly across the Arab world, and in order to enable its development we have to develop the next generation of capitals. That was how the idea for the summit emerged and Abu Dhabi – a living, “sneak preview” city of the future – was the obvious choice of location.

We believe there are six primary pillars critical to the development of tomorrow’s nations – creativity and innovation, sustainability, resilience, collaboration, livability and business leadership – and Abu Dhabi is clearly a world leader on all these fronts, managing a balance that positions it as one of the most important future capitals of the age.

The emirate’s leaders are creating a community that successfully integrates the vital mix of modern business practices and cultural dimensions, generating the exciting sense for me, as an Arab-American, that I am in the Arab world but at the same time part of a capital that is integrating and fusing traditional and cultural attributes with the architecture and infrastructure of the future. Here, I feel at home.

The awareness here of the importance of innovation is evident; the commitment to knowledge development and higher education, harnessing the experience of world-leading academic powerhouses such as New York University and the Sorbonne, and the embracing of iconic cultural institutions such as the Louvre and the Guggenheim.

Equally important for the future city is sustainability, the development of “blue-green” coastal communities that allow us to coexist with nature. The 2030 plan, Abu Dhabi’s environmental framework, the Masdar project and its commitment to the principles behind them place the city in the forefront, not just of cities in the Arab world, but globally. Very few cities are as committed now as Abu Dhabi to advancing the environmental agenda.

One of the lessons of recent years is that resilience is an essential pillar for tomorrow’s world cities and this means preparing for tomorrow’s natural disasters – one has only to look at how the apparent invincibility of major cities was badly shaken by the fate of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the devastating effect of the tsunami in 2004.

But resiliency is not only about focusing on infrastructure but also about our responsibility as cultures to learn from the lessons of the recent financial upheavals and to steer our societies away from the concepts of leverage and debt to prevent a repeat of man-made economic disasters.

In times of economic hardship it can be tempting to retreat behind the barricades but we believe collaboration is the critical fourth pillar and we will be discussing how to embrace openness even in the midst of crisis. This is one of the defining factors in what will transform cities into future capitals; it is vital to keep ourselves open to the outside world and to collaborate with global partners.

In today’s increasingly competitive environment, cities must be willing to incorporate advanced technologies and leverage the talent outside their borders. Again, Abu Dhabi stands as an inspirational example. Only this week, for instance, American regulators gave the go-ahead for a deal between Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Company and the American technology company AMD that will see Abu Dhabi become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer chips.

This and other such projects show that Abu Dhabi’s commitment to economic collaboration is at least as solid as its engagement with cultural co-operation. With the focus of world institutions on the physical location of financial capital, and with companies and individuals questioning whether they are in the right place in terms of business and employment hot spots, economic shifts and the current economic crisis are creating opportunities for all cities in emerging markets.

If you look at the global cities we have respected for centuries – the Londons, the New Yorks – tectonic shifts are afoot. Abu Dhabi and other new cities have the opportunity to learn from the challenges facing these “old world” centres, to learn from the way they have developed and the way they have cared, or not cared enough, about environmental issues and infrastructure.

Will Abu Dhabi surpass today’s financial centres in terms of influence? My view is that Abu Dhabi will continue to have its own identity, its own “brand”, because it will remain rooted in its heritage, which defines the courage to look forward and the confidence to carry on, pointing the way to many of the best practices for the world’s next generation of great cities – our future capitals.

Civic direction is, of course, a key component; in Abu Dhabi, the fact that the people who are driving the master-planning have tapped into the best of the best, bringing together planning talent from cities around the world, and is backing so many key institutions, tells us they are putting a lot of energy, intelligent thought and resources into development.

Business leadership is equally critical, however, to the integrity of any future capital, and one of the questions we will be posing at the summit is what businesses can do to help to stop the free fall of the global economy, to regain the confidence of the stakeholders they represent. We cannot speak about future capitals without curing the diseases we have seen exposed on Wall Street.

Because economic crisis also represents an opportunity for economic growth, we will be discussing whether now is the time for consolidation — or for acquisition. Yet again, Abu Dhabi leads the field; take TAQA, the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, one of the leading companies on the energy stage. That it has been aggressively moving forward in terms of key acquisitions, even in these tough times, tells us that its leadership is looking outside its borders to advance its competitiveness and to use the global economic crisis as a catalyst for more growth.

The story of the US automotive industry should serve as a cautionary tale. For a long time it has looked only inward and neglected to venture outside its borders to try to learn from other industries that might have inspired them. Fiat, on the other hand, is looking at how Apple is run to try to influence the way its designs the next generation of cars.

The capitals of the future must also look beyond their borders. They need to be rooted in what they came from, to believe in their history and civilisations, traditions and identities. They also need to collaborate openly with innovators, artists, technologists and business leaders from around the globe to shape their future.

Only time will tell what will become of those cities that fail to comply with this model. When the tide of the current economic crisis recedes, a very different landscape will be exposed. Cities that stood tall may have been laid low, while those emerging now, if they have learnt the vital lessons of the past, have the opportunity to become the recognisable cityscapes dominating the future horizon.

Sam Hamdan is chairman and chief strategist of Global Leadership Team